willingness........................

 

     A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.  The only way we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers. . . .

     The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature.  But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. . . . Another characteristic of human nature—perhaps the one that makes us most human—is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.

-M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled