The far reaches of the human psyche

Written by Abraham Harold Maslow, excerpts from Far Beyond the Human Psyche. St. Petersburg, «Eurasia», 1999

The fusion of reality and value

p.117-125

I will begin by explaining what I call the highest experience, because it is through the example of these experiences that my thesis can be demonstrated most simply and in detail. The concept of «highest experience» combines the best moments of human life, the happiest moments of human existence, experiences of ecstasy, passion, bliss, the greatest joy. I have found that these experiences have deep aesthetic foundations, such as creative ecstasy, motherly love, perfect sexual experiences, parental love, childbirth experiences, and many others. I use the phrase «higher experiences» as a generalized and abstract concept because I have found that all these ecstatic experiences have common characteristics. It is possible to imagine a generalized scheme or abstract model that would describe the general characteristics of all such experiences. Using this concept, we will be able to speak simultaneously about all experiences of this kind and about each of them separately.

I received from my subjects many descriptions of higher experiences and their perception of the world at such moments. These descriptions can be schematized and generalized. This must be done also because, apart from schematization and generalization, I see no other way to comprehend and organize the variety of definitions and verbal constructs that I have accumulated. If you try to make a squeeze out of the many words and descriptions of the world as it appears to people in moments of higher experiences (and I listened to about a hundred people), then all this diversity can be reduced to the following main characteristics: truth, beauty, integrity, harmony, liveliness, uniqueness , perfection, necessity and necessity, completeness, justice, order, simplicity, wealth, tranquility and freedom, game, self-sufficiency.

Although this list is just a summary made by one particular researcher, I have no doubt that any other researcher with a similar goal will come up with a similar list. I am sure that the differences will be extremely insignificant and they will only concern the selection of more suitable synonyms for the same concepts.

These concepts are very abstract. Yes, and how else? After all, each of them combines several aspects of very different in origin and manifestations of experiences. The very grandeur and breadth of the covered phenomenon inevitably presupposes the general character and abstractness of the word denoting it.

These are the nuances of world perception in moments of higher experiences. Here there can be differences only in the degree of expression, brightness of this or that impression. Sometimes people first of all comprehend the veracity and truth of the world, and sometimes beauty.

I want to emphasize that these concepts denote the characteristics of the world. These are descriptions of the world, accounts of its perception, evidence of how it appears to people at the best moments of their lives, and even of what it really is. In fact, these descriptions are akin to a report by a journalist who has witnessed a certain event, or a report by a scientist who has encountered facts that are curious in his opinion. These are not descriptions of an ideal world and not projections of the researcher’s desires. These are not illusions or hallucinations — it cannot be said that a person overtaken by a higher experience experiences an emotional cataclysm that turns off his cognitive abilities. On the contrary, higher experiences are usually evaluated by people as moments of enlightenment, moments of comprehending the true and authentic characteristics of reality, previously inaccessible to understanding.

There is one very old problem — the problem of the relationship between truth and revelation. Religion, as a social institution, grew up on the fact that it refused to recognize the existence of this problem, but we should not be confused and fascinated by the conviction of mystics in the absolute truth of their worldview given to them in revelation. Yes, this is a kind of comprehension of the truth for them. But many of us also know this feeling of sincere conviction that the truth is revealed to us when we are overtaken by moments of revelation. However, a man has been writing his history for three thousand years, and during this time he has already managed to understand that conviction in the truth alone is not enough, some external confirmation of this truth is necessary. There must be some method of verification, some pragmatic test, some measure; we must approach these revelations with a certain amount of caution, composure, and restraint. Too many spirit-seers, seers and prophets felt absolute conviction and infected others with it, but were subsequently put to shame. To a certain extent, this disappointment — disappointment in personal revelations contributed to the birth of science. From then until today, official, classical science has dismissed revelation and insight as untrustworthy.

Now we will begin to rise to the very top — we will begin to compile a list of the characteristics of reality, the bright features of the world that people see in moments of higher experiences, and we will prove that they coincide with what is commonly called eternal values ​​or eternal truths. We will see the realm of the good old trinity, truth, beauty and virtue. That is, the list of the described characteristics of the world, which is the gaze of a person at such moments, is at the same time a list of values. From time immemorial, these characteristics have been highly valued by great religious thinkers and philosophers, and this list almost completely coincides with those things and phenomena that, among the most serious thinkers of mankind, deserved the title of the main or highest meaning of life.

I want to repeat that my thesis is formulated in terms of science, which I define as popular. Anyone can try to reformulate it, check it out for themselves; anyone can do what I did; he can, if he wishes, as objectively as I did, record on a tape recorder everything that his subjects answer him, and then publish these answers. What I will present below is not scholasticism.

