There's an illusory quality to M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled (1978) that may very well explain the longevity of this self‑help mainstay. It's not unlike the euphoria which attends the coordination of a sock drawer or a wax job on your car. There's the feeling that all bases are finally being covered, that your ducks are not only in a row but beginning to march in time—that you are doing, or have done, all those things which precede the polishing that is the last, preparatory stage before freedom and real living. When I first ran across the book in college, it appealed to nearly every side of me (not exactly a world‑shattering accomplishment in those days, I can assure you). For starters, there was this delectable funkiness to its advice; it was delivered with a simplistic joie de vivre that called to mind Birkenstock sandals and ankle tattoos. Far beneath the psychological theories and actual case histories, I could detect a voice that was decidedly bohemian and young, a residual hipness that made a mild mockery of the book's all too serious footnotes. More conspicuous was its peculiar theology which couched Eastern philosophy within the familiar rhetoric of Christianity. Its case for God tapped into my own spiritual nomadism and offered an appealing alternative to dogmatic truth claims. Most compelling, however, was the book's underlying promise. It dangled before me not perfection, exactly, but a version of it that was made to seem completely attainable: the ability to transcend anxiety and consume life in all its fullness. To a committed procrastinator who had spent most of his young life cramming and catching up, this was indeed a road less traveled.

Simon and Schuster, The Road's publisher, doesn't keep an exact count of the copies it has sold. The typical estimate, however, ranges anywhere from six to eight million. The book has been on The New York Times' best‑seller list for a little over 14 years (a world record) and, with a new twentieth anniversary edition now in bookstores, it seems unlikely that sales are going to drop off any time soon. All of this was news to me. Certain that I had stumbled across an important—but forgotten—psychological artifact, I took it upon myself to introduce the book to nearly everyone I encountered. But rare was the soul who had not already devoured it. In fact, it was some sort of dog‑eared staple for the spiritually inclined, not so much a book as a sacred manuscript to which one turned for a jolt of morality and common sense. It was like the Bible, only better because you could take any of its passages out of context and apply them directly to the matter at hand. Okay, so maybe it was exactly like the Bible. The point is that The Road was already an institution by the time I discovered it and continues to attract a rather sizable audience two decades after its inception—a good enough reason to regurgitate its philosophies and try to account for the book's perennial allure.

Morgan Scott Peck was born in 1936. His father, David W. Peck, was the youngest senior partner at the prestigious Manhattan law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. This is important only because it was in the face of all things proper and expected that Scott Peck decided, at age 13, to drop out of an elite New England boarding school to attend Friends Seminary in New York City. It was there that he took a class in world religions and became interested in Hinduism and Buddhism. Much of Peck's life followed this pattern: a seemingly prosaic beginning to things from which he eventually deviated—not in any big way but just enough to alter his destiny. He entered Case Western Reserve University, for example, to obtain a standard medical degree but emerged a psychiatrist: "Just weeks before med school ended, I realized I didn't want to be a GP or an internist. What I liked to do most was to talk to people." And shortly after that, he joined the United States Army instead of establishing himself through a private practice—this despite his strong opposition to the Vietnam War. But perhaps the strangest divergence of all came in 1976 when he suddenly decided to be an author: "I was sitting in my living room and this book said, 'Write me!' I said, 'Scotty, you've had funny ideas before.' But it still said 'Write me.'" Handwritten on yellow legal pads, the resultant manuscript was purchased for $7500, retitled The Road Less Traveled (it was originally called "The Psychology of Spiritual Growth") and received a paltry hardcover print run of 5,000 copies.

As Peck himself has suggested in nearly a dozen variations on a single anecdote, the idea for his book came to him in a suspiciously abrupt and, some would say, anomalous fashion. "God happened to be walking in northwest Connecticut one day," he told Rolling Stone's John Colapinto, "when He decided He wanted a book written." Now without making too much of his metaphors for inspiration, I'm going to insist gently that they are useful to an understanding of where Peck was coming from when he took on this project. It's one of those non‑fiction works—like Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write or M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf—which cradles its instructional subject matter in an ambiguous, though still attractive, mysticism. That its thesis struck Peck with the force and clarity of a divine thunderbolt goes a long way toward describing the book's ambitions. From its advent, The Road was an extravagant gesture, an "important" volume that sought for itself a field of inquiry which would stretch beyond the usual scope of things. This said, the book is also modest at times and light‑handed; it begins, in fact, with the most elementary of sentiments.

"Life is difficult." The Road's "New Psychology" grows in wide, wild plumes from this one incontrovertible seed. Like Viktor Frankl and Erich Fromm before him, Peck puts mental health in the hands of his patients by asking them to consider what meaning can be derived from their suffering. "Once we truly know that life is difficult," he writes, "once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters."

It would seem that at this juncture readers could either option themselves out of the argument or acknowledge it. But there is no real alternative except to plow forward. Most people are seduced by statements which confirm their misery. By opening The Road with a universal fact, Peck creates the illusion of listening. What follows is a perpetual anticipation of our questions and protestations that catches us in a dialogue before we can raise our defenses against it. We feel understood and so are open to his suggestions.

These he gives under four different headings: Discipline, Love, Growth and Religion, and Grace. The first half of the book is by far the most practical. Its counsel is tangible and closely aligned with Peck's psychiatric training. In the section on discipline, he teaches how to channel pain into a constructive system of mental and spiritual maturation. Through delaying gratification, accepting responsibility, a dedication to truth and balancing, a person can learn to face problems and eventually use them to attain an enlightened station in life. The key to the process is love with which Peck deals extensively in the book's second section.

Love, Peck says, is the motivation that will ensure an adherence to discipline. He then goes to great, unnecessary lengths to distinguish it from its unwieldy imitators. Love, as he defines it, "is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth"—an accurate description, to be sure, but it scarcely merits the 100 pages devoted to it. Still, these are effective chapters because they play off our natural inclination toward structure. They remind me of those office supply shops that specialize in crates and containers. It hardly matters that we can reproduce their products at home with a little ingenuity and a good cardboard box. What these stores do is make organization seem like a new concept. In the same way, The Road's first half appeals to that part of us which appreciates the idea of self‑improvement. Whether we actually integrate its notions is not the point. It's just fun to imagine what it would be like to have it completely together.

In all fairness, the book wasn't intended for the likes of me: a person with garden‑variety dysfunctions who's looking to fine‑tune his lesser attributes. It was written for those already in therapy or close enough to it that a small push would seal the deal. Upon hearing this, some logically conclude that The Road is, then, the means through which its author guaranteed his livelihood. But I honestly don't think this was the case. No, Peck was aiming for something far more majestic than mere occupational perpetuation. If the closing portion of his book is any indicator, he was shooting for nothing short of a post‑modern cosmology.

The last section is a bizarre blend of competing dogmas and ostensibly unrelated sub‑topics. I must admit, however, that it's also a joy to read. When concluding his section on love, Peck writes the following:

This is the only available connection between the solid science that began the book and the ensuing cabalistic frenzy. Shortly after The Road was published, Peck became a born‑again Christian. Even so, he has never hedged from the New Age flavor of these final chapters. How to account for the discrepancy? It's tempting to cite the fact that Peck's book, once Simon and Schuster had published a Touchstone trade‑paperback version of it, was in the process of making him a millionaire at the time of his conversion. But ye without sin can go ahead and change the first word. Regardless, The Road's theology has more in common with funambulism than fundamentalism.

As I see it, the gist of its convoluted thesis is that religion sometimes frustrates spiritual development. Each of us harbors a world view and, as far as Peck is concerned, that's enough to get us into psychological trouble—especially if our personal philosophies were passed down to us from our parents or, for that matter, any microcosmic source. Even science isn't above reproach. For it, too, is a close‑minded scheme that encourages stasis and relinquishment. "The road to spiritual growth, however, lies in the opposite direction," writes Peck. "We begin by distrusting what we already believe, by actively seeking the threatening and unfamiliar, by deliberately challenging the validity of what we have been taught and hold dear. The path to holiness lies through questioning everything."

Point taken: religion bad; skepticism good. So why finish with a categorical defense of God? Here's where Peck loses a lot of people. After disparaging all forms of fanaticism—on the heels of an argument that mercilessly maligned every manifestation of inherited tradition—Peck not only argues for the existence of God, he does it in the vernacular of a Calvinist: "mental illness occurs when the conscious will of the individual deviates substantially from the will of God." Now, add a nod to our brothers out East ("We are growing toward godhood."), mix the two together ("What this suggests is that the interface between God and man is at least in part the interface between our unconscious and our conscious. To put it plainly, our unconscious is God."), tie it to the rest of the book ("Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace—a gift of God, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to initiate self‑examination and repair.") and you have all the makings of a far‑out, Sixties‑inspired amalgam of science, religion and sociology. In short, you have "Zen and the Art of Emotional Maintenance."

It's no wonder, then, that The Road captivates more than your typical neurotic; here's a book that's determined to meet your every need. Its influence has been compared to that of Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in that it manages to traverse ideological and disciplinary boundaries with the angel‑headed ease of a Beat poet. And it does so with a lilting inflection that is at once ingratiating and aloof, professional and neighborly, down‑to‑earth and celestial. But far and above these traits—notwithstanding its exorbitance and the unfettered hodgepodge that was its finale—is how The Road fosters a habitual devotion to its advice.

For several years, it was a permanent constituent of my backpack. It represented my dedication to incessant self‑analysis in the pursuit of a visceral philosophy that would somehow unite the facets of my personality and allow me to soar over the ho‑hum apprehensions that had thus far plagued my existence. And whether it was the discovery that one's ducks are never so in a row that you can keep the most willful of them from flying south, the moment I read about Scott Peck's life‑long addictions to alcohol and cigarettes, or the realization that, when it comes to spirituality, you can't have your cake and eat it, too, I left the book at home one day and there it has remained ever since. Today I regard The Road with what amounts to a defiled nostalgia. I don't blame it for anything; in fact, I associate it with a period when my head was swimming with glorious ideas and romantic delusions of saving the world. But it wasn't until I set the book aside that I stopped anticipating my life and began living it. So while I'm still a procrastinator, even a reluctant proponent of instant gratification, at least I've forsaken my pursuit of perfection. And that has made all the difference.