Certain people just shone as exemplars of wholeness, intensity, virtue, achievement, and delight;
It would become Maslow’s life’s work to describe such people, to explain their excellence, and to spread the word to the multitudes that this richness was in fact an inborn human possession, lost to most by dint of social malfeasance and emotional attrition, recoverable on a wide scale by overthrowing the diminished and oppressive view of mankind that had passed for wisdom down the millennia.
Nearly all of the Blackfoot, he discovered, displayed a level of emotional security that only the upper percentiles of the U.S. population reached, and Maslow attributed this in large measure to the Indians’ emphasis on personal responsibility instilled from early childhood
What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.”
Mediocrity appeared to be the general lot, but the exceptions thrilled Maslow sufficiently that he refused to accept mediocrity as the inevitable lot of most.
Maslow would memorably inveigh against the “psychopathology of the average.”
Science at its highest level is ultimately the organization of, the systematic pursuit of, and the enjoyment of wonder, awe, and mystery
every person ought to be able to excel and find fulfillment in his work, whatever it was. Any work done with mastery possessed high dignity in his eyes.
He faulted Aristotle for enthroning philosophy, the love of wisdom, above love of another person, or of humanity at large; Maslow thought them equal. Aristotle of course believed that the true philosopher alone was self-sufficient, needing only his own mind for his happiness, which excelled that of all other men; to love someone else was evidence of deficiency, of an incompleteness and unseemly neediness in one’s own nature.
distinction between “deficiency needs” and “Being values"...the former treat other persons as means to an end, the latter deal with “persons insofar as they are ends-in-themselves (sacred, unique, noncomparable, equally valuable with every other person rather than as instruments or means-to-ends).”
unlike Freud he came to believe that human beings have always had experiences that can only be called genuinely religious. These “peak-experiences
Religious ecstasy is the ultimate celebration of the self. For as man’s understanding of and regard for himself have grown, his dependence on the imaginary supernatural has dwindled, so that now the natural is quite enough to explain the highest things — which is to say, as Maslow saw them, the highest human things.
Maslow declares that religious experience in its pure form, the mystic transport unadulterated by the legalism of priestcraft, represents the ultimate human rapture.
the cultivation of personal excellence is the end of human life,
The best possible life is to be found in a state of “synergy,” in which individual energies serve the social good and social arrangements enhance individual happiness.
Eupsychia was the name Maslow invented for the synergistic society at its best, a community of “good souls”;
The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.”
distinction between “deficiency needs” and “Being values"...the former treat other persons as means to an end, the latter deal with “persons insofar as they are ends-in-themselves (sacred, unique, noncomparable, equally valuable with every other person rather than as instruments or means-to-ends).”
unlike Freud he came to believe that human beings have always had experiences that can only be called genuinely religious. These “peak-experiences
Religious ecstasy is the ultimate celebration of the self. For as man’s understanding of and regard for himself have grown, his dependence on the imaginary supernatural has dwindled, so that now the natural is quite enough to explain the highest things — which is to say, as Maslow saw them, the highest human things.
Maslow declares that religious experience in its pure form, the mystic transport unadulterated by the legalism of priestcraft, represents the ultimate human rapture.
the cultivation of personal excellence is the end of human life,
The best possible life is to be found in a state of “synergy,” in which individual energies serve the social good and social arrangements enhance individual happiness.
Eupsychia was the name Maslow invented for the synergistic society at its best, a community of “good souls”;
The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.”
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/article_detail.asp?id=646&css=print