My experiments can be repeated, confirmed or refuted, my conclusions, if you like, can even be quantified. They are final and reliable precisely in the sense that if we undertake to repeat the experiment, we will get the same results. Even from the point of view of orthodox, nineteenth-century positivist science, my conclusions cannot be considered unscientific. My conclusions are a cognitive statement, this is a description of objective reality, the characteristics of the cosmos, the world that exists independently of the will and predilections of a person who only reports about it and only describes it, this is a dry list of how the world is seen by a person. These data can be processed with traditional scientific methods, establishing a measure of their accuracy or inaccuracy.

However, this same description of the worldview simultaneously acts as an evaluative description. Before us are values ​​that can inspire a person, things for which a person is ready to die, endure pain, suffering and deprivation. They can be called «higher» values ​​because they are usually revealed to the best people, at the best moments of their lives, under the most favorable conditions. We find ourselves in a conceptual environment of a higher, more perfect, more spiritualized life, and I want to add right away that immersion in this environment should become both the main goal of psychotherapy and the ultimate goal of education, education in the broadest sense of the word. It is in this atmosphere that qualities are born that so admire us in great people, qualities that were inherent in our heroes, our saints, which are attributed even to our gods.

Thus, the cognitive process becomes at the same time the process of determining values. That which exists takes on the properties of its due. Facts become estimates. The real world, seen and understood, turns into a world valued and desired. The world that «is» becomes the world that «should be.» That is, in other words, the real merges with the value.

We already know that in order for a person to understand how he should act, he must first understand who he is, what he is. The direct road to the main moral and value decisions, to true self-determination, to “correctness” goes through the person himself, through his knowledge of his nature, his characteristics, through his discovery of the truth about himself. The deeper he knows his nature, the desires of his inner «I», his temperament, his constitution, his needs and aspirations, the more clearly he realizes what actually gives him joy, the easier, more natural, automatic, epiphenomenal he will solve the problem. value choice. (This is not my observation, this is one of the greatest discoveries of Freudianism, undeservedly overlooked.) If a person learns what exactly is consistent with his nature, what is acceptable for her and what she needs, then many problems will simply disappear by themselves, and the solution of the rest will not will be labor.

It cannot be said that the knowledge of one’s identity, the achievement of authenticity, full self-realization automatically relieve a person of all ethical problems. When the pseudo-problems disappear, the real ones will come out more clearly. But, without a doubt, a person who is clearly aware of himself will more easily solve them. Honesty to oneself, a clear understanding of one’s own nature are necessary prerequisites for the naturalness of moral choice. By no means do I take the liberty of asserting that it is enough just to become authentic or to know oneself well. Often, authenticity alone is not enough — it acts as a necessary, but by no means sufficient condition. I do not leave aside the undeniable educational impact of psychotherapy, when the therapist becomes a role model for his patient, when the patient unwittingly accepts the therapist’s value system. I want to concentrate on the main questions: What is the most important thing for a person? What is secondary? What needs to be developed? What needs to be minimized? What should psychotherapy aim for? Simply to help a person to discover the truth about himself, that is, to pure self-knowledge, or to set more pragmatic goals for himself? In passing, I note that if we do not want to impose or inspire the patient with our worldview and our value system, we can use both the lessons of the psychotherapist’s alienation from the patient, taught by Freud, and the method of «arguing about the main thing» of existential psychotherapy.

(We should not forget that the knowledge of the nature of one person at the same time brings us closer to the knowledge of human nature as a whole.)

Thus, we help a person to find his «should» with the help of what «is». The knowledge of one’s deepest essence is both the comprehension of facts and the comprehension of values. This kind of value search, although it is based on the collection of data, facts, information, that is, on the search for truth, is directly under the jurisdiction of science. As for psychoanalysis, as well as all others that do not encroach on the integrity of a person, but only reveal his essence, non-interventional, Taoistic methods of therapy, it would be equally fair to say that, on the one hand, they are scientific methods, and on the other hand, methods of comprehending the meaning of life. ; therapy of this kind is always a moral quest, even a quest for the divine in the scientific sense.

Note that in all these methods, the therapeutic process and the goal of therapy (another common contrast between what «is» and what «should be») are inseparable from each other. Attempts to separate these two sides of one phenomenon would look ridiculous if they did not threaten with a tragic outcome. In this case, the immediate goal of therapy and the process of therapy itself is the search for what a person is. Do you want to understand how you should be? Then understand what you are! «Find yourself»! Having undertook to describe what a person should become, we involuntarily describe what he is in his nature.

Here “value” is understood as a telos (the esoteric meaning of the concept), as a desired goal, as a real-life terminal station, a promised land. The true “I”, to which a person aspires, already exists, and the traces of his presence are visible, just as in true learning the main thing is not the diploma awarded at the end of the four-year path, but this path itself — moment by moment, dedicated to teaching, cognition, reflection. Likewise, paradise is not a heavenly gate into which the righteous man enters after death, freed from the burden of life, but life itself. Paradise is already here, it surrounds us.

