M. Scott Peck

In his ROAD LESS TRAVELED, M. Scott Peck wrote: “ We must continually expand our realm of knowledge and our field of vision through the thorough digestion and incorporation of new information. . . learning of something new requires a giving up of the old self and a death of outworn knowledge. To develop a broader vision we must be willing to forsake, to kill, our narrower vision. In the short run, it is more comfortable not to do this – to stay where we are, to keep using the same microcosmic map, to avoid suffering the death of cherished notions. The road to spiritual growth, however, lies in the opposite direction. We begin by distrusting what we already believe, by actively seeking the threatening and unfamiliar, by deliberately challenging the validity of what we have previously been taught and hold dear. The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.”

I have great respect for Peck for writing those simple, but powerful lines. Unfortunately, Peck who just died at the age 69, did not live up the values of skepticism to the end.

In his ROAD NOT TAKEN, Robert Frost writes: “It seems that as the years wore on his faculty for clear thinking was more and more clouded or occluded by supernaturalism. His last work may be a gauge of how deep he was in his late age into this: Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption. Rather than of demoniacal entities his account is more a glimpse into how far Peck had strayed from the rigors of scientific thinking.

This development reminds me of what Bertrand Russell said in his WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN about Immanuel Kant: - “He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother’s knees. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize – the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have been than those of later times.” Poch Suzara