Peck's Theories About The Unconscious God example essay topic

Certain administrators, educators, and medical professionals in our ranks are recommending strange books which teach skepticism, atheism, and New Age philosophies. This present report draws the curtain back, so you will not be ignorant when these concepts and their corollary code words are presented in your area. It may all sound very exciting, mystifying, and life-changing. But it is old-fashioned Oriental mysticism in a new guise.

There are churchmen and medical professionals in our ranks who claim that these books will change a person's life. We agree. THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED. Scott Peck, M.D., is a practicing psychiatrist. His most famous book is The Road Less Traveled, which was initially published in 1978. It has been a national best-seller ever since.

This book, and its companion volumes by the same author, are increasingly being urged on our people. The subtitle of this book is A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. Sounds pretty good, does it not? Do not be fooled. We are giving you an advance warning.

You may find these theories taught at your own church one of these days. Peck excites the imagination to lofty flights of fancy while subtly instilling pride in one's own wisdom. This is the secret of its fascination. It lures one on to seek a wisdom hidden from, and unavailable to, commonplace people.

One might think that M. Scott Peck is a very wise man, in view of the profundity which people imagine they find in his writings; yet we will learn that, by his own admission, he is a tobacco and alcohol addict. The wisdom of the world is foolishness with God. "The wisdom which spiritualism imparts is that described by the apostle James, which 'descend eth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. ' This, however, the great deceiver [initially] conceals". -Great Controversy, 554. M. Scott Peck teaches his readers that they must forsake the half-truths their parents have taught them and become skeptics in order to attain the level where wisdom begins: "Science is a religion of skepticism. To escape from the microcosm of our childhood experience, from the microcosm of our culture and its dogmas, from the half-truths our parents told us, it is essential that we be skeptical about what we think we have learned to date.

It is the scientific attitude that enables us to transform our personal experience of the microcosm into a personal experience of the macrocosm. We must begin by becoming scientists". -The Road Less Traveled, 195. In the next paragraph, he claims that true spirituality is to worship "the truth". As you forsake the religion your parents taught you-you leap far beyond them into a new sphere of enlightenment. You have left the lie of religion for the truth of skepticism, your new religion: "Many patients who have already taken this begin to say to me: 'I'm not religious.

I don't go to church. I no longer believe much of what the church and my parents told me. I don't have my parents' faith. I guess I'm not very spiritual. ' It often comes as a shock to them when I question the reality of their assumption that they are not spiritual beings.

'You have a religion. ' I may say, 'a rather profound one. You worship the truth. You believe in the possibility of your growth and betterment: the possibility of spiritual progress. In the strength of your religion you are willing to suffer the pains of challenge and the agonies of unlearning. You take the risk of therapy, and all this you do for the sake of your religion.

I am not at all certain it is realistic to say that you are less spiritual than your parents; to the contrary, I suspect the reality is that you have spiritually evolved beyond your parents, that your spirituality is greater by a quantum leap than theirs, which is insufficient to provide them with even the courage to question". -195-196. In the next paragraph, Peck notes that science is greater than religion and other things he had been talking about. "Science as a religion represents an improvement, an evolutionary leap, over a number of other world views". -196. One aspect of attaining to the deeper wisdom, Peck declares, is to obey the promptings or impulses which urge us to do things.

We must listen to and obey unconscious self. We must obey our random impulses! "If we identify our self with our self-concept or self-awareness or consciousness in general, then we must say concerning the unconscious that there is a part of us that is wiser than we are. We have talked about this 'wisdom of the unconscious' primarily in terms of self-knowledge and self-revelation". -251. Peck then attributes this to something of a godlike quality that is in all humans.

"The unconscious is wiser than we are about other people as well as ourselves. The fact of the matter is that our unconscious is wiser than we are about everything... Among the possible explanations, one is that of [Carl] Jung's theory of the 'collective unconscious,' in which we inherit the wisdom of the experience of our ancestors without ourselves having the personal experience". -251,252. Those who have read the present writer's reports on Neuro linguistic Programing, LEAD, and Erickson ian hypnosis (see our Hypnotism Tract book) will recognize that M. Scott Peck is actually traveling the same road they are! It is a pathway which leads to destruction.

