Insights from Maslow and Ephrem
I’m a big lover of the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow.
I’m a big lover of him because of his belief about human potential. His pyramid is well-known. The pyramid of needs is usually understood that in order to self-actualize you must first achieve the lower steps in the pyramid. But according to one of the best experts on Maslow, the scholar Scott Barry Kaufman, you need not achieve anything in order to self-actualize. Self-actualization is available to anyone.
Self-actualizaiton can be defined as a process and not an end goal. This process involves an approach to life where you are open to experience, express yourself creatively, accept your whole self, strive for excellence in various domains that spring from a recognition of your own values, your own unique strengths.
In essence, self-actualization is a way of life where you are engage in life and accept your whole self.
The idea of self-actualization is based on assumptions on what human beings are and are capable of. Psychologists of the 20th and 21st centuries are not the first ones to make this assumption. Ancient and medieval thought leaders made similar assumptions and had similar ideas. I see several parallells and here are some examples.
The Christian theological tradition in the East, such as the Syriac and the Greek all viewed the human being as a vessel for divinity. Their basic anthropological assumption about the human being was that it was made in the image of God which meant that it had a potential to be more and more like God. This image was distorted and damaged in the human condition. But it was never thought that it was completely and utterly lost.
The potential to become yourself was seen as being implicit in creation. All of creation — not only human beings — long for transcendence. This idea is highly evolutionary. Christian authors such as Ephrem the Syrian (4th century) were of the view that our task in life is not to become something else but to become ourselves fully.
Ephrem had an idea about the luminous eye. In antique physics it was assumed that light sprung from within the eye and made it possible to see. For the eye to be able to see clearly it must be clean, unmuddled and pure so that the light within could shine through the eye and hence you’d be able to see whatever you were looking at.
So the idea of physics was adopted by authors such as Ephrem to talk about the human condition beyond the material. For Ephrem, in order to have a luminous eye one must have certain attitudes to life.
For example, a sense of wonder is for Ephrem the first step to having a luminous eye. Wonder opens up your consciousness to the beauty of life and helps you see life in a different way — a truer way. With a sense of wonder the sky is not simply the sky, it is vast and you sense that you are absorbed by it. The ocean is not only water, but it is vast and it absorbs you into its vastness.
For Ephrem, ultimately wonder and curiosity leads to faith. But faith and wonder and curiosity are in his thought very close to one another. They belong to the same domain of the human consciousness. Faith strengthens curiosity because it assumes that the world is more than what meets the eye and that transcendence is possible.
Ultimately, what Ephrem is after is a self-transcending awe experience where we approach life with a sense of ease, lightness and ultimately with a childlike wonder. Ephrem was first and foremost a poet. A poet who was drunk on the beauty of life despite living through wars and dislocations.
Back to Maslow and his definition and idea of self-actualization. For Maslow human beings have basic needs that need to be met such as a need for safety, connection and self-esteem. Once these basic needs are met, I find myself asking, what does it look like to be in a state of self-actualization?
In a lecture given in 1956, Maslow defines self-actualization as
“an episode in which the powers of the person come together in a particularly efficient and intensely enjoyable way, and in which he is more integrated and less split, more open for experience […], more ego-transcending. […] He becomes in these episodes more truly himself, more perfectly realizing his potentialities, closer to the core of his Being.”
Perhaps you see now how Maslow stands in a long tradition of human thinkers who have peaked into this potential of self-actualization. Maslow also believed that self-actualizers are people who are mature and who have access to this state more often than those who struggle.
How do you become a self-actualizer?
Self-actualization is a skillstack. It doesn’t simply happen to you. The long human wisdom tradition as expressed in Ephrem noticed that it requires an attitude to life. An attitude of curiosity, beauty and faith. Maslow who systematized human needs more comprehensively noticed the following:
- Get your basic needs of safety met: food, shelter, connection and a sense of self-esteem.
- Life a life of growth: connect with others, love others and find your purpose.
- Self-transcend by engaging in activities where you do what you love, what you’re good at with an attitude of openness and spontaneity. This requires a level of self-awareness, an attitude of curiosity and openness. More than anything, expose yourself to awe. Awe is defined as an emotion of vastness.
Finally, let me end with a statement and a quote. Self-transcendence is the ultimate goal of your life, of human life. This is no wishy washy mambo jambo. Self-transcendence has to do with you integrating all parts of yourself in serving others. In the words of the humanistic psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman in his book Transcend:
Healthy transcendence is an emergent phenomenon resulting from the harmonious integration of one’s whole self in the service of cultivating the good society.