Why is Margaret Placentra Johnston Writing About Spiritual Development?

OPTOMETRY PRACTICE

So - how did this all come about? Well, years ago, completely by accident - or so I, Margaret Placentra Johnston, Optometrist, thought at the time! - I ran across the book "The Road Less Traveled" by M. Scott Peck. Here is a story about how I came across it and more about the effect it had on me. This book introduced the concept of the religious or spiritual growth stages and the very idea of that more or less blew me away.

After that first encounter, I kept reading more and more about those spiritual development stages. Once I got past Peck's writings, everything else I came across about the spritual development stages was either written at the academic level and very hard to plow through or would appear as just a very small portion of a larger work. There seemed to be almost no acknowlegement of these stages in our popular culture.

Yet seeing correlations among the writings of many theorists on this topic, gave me a viewpoint that seemed to explain a lot of the craziness that surrounds religion. I began to wonder why we don't hear more about these stages in the popular culture.

Suddenly one day it hit me! I, Margaret Johnston, was the one who should bring information about spiritual development to the general public! Through most of my adult life, I have always had the feeling that I should one day write a book about something - but I had no idea what.

I have always been a story-teller. My kid's favorite thing when they were little was to get me to tell them stories from when I was little. Here's one I will share with you now.

So I began work on the book I am writing now. Then, as I came to find out, a new writer needs what is called a "platform." That is, he must be known in the public as someone who writes or speaks about a given particular topic. At that point, no one had ever heard of Margaret Placentra Johnston in connection with the topic of spiritual development. That is why I am developing this site.

If you like what I am trying to do, please help me develop a platform for Margaret Placentra Johnston, author! Send a link to your friends and recommend me to them. Or hey - if you hate what I am doing (and I know there will be those who do) then send a link around complaining about me!

So here it is over four years since I first thought about writing my book. I have about three-quarters of the stories completed. I think I am too far into it to back out now! But the more I study what I thought was a pretty cut and dried topic, the more complex it becomes. No longer certain that the stages are strictly valid, despite excellent correlation among a whole lot of experts, I have also run across the possibility that religious orientation may be more a function of personality type,

But in any event, please join along with me, Margaret Placentra Johnston, in my search for understanding how people decide what they believe - about how we got here and and why and where we are going next.