Scott Peck M.D
[Useful definition of two types of love, and the 4 stages of spiritual growth, especially the first 3.]
THE STAGES OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH By M. Scott Peck, M.D.
Web: http://www.mscottpeck.com/
Books
People of the Lie (The Hope for Healing Human Evil) By M.
Scott Peck, M.D.
Book Review: People of the Lie (The Hope for Healing
Human Evil) By M. Scott Peck, M.D.
[1998] The Road Less Traveled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety
His perspective on love (in The Road Less Travelled) is that love is
not a feeling, it is an activity and an investment. He
defines love as, "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing
one's own or another's spiritual growth." Love is primarily actions towards
nurturing the spiritual growth of another. Love cannot be sustained by mutual
dependence; rather, love between two parties is made stronger when they are
completely independent of one another.
Peck seeks to differentiate between
love and cathexis. Cathexis is what explains attractions to the opposite sex,
the instinct for cuddling pets and pinching babies' cheeks. However, cathexis is
not love. All the same, true love cannot begin in isolation, a certain amount of
cathexis is necessary to get sufficiently close to be able to truly love.
Once through the cathexis stage,
the work of love begins. It is not a feeling. It consists of what you do for
another person. As Peck says in The Road Less Traveled, "Love is as love
does." It is about giving the other person what they need to grow. It is about
truly knowing and understanding them.--Wiki
Quotes
Thus I
believe the greatest positive event of the twentieth century occurred in Akron,
Ohio, on June 10, 1935, when Bill W. and Dr. Bob convened the first AA meeting.
It was not only the beginning of the self-help movement and the beginning of the
integration of science and spirituality at a grass-roots level, but also the
beginning of the community movement.
That is the other reason why I think of addiction as
the sacred disease. When my AA friends and I get together, we often come to
conclude that, very probably, God deliberately created the disorder of
alcoholism in order to create alcoholics, in order that these alcoholics might
create AA, and thereby spearhead the community movement which is going to be the
salvation not only of alcoholics and addicts but of us all.---Scott Peck M.D
(Further Along the Road Less Travelled p. 150)
When the demonic finally spoke clearly in one case, an expression appeared on the patient's face that could be described only as Satanic. It was an incredibly contemptuous grin of utter hostile malevolence....... when the demonic finally revealed itself in the exorcism of this other patient, it was with a still more ghastly expression. The patient suddenly resembled a writhing snake of great strength, viciously attempting to bite the team members. More frightening than the writhing body, however, was the face. The eyes were hooded with lazy reptilian torpor—except when the reptile darted out in attack, at which moment the eyes would open wide with blazing hatred. Despite these frequent darting moments, what upset me the most was the extraordinary sense of a fifty-million-year-old heaviness I received from this serpentine being. It caused me to despair of the success of the exorcism. Almost all the team members at both exorcisms were convinced they were at these times in the presence of something absolutely alien and inhuman. The end of each exorcism proper was signaled by the departure of this Presence from the patient and the room.---M. Scott Peck, M.D (People of the Lie. p. 196)
After I had been practicing psychotherapy for some years, a strange pattern
began to emerge. If religious people came to see me because they were in pain
and trouble and difficulty, and they really got involved in therapy, then—more
often than not—they would leave therapy as questioners, doubters, skeptics,
agnostics, possibly even atheists. But if atheists or
agnostics or skeptics came to me in pain, trouble, and difficulty and they
really got involved in therapy, then—more often than not—they would leave
therapy having become deeply religious or spiritually concerned people.
This pattern just made no sense.....until it slowly began to dawn on me that we are not all at the same place
spiritually and that there are these different stages.
....At the beginning—the bottom, if you wish—is
Stage One, which I label "chaotic/antisocial." This stage probably encompasses
about twenty percent of the population, including those whom I call people of
the lie. In general, this is a stage of absent spirituality and the people at
this stage are utterly unprincipled. I call it antisocial because while they are
capable of pretending to be loving, actually all of their relationships with
their fellow human beings are self-serving and covertly, if not overtly,
manipulative. Chaotic because, being unprincipled, they have no mechanism that
might govern them other than their own will. Since the unharnessed will can go
this way one day and that way the next, their being is consequently chaotic.
Because it is, the people in this stage will frequently be found in trouble or
difficulty, and often in jails or hospitals or out on the street. Some of them,
however, may actually be quite self-disciplined, from time to time, in the
service of their ambition and may rise to positions of considerable prestige and
power. They may even become presidents or famous preachers.
....occasionally, they may convert to Stage Two. Such conversions
are usually—I say usually because there are always exceptions— very sudden and
dramatic. It is as if God literally reaches down and grabs that soul and yanks
it up in a quantum leap. Something astonishing happens to that person and it is
usually totally unconscious. If it could be made conscious, I think it would be
as if that person said to himself or herself, "I am willing to do
anything—anything—in order to liberate myself from this chaos, even submit
myself to an institution for my governance."