Being and Becoming exist side by side, simultaneously, in every current moment. So, the journey will be a joy only if you do not remember every minute how far the destination is. Too late, many of us come to understand that retirement, which seemed to be a blissful rest from work, is not such a happiness, and along with understanding comes a feeling of bitterness from the fact that we enjoyed our work and our youth so little.

Humility or willingness to accept

There is another way to bring reality and value closer together, and this way is humility. In this case, a person seeks agreement with himself, a merger of the real and the desired, not by striving to improve the existing state of affairs, not by correcting what “is”, but by lowering the bar of “due”, redistributing his expectations to more achievable things, hoping only that realistically feasible, which has almost become a reality.

This can be illustrated with examples from therapeutic practice, when a person, having embarked on the path of comprehending his deep “I”, feels a conflict between the truth that he has learned about himself and those overestimated, ideal requirements that he made of himself. His idea of ​​himself as a brave man, or as a wonderful mother, or as a reasonable and rational person, crumbles to dust as soon as he detects in himself a hint of cowardice, envy, hostility or selfishness.

Very often, such awareness causes severe feelings, often depression. A person acutely feels his sinfulness, depravity or worthlessness. It seems to him that his essence is unbearably far from his ideas.

Characteristically, the success of therapy in this case is possible only on the path of humility. First, the unbearable self-abasement is replaced by the denial of the revealed truth. But then the thought creeps in: “After all, it’s not all that scary. It’s not so wild and blasphemous that sometimes a mother can hate her child.” And sometimes a person is able to achieve absolute, loving humility before the truly human; knowing his weaknesses, he finally understands that he can even welcome them, rejoice in them, love them. A woman who was afraid of the masculine, who was frightened by any manifestations of masculinity, finally begins to rejoice at her, is filled with reverent, almost religious awe of the masculine power. What at first seemed to her bad and vicious, transforms into something worthy of admiration and surprise. Thus, simply by understanding masculinity differently, she already looks at her husband differently, she is able to see him as corresponding to her ideal idea of ​​​​a man.

Everyone can feel something similar by looking at their children in a new way. Try to forget for a while that you have to patronize them, tell them how to act and what they should be, try to get rid of the usual exactingness towards them. If you manage to do this, even if only for a few moments, then you will be able to see them completely different, perfect, painfully beautiful, wonderful, wonderful.

Comments on «Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences»

Much has changed in the world since Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences was first published, and history has taught us many new lessons. Some of them are extremely instructive and complement the main conclusions that I reached earlier. It would be more correct to say that history warns us against an excessively broad, dangerous, or, conversely, one-sided adherence to the theoretical conclusions of this work. Perhaps this is the price that thinkers have to pay for striving for holism, wholeness, and inclusiveness. In the end, this serves as yet another proof of my conviction that most people still tend to think atomistically, in terms of «either/or», «black or white», «all or nothing», in terms of separateness and mutual exclusion. As an example, we can recall the story of a woman who gave her son two ties for his birthday. The son immediately, to please her, ties one of them around his neck. To which the mother, saddened, asks him: “What about the other? Didn’t you like him?»

Or let’s look at the same problem — the problem of polarization and dichotomization — through the prism of religiosity. I noticed that within the framework of a single Religious Institute, two independent wings of Religiosity often develop: the “mystical”, individual, on the one hand, and the dogmatic, general, on the other. A true believer easily and unconsciously integrates both of these tendencies in his faith. The external manifestations of Religiosity, rituals, ceremonies, the language in which he was brought up are connected for him with personal experience, filled with symbolic meaning, archetypal and unitive. Such a person outwardly, in behavior, in the performance of rituals is no different from his co-religionists, but his faith is by no means reduced to external ritualism, as is the case with many believers. Most believers do not have religious experiences as such, they do not realize their necessity for true faith, for them religion is just a set of habits, behavioral stereotypes, verbal clichés, which, in the extreme manifestations of the detachment of form from content, become absolutely dogmatic, bureaucratic and conventional, but in essence meaningless and even anti-religious. Such people have long forgotten what a mystical experience is, have lost the skills of insights and insights; the charismatic prophet who stood at the origins of religion became an abstraction for them. Religious institutions, with all their temples and rituals, eventually become the main opponents of truly religious experiences and truly believing people.

But on the other hand, representatives of the mystical wing (people who have experience of religious experiences) also face traps that have not yet been described in sufficient detail. If the Apollinian type of a believing person can reach a complete reduction of faith, reduce his religiosity to purely behavioral acts, then the mystical type is subject to the opposite danger — the danger of reducing religiosity to absolute subjectivity. Having known joy, delight and ecstasy in higher experiences, he may fall into the temptation to seek only them, to value only them as the only or at least the highest blessings of life, rejecting all other criteria of right and wrong. By concentrating all his attention, limiting all his interests to these wonderful experiences, to delightful subjective experience, he runs the risk of losing touch with fellow believers, with religion and reality, and completely immersing himself in the search for triggers of higher experiences, and any triggers. He will no longer agree to immerse himself in self-contemplation and reflection from time to time, he passionately desires the only goal that is important for him — the achievement of higher states of consciousness; for this, he can easily turn into a complete egoist, seeking personal salvation, trying to climb into «heaven» before others, perhaps even using others as a trigger. From such selfishness one step to sin, at least in a religious, even in an everyday sense. Looking back at the history of mysticism, I can state that such aspirations have led to vice, a complete loss of compassion for people, and in extreme cases even sadism.

In the history of mysticism, it is not difficult to find examples of another skill that lies in wait for the lover of higher experiences we have described. It lies in the fact that, having once experienced a state of ecstasy, the mystic will be forced to look for an ever stronger trigger in the following cases. That is, in order to evoke a higher experience again, each time a stronger and stronger impetus to it will be required. The highest experience, which has become the only value in life, when the number of these experiences becomes important, makes a person aggressive, active in achieving, thirsty and suffering, ready to fight for them, unscrupulous in means. Gradually, the highest experience loses the properties of an ennobling experience, becomes a manifestation and source of magical, secret, occult, esoteric knowledge, a kind of exotic cult ritual, dangerous for a person, because it requires more and more effort and struggle from him. A healthy openness to the mystical, a realistic, humble insight about which we know so little, a modest and grateful acceptance of the favor of fate or simply luck — all this gives way to an irrational, anti-empirical, anti-scientific, anti-verbal, anti-conceptual attitude. The highest experience is understood as the best or even the only way to knowledge, and therefore any verification and confirmation of the truth of the revealed knowledge is discarded as unnecessary.

The obvious possibility that the inner voice or the voice of “revelation” may be false is dismissed as degrading the highest experience, the clear and unambiguous lessons of history are not taken into account, and the person loses the ability to determine the measure of the truth of what was revealed to him, to distinguish whether the voice of good addressed him or the voice of evil. (This problem is described by George Bernard Shaw). Spontaneity (impulses coming from the best part of our «I») becomes indistinguishable from impulsivity (from impulses coming from the sick part of our «I»), and it is no longer possible to determine where spontaneity is and where impulsivity is.

Impatience (especially the impatience of the young) makes one look for simple paths to the highest, and what could be a medicine if used wisely becomes a poison. Insight itself becomes valuable, insight itself, and patient and disciplined reflection on it is postponed until later or begins to seem unnecessary. Joy no longer “overtakes” a person, he “acquires” it, paying a known price; such happiness—planned, calculated, bought, and made to work—turns into a commodity. This is how love and sex are depreciated, and instead of being a way to comprehend the sacred, they are overgrown with technology, measured by the number of ejaculations. The «techniques of sex» become more and more exotic, requiring more and more cunning and sophistication, until sophistication becomes necessary, until satiety and impotence set in.

The search for the unknown, unusual, outlandish, exotic takes the form of wandering, hermitage, «pilgrimage to the country of the East», travel to another country or to another religion. The great lesson taught to us by true mystics and Zen monks, learned by humanistic and transpersonal psychology, the lesson that the sacred is contained in the most ordinary things and phenomena, that a person can find it in everyday life, communicating with neighbors, friends, wife and children that for this there is absolutely no need to go to distant lands, but you just need to look around your yard with a gaze, this lesson, unfortunately, has been almost completely forgotten.

Humanity has made a huge step forward when it ceased to consider the clergy as the only seers of the sacred, when other mystics rushed to the highest. But the most beneficent intuition, leading a person to the highest, will direct him along the wrong or even bad path if it is distorted by dichotomization and its value is overestimated. No intuition can replace a person’s leader, teacher, sage, therapist, mentor, elder, assistant, able to guide along the path of self-actualization and Being. Here I see a great danger and hindrance.

To formulate my thought more clearly, one can say that healthy Apollinism (which means integration with healthy Dionysianism) can take exaggerated, dichotomized, pathological, compulsive-obsessive forms. But also healthy Dionysism (implying integration with healthy Apollinism) can, in extreme terms, take pathological, hysterical forms.

In light of this, it becomes clear why I became an all-encompassing holist and holistic mindset. Sensual, experience-based cognition should become a full-fledged subject of research and a source of reality for psychology and philosophy, but not only in order to be opposed to the absolute, difficult to comprehend abstraction of “scientific”, a priori knowledge and far-fetched, empty concepts, we also have to integrate the sensual with abstract and verbal, that is, we will have to develop “concepts based on sensory experience” and “concepts experienced by a person”, come to a true, internally justified rationality, abandon a priori scientific rationality, which we always take for “real” rationality .

