#peak experiences

On this Day, 1st April, 1908, Abraham Maslow was born.  Maslow is famously accredited for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Abraham Harold Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York, US, the eldest of seven. Maslow’s parents fled Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire as a result of the Czar’s prosecution on the Jewish community (read more on Jewish Persecution in Russia).  In spite of Maslow having six siblings, he described his childhood as being lonely and unhappy, having struggled to overcome acts of racism and anti-Semitism such as events like anti-Semitic gangs chasing and throwing rocks at Maslow. One of his only friends was his cousin, Will and the books he immersed himself from the library. 

Maslow also despised his home life, having a negative relationship with his mother, himself having said, "What I had reacted to was not only her physical appearance, but also her values and world view, her stinginess, her total selfishness, her lack of love for anyone else in the world  – even her own husband and children  – her narcissism, her Negro prejudice, her exploitation of everyone, her assumption that anyone was wrong who disagreed with her, her lack of friends, her sloppiness and dirtiness...".   Maslow had attended one of the top high schools in Brooklyn, Boys High School. Whilst here he served as an officer to many academia clubs and became editor of the Latin Magazine as well as editor of “Principia,” the school’s Physics paper for a year,  After high school, Maslow attended the City College of New York, where he also took night classes on legal studies alongside his undergraduate course. In 1927 he transferred to Cornell after having nearly immediately dropped out of his previous College, although Maslow he dropped out of Cornell after one semester due to low grades and the high cost of tuition. He later went on to finish Law at City College of New York, and after developing an interest in psychology had went to Graduate School at University of Wisconsin. Here he found a mentor in psychologist, Harry Harlow who served as a doctoral advisor. At the University of Wisconsin Maslow earned his bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees in Psychology. Maslow’s masters thesis on  "learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material" was published in 1934, three years after completion after Professor Cason (the individual who recommended Maslow to research the subject for his thesis) had convinced Maslow that it was nothing to be embarrassed off (Maslow’s belief).  Whilst studying in 1928 Maslow married his first cousin Bertha, who was still in high school at the time, having met years earlier in Brooklyn. 

Maslow progressed to Columbia University on similar themes of his thesis on his research. At Columbia, Maslow found himself mentored by Alfred Adler, an earlier colleague of Sigmund Freud. 

“BLACKMORE: One concept you've written about is the "Robot" - the lower functions that automatically steer us in certain methods of behaviour and that sort of thing. It's only when we can break out of that consciousness that the Robot controls that we're really free. Does that relate to these three levels of control?

WILSON: Oh, absolutely. It's very perceptive of you to say that, because that obviously is where the freedom comes about. In Religion and the Rebel, my second book, I talked at the beginning about what I call the "automatic pilot" which takes us over. This is what I tend to later call the Robot, pretty well the same thing. Also, what Gurdjieff meant by "the machine". When Gurdjieff says "understand the machine", he means "understand your own robot", the Robot being this part of us that does things for us, and which ought to be entirely good. It drives your car for you, it speaks French for you, it does all kinds of things. Unfortunately, it also does the things you don't want it to, like - you go for a walk which really moves you deeply the first time. The second and third time, it's the Robot walking instead of you; you listen to a symphony that moves you, the third or fourth time it's the Robot listening as well as you, and interfering. So this automatic level, which tends to cut in particularly when we're tired, is of tremendous importance, and obviously, because the Robot in human beings is so fiercely efficient, we are not aware of our degree of freedom. We just get so completely - I mean, imagine a rich person who is born rich, and has lots and lots of servants, and he could quite easily, if he was a gentle character, get used to the idea that in fact his servants were minders who told him what to do, until he had a feeling that he had no freedom at all. You know, he did what his butler and his maid and his secretary told him. Now we're rather like that with the Robot, and it's only in these sudden moments of freedom in which you suddenly realise that you're in charge, and not the robot, and the Robot's a servant, not a master. It's very much tied up with this notion of the third level of control.

BLACKMORE: Given that "peak experiences" are often random or unpredictable, can we practise extending or maintaining these moments of heightened awareness? What about techniques for expanding consciousness, for achieving that level of freedom? I know you've talked about, for instance, the act of mental "clenching" and the notion of "intentionality".

WILSON: Of course, but you see, there's only one basic technique for switching off the Robot. If you were sitting in a class in school, staring blankly out of the window, and the master suddenly shouted at you, "Wake up, Leigh", what he's saying is "Pay attention!" Now, "Pay attention" is in fact what switches off the Robot and makes the real you come on. So the truth lies in that phrase "attention".

BLACKMORE: So it's a focusing of attention that is the crux...

WILSON: And the reawakening of attention again and again and again every time we "go to sleep". That story I love quoting of the master Ikyu, when a workman said to him "Will you write something significant on my tablet?" and he wrote "Attention!" And the workman said "Hmph, that's not very significant, can't you write something else?" And he wrote "Attention! Attention!"

BLACKMORE: That's a Zen parable?

Ocean : simplicity, pleasure and peak experiences.

Or just hedonistic pleasure seeking ?

A bit of navel-gazing (Ted)

“The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants’ soul.”  ― Joseph Conrad

In a recent post i touched on a couple of things that the late Bill King said about his time at sea as a sailor when he was competing in the Golden Globe race and when he went on to sail a cruising…

The American psychologist Abraham Maslow studied many hundreds of people who had unitive mystical experiences and coined for them the term peak experiences (Maslow 1964). He expressed sharp criticism of Western psychiatry's tendency to confuse such mystical states with mental disease. According to him, they should be considered supernormal rather than abnormal phenomena. If they are not interfered with and are allowed to run their natural course, these states typically lead to better functioning in the world and to "self-actualization" or "selfrealization" — the capacity to express more fully one's creative potential and to live a more rewarding and satisfying life.

Psychiatrist and consciousness researcher Walter Pahnke developed a list of basic characteristics of a typical peak experience, based on the work of Abraham Maslow and W. T. Stace. He used the following criteria to describe this state of mind (Pahnke and Richards 1966):

Unity (inner and outer)

Strong positive emotion

Transcendence of time and space

Sense of sacredness (numinosity)

Paradoxical nature

Objectivity and reality of the insights

Ineffability

Positive aftereffects

As this list indicates, when we have a peak experience, we have a sense of overcoming the usual fragmentation of the mind and body and feel that we have reached a state of unit and wholeness. We also transcend the ordinary distinction between subject and object and experience an ecstatic union with humanity, nature, the cosmos, and God. This is associated with intense feelings of joy, bliss, serenity, and inner peace. In a mystical experience of this type, we have a sense of leaving ordinary reality, where space has three dimensions and time is linear. We enter a metaphysical, transcendent realm, where these categories no longer apply. In this state, infinity and eternity become experiential realities. The numinous quality of this state has nothing to d with previous religious beliefs; it reflects a direct apprehension of the divine nature of reality.

Pick Your Top Five Super Powers

No, this request is not just for kids.  It’s true of everyone – we each have natural talents and strengths. Talents and Strenghts are Naturally occuring patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Here’s some ideas on how to gain insight and / or confirmation of your own innate talents. It’s because sometimes these are so intangible or undervalued that they can be hard to spot: First and…