Brief Summary Of Four Noble Truths By M. Scott Peck Sparknotes

M. Scott Peck in the beginning of the book rejects the assumption that life should be easy and only once we accept it can we ravel on the path of maturity. We should not think that the path of least resistance is the best path. According to Peck, life is suffering (the first of the ‘Four Noble Truths’ given by Buddha). Accepting that life is difficult and embracing the difficulty can lead us to a good and meaningful life. Learning how to deal with difficulties instead of avoiding them is a ‘road less travelled’ according to Peck.
Peck also contrasts the healthy way of dealing with difficulties with the unhealthy way of avoiding them giving examples which contrast these two was of life. He says how it is necessary to obtain discipline to value your existence.
The way to achieve discipline is
1. Delay Gratification
2. Accept your responsibilities
3. Dedication to truth
4. Balancing – How following a process of bracketing is important and we need to set aside our prejudices when meeting net people.
He defines discipline and shows what a disciplined life and an undisciplined life looks like. One of the crucial concepts he writes about is
‘life-maps’. We constantly have to map our life and surroundings throughout our lives, but we tend to do this is a very arbitrary way. We never questions the way we are drawing the maps. Peck focuses on self-examination, instead of trying to live in auto pilot and avoid pain and difficulty. He challenges the reader to make their maps as close to reality as possible.
In the next section, Peck also takes the map of love that most of us have and examines it in detail.
He discusses the meaning of love and what it isn’t. Peck shows how our understanding of love is faulty and gives some examples of how lack of parental love can affect people. Parental love develops discipline and an accurate idea of one’s personal duty and its limits. He rejects the forms of love usually accepted as either dependency (which does not foster growth of the other) or self-sacrifice (which is a tolerance of abuse). According to him, true love begins when we fall out of ‘love’. It is an act of effort whose primary purpose is spiritual purpose by taking the risk of independence and the risk of criticism. He defines love as ‘The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual
growth’.
In other sections Peck applies the life maps to personal and spiritual growth and religion. He talks about the unconscious mind and how it can guide us into a spiritually guided individual. We should open up and listen to the wisdom of the world and give up laziness (which is the actual sin). He also talks about hos God resides within us. God is the unconscious, consisting of a ‘collective conscious’ and how God wants us to become Him.