The Road Less Traveled
    A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
M. Scott Peck, M.D.

Scientific Tunnel Vision

- Psychiatrists occasionally encounter patients who can only see down a narrow path directly in front of them
    - Tunnel vision
   
- Many scientists do not look at the evidence of the reality of God
    - Self-imposed psychological set of blinders which prevents them from turning their attention to the realm of the spirit
   
- Use of measurement has enabled science to make enormous strides in understanding of the material universe
    - Measurement has become kind of scientific idol
    - So scientists are skeptical, or reject outright, what they cannot measure
    - What cannot be measured is unimportant and unworthy of our observation
- So many scientists exclude from serious consideration anything intangible

- Science recognizing more and more that at a certain level, reality IS paradoxical
    - Nature of light, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, relativity theory
    - Possibly beginning to see a meeting ground between science and religion
- Possibility of unification of science and faith
    - The most significant and exciting happening in our intellectual life today
   
- Scientists may have made an idol of natural laws
    - Anything not explainable by natural laws assumed to be unreal by scientific establishment
    - Science seems to say: "what is very difficult to understand doesn't exist"
- Medicine explaining away "miracle cures"
    - Disease must not have been present to begin with
   
- Peck: certain that miracles abound
    - Whole variety of experiences as psychiatrist
    - Patients' growth was being remarkably assisted
- He began looking at ordinary existence with an eye for the miraculous
    - The more he looked, the more he found
    - One thing to hope for the reader:
    - Capacity to perceive the miraculous

- Self awareness born and matures in distinctive kind of awareness
    - Mystics speak of it as the perception of the divinity and perfection of the world
    - Peck calls it "perception of the miraculous"
    - Once we disengage from preconceptions and personal interest,
    - Free to experience the world as it is in itself and to behold its inherent magnificence
    - Simply a matter of paying full and close attention to the givens of life
- We are all individuals, but also parts of a greater whole
    - United in something vast and beautiful beyond description
    - Perception of the miraculous is subjective essence of self realization
    - Root from which man's highest features and experiences grow
   
- This interface between science and religion can be shaky, dangerous ground
    - Things that appear to be extraordinary
    - But two events that occur together in time doesn't imply that they are causally related
    - Essential that our critical faculties and capacity for skepticism are not blinded by beauty of the spiritual realm

Scientists have been conditioned to ignore the possibility for the existence of God.  Through a focus on natural laws, they have developed a sort of tunnel vision in which they ignore the question of the existence of God.  But there is evidence in the natural world of miracles.