And so it is that they convert to
Stage Two, which I have labeled
"formal/institutional." I label it institutional because people in it are
dependent upon an institution for their governance. For some the institution may
be a prison. In such places, in my experience, there is always a prisoner who,
when the new psychiatrist comes in to work in the prison......For
others the institution may be the military. .....For
still others, the institution to which they submit themselves for their
governance may be a highly organized business corporation. But for most people,
it is the church. Indeed, the majority of
churchgoers fall into Stage Two..... Although there
are gradations and nothing is absolutely cut-and-dried within these stages,
certain things tend to characterize people's religious behavior in Stage Two. As
mentioned, they are dependent on the institution of the church for their
governance, and I call it formal because they are very attached to the forms of
the religion.
Stage Two people become very, very upset if someone starts changing forms or
rituals, altering their liturgy or introducing new hymns. For example, in the
Episcopal church, in the mid-seventies, it was decided that there might be some
alternative ways to say the same things on different Sundays, and many people
were so up in arms that a full-blown schism resulted.....This
kind of turmoil goes on in every denomination of every religion in the world.
And it's no wonder that people in Stage Two become so upset when the forms of
their religion are changed, because it's precisely those forms that they depend
upon to some ex tent for their liberation from chaos.
Another thing that tends to
characterize people's religious behavior in this stage is that their vision of
God is almost entirely that of an external being. They have very little
understanding of that half of God which lives inside each of us— what
theologians term immanent—the dwelling divinity within the human spirit. They
almost totally think of God as up there, out there. They generally envision God
along the masculine model, and while they believe Him to be a loving being, they
also ascribe to Him a certain kind of punitive power which He is not afraid to
use on appropriate occasions. It is a vision of God as a giant benevolent cop in
the sky. And in many ways, this is exactly the kind of God that people in Stage
Two need.
.....Stage Three.... I call "skeptic/individual."
Again speaking generally, people in Stage Three are ahead of people in
Stage Two in their spirituality, although they are not religious in the ordinary
sense of the word. They are not the least bit antisocial. Often they are deeply
involved in society. They are the kinds of people who tend to make up the
backbone of organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility or the
ecology movement. They make committed and loving parents. Frequently they are
scientists, and certainly scientific-minded. Invariably they are truth seekers.
And if they seek truth deeply enough, and widely enough, as
I've suggested, they do begin to find what they are looking for, and get
to fit enough pieces of truth to catch glimpses of the big picture and see that
it is not only very beautiful, but that it strangely resembles many of those
primitive myths and superstitions their Stage Two parents or grandparents
believed in. And it is at this point that they begin to convert to Stage Four,
which I call "mystical/communal." I use the word "mystical" to describe this stage even though it is a word
that is hard to define and one that has been given a pejorative connotation in
our culture and is usually misdefined. But certain things can be said about
mystics. They are people who have seen a kind of cohesion beneath the surface of
things. Throughout the ages, mystics have seen connections between men and
women, between humans and other creatures, between people walking the earth and
those who aren't even here. Seeing that kind of interconnectedness beneath the
surface, mystics of all cultures and religions have spoken of things in terms of
unity and community. They also have always spoken in terms of paradox.
Mystical has as its root the word mystery. Mystics are people who love mystery.
They love to solve mysteries, and yet at the same time, they know the more they
solve, the more mystery they are going to encounter. But they are very
comfortable living in a world of mystery whereas people in Stage Two are most
uncomfortable when things aren't cut-and-dried.
These principles hold true not only
for Christianity and not only in the United States but in all nations, cultures,
and religions. Indeed, one of the things that characterize all of the world's
great religions is that they seem to have a capacity to speak to people in both
Stage Two and Stage Four as if the very teachings of a given religion have two
different translations. ....
The greatest problem of these different stages—and the biggest reason it is
so important to understand them—is the sense of threat that exists between
people at such different points on the spiritual journey.
To some extent, we all may be threatened by the people still in the stage we
have just left, because we may not yet be sure or secure in our new identity.
But for the most part the threat goes the other way, and we particularly tend to
be threatened by people in the stages ahead of us.
People in Stage One will often tend to appear like cool cats—seemingly nothing
bothers them very much. But if you are able to penetrate that facade, you find
they are terrified of virtually everything and everyone.
People in Stage Two are not particularly threatened by the Stage One people: the
sinners. They love the sinners, seeing them as fertile ground for their
ministrations. But they tend to be threatened by the
skeptic individualists of Stage Three, and more than anything, by the Stage Four
people, who seem to believe in the same things they believe in and yet believe
them with a kind of freedom they find absolutely terrifying.
