Since I first blogged about this last week, I’ve wanted to return to M. Scott Peck’s book with the goal of pulling out a few especially juicy passages, attempting to “unpack” and react to them, and hopefully weaving the results together with strands of ideas and insights I’m picking in the rooms and from my sponsor and friends.

That said, let’s just jump right in!

“…the exercise of discipline is not only a demanding but also a complex task, requiring both flexibility and judgment. Courageous people must continually push themselves to be completely honest, yet must also possess the capacity to withhold the whole truth when appropriate. To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours. To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined. The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balance …”

Wow, there’s a whole lot of good stuff in there to chew on …

It seems to me that Scott puts some of the 12 Step’s “spiritual principles” into a more “secular” context, but ultimately for both the overriding concern is with personal growth, or more bluntly, with “growing up.”

The Big Book says that alcoholics as a group are by nature “undisciplined.”  Scott devotes a chapter at the beginning of “Road Less Traveled” to the topic of discipline; as you probably already guessed, the passage quoted above is from this chapter.  Interestingly, Scott proposes that “complete honesty” is one of the necessary components of self-discipline.  I don’t think I’ve heard this relationship between honesty and discipline explicitly talked about in AA, but insofar as the Steps represent a general path towards greater discipline and direction, honesty certainly is one of the three basic prerequisites to striking out on this path- the other two of course being open-mindedness and willingness.   For Scott, honesty requires courage and the process or practice of honesty itself is disciplining – by holding ourselves to a standard of honesty we avoid the “easier, softer ways” of self-deception and complacency.   Yet, in a phrase reminiscent to me of the 9th step’s caution about making amends “except when to do so would injure them or others”, as well as the admonition to “practice restraint of pen and tongue”, Scott adds that we should “withhold the whole truth when appropriate.”

In a similarly parallel way, the sentence that follows about “accepting total responsibility for ourselves”  while “rejecting responsibility that is not truly ours” reminds me of conventional AA wisdom about “taking care of our side of the street,” an act that not only requires willingness and acceptance, but also balance and perceptiveness.  As people who can be variously driven by excessive self-centeredness and denial on the one hand, and desire to control and people-please on the other, figuring how to steer between the rock of  “total responsibility” and the hard place of “not taking on others’ responsibilities” is not an easy prospect.

I have a feeling that Scott might agree with the sentiment I hear in the rooms that learning this kind of discernment is a “long and winding road.”