The theme of this book is to introduce us a "road less traveled": the journey of spiritual growth. It's a path that requires one to constantly revise his or her understanding of the world, to update one's "cognitive map". This process of abandoning the old identity and gaining the new one will inevitably involve pain, but the pain is a normal state of life, and discipline, to forebear the pain for the good, is the approach to spiritual growth. He believes that life is like problem-solving, by embracing the challenge and take difficulties as normal, one will no longer complain about life but progress further in the spiritual path.

Scott Peck wrote this book with his years of experience as a psychotherapist. A lot of patient examples were used to illustrate concepts and ideas in the book. He also re-conceptualizes many terms that we are familiar with, such as "love", "sin", "religion", "grace".

He believes that love for ourselves is the motivation for self-discipline. Also, he defines love for others as the "extension of one's ego boundary". (I guess it's the same as "love your neighbors as yourself") Romantic love is not considered as true love in this book. On the contrary, when the love from natural attraction ends, the true love will start, because this kind of love requires effort to bear with the drawbacks of the other and to think for the benefit of the other instead of oneself's. He listed what love is not: love is not dependency, not self-sacrifice, not a feeling, not controlling. He claims that the opposite of love is laziness, which is also considered "the original sin" in the later chapters.

Religion, in this book, is broadly defined as the overall understanding and believes about the world. Everyone has his or her own religion. Scott gave examples of both sides: people who suffered from oppressive religious parents, and people who were against religion once found their true faith. I really like one sentence in this book: "our religion must be a wholly personal one, forged entirely through the fire of our questioning and doubting in the crucible of our own experience of reality."
This is on the contrary to what I was once taught in institutional religion that Satan works through doubts. A state of "both trust and doubt" is a healthy state of mind, I think.

In the end, when it comes to the section of "Grace", he's basically reinterpreting many Bible verses. Through examples miracles, cases of the recovery of mentally-ill patients, and his own experience of getting helped by the unconsciousness, he believes that God, or the power that beyond ourselves, or "grace", is both inside us appearing as the unconsciousness, and external to us, like an invisible hand constantly giving us help, as long as we notice it and accept it. Therefore, the way to spiritual growth sounds difficult but it can be easy, since an inherent power is in us to push us mature, and eventually "be like God". Interestingly, he also considers the evolution of human society as the process of "being like God".

Though I like this book and I think many ideas in this book make real sense, but somehow I think it still lacks something. When I was in misery, this book only asked me to accept the pain without telling me where to get the strength of taking the pain...