Stage Three people, the skeptics, are not particularly threatened by the
unprincipled people of Stage One, or by the Stage Two people, whom they simply
toss off as superstitious idiots. But once again, they tend to be threatened by
the Stage Four people, who seem to be scientific-minded like them and know how
to write good footnotes, yet still somehow believe in this crazy God business.
And if you mentioned the word "conversion" to the Stage Three people, they would
see a vision of a missionary arm-twisting a heathen and they would go through
the roof.
I have used the word "conversion" rather freely to describe the transition from
one stage of spirituality to the next. It is, however, a markedly different
experience in each case. Conversions from Stage One to Stage Two are usually
very sudden, very dramatic. Conversions from Stage Three to Stage Four, on the
other hand, tend to be gradual. For example, I was in the company of Paul Vitz,
the author of Psychology as Religion, when he was asked when he had become a
Christian. He scratched his head and said, "Well, it was along about somewhere
between '72 and '76." Compare that to the Stage Two man who says, "It was eight
p.m. on the night of the seventeenth of August!" Obviously, a different sort of
phenomenon is going on here.
I have also spoken of Stage Three people—the skeptics and doubters—as being
spiritually ahead of the vast majority of churchgoers of Stage Two. These people
have also undergone a "conversion"—that is, a conversion to skepticism and
doubt, which is something equivalent to what the Bible calls a "circumcision of
the heart." They are ahead of the Stage Two man who acknowledges Jesus to be his
Lord and Savior at exactly eight p.m. on the night of the seventeenth of August, but may yet have to undergo a conversion to peace or to justice.
Conversion is not a onetime thing. Like any kind of spiritual growth, it is a
continuing process. I expect and hope to continue to be converted until the day
I die.
APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING
I'd like us to be reminded at this point how God can interfere with my
categories, and how we need to be both cautious and flexible when we make
diagnoses of where our fellow humans—and we ourselves—fall in this spectrum of
spiritual growth. There are quite a number of people who superficially appear to
be in one stage when, in fact, they are someplace else entirely. For example,
there are people who attend church and who, to the naked eye, appear to be
in Stage Two, but who inwardly are dissatisfied with their religion and are skeptical of it and have become scientific-minded. This is so common that entire
congregations have been created which are only faintly religious. A lot of
Methodist and Presbyterian ministers in wealthy suburban communities don't
talk to their congregations about God on Sunday mornings, but about psychology.
God forbid they should talk about God. It would be too threatening. Then again,
there are people who talk about God but are not the least bit religious or
spiritual. These are people who may appear to be in Stage Four, who can wear
Stage Four veneer— like certain cult leaders—but who, in fact, are Stage One
criminals.
Similarly, not all scientists are Stage Three people. They too know how to write
good footnotes, but only in an extremely narrow area of research where they
have the scientific doctrine down so pat that they feel very safe while ignoring
all the mystery of the world. Such scientists are really Stage Two people.
There are also people whom psychiatrists refer to as borderline personalities. One of the things that characterize them is that they
seem to have a foot in Stage One and a foot in Stage Two, and a hand in Stage
Three, and a finger in Stage Four. They're all over the place. They lack
coherency, and that, in a sense, is why we call them borderline: they don't have
much in the way of borders or boundaries.
Furthermore, there are people who might begin to enter a more advanced stage,
then slip backwards. We actually have a name for the person who slips back from
Stage Two to Stage One—"backslider." Typically, he might be a man who ran around
drinking and gambling and chasing after women and leading a dissolute life,
until one day he bumped into some fundamentalist folk who had a chat with him
and he was saved. For the next couple of years, he leads a sober, Godfearing,
righteous life and then he vanishes one day, and nobody knows where he is until
six months later when he is discovered back in the gutter or gambling house. His
church friends talk with him and he is saved again and does pretty well for
another couple of years, until he backslides once more.
There are also people bouncing back and forth between Stage Two and Stage Three.
An example of such a person might be a churchgoer who says, "Of course I still
believe in God. I mean, look how beautiful nature is—those hills turnng green
and the white clouds flying and the flowers blooming. Obviously, no human
intelligence could have created such beauty, so there must have been a divine
intelligence that set all this in motion millions and millions of years ago. But
you know, it's just as beautiful out on the golf course as it is in church on
Sunday morning and I can worship my God out on the golf course just as well."
So this man chooses the golf course over church. And all is well, until his
business undergoes a mild reversal and he says, "Oh my God, I haven't been going
to church! I haven't been praying!" He goes back to church and starts praying
very hard, until after a couple of years there is an upturn in the
economy—for all I know perhaps because he's been praying so hard—and he begins
to drift back onto his Stage Three golf course. [1998]
The Road Less Traveled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety