Hey, podcast listeners, some of you may know that Oprah began having conversations about the deeper meaning of life in the world around us, even in the early days of the Oprah show.

When you look inward, then you can begin to create another kind of power because we know you love a super soul style discussion.

I went, oh, we opened up the vault of the Oprah Winfrey Show to handpick episodes that will enhance the Super Soul podcast library.

Every experience in our lives is to teach us to learn to love.

Please enjoy this past episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show on Super Soul Conversations. Today, I'm joined by an extraordinary person, Dr. Scott Peck. He is a renowned psychiatrist and author of one of the most widely read books in modern history. It's called The Road Less Traveled. Few writers have touched more lives than Dr. Peck, and few messages have empowered more people in 10 years. The road less travel has been sold to an unprecedented four and a half million readers, a record that's been compared to that of the Bible.

I wanted to talk with Dr. Peck today to meet the person, the mind behind such a powerful and influential book and words who can write a book that can stay on the bestseller list for 10 straight years. Well, in his work, he shares lessons of truth and love and values that have enriched my life. And I know millions of other people. Though his work is quite famous, his face is not. Doctor Peck rarely appears on television and therefore I'm very honored to have him here with us today.

Thank you very much for being here.

Thank you, Oprah. It's good to be here, although I hope my face doesn't become that familiar because you like having the anonymity. Really?

I really like privacy. I'm a very shy person. I don't know about you, but. Oh, yeah, I'm very shy.

How do you explain the fact that this has happened, that this book has become a phenomenon?

Well, you know, I'm a psychiatrist. Yes. And in psychiatry, we've got a saying that all things are overdetermined, all symptoms are overdetermined, by which we mean that a symptom or disease has more than one cause. And so there's not just one reason why this book has become so popular. Of course, I think there are a whole bunch of the most common response I've gotten to not only the road less traveled, but most of the rest of my other work is not that I've said anything new, but I've been saying the kinds of things that people have been thinking in their heads all along but felt that they shouldn't talk about because they just went against the culture.

Right.

And you know what it is what I call it, that's an aha feeling you'll be reading and you go, ah, because it's something you already somewhere inside of you knew or had thought but just hadn't been able to articulate in such a way. Like for instance, the very first line of road less traveled is life is difficult.

I went Oh yeah. And this is the kind of thing you're not supposed to think about. Yeah. You know we are bombarded by the media and even by the church with messages that we should be happy that the reason that we're here is to be comfortable and fulfilled. And then when people get finding that they're not happy and they're not feeling comfortable or fulfilled, I think that something must be wrong with them because they think that life ought to be easy, because that's the kind of message of our culture.

It ought to be easy if you just do it right, it's going to be easy. And that does that.

And they said, oh, thank God, yeah, thank goodness. At least somebody else knows that it isn't easy. And once you see it in print that way you say life is difficult. Oh, then I can go on and expect life to be difficult. And that's why you started it that way. Exactly.

Yes. And so what should we expect?

Well, I think that we should hope for some happiness and some relief of pain. And I think this is why doctors are good. And I don't think that all pain is good. But we grow also only through pain. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Those things that hurt, instruct." And I think that what happens to wise people is that sometimes they will actually come to welcome some of the pain in living because that's what they learn from.

Do you believe that every experience is here to teach us something about ourselves?

Yes. Yes. Again, the current message of our culture is that we're here to be happy and fulfilled. I do not think that is the meaning of life. I think that the meaning of life is that we're here to learn that this lifetime is what Keats referred to. Is this Vale of soul making?

Yes. And every day every experience contributes to the making of the soul.

Yes, there is a wonderful author by the name of Donald Nicole, who wrote a book entitled Holiness.

And in the introduction to it, he referred to it as a how to book. He says If you're caught carrying around a book on holiness and people ask you what you're doing with it, you're likely to say, well, I'm just interested to see what authorities have had to say about the subject, he said. But actually, there's no reason for you to buy or read a book in holiness unless you're interested in becoming holy. So it's a how to book about two thirds of the way through that book.

There's a little sentence where Nicole says he says we cannot lose, we cannot lose once we realize that everything that happens to us has been designed to teach us holiness.

Wow. Now, what better news could there be than that? We cannot lose. We are bound to win. We are guaranteed winners once we simply realize that, you know what I mean?

Gives me goose bumps. Because once I made that realization for myself and I didn't phrase it that way, but I had a dream many years ago. Well, not that many years ago.

But I had a dream. And in the dream I was flying and I loved flying dreams.

Do you fly a lot in your dreams? Little bit.

I sort of started. I would be in an airplane and I'd be stuck. I was the pilot for some reason and I'd keep trying to get this thing like an old goose off the ground. And then as my dreams went on, I got a little better. We finally got on with the pilot in the plane. I mean, finally, I went I got out of the plane entirely and started flapping my own arms and. Yeah. And got about three feet off the floor.

And then I got really good at it. I got about eight feet off the floor. At that point, I stopped having them.

Oh, well, I have the most wonderful flying dream. You fly all over the place. Oh my goodness. Sometimes I'm just topping the trees and sometimes I'm way above them and I can see them.

I think you're more enlightened than I am. I don't think so. But let me say this. I've had this flying dream once and I didn't even have to use my arms to fly.

I could just move my foot and I was fine. It was such an extraordinary flying dream that I actually thought, I don't think I'm crazy, but I actually thought after I awakened, after I awakened, I thought I think I actually left. I believe I was really there. But anyway, I was flying down the street and kind of kind of changing my direction with my foot and I'd run into children.

I know it sounds crazy, but but I would run into children. And as I would encounter children, they would say to me, this is all a dream. They'd say I'd say, hi, how are you doing? They'd say, no. You're supposed to say, what are you here to teach me? What are you here to teach me? And I wake up from that dream believing or understanding somehow that that's what every life experience is about.

Whenever I would encounter somebody else on the street, the children would say, no, what are you here to teach me? What are you here to teach me? Are you following me? Oh, that's a beautiful dream.

And thanks. So as I said, I'm a psychiatrist so I can give you a certificate of mental health really for that dream.

But that true. But yes. And so what happened after that is every single experience and there have been some good ones and some not so good ones. I would look at that experience and say whenever crisis would come into my life, I'd immediately say, what is it here to teach me?

And what happens is there's a miracle that happens when you do that, because when you look for the lesson, the crisis sort of dissipates somehow. Why is that?

Well, I think that's one of the virtues of being a sort of spiritual or religious kind of person. You know, other people just get ups and downs in their lives, whereas we religious folk get to have spiritual crises. It is much more dignified to have a spiritual crisis than a depression. Yes. And in fact, you're probably going to get over that depression more quickly if you think of it in terms of spiritual crisis. Yes. Which often it is not that there aren't biological causes of depression.

And again, I think one of the things that we need to do desperately in our culture is to start dignifying discomfort of certain kinds, start dignifying depression in some ways in the road less traveled. You may remember there's a little subsection entitled The Healthiness of Depression. Yes, midlife crisis. We need to start dignifying crises in our lives.

So the most important thing we can gather from this few minutes we've spent together here is that life is difficult and that if you understand that if you go in understanding that and understand that every experience that you have is really an opportunity for you to learn something, or can you give us that phrase again about holiness used to teach you holiness?

Yeah, I think the key is to accept that it's difficult and also see that we are here to learn. I think that's what the meaning is. Some other place, some other time we may get to be fulfilled. We may get to be happy. Happiness is a byproduct.

So, for instance, if you want love. Yeah. And you're going out to get love, chances are you're not going to get love. Right. On the other hand, if you are loving and you work on being a loving person, chances are a lot of love is going to come your way. Well, what is a byproduct of you being love, being good and a lot of knowledge and a lot of enlightenment is going to come your way as long as you see it as your task to learn one of the most profound things you say.

And I think this could save the world a lot of time if they fully comprehend it.

When you say in the book that love is really not a feeling, it is not a feeling, your Dijana, that it's not a feeling all these years you thought it was a feeling, but love is not a feeling.

One of the things that you emphasize, I think that stays with a person more than anything and more or less travel is the concept of discipline.

Well, I preach a lot about what I need to learn, but I did say in that one of the things that we are here to learn is discipline. This is what we teach our children or tried to do from the word go. And if we don't have any discipline, we can't solve any problems. And I think that's part, again, of what life is about is about solving problems, because we're here to learn. We're here to learn.

And it's only through problems and working through the solution.

Right. Because you can't learn if everything's going kind of hunky dory. That's right. That's right. You don't learn anything.

So how do we get people to understand that? Because if you just understood that this is a great big schoolroom, the planet Earth is and that that you've come here to learn how to get along with other people.

No. One, how to love. Yourself and therefore spread that love around, then that changes your entire perception of why things happen and relationships and jobs and everything. Does it not?

Yeah, well, you're asking about love and love not being a feeling. Yeah.

You know, they're going to be this Saturday night, 3000 men sitting in bars crying in their beer and saying to the barkeep that I, you know, I really love my children so much and I love my wife so much. Meanwhile, they're not home and they're drinking away the family income. And they are feeling I mean, they are being honest when they tell the.

So what are they feeling? What is that? If if that's not love.

If love is not a feeling, well, that's alcohol or or sometimes it's being in love, which is a distinct difference, which is some kind of genetic trick that is pulled on us or an illusion falling in love when we we're in love.

It is not a unselfish, loving kind of thing, is matter of fact, it is a totally narcissistic kind of phenomenon. It is what Martin Buber and his followers have called an I-I relationship. When we fall in love with somebody, we do not fall in love with somebody else. We fall in love with a fantasy.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Scott Peck today, and he says about falling in love in the road, less traveled. We fall in love. I know a lot of you are going to disagree, but just hear me out here.

We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously. That's the key word, sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes.

The honeymoon, always in the bloom of romance, always fades. Well, isn't this just the fine Howdy Doody?

Which is not to say, though, that you cannot have long term loving relationships with somebody that you're married to. But that whole romance I'm so in love with you, baby thing that's out, it becomes an entirely different ballpark.

What happens? I was saying that we fall in love with a fantasy that we have. And then what happens after a couple of weeks or a couple of months or even after a couple of years after we get hooked like you're thinking of doing? And then you wake up one morning and we realize that our beloved no longer conforms to our fantasy? Well, wait, wait. We're stuck there with a stranger.

But I have I've had seven years to kind of look at him. So do you think I'm over that already? I think I've already gone to the next.

I hope so. OK, thank you.

What do you think? I think I really am.

I think I'm not past the illusion of that romance thing. No, I think we have what is deeper than that.

Now you're slogging through the mud and. Yeah, and that's where we learn a great deal. And then it can become something really rich and strange and wonderful. But it is not unfailing ecstasy.

But isn't that why so many marriages fail? And I do so many shows throughout the year on relationships and problems within the marriage. And I think one of the reasons that marriage is fifty percent of marriages fail today is because most people believe in the soap opera fantasy of the romance can continue. So when the romance dies, that that bloom is faded, they think that that means that they don't love the person anymore or that the marriage is over. Isn't that correct?

Yeah.

That their stars got crossed or something. And the person I find that they're out of love or they find in the context of a marriage that they're feeling lonely. I had a fantasy when I got married that I would never feel lonely again. And then I found myself at times when I was very difficult to communicate with Lily.

And we were in different places and I was feeling quite lonely. But actually that's just par for the course. But what happens to a lot of people? Yeah, they figure out I just must have made a mistake. The stars didn't work out and it's wrong when it's par for the course.

That means the work just begins. The lessons just start. That's when that's when you're starting to learn something.

Yeah.

That's when the work of real loving begins, which I defined, you may remember, as the will to extend yourself means go beyond where you ordinarily would be, the will to extend yourself for someone else's spiritual growth, your spouse or your children or your own. And that's very important. We also have to extend ourselves not only for other people, but we have to extend ourselves for ourself. And isn't all growth about being spiritual, however?

I think so. You don't have to look at it that way, but I think, as I was saying, we religious folk get to have spiritual crises. I think it can if we take a spiritual view of things, I think that it can facilitate our growth.

And you believe there's no problem that cannot be solved with discipline. I had said that without any discipline, you can't solve any problems with some. You can solve some. And with total discipline, you can solve all problems. But but but the solution to some problems is to accept that there is no solution.

So, for instance, I am getting old and getting old quite rapidly. I'm not in middle age. I'm late middle age. But there's a middle change.

The older you get over me. Metal's getting really farther along.

Americans, in their distaste for pain, will think that middle age begins when you're 60 and then suddenly 65. They find that they're in old age. Well, I'm in late middle age. And if you want to look at that as a problem that you can solve, you're not going to get anywhere. There's not aging is not a problem that you can solve. Now, if you look at it, OK, what have I got to learn from the aging process and beginning to face my mortality, then you got a great deal.

Well, Deepak Chopra believes that you can actually stop the aging process, but I want to know whether or not you believe that we can solve the problem of racism with discipline.

Yes, indeed.

I think that we can. But, boy, what a lot of discipline over the past 60, 70 years, just as we have learned how to blow ourselves off the face of the earth, unbeknownst to most people, we have developed a technology, a human technology, as opposed to a technology of bombs or things to make peace technology, of reconciliation, peacemaking or consensual decision making or what we call community building.

And so we know how to get blacks and whites together, greens, yellows and purple people eaters. We know how to resolve conflicts, but the problem is to get people to use this knowledge. Do you think people want to come together or.

I did a show not too long ago where this couple was fighting and she said, the problem is my husband is more comfortable with his anger. And I find over the years, having done many shows on racism and sexism, that a lot of people are more comfortable just being racist or more comfortable being prejudiced because it means they don't have to learn, they don't have to move out of their little narrow minded box.

Yeah, my book, A World Waiting to be Born, is subtitled Civility Rediscovered. It's about civility, about people relating together with civility. But a lot of it is also about this business of pain. Again, because I point out it is easier to be uncivil. Yes. Than it is to be civil. To be civil requires that we listen to people. And that means that we might get changed. It requires that we think about new things.

It is much easier to sit with your prejudices and not get to know other people and not change.

And don't you think, though, then if you come to the planet and with all of these prejudice and you end up dying this hard, narrow, mean little life you've lived that you have just missed the point?

Yeah, I think you have missed the point. The cure for racism and bigotry. Obviously we all have it, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

We absolutely could end it in our lifetime if we chose to do so, if we chose to do so.

We've got this technology of peacemaking or reconciliation. And I can guarantee you take it out of this country for a moment. In South Africa, if you took five Anglos and fifteen blacks, fifteen Afrikaners and about 35 blacks, which is about proportional, the population got them in a room together for four or five days and got them to submit to these rules to the disciplines of community building. I can guarantee you that they would leave their not only loving each other, but able to work together with a profound effectiveness.

But the problem is, how do you get them into the room? I was talking about the Baptist Church. The Southern Baptist Church has been a huge conflict going on for forty years there, and they've had peacemaking machinery off in the wings. But people have used a lot of people would rather fight than switch. And it is not so easy to learn. We could learn. We know how to do this if we're willing to learn it. But the problem is how do you get people to do it?

So what's going to happen if we don't learn it? I don't know. I'm indebted to my father. Back in the 50s, this was more pointed. He told me about an Oriental sage who was asked by a reporter, somebody like you, whether he was an optimist or a pessimist. And he said, oh, he said, I'm an optimist, of course. And the reporter said, well, how can you possibly be an optimist with all of this racial problems and corruption and inflation and war and whatnot.

And he said, well, he said, I'm not very optimistic about this century, but I'm profoundly optimistic about the next war. Huh. Well, now that's forty years later. I'm not so optimistic about the first half of the 21st century, but I'm profoundly optimistic about the second half if we can get there without blowing ourselves up. Are killing us selves off with racial problems. Well, what role do parents play and how important is it, do you think?

I think the children are gifts to us from God, essentially, and that we are stewards of that gift. And I think it is terribly important that we learn how to steward that it takes a great deal of time and energy and learning. One of the greatest virtues of having children is the way to learn from them. It's a way of joining the human race and really learning.

Yes, because every experience is about learning and I think that parents can credibly influence their children's lives. Now, there is no way I think that most don't try hard enough, don't learn enough. On the other hand, no matter how much you learn, there's no way that you can do it perfectly.

My own children who were in their early 30s now or just getting around to really blast me for all the things that I did wrong when I was a parent.

What did you give misguided love, what you speak of in the book?

Oh, yeah. I think that sometimes my love was thoughtless, sometimes it was selfish. Sometimes I didn't think enough.

We said love was not a feeling, but we were going to tell you what it is. And what you say is that it really is action. It is behavior. It is a way you act.

So all of those men sitting around the bar crying in their beer about I love my woman, I love my wife, I love my kids, the way to show it is their behavior is through how you act toward another person.

Yeah, there's really one great rule for discernment. It's been said in two ways. My grandfather used to say Handsome is as handsome does. And another translation of that was when Jesus said by their fruits, you shall know them.

And so when we want to talk about building a world or creating a world where children grow up to be responsible for their own lives and understand that the power to change the world is is within them, then how do you do that with parents who don't get that yet again?

It can be very hard for children to assume responsibility for their own lives when their parents have treated them irresponsibly. Nonetheless, eventually you got to get unhooked from your parents. You may remember in the road less traveled. There's this wonderful old Greek story about Orestes. His mother had killed his father and that put him in a real bind because a Greek boy was obliged to kill his father's murderer. And yet the worst in the Greek boy could do is kill his mother.

He did go ahead and kill her.

And as a result of that, the gods gave him this family curse in the form of what were called the furies were three harpies.

And wherever poor Orestes went, they were cackling in his ear, like with hallucinations and whatnot.

And finally, after about 20 years of trying to atone for his problems, are doing self psychotherapy, maybe arrestees with the gods and said, hey, listen, I've done enough treatment. I think that you ought to lift this curse. So they held a trial and Apollo was Rusty's defense attorney. And he said, well, you know, the gods really set this up. It really wasn't arrestees fault, whereupon Orestes stood up in the courtroom and he said it was I not the gods who killed my mother.

Hmm. Well, the gods were amazed because no time before when a human being could have blamed something on the gods, did he not take the opportunity that he held himself responsible? And they were so amazed that what they did, they lifted the curse and they transformed the harpies into what were called the humanities or the or the bearers of grace who then became wise voices teaching him. And the message of this is eventually, no matter how badly you've been treated as a child, that you can sit around and complain about it for the rest of your life.

But that's not going to do any good. Eventually you need to take responsibility for your difficulties yourself and get on with it. And the bearers of grace will bear you up.

Yeah, yes. The single most important thing a parent can do, of course, is is to love them is to love children.

But loving remember, isn't just having a feeling like I love my children. It is something has to be translated into action. It's also something that takes a lot of time. One of the things that's terribly important for parents to do is to learn again how to speak to their children with a single voice. So nothing could be more destructive for children than to have mommy saying do it this way and daddy saying no, do it that way, and they can just get torn apart.

But this takes a lot of time. The most valuable thing, one of the most valuable tricks Lily and I have learned in our thirty three and a half years of marriage is how to make appointments with each other. Now, initially, this seemed very stultifying and unromantic that you should need to make an appointment to talk to your husband or your wife. Except, you know, the problem was that I would come into the kitchen one afternoon and Lily was fixing dinner for a dinner party of 12 that night, and I'd raise some profound issues with my married.

Or I'd come home at the end of the day, totally strung out, and she would no sooner cross the threshold and she'd dump some very complex problem about the children on me when there's no reason it couldn't have waited for a day or even a day or two.

And so what we've learned to do now is to say, hey, hon, I would like to talk to you about such and such. Win would be a good time. Yeah. And we'll set up an appointment maybe later that day, maybe the next day, maybe the next week, sometimes with our busy schedule, the next month where we will have had the time to think about the issue, where we would clearly be able to hear each other rather than making kind of snap decisions.

Most parents make really snap decisions. Somebody says, Mommy, daddy, can I start to 2:00 a.m. the Saturday night? The most common ways people respond is to say, no, of course you can't. You know damn well you curfew's 10:00 or another is to say, Oh, sure, dear. Whatever you like. Uh huh. Those are what might be called the right wing and left wing responses. And you may realize why on Thursdays I call myself radical, moderate.

But even though they're opposite the same in the sense they're both shoot from the hip kind of responses to take no thought, no energy, no time.

And so the best thing to do is to take the time and figure out the consequences of your actions or the consequences of your intention.

Think, think and thinking takes time. Good thinking takes time and prayer. But what about all the people who say, I just don't have the time? Well, you know, a lot of people ask me, Scotty, how can you do all that you can do? How can you keep writing books and run across the country, shooting your mouth off and be all involved in this community business and social action and still be something of a husband and something of a father?

The reason I tell them that I can do all that is that I spend at least two hours a day doing nothing. Now, they immediately tell me, of course, they're much too busy to do that. Instead, they're watching you on TV. Well, that's good bye.

My two hours a day doing nothing. I call this my prayer time. Most of the time I'm not praying. I'm just thinking about my life. I call it my thinking time. People feel free to interrupt it, but if I call it my prayer time, then that makes it holy, right? Oh, that's another trick of being a religious sort of person. And that's where I get my life in order. That's where I try to look at things in perspective and and set my priorities as between what is important and what isn't important.

Rather than just quickly respond to one of the things I think that I look forward to and having children is to be able to do what Andrew Fox says in his book, Another Chance to Get It Right. It's what he calls a book. And for me, being able to have a child and to be able to impart this kind of wisdom or information or learning about life or to be able to start out with the child and let the child know from the very first day that he or she can speak that you came here to learn, honey.

And this is a great big school run and that life is going to be difficult. And there are some happy days there. Some days it won't be so happy in between. That, to me is really exciting. The idea of doing that excites me.

I think if I could give one gift to parents, it would be to be able to remember what it was like when they were children, what it was like to be a child. One of the problems of poor parenting is that most parents have forgotten what it was like. It is not easy to be a child because there is so much to learn. And I think that talking to children about saying, yeah, it isn't easy, I'm sorry, it is hurting often what we do, you know, we'll say don't do that and then wipe that look off your face.

Oh, I know. As if we not only expect children to obey, but also to be happy about it all the time.

Yeah, I used to get whippings and in the midst of being whipped would be told to be quiet and not to cry.

Yeah. Which is really. So why are you whipping me for. And then I'd be whipped until I did cry. So it was always this balance of should I cry early, should I wait late.

You know, really again I'm really sorry about that and that but that kind of. Yeah, I am sorry.

That kind of stuff hurts and can leave scars you got to work on. And it is. Yeah it is tough talking.

You know what it left me with this whole disease to please that I had to work on for most of my life because in the midst of getting beaten, you're trying to please the abuser. You're trying to please the person that's beating you to do whatever it is, you know, to dance as fast as you can, as Barbara Gordon had written in her book, to do whatever you can to make the person think that you're all right, which leaves a lot of scars.

Yes.

But you've also turned it to good use.

Yeah, I'm working on it. Yeah, I'm working on it. So you were what we're talking about children. I know you wrote a book for children. Yeah.

Yeah. That's was kind of a surprise to me. The greatest pleasure about it is that it's illustrated by my son Christopher. He called up one night and he's an artist out in San Francisco. And I told him I was starting to write my first book that was for children as well as for adults. And he said, hey, let me illustrate. And we got together and really worked out. Well, now there there's some problems sometimes for a guy to work with his son, just 23.

There's some sort of power issues. Of course not. But you remember what it was like to be twenty three.

I remembered something. About having power issues with my own father and I tried to do the best I can. We kind of transcend and he did he did a wonderful job with the illustrations.

So I know there's an interesting story behind why you called it the friendly snowflake. Yeah, people have been urging me for years to write some kind of children's book which would embody the principles of my other work, including The Road Less Traveled. And I said, no, you do it. I said, I don't know how to talk to children. I don't even like children. I don't understand children very well. You can do it. But about two years ago, I was out doing a speaking engagement in November in Columbus, Ohio, and it was a really cold, gray day.

And I got into my hotel room and I was feeling kind of lonely and sorry for myself that I'd left home and the skyline wasn't too great. But as I was sitting there looking out the window, this one little snowflake started falling past my window. And this got me out of feeling sorry for myself. And I said, Well, hi there, Snowflake. And then it kind of drifted down.

You talk about my dream and well, maybe you can give me a certificate of mental health. I know. Yeah, I talked to snowflakes.

I said it was nice of you to come by and drift down a little more. And I said, you know, makes me feel kind of better just to see you. And then as it drifted out of sight, I said, you know, maybe your friendly snowflake. And then I said, hey, I can write a book about a friendly snowflake.

Wow. Well, I think what is magnificent is to be able to take pleasure in the smallest of moments. I mean, how many of you have stopped to notice a snowflake recently?

One of the neatest things about this was it was such a small moment. I love to watch blizzards and heavy stuff, and I'm always wishing on what we should snow harder, harder and harder.

When I was reading that, I was thinking it is hard to follow one snowflake.

You know, you got to really be paying attention or be bored or be bored to do that.

We're talking about the calling and how you felt that you were called to do road less traveled. Yeah, I was sitting one autumn evening in my living room and it just said, right, me, discipline, love, grace, me. And I'd had that kind of thing happen before and I thought was kind of crazy. So I said, well, let's see how this looks in the morning. And when I've got a clear head and it looked pretty good.

And then I said, let's see how this looks next week. And after about three weeks, started revising my schedule so that I could write it. But, you know, to write a book that's a kind of two year endeavor. Plus I had to set aside from busy practice and I couldn't do something like that unless I was really enthusiastic about it. And enthusiasm, you know, means in theory, God within it's like I couldn't have done it without God's help.

And boxset God wrote my music. No, I don't think that God wrote the road less traveled is not the literal, inerrant word of God. It's even got a few mistakes in there. But I think that I had some help with it.

And inspiration means the the incoming of breath or spirit. So I think in some I think I was called by God. But if you want secular people would call it your muse. Really, they're talking about God, except they're secular people. Yeah.

And I just don't believe God cares whether you call him God or whether you call him Muse or whether you call it nature or her or what you call it it or whether you say universe or I don't like it.

You don't like it. It is kind of neuter. And I don't think God is neuter. I think God is she he is very sexy. You do? Yeah. You know, I got a whole lecture. I given that, but I don't think it'd be right.

But I, I don't think it'd be right for this program.

But I could talk to you for hours about this because I just think any force you gonna come visit. Yeah. I'd love to come up and sit on the porch. Any force that is omnipotent, that powerful, all knowing would not get caught up in a name.

That's what I feel. I was sitting in church many years ago and listening to the preacher talk about the Lord, that God is a jealous God. And I thought, what's he got to be jealous of?

Because he's got everything. And that's when my whole concept of what religion was versus spirituality changed.

Do you believe that the world waiting to be born will not be born until the 21st century? Well, I kind of think that it's struggling now. I think that the birth is going to be an ongoing thing. We've always envisaged Utopia as being some kind of static place where you get to and then everything's perfect and you don't have to do anything more than sit around on your duff. And I think that utopia is a kind of process. I think that the world is always going to be in the process of being born just like we as people.

I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast you can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple podcast and subscribe rate and review this podcast. Join me next week for another super soul conversation. Thank you for listening.