I'm interested in learning what psychiatrists, psychologists have to say about the complete man, body and mind, the here and now and the beyond. The road is a metaphor, every traveler takes a route, some have no maps though maps are not the territory. As a psychotherapist and psychologist, I was curious to know how Dr. Peck builds the alliance with the client and the type of theory and principles he starts from. Life is difficult, uncertain, an 'inherently insecure burden' involving unlearning, relearning, 'the agony of not knowing'. There is something about us we need to work on, I agree. It is a field hospital, not dissimilar to MASH, a naturally evil world contaminated by goodness. Because evil is so destructive, it is the ultimate illness, and evil is the militant ignorance of the Shadow that we would rather not own up to, that we try to hide from ourselves and others because our conscious mind tries to avoid pain. Dr Peck tells us our finest moments occur precisely when we are uncomfortable, not feeling happy or fulfilled, struggling and marching. The journey of a road beyond is not easy without renunciation, kenosis and mortification in our natural idolatry of ease and comfort which the mass media conspires to keep alive in our consciousness. There are parallels between spiritual development and psycho-sexual developments. The author's mellowed and mature perspective of the Beyond which is an essential quest gives ultimate meaning to man's soul, his spiritual nature, the whole being, one cannot treat the body alone, the medical model is just one way of looking at disorders, disregarding the spiritual would be at our cost and the healing incomplete.

This was my x-girlfriends favorite book. she did alot of coke in college and right after we broke up, she got married in less than a year. Little did she know when I read her book, it backed me from untrapping myself from her wanting kids before 6 months of a relationship. She was 25, YIKES! She found someone and got married at 26. No relationship, straight to marriage. We both got what we wanted. She got her douchebag, I got my freedom! Good read for all :)

This is one of the books that will change your life, your view of the world, and your view of yourself. There is not a person on this earth to whom I would not recommend this book.

Quite hilariously, I read this book for book club, got 80 pages from the end and realised this is the sequel, not the book I was meant to be reading... However, I assume the books are fairly similar so I'm sure my thoughts will be the same!

I didn't enjoy this book at all. I almost gave up on it but felt bad as I had given up on the last book club book, so I ending up skimming the rest to at least finish it!

I didn't vote for this book for book club and went into it fairly blind, so I didn't realise it was a psychospiritual book. As an atheist, it therefore made for a jarring read when the author was talking about religion or God as this is incongruous to my own beliefs, and meant I often found myself disengaging from some of the sections.

I also found it difficult to understand the point of this book and who it is aimed at - it felt like a self-help book but it didn't really present any tangible actions to take forward into your own life, and instead felt like a bunch of learnings and ramblings from the author's own life which only really felt relevant and applicable to him. I found myself disagreeing a lot with what he was saying, but the way the book was written meant he was describing his opinions like they were a universal fact, which made me frustrated and annoyed. For example, he says 'if we are not here necessarily to be happy, fulfilled, or comfortable all the time, then what are we here for? What is the meaning of life?'. Personally, being happy and comfortable is the meaning of life for me, and so it was weird to read this person contradicting my own world view and presenting it as fact. There was similar emphasis throughout the book on the importance of learning and progressing, which is a very capitalist viewpoint and I really hate the idea that everything you do must be to better or develop yourself, like what if I am comfortable where I am right now and just want to standstill for a minute?! And then later he says the experience of suffering when dying is an opportunity to learn and grow - absolutely not, I want my death to be as painless as possible thank you!!

There were also a couple of sections where the author would present a learning from his life as revolutionary when I felt it was quite the opposite. However, I appreciate that this book was written almost 30 years ago and attitudes to things such as counselling and marriage were different, and being able to have access to an abundance of information nowadays means a lot of these topics are widely discussed in today's society when they might have been a bit more eye-opening for people back then.

To counter with some positives, there were some insightful and interesting quotes/titbits throughout this book, and I was surprised at how relevant some of the sections were for a book that's almost 30 years old. The start of the book talks about how a lot of people don't critically think and blindly go along with what they're told to believe or think, which is extremely pertinent to today's society (see: Trump supporters). There was also some interesting discussions about human behaviour and different types of thinking which I had never really thought before (e.g., neurotic/character disorders, stupid/smart selfishness etc.). And whilst I do not share the same religious beliefs as the author, I did find it interesting to hear about some of his beliefs and how it links to psychology. For example, the way he interprets the story of Adam and Eve as the evolution of human consciousness. I also liked (and partly disliked) the structure of the book - the sections were short which made them easy to digest, but I felt like the chapters could have benefited from a summary of key learnings and insights at the end of each chapter to encapsulate what the author wanted to convey to the reader. Without this, it made the book feel like one long rambling of consciousness from the author.

In conclusion, this book just wasn't written for me and so I really struggled to get through it!

A great book about spirituality, change, and god.

It's an interesting book as it is written by a psychotherapist and deeply spiritual writer. The book is mostly about change. Personal change, organizational change, and change/transformation of communities.

It may sound like a promotion of religious beliefs but the book is actually a good advocate for the process behind the change and what to be aware of.

One point I like to point out because of my personal experience with hard transformation (due to alcohol abuse) is that it is impossible to see the change yourself. It feels like walking into the valley of death. But you need to go through it. No matter what kind of change/transformation you want in life. You need to let go of something, to get something new. Change requires you to trust the process sometimes religion of some sort helps you with that. Sometimes knowledge is everything.

Learning is the key to change. So keep an eye out for possibilities of learning and grab them.

Reading this was challenging - I was worried about the religious content in the beginning when I read about the authour, only to read the first chapter and to relax that it wasn't "contaminated", struggled with the later ones, when terms like good and bad, evil and sin, soul and ego flew in all directions, only to find in the latter chapters quite a unique view of how he thinks God is, even though he consider himself as a christian, and was actually baptized in his forties as a christian, but not belonging to any religion (how is that even possible?), and confessed that he even did not read the whole Bible. So the ideas that did stuck wih me was his opinion on the existence of paradoxes and the need for " wholeness" and "integration/integrity", maybe even the importance of awareness. The poem at the end was an infusion of spirituality, so I'm pretty happy that I stuck with reading it all the way trough.

4 thumbs up

Didn't hate it, but was bored, so I quite about 25% of the way in. Meh.

Nothing new in this book. I loved "The Road Less Traveled" but this was blah and a nothing new sequal.

The first half of the book was ok, not so much new, but ok. Mostly talking about how "discipline" helps solving problems in life and examples of the cases that its lack is disastrous.

The second half is terrible though. This is when he goes to spirituality and the motivation behind discipline which is "love". To see how meaningless it was, the author says because of second law of thermodynamics, evolution shouldn't have happened. It's because of "love" that it has happened! He not only has no understanding of second law of thermodynamics, but doesn't understand evolution either.

I hope I hadn't wasted my time reading it at all!

It is about spiritual growth in an age of anxiety. This man puts it all together nicely in this book. He establishes the need for thinking again. In a society that has given over their decisions to everyone else by following established roads Dr. Peck re-ignites the need for genius and thinking about life daily. How the lack of thought causes the inequity and injustice's and prejudices in life.

Heavy going, but a valuable resourse...