The same can be said about experimentalism and social reformism. Limited people often oppose them, consider them as mutually exclusive things. History, as well as our present, gives us many examples of this. And yet this is a mistake, a huge atomistic mistake, an excellent example of dichotomization and pathologization, testifying to social and personal immaturity. We know from experience that from self-actualized people, from people who know how to feel, sympathize and compassion, came the greatest social reformers, the most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (as well as the best fighters for perfection, efficiency, justice ). Every day it becomes more and more obvious that only incarnated people can “help humanity”. This integration of self-improvement and social enthusiasm, the idea that in order to help humanity one must first become better oneself, I would call the path of the Bodhisattva. It is just as true as the opposite idea, that self-improvement is nothing without the desire to improve humanity, to help it. A person must do both at the same time, and the question: «Where to start?», We leave to the atomists.

In this connection, I would like to recall what I wrote in the preface to the revised edition of my book. There I argued that emotional bias does not contradict scientific objectivity, that they are capable of integration, the result of which is the highest form of objectivity, Taoistic objectivity.

All this allows us to assert that religiosity, religiosity with a small letter, at the highest levels of personal development does not necessarily conflict with rationality, with science, with social compassion. That, in principle, a healthy animal nature of a person, material and selfish, naturally integrates with the truly transcendent, spiritual and axiological.

I’m beginning to think that in the book I’ve gone too far in praising the individual and blaming groups, organizations, and communities. In the last six or seven years it has become more obvious that the organization does not inherently strive for a dominant hierarchy and bureaucratization. Humanistic communities have become known, communities striving to meet the needs of their members, such as factories organized according to the Ygrek theory and other latest management theories, rapidly accumulating the experience of training groups, meetings groups and personal growth groups, such as Synanon and Israeli kibbutzim. (See my list of «Eupsyche’s First Sprouts,» appendix to the revised edition.)

Today, I can say more confidently than ever before that the basic human needs can only be met by other people, only with the help of other people, only in the society of other people. The need to be a part of society (the need for belonging, for contacts, for association) is in itself a basic need. Loneliness, isolation, ostracism, rejection by a group are not only unpleasant for a person, but have a pathogenic effect. It has long been known and, as far as I know, no one disputes the fact that incarnation and belonging to a species are inherent in an infant only in potency, that only society is able to actualize these potencies.

I have researched why so many utopias fail, and this has taught me how to formulate the most fundamental questions about the essence of the human in such a way as to get a concrete and verifiable answer to them — “How good can a society be consistent with human nature? » and “How good can human nature become in the present society?”

I found it possible and useful to include in the category of higher experiences, in addition to tragic experiences, the psychedelic states of Grof’s patients (40), experiences of people who have experienced clinical death, visions after surgical operations, etc., also plateau-cognition. This is what I call a calm and peaceful state caused by a meeting with the highest values, a reverent, tremulous and unitive reaction to them, in contrast to the explosion of emotions and the violent work of the autonomic nervous system during the highest experience. It seems to me that the highest plateau-cognition always contains a poetic and cognitive component, which cannot be said with complete certainty about higher experiences, sometimes limited by purely emotional cognition.

Plateau-knowledge is much more subject to man than higher experience. A person is able to learn to independently determine the measure of unitivity of his perception. He can, at his own will, plunge into a contemplative state, he can afford to tremble and worship, bless himself with peaceful knowledge, which at the same time remains non-violent and free.

A person experiencing the highest experience feels taken by surprise, he can hardly believe his feelings, shocked to ecstasy by what was first revealed to him. In one of my writings, I wrote that the body and nervous system of an elderly person may not endure the shock caused by a higher experience. I can add to this that a mature, elderly person largely loses the ability to experience novelty, the delight of revelation, amazed confusion.

Higher experience and plateau-cognition are related to death in different ways. The highest experience is often perceived by a person as in some sense «death» or rebirth. Plateau-knowledge is not so ecstatic, it is akin to quiet joy and happiness, like the quiet joy of a mother, who watches the playing baby for hours with satisfaction and surprise, immersed in dreams and not daring to fully believe her happiness. She experiences this state as a pleasant comprehension of the truth, as an experience that will never end, there is no surge of emotions ending in exhaustion.

Old people who have come to terms with the inevitability of death, unlike the young, are close and understandable to the bright sadness that embraces them when they compare their own mortality, the short duration of their stay on earth with the eternal qualities of what causes the experience. Such a comparison, such a contrast, gives a special, painful value to any observation and experience. “I will soon be gone, and these waves will forever run into the sand. And yet I can look at them, listen to their noise, and rejoice. I was lucky, and I am grateful to fate for this.

Today it would be especially important to realize that it is possible to climb the level of plateau-cognition, that it is achievable, although the road to it is long and difficult. One can aspire to a plateau of knowledge. But I do not know other ways to it, except for gaining maturity, the accumulation of experience of feelings, except for the difficult lessons of the school of life. All this takes time. Of course, it is possible to comprehend the highest in a brief moment of insight, and in the end it is available to every person. But this is not at all like life in the light of truth, in the rarefied air of a unitive consciousness. In order to achieve this, often a lifetime of persistent striving is not enough. Don’t think that one Tuesday night you will feel transcended. Strictly speaking, in plateau-cognition there is nothing of the momentary and particular. Any «spirituality», both classical and only recently revealed to us, requires time, work, self-discipline, reflection and awareness of the need.

One can talk a lot about these states, which are certainly important for understanding transcendence and the transpersonal, for cognition of higher life. I mention them here because of late there has been a tendency to classify as transcendent only dramatic, ultimate, trance, «peak» experiences, such as the rapture of a climber on the summit of Everest. I want to emphasize that there are other heights of the spiritual, heights on which a person can live permanently.

I will say briefly: the highest and transcendent is inherent in man, this is part of his essence, part of his biological nature, bestowed on the whole human race, the whole species in the course of evolution. I must say directly and unequivocally that such an approach to the human forces me to an absolute rejection of Sartre’s type of existentialism with its denial of the species of man, his biological nature and contempt for the biological sciences. Of course, recently the term «existentialism» is so much in use, it means such heterogeneous Things, that it would be wrong to indiscriminately accuse of the sin of antibiologism anyone who decides to call himself an existentialist. But precisely because of the variety of interpretations of this term, it seems to me that the time has come to abandon it. The only problem is that I can’t find a suitable replacement for him. We need to find a concept that tells us: “Yes, in a sense, a person is a product of his own will, a person creates himself. But human arbitrariness has clear limits. At the heart of «one’s own will» is the common desire for incarnation for the entire human race. Man cannot become a chimpanzee. A man is a woman. An adult is a child. The new term should combine together the humanistic, transpersonal and transhuman. In addition, the word must be phenomenological in its basis. It should unite, not divide. It must be empirical, not a priori, etc.

XXIII

The highest values ​​are not the attitude of this or that person to them, not his emotional reaction to them. The highest values ​​are demanding on a person, they cause him a kind of «sense of duty» and a sense of his own insignificance.

It would be reasonable to separate the highest values ​​from the attitude towards them, to separate them at least to the extent that this difficult task is feasible. I will give a list of different types of attitudes towards higher values ​​(or higher reality): love, reverent awe, adoration, humiliation, reverence, a sense of undeservedness, surprise, a sense of miracle, exaltation, gratitude, fear, joy, and others (85, p. 94) . Obviously, all these are emotional-cognitive reactions of a person to something external, separate from him or described as separate from him. It is clear that as a person merges with the world in a higher experience or through mystical experience, the frequency of such reactions, referred to the outside, will decrease, the “I” as a separate entity will tend to disappear.

I suppose that the main reason why the separateness of the «I» still persists (I’m not talking now about its obvious advantages for theoretical understanding and scientific research) is the rarity of the short duration of the greatest moments of higher experiences, moments of insight, hopeless despair, ecstasy and mystical fusion. Even the most sensitive people spend a tiny fraction of their lives on them. Much more time, they more or less calmly contemplate the limits of the comprehensible that open to them and rejoice at the possibility and proximity of insight (without striving for an ecstatic merger with the higher). It would be more accurate to speak of «commitment» to the comprehension of the higher, but also about duty, responsibility and devotion to this cause.

Moreover, by adopting such a theoretical framework, we no longer think that reactions to higher values ​​can be accidental or deliberate. All of the above makes us think of them as necessary, appropriate, required, correct, logical and true, that is, we begin to understand the highest values ​​as something deserving or even demanding, calling for love, reverence, reverence. Surely an incarnated person cannot imagine life without these feelings.

We must not forget that the comprehension of absolute truths often evokes in a person a keen sense of his own insignificance, limitation and depravity in the face of the higher; he understands the brevity, transience and finiteness of his life, his human helplessness.

XXIV

The entire vocabulary of terms describing motivation should be hierarchical, if only because growth motives require several other characteristics than basic needs (“needs”).

On the basis of the distinction described above between essential values ​​and attitudes towards them, one more hierarchical one can be constructed; a list of motives (I’m talking about «motives» in the most general and broadest sense of the word). I have already talked about the hierarchical relationships between the different manifestations of satisfaction, enjoyment and happiness, built in accordance with the hierarchy of needs — from «needs» to metaneeds (82). We must remember that the very concept of «need satisfaction» at the level of metamotives, or growth motives, is transcended, at this level it is impossible to literally satisfy the need. The same applies to the understanding of happiness, which can also be transcended at higher levels. What at lower levels was contentment, pleasure or happiness, here at higher levels can be transformed into a kind of cosmic sadness, melancholy or detached contemplation. At the lower levels, at the levels of basic needs, we say that we are driven by something or desperately want something, suffer from a lack of something, fight for something, or need something, such as when we have nothing to breathe. or severe headache. As we rise to higher levels of need, we increasingly use words such as «desire», «desire», «preference» or «choice». But at the highest levels, at the level of metamotivation, even these words become inappropriate, and we begin to talk about love, adoration, admiration, enthusiasm, inspiration, fascination, fascination.

Here, at the level of metaneeds, we will certainly encounter the problem of the limitations of our language, with its inability to correctly convey the feeling of correctness, duty, appropriateness, absolute justice of our love for that which, by definition and essence, deserves and requires love, which must love.

All these words presuppose the separation of the loving person and the object of his love. But where can one find words to describe love and desire when separateness is overcome, when the lover is in many ways identical to the beloved, and the desired has become part of the seeker? How to talk about the fusion of desire and desirability?

I can offer you a description of this in the spirit of Spinoza, as the transcendence of free will in the name of higher determinism. A person who has ascended the level of metamotivation freely, happily and wholeheartedly accepts the determinism of being. A person agrees and desires what is destined for him not involuntarily, not «ego-dystonic», but with love and enthusiasm. And the brighter the insight that brought him to these heights, the more «ego-syntonic» the fusion of free will and determinism.

XXV

The highest values ​​require from a person, in addition to subjective experiences, also behavioral reactions, require «triumph».

I fully share Heschel’s view of «celebration,» which he describes as «the act of expressing respect or reverence for what a person needs or honors… The essence of celebration is to draw the attention of others to the sublime or sacred aspects of life… The triumphant person seeks to share the great invites you to participate with him in eternity.

It should be noted that the highest values ​​not only cause a surge of respect in a person, not only bring him joy, but also push him to expressive behavioral reactions that are easier to objective research than subjective states and experiences.

In addition, in the description of the celebration, one can notice another phenomenological meaning of «sense of duty». To celebrate the holiday of meeting with the highest values, to glorify them seems so right, appropriate and appropriate that a person gladly takes on this responsibility. Probably, this is our duty to the highest values, we are obliged to repay them at least in this way, it is fair, right and natural to protect them, strive for them, rise to them, rejoice at meeting with them and celebrate it.

XXVI

If we learn to distinguish between the higher reality and the reality of the lower «needs», if we predetermine the difference between them at the level of language, we will be able to achieve certain advantages both in educational and in therapeutic practice.

I found it very useful to distinguish between the highest reality and the reality of «needs», that is, to distinguish between the eternal and the «worldly». This is already useful in order to live a full life, independently build its strategy and tactics, without waiting for someone or something to determine it for you. Daily chores and haste distract from the eternal and the main thing, and this especially applies to young people. Often we barely have time to respond to external stimuli, to rewards and punishments, to the pressing, to pain and fears, to the demands of other people. And at first, a special, deliberate effort, an ad hoc effort (for the given case), is required to turn to essential and lofty things — a person begins to seek solitude, learns to listen to music, seeks communication with good people, strives for the city, for nature, etc. n. Only after accumulating some experience of communication with the higher, a person learns to easily, automatically move into a higher reality, learns to live a «unitive» life, a «meta-life», a «higher life», no longer making conscious efforts to do so.

It seems to me useful to use special words to teach people a better awareness of higher values, a unitive consciousness; one must speak to them in a special language, the language of being, which alone can describe the absolute facts of being and the higher life. The dictionary I have proposed so far is somewhat clumsy, some words in it can cause irritation, but it serves its purpose (85, Appendix 1). It is good at least because it was successfully used as the basis of an experimental study.

I want to put forward another particular hypothesis. As I can judge from individual observations of highly developed, mature personalities (behind “meta-personalities”?), they surprisingly easily and quickly find a common language with each other, find points of interest precisely in higher spheres and precisely with the help of this higher language , which I call the language of Genesis. In the first approximation, this observation once again proves the existence of higher values ​​or values ​​of Being, proves their immutability and reality, shows that they are easily comprehensible by some people and not comprehensible by others, allows us to put forward the hypothesis that communication with people who have not comprehended the highest reality, communication a full-fledged and true one is possible, but it must be built on other, less high levels of reality awareness.

I have not yet found a way to test this hypothesis. I was put off by the fact that some people confidently use the lexicon of the higher, not really understanding what they are talking about. I have heard a lot of authoritative judgments about music or love from people who have never really been able to feel the beauty.

In addition, I got the impression that people who have found mutual understanding in the language of Genesis have trusting, almost intimate feelings for each other. Looking at such people, you feel that they profess common values ​​and ideals, are engaged in one thing, you feel the kinship of their souls, even a pre-established pairing.

