Process of Self psychological discovery | Road Less Travelled

I am reading this book called "Road less travelled" written by Dr. M. Scott Peck, M.D, Harvard passout. Basically this guy is a psychologist in addition to being a deep thinker. My reason for picking up this book is firstly that mysterious subjects like human psychology interest me. Secondly there are a few strange things in my way of thinking, for which I want to discover, why I think this way.
Anyways, I picked up the book because I thought it would be an interesting read. Let me tell you, I’m the guy who thinks everything is logical and everything can be deduced from other things and most of the things in this world are obvious. The unique thing about this book is that it proposes some things, some ideas which are Radical, and supports it with arguments and experience.
Few points that author made about love that particularly interest me are:
1. Falling in love is not love actually.
2. You truly start to love someone when you ‘fall out of the love’.
What Dr. Scott means is that falling in love is involuntary and no matter what, the charm and newness of falling in love would eventually fade away. This is what he refers to ‘falling out of love’. That is when people start to see their differences with their loved one, their dissimilarities. Falling in love is a passive process. You don’t have to make an effort for it. So is falling out of love.
Doctor’s most valid argument is that real love is an active process which involves "Work" and "Courage". To be honest, I feel I lack both of them, though I quite agree with the importance of both these attributes in a true relationship. May be we all know it instinctively, but to read it out was a moment of awareness. Hence, the non-essence of love is Laziness. Oh man, I feel sleepy.

Author also talks about the importance of listening in a relationship and says that complete listening is a tiring and energy-draining process. We think we are completely listening when we are with a friend, family or business associates. But we are actually doing only selective listening with a specific objective in mind. It seems in most cases of psychological disorders, the patient shows major improvement by the assurance of mere fact that the therapist is completely listening to them, may be some1 for the first time in years, first time ever, even before the root cause of problem is touched at all. For relationship counselling’s they often tell couples to listen to each other (when a doctor says that, it doesn’t sound this general and ‘ya, ya we know all this’ kinda stuff) and ask them to talk to each other with appointment (strange?). This is because complete listening cannot happen while driving or cooking. It can only be done with specific time scheduled only for this purpose.
There are numerous interesting concepts that author discusses, like importance of parenting in life (it is the biggest influence on our life and to know how long it’s affects reach, read the book), how most people never grow up and become independent, mature individuals (let me warn you this goes much beyond your general understanding of what maturity means. It doesn’t means these guys are afraid or unsuccessful in life or careers) and remain a child long after their parents have been dead and buried, importance of the concept of bracketing, i.e., to keep prejudices away while talking/ listening to someone and many other in addition to the ones which I could not comprehend clearly.
Well, I liked the book because Dr. Scott all the times talks about a typical individual like me, who thinks that whatever he is doing is perfectly right, who thinks himself mature, independent and intelligent, has certain fears about which he doesn't know, and behaves in a particular fashion. But upon the revelation of various factors that have gone into his this kind of behaviour - which make perfect sense to me - he analyses why that person is behaving this way, or why is it unhealthy to behave this way. Basically doctor takes Spiritual Growth as the ultimate objective for all our behaviours, which is closely related to mental growth.

I think everyone, who is as self obsessed as I am, should give a glance to this excellent book. It gets a little boring and abstract at few paes, but thatz okay, since as I said the doctor is also a deep thinker. Of course reading his book is not a substitute to attending actual therapy, but it does gives you many insights to why you behave, the way you do.

What did u just say? It’s a long post? Back off!!! Its’ my blog. (What? Attitude problem with me? I think so :-)