I gave examples from my clinical practice of how love was not wholly a thought or feeling. I told of how that very evening there would be some man si… - M. Scott Peck

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.

The idea that God is actively nurturing us so that we might grow up to be like Him brings us face to face with our own laziness.

Another characteristic of human nature — perhaps the one that makes us most human — is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.