One of the most influential books that I have read in my life.

I was attracted to this book by the title & the cover; I'm interested in all the megalithic stones and henges of England. The parts of this book that were about them was very interesting. Peck and his wife stumbled across the first ones in Wales and then over a 3 week car trip through Wales, the Lake District, Scotland and some of its islands, they continued to search them out. I had no idea there were so many. Great fun to follow along with look ups in Wikipedia to learn more about the individual stone outcroppings. Enjoyed the drawings of the stones included also.

Also enjoyed the chapter about their visit to the first Quaker church in northern England & its story of George Fox, the Puritan who became the first Quaker leader.

But there's lots here of Dr. Peck talking about himself and his family -- some of it very interesting and some not, some of it is too personal.

I didn't finish this one but maybe one day I will return...It makes one want to travel around Britain in a car. I liked the way he and his wife were freely traveling, doing whatever took their fancy. Peck would intermingle the traveling with incites into life (his included).

Quite interesting about the megalithic standing stones. Less so of Scott Peck.

A delightful book. Awfully difficult to categorise as he covers so many topics but for me this is part of the book's attraction. The eclectic mix of topics are all knitted together really well. Part autobiography (and he is searingly honest especially about his adulterous behaviour and the difficult relationships with his children), part road trip (Wales, the Borders and Scotland), part history (the megalithic stones that he goes in search of contain many mysteries and he narrates this aspect really well), and psychological in approach as you'd expect from a practicing psychiatrist. However, he doesn't claim any great insight into the complex nature of human lives. "The longer I stayed in practice the more I gradually became aware that I was largely operating in the dark not only in relation to my patients but also in relation to myself." He also has come to the opinion that there are no simple answers to anything because events always have more than one cause. "For any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons." Worth always bearing in mind I think - saves us from rushing into simplistic knee jerk responses.

I've deducted a star because I found his constant references to a community that he and his wife created and continued to be actively involved in a little tedious after a while. He seems to think that community and the loss of it is at the root of a lot of society's problems and whilst he may be right I found this aspect of his writing an intrusion into what otherwise was really entertaining and educational. I learned quite a lot from this book.

He is religious (of sorts)and this is discussed as the book and his journey progresses. For Peck "prayer is a radical response to the mysteries of life." Really, he is a meaning junkie and this is what he has searched for in his life. "I remain a rebel of sorts, a rebel with a cause, and that cause is meaning." He believes that he actually has an addiction to consciousness, he can "no more pass up a new insight than a cigarette." His addiction to consciousness is intertwined with mystery and this is where the spiritual dimension enters.

He addresses the issues of ageing and seems to feel its ravages deeply. "Perhaps the thing that has surprised me most about ageing is the pure physicality of it. Whatever one's attitude about it - however different its individual schedule and distant it may seem, however much it may be denied - it comes. It is inexorable." However, he admits that we not have to grow old mentally.

As in his earlier book, the road less travelled, Peck tries to encapsulate what it means to live a good life. He points out that life is am inherently insecure business and that it is foolish to seek the illusion of any form of security. "The only real security in life lies in relishing life's insecurity." he also likens life to a journey. "One's destination is quite likely to not be nearly as important or meaningful as the journey itself."

It is a shame that a man with such insight and helpful ideas about living did not seem able to take his own advice. His longstanding wife, who went with him on this trip, actually divorced him a couple of years before he died. Whether it was due to his serial adultery or something else is not known but he certainly had difficulty in building the integrity required to live what he would claim to be a better life. Nevertheless, he makes so much sense in so many ways and does so in a light and accessible manner.

"Society's task is not to establish equality. It is to develop systems that deal humanely with our inequality - systems that, within reason, celebrate and encourage diversity."

Again - a must have for any ley hunter or lover of stone circles

a depressing and exhausting tromp thru the centuries old stone monuments of GB.
i kept hoping it would become less turgid, less didactic, less oppressive... some interesting reflections that would have seemed more fresh and insightful if it had been capsulized in an article instead of dragged over 420 pages...

It takes a special breed of narcissist to write a book like this. It takes a rare mixture of glib pretension at honesty and integrity, a certain openness to sharing one’s sins and struggles and be so deeply critical of one’s family, while still professing to be a spiritual guide to others. Unfortunately, as the author and I share the precise Myers-Brigg personality score (this author is clearly an ENTJ), I recognize that the author and I share the same sort of tendencies and therefore the most critical things I have to say about him, and there are plenty of critical things to say about him based on this book, are criticisms I must make of myself. Whether they are humble or arrogant in their own fashion is something of which I am not qualified to be the judge.

This book is organized as a set of essays on such profound subjects as reason, romance, addiction, holiness, change, religion, aging, parenthood, money, death, pilgrimage, gratitude, peace, adventure, consideration, space, time, art, integration, and despair that is structured around a vacation that he and his wife Lily (an INFJ from the account presented, the same type of personality as my own mother and one of my fellow teachers here at Legacy). It is difficult to determine who the precise audience of this book is, as the book is a strange mixture of deeply uncomfortable oversharing about his family life, including his problems with his children, his rather hostile thoughts about his own parents and the WASP culture in general (the two are probably not unrelated), his marital infidelity, his largely unrecognized addictions to smoking, drinking, and painkillers, his unconventional religious beliefs, but his smug superiority over fellow New Agers, and his sometimes tedious ramblings about the importance of his search for understanding community and peacemaking.

One addiction the author is willing to admit is his shared addiction, with his wife Lily, over the megalithic stones of a prehistoric culture. As someone who shares an attraction for the romance of ruins, and an interest in general archeological material, as well as “art” in its larger sense, I can understand where the author is coming from. But one issue I found with the book that might be common is the rather unsettling feeling of being both too close to the author in approach as well as too far in worldview to be truly in sympathy with this author’s narcissistic journey through Wales, northern England, and Scotland in search of ancient pagan standing stones as well as luxurious hotel rooms, and his general attitude of hostility toward sharing this beauty with other people. The author strikes me as a particularly offensive sort of hypocrite, but also the sort of hypocrite I must be very careful to avoid becoming, making him instructive and unsettling at the same time.

One striking similarity the author and I share is our identity at the point where faith and reason meet, with a strong inclination for rationality, but also an appreciation of the irrational within ourselves and others and our world in general, and a general acceptance of tension and paradox that many ascribe (in my case falsely) to a sort of Eastern religion approach. The author talks a lot about his previous practice as a psychotherapist, as well as a little about his participation in a couple of exorcisms, and about numerous other matters as well, which are quite varied, sometimes entertaining, and sometimes highly awkward and uncomfortable. He comments, wisely, at the beginning of the book that he pities the booksellers who have had difficulty sorting this book, and this difficulty is genuine, as this book is a strange mixture of travel book, personal memoirs, and speculations on matters far beyond the author’s competence.

The fact that the author considers himself a person of high sensitivity to others and high personal integrity despite his rather open admission of numerous sexual affairs suggests a level of self-deception that is rather frightening. But it is a level of hypocrisy to which none of us are immune, and as a sensitive soul he is perhaps a bit too prone to reflect on the guilt-induced sufferings of being born into privilege as a sign of genuine spirituality rather than being a self-loathing pathology typical of “white liberal guilt.” The fact that the author’s Christianity is largely doctrine free, and that he certainly is of the antinomian variety of Christianity that thinks nothing of committing sins of massive syncretism (of which this book is a product), therefore completely failing to understand the just and moral aspect of God’s character, and the fact that moral laws were created for all people to obey, even intellectuals like ourselves.

The author does have some wise insights to make, but his knee-jerk hostility to the accoutrements of traditional religion and culture (including his hatred of the military, and his rather lengthy rant about locked bathrooms at a Scottish memorial that he happened to visit on Sunday, totally oblivious to the serious Sundaykeeping of the Scottish Presbyterians of the area, which he comments on as being a sign of a “Sunday-morningism” rather than being a legitimate part of a different and coherent worldview to his own rather vague and wishy-washy one and his extreme dislike of sheep, which seems to suggest an arrogance at being above the common herd of humanity), cut against the value of those insights. Instead, he offers somewhat trivial cliches about the need to build genuine communities through frequent community-building workshops, to develop personal integrity (without some kind of firm moral code to base that integrity upon), and frequent travel critiques about the poverty of such cities as Cardiff and Glasgow and their effects on his own creature comforts. He therefore misses the chance to make more substantial contributions to amateur archeology because of the basic indulgent and trivial approach he takes to his journey. He talks about numinous places, but in such a solipsistic way that it fails to offer relevance to anyone who does not think as he does.

Therefore, this book is overall a rather mixed bag. It offers occasionally valid critiques of traditional culture, while at the same time showing that neither the faith nor ultimate the rationality of the author are founded on the ground of a sufficiently deep spirituality as to appreciate God as lawgiver and judge as well as loving Father and gracious giver of good gifts. In having a universalist approach to God and religion, the author appears to deny anything distinctive about Christianity, making this a poor case for Christ, given that it comes from someone whose genuine biblical knowledge and practice is slight. If he is not a Sunday morning Christian, he might be something that is just as offensive, a Christmas and Easter Christian who cannot understand that the proper grounding of his personal crusade for peace and social justice lies in the severe moral justice of the Law under which all of us are sinners in need of grace, and where God shows no partiality. The book, which is a somewhat lengthy work at more than 400 pages of solid text (no scholarly footnotes or endnotes here), will prompt serious reflection in the reader, but also a fair degree of well-earned harsh criticism towards the author’s rather smug and self-satisfied version of left-wing New Age spirituality. Caveat lector.

After reading The Road Less Travelled many years ago I couldnt believe this was written by the same author. I gave up after 2 chapters, not wanting to read numerous criticisms on every place he visited and details of his infidelity.

Although this true story was a little slow and methodical, it was quite impressive how much M. Scott Peck was able to relate his and his wife's discoveries of Stonehenge to lessons in life.
It was an interesting twist on an ancient landmark (for sake of a better discription) that I knew very little about.

Traipsing around Britain in the damp, looking at mysterious stone circles. What could be better?!

A good book to pick up and browse, a no pressure read.