XXVII

«Essential conscience» and «essential guilt» ultimately also have biological roots.

Today, most humanistic scholars, following Fromm with his «human conscience» (37) and Horney’s rethinking of Freud’s «super-ego» (50), have agreed that there is an «essential conscience» besides the «super-ego», just as and «essential guilt», which should be seen as a well-deserved self-punishment for betraying one’s true self.

I believe that the thesis about the biological nature of metamotivation will clarify and make these concepts more common in the future.

Horney and Fromm, objecting to the deliberate tendentiousness of the Freudian theory of instincts, involuntarily exaggerated the role of social determinism and rejected all variants of «biologism» and «theory of instincts». But, if the logic of my reasoning is recognized as correct, they thereby made a serious mistake.

The biological characteristics of a person are, without a doubt, a necessary component of his “real self”. To be oneself, to be natural and spontaneous, to be authentic, to show identity in all these messages there is necessarily a biological moment, they all involve the acceptance by a person of his constitutional, temperamental, anatomical, neurological, hormonal and instinctual-motivational nature. By affirming this, I continue to move in the same direction in which Freud moved, I do not contradict the views of neo-Freudians in anything (not to mention Rogers, Jung, Sheldon, Goldstein and others). In my opinion, I am only clearly and concretely formulating what Freud was groping for, the need for which he vaguely foresaw. Therefore, I am inclined to consider this statement Freudian. It seems to me that Freud tried to express something similar with his theory of instincts. I believe that this statement does not contradict Horney’s concept of «real self», but rather confirms and complements it.

If the facts prove the validity of this more biological interpretation of the true self, then we will have new grounds for distinguishing neurotic guilt from the essential guilt that stems from a person’s awareness of his destiny and the inability to live up to it.

But based on all of the above, it turns out that the true «I» must include the highest values, or the values ​​of Being. Only in this case can it be assumed that an offense inflicted on truth, beauty, justice, or any other higher value will make a person feel guilty, essential guilt (meta-guilt?), deserved guilt, guilt in the biological sense. In a way, it looks like pain. Pain signals to us that something is harming our health. And so pain can be perceived as a blessing. Also, essential guilt signals to a person that something harms his «I», when he betrays the higher. A person suffers from guilt, and in a certain sense he must suffer, this suffering is good for him. This «debt of suffering» signifies a new understanding of the «need for punishment», which can now be viewed positively as a desire to «purify» through redemption (118).

XXVIII

Our approach to higher values ​​solves the same problems that religion took upon itself to solve.

Mankind has always striven for eternity and the absolute, and it seems to me that the highest values ​​to some extent can serve these goals. They are independent, they do not depend on the whims of man. They are known, comprehended, but not invented. They are transhuman and transindividual. They are unhistorical. They can be understood as a kind of perfection, an ideal. And at the same time, they are concrete and realizable.

But they are human in a strictly defined sense. They are not only characteristic, but also inherent in man. They demand adoration, reverence, glorification, sacrifice. They deserve to live and die for them. Comprehension of them or merging with them brings the greatest happiness to a person.

Immortality in this context also acquires a very definite and understandable meaning of values ​​that have become the essence of a person, a part of his “I”, are immortal, they continue to live after his death, that is, in a certain, very understandable sense, the human “I” transcends death.

Similarly, one can consider other functions that religious institutions are trying to perform. Apparently, all or almost all concepts and experiences that are considered to be religious, ever described as religious in both theological and atheistic works, both within Western and Eastern culture, can be included in this theoretical framework. and can be expressed empirically.

«The Transcendence of Time. pp. 281-282.

Let me give you boring university ceremonies as an example. I often had to participate in them, to stand for a long time in an absurd professor’s attire, and I always felt melancholy and annoyance, until one day I felt a strange insight, I did not realize myself as some kind of timeless symbol. My perception of the academic procession extended, reached into the future, went beyond my time-limited mind’s eye, and found Socrates and other scholars at the head of the column. I saw ahead of me whole generations of the greatest academicians, professors and intellectuals, of whom I was a follower, student and successor. I was able to see in the boring ritual some kind of solemn procession, hiding in the fog, in the barely discernible infinity, in those times when people did not yet experience longing and annoyance from it, but with joy and pride joined the great cohort of scholars, intellectuals, scientists and philosophers. . I felt a shiver of reverence, I was happy to be among them, I felt proud of the mantle on my shoulders and the cap on my head. I became a symbol, I stood for something more than just a visible human body. At the time, I wasn’t even fully human. I was the personification of the eternal teacher. I was the Platonic essence of the teacher.

The transcendence of time can also take somewhat different forms. For example, I can feel a friendly, very personal, almost loving relationship with Spