Excerpts from "The Road Less Travelled" by M.Scott Peck,M.D.
The impediment to spiritual growth is laziness. If we overcome laziness, all the other impediments will be overcome.In the struggle to help my patients grow, I found that my chief enemy was invariably their laziness. And I became aware in myself of a similar reluctance to extend myself to new areas of thought, responsibility and maturation. One thing I clearly had in common with all mankind was my laziness. It was at this point that the "Serpent-and-the-Apple" story suddenly made sense.
The key issue lies in what is missing. The story suggests that God was in the habit of "walking in the garden in the cool of the day" and that there were open channels of communication between Him and man. But if this was so, then why was it that Adam and Eve, separately or together , before or after the serpent's urging, did not say to God, " We're curious as to why You don't want us to eat any of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We really like it here, and we don't want to seem ungrateful, but Your law on this matter doesn't make much sense to us"? But of course they did not say this. Instead they went ahead and broke God's law without ever understanding the reason behind the law, without taking the effort to challenge God directly, question his authority or even communicate with him on a reasonably adult level. They listened to the serpent, but they failed to get God's side of the story before they acted.
Why this failure? Why was no step taken between the temptation and the action? It is this missing step that is the essence of sin. The step missing is the step of debate. Adam and Eve could have set up a debate between the serpent and God, but in failing to do so they failed to obtain God's side of the question.The debate between the serpent and God is the symbolic of the dialogue between good and evil which can and should occur within the minds of human beings. Our failure to conduct - or to conduct fully and wholeheartedly - this internal debate between good and evil is the cause of those evil actions that constitute sin.
In debating the wisdom of a proposed course of action, human beings routinely fail to obtain God's side of the issue. They fail to consult or listen to the God within them, the knowledge of rightness which inherently resides within the minds of all mankind. We make this failure because we are lazy. It is work to hold these internal debates. They require time and energy just to conduct them. And if we take them seriously - if we seriously listen to this "God within us" - we usually find ourselves being urged to take the more difficult path, the path of more effort rather than less. To conduct the debate is to open ourselves to suffering and struggle. Each and everyone of us, more or less frequently, will hold back from this work, will also seek to avoid this painful step. Like Adam and Eve, and every one of our ancestors before us, we are all lazy.
So original sin does exist; it is our laziness. It is very real. It exists in every one of us- infants, children, adolescents, mature adults, the elderly; the wise or the stupid; the lame or the whole. Some of us may be less lazy than others, but we are all lazy to some extent. No matter how energetic, ambitious or even wise we may be, if we truly look into ourselves we will find laziness lurking at some level. It is the force of entropy within us, pushing us down and holding us all back from our spiritual evolution.
Some readers may say to themselves, "But I am not lazy. I work sixty hours a week at my job. In the evenings and on the weekends, even though I am tired, I extend myself to go out with my spouse, take the children to the zoo, help with the house work, do any number of chores. Sometimes it seems that's all I do- work, work, work." I can sympathize with these readers but can persist only in pointing out that they will find laziness within themselves if they look for it. For laziness takes forms other than that related to the bare number of hours spent on the job. A major form that laziness takes is fear. The myth of Adam and Eve can again be used to illustrate this. One might say , for instance,that it was not laziness that prevented Adam and Eve from questioning God as to the reasons behind His law but fear - fear in the face of the awesomeness of God, fear of the wrath of God. But while all fear is not laziness, much fear is exactly that.
Much of our fear is fear of a change in the status quo, a fear that we might lose what we have if we venture forth from where we are now. More often, people will fight against the new information rather than for its assimilation. Their resistance is motivated by fear, yes, but the basis of their fear is laziness; it is the fear of the work they would have to do. So it is quite probable that Adam and Eve were afraid of what might happen to them if they were to openly question God; instead they attempted to take the easy way out, the illegitimate shortcut of sneakiness, to achieve knowledge not worked for, and hope they could get away with it. But they did not. To question God may let us in for a lot of work. But a moral of the story is that it must be done.
In the earlier stages of spiritual growth, individuals are mostly unaware of their own laziness, although they may give it lip service by saying such things as "Of course, like every body else, I have my lazy moments". This is because the lazy part of the self, like the devil that it may actually be, is unscrupulous and specialises in treacherous disguise. For to recognize laziness for what it is and acknowledge it in oneself is the beginning of its curtailment. When I do become conscious of the fact that I am dragging my feet, I am compelled to exert the will to quicken my pace in the direction I am avoiding. The fight against entropy never ends.
We all have a sick self and a healthy self. No matter how neurotic or even psychic we may be, even if we seem to be totally fearful and completely rigid, there is still a part of us, however small that want us to grow, that likes change and development, that is attracted to the new and the unknown, and that is willing to do the work and take the risks involved in spiritual evolution. And no matter how seemingly healthy and spiritually evolved we are, there is still a part of us , however small, that does not want us to exert ourselves, that clings to the old and familiar, fearful of any change or effort, desiring comfort at any cost and absence of pain at any price, even if the penalty be ineffectiveness, stagnation or regression.
In some of us our healthy self seems pathetically small, wholly dominated by the laziness and fearfulness of our monumental sick self. Others of us may be rapidly growing, our dominant healthy self reaching eagerly upward in the struggle to evolve toward godhood; the healthy self , however, must always be vigilant against laziness of the sick self that still lurks within us. In this one respect we human beings are all equal. Within each and every one of us there are two selves, one sick and one healthy - the life urge and the death urge; within each of us is the instinct for godhood and the hope for mankind, and within each of us is the original sin of laziness, the ever present force of entropy pushing us back to childhood, to the womb and to the swamps from which we have evolved.