Yet this is what is being recommended at Southern University. It very likely is at some of our other educational and medical institutions as well. On pages 263-268, M. Scott Peck discusses the similarity of physical evolution to spiritual evolution. He says both evolve all the time.

Just as man is ever evolving physically, so his spirit is spontaneously evolving into higher spheres. We are naturally getting better all the time. On page 270, we are told there may be some kind of he, she, or it god, and that we are to grow into it. We are to become this god.

We are to attain all its power, all its might. We are to be god. "God wants us to become Himself (or Herself or Itself). We are growing toward godhood.

God is the goal of evolution. ". It is one thing to believe in a nice old God who will take good care of us from a lofty position of power which we ourselves could never begin to attain. It is quite another to believe in a God who has it in mind for us precisely that we should attain His position, His power, His wisdom, His identity... It [is] possible for man to become God. ".

As soon as we believe it is possible for man to become God, we... must constantly push ourselves to greater and greater wisdom, greater and greater effectiveness". -270-271. The key to attaining godhood, Peck says on pages 271-277, is to not be lazy, but work and believe yourself into divinity. He says "the myth of Adam and Eve can again be used to illustrate this" (p. 274). Like the rest of the Bible, Peck considers Genesis to be a myth (207). In the next chapter, The Evolution of Consciousness, Peck again returns to his theory, that we become God by listening to our unconscious impulses and obeying them.

-Do you think it is safe to obey your impulses? Yet that is the only safe path, according to Peck. "The collective unconscious is God; the conscious is man as individual; and the personal unconscious is the interface between them... I have said that the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is for the individual to become as one with God. It is to know with God. Since the unconscious is God all along, we may further define the goal of spiritual growth to be the attainment of godhood by the conscious self.

It is for the individual to become totally, wholly God. Does this mean that the goal is for the conscious to merge with the unconscious, so that all is unconsciousness? Hardly. We now come to the point of it all". The point is to become God while preserving consciousness.

If the bud of consciousness that grows from the rhizome [root] of the unconscious God [within you] can become itself [the conscious] God, then God will have assumed a new life form. This is the meaning of our individual existence. We are born that we might become, as a conscious individual, a new life form of God". -282-283.

The nonsense logic we find in the above paragraph is what we find in all false religions. It is the lie that you are god, the lie taught by the serpent in the garden of Eden. The last part of the above quotation sounds exactly like the theories taught by Eastern mysticism. M. Scott Peck has been doing his homework; he has been studying Hinduism. And some of our leading men have been studying M. Scott Peck. And they are teaching these theories to others.

Will you let them do it? Mail copies of this report to every administrator you know, with a plea that something be done to stop this spiritistic indoctrination. Ellen White said the Omega would be "of a most startling nature". Is not this startling? At his home on Academy Drive in Glendale, Merle Vance told me about the Old Testament reference to the seven-headed serpent. He noted that it was one of the snakes worshiped by the ancients, and that the Nile Delta flowed out into seven heads, and was thus considered a reincarnation of that serpent.

Well, we are seeing the Omega in our denomination in this our day, and it is a seven-headed serpent. The infiltration into our ranks of M. Scott Peck's theories about the unconscious god within us is one of those heads; William Loveless with his meditation fixation is another. Many more could be mentioned. -And all of the heads of this serpent are calling to us that we can safely disobey God and His laws! None of them teach that sin must be resisted and overcome. You will not find it in M. Scott Peck's books; you will not find it in any of the liberal preachers, or liberal books and articles in Adventist.

Men are going to answer in the judgment for teaching people they can live in their sins and be saved. "The goal of theology presented here [in this book, The Road Less Traveled], and that of most mystics, is... not to become a an egoless, unconscious babe. Rather it is to develop a mature, conscious ego which then can become the ego of God. If... we can identify our mature free will with that of God, then God will have assumed through our conscious ego a new and potent life form".

-283. The above paragraph may sound deep and profound, but actually says nothing. The chapter after that, The Nature of Power, speaks of the great power we attain as we become god in the flesh. The following chapter says that Grecian myths illustrate mental illness. (Remember, Peck is a psychiatrist.) And the following chapter is about grace.

Entitled Resistance to Grace, it explains that we receive god's grace simply by becoming god. "For the call to grace in its ultimate form is a summons.