The Road Less Traveled: Love, on Cathexis without love

Among the things that I am saying there and throughout this section of the book is that our use for the word “love” is so generalized and unspecific as to severely interfere with our understanding of love. I have no great expectation that the language will change in this respect. Yet as long as we continue to use the word “love” to describe our relationship with anything that is important to us, anything we cathect, without regard for the quality of that relationship, we will continue to have difficulty discerning the difference between the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad, the noble and the ignoble.

Using our more specific definition, it is clear, for instance, that we can love only human beings. For, as we generally conceive of things, it is only human beings who possess a spirit capable for substantial growth. Consider the matter of pets.’ We “love” the family dog. We feed it and bathe it, pet it and cuddle it, discipline it and play with it. When it is sick we may drop everything and rush it to the veterinarian. When it runs away or dies we may be grief-stricken. Indeed, for some lonely people without children, their pets may become the sole reason for their existence. If this is not love, then what is? But let us examine the differences between our relationship with a pet and that with another human being. First of all, the extent of our communication with our pets is extremely limited in comparison with the extent to which we may communicate with other humans if we work at it. We do not know what are pets are thinking. This lack of knowledge allows us to project onto our pets our own thoughts and feelings, and thereby to feel an emotional closeness with them which may not correspond to reality at all. Second, we find out pets satisfactory only insofar as their wills coincide with ours. This is the basis on which we generally select our pets, and if their will begin to diverge significantly from our own, we get rid of them. We don’t keep pets around very long when they protest or fight back against us. The only school to which we send our pets for the development of their minds and spirits is obedience school. Yet it is possible for us to desire that other humans develop a “will of their own”; indeed, it is this desire for the differentiation of the other that is one of the characteristics of genuine love. Finally, in our relationship with pets we seek to foster their dependency. We do not want them to grow up and leave home. We want them to stay put, to lie dependably near the hearth. It is their attachment to us rather than their independence from us that we value in our pets.

Peck, M. Scott. (1978). The road less traveled: A new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth. Simon & Schuster, New York. pp. 108-109.

The Road Less Traveled: Discipline, on Renunciation and Rebirth

The process of giving up the self (which is related to the phenomenon of love, as will be discussed in the next section of this book) is for most of us a gradual process which we get into by series of fits and starts. One form of temporary giving up of the self deserves special mention because its practice is an absolute requirement for significant learning during adulthood, and therefore for significant growth of the human spirit. I am referring to a subtype of the discipline of balancing which I call “bracketing.” Bracketing is essentially the act of balancing the need for stability and assertion of the self with the need for new knowledge and greater understanding by temporarily giving up one’s self – putting one’s self aside, so to speak – so as to make room for the incorporation of new material into the self. p. 72-73.

A final word on the discipline of balancing and its essence of giving up: you must have something in order to give it up. You cannot give up anything you have not already gotten. If you give up winning without ever having won, you are where you were in the beginning: a loser. You must forge for yourself an identity before you can give it up. You must develop an ego before you can lose it. This may seem incredibly elementary, but I think it is necessary to say it, since there are many people I know who possess a vision of evolution yet seem to lack the will for it. They want, and believe it is possible, to skip over the discipline, to find an easy shortcut to sainthood. Often they attempt to attain it by simply imitating the superficialities of saints, retiring to the desert or taking up carpentry. Some even believe that by such imitation they have really become saints and prophets, and are unable to acknowledge that they are still children and face the painful fact that they must start at the beginning and go through the middle.

Discipline has been defined as a system of techniques of dealing constructively with the pain of  problem solving – instead of avoiding that pain – in such a way that all of life’s problems can be solved. Four basic techniques have been distinguished and elaborated: delaying gratification, assumption of responsibility, dedication to the truth of reality, and balancing. Discipline is a system of techniques, because these techniques are very much interrelated. In a single act one may utilize two, three or even all of the techniques at the same time and in such a way that they may be indistinguishable from each other. The strength, energy and willingness to use these techniques are provided by love, as will be elaborated in the next section. This analysis of discipline has not been intended to be exhaustive, and it is possible that I have neglected one or more additional basic techniques, although I suspect not. It is also reasonable to ask whether such processes as biofeedback, meditation, yoga, and psychotherapy itself are not techniques of discipline, but to this I would reply, that to my way of thinking, they are technical aids, rather than basic techniques. As such they may be very useful but are not essential. On the other hand, the basic techniques herein described, if practiced unceasingly and genuinely are also sufficient to enable the practitioners of disciple, or “disciple,” to evolve to spiritual higher levels. p. 76-78.

Peck, M. Scott. (1978). The road less traveled: A new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth. Simon & Schuster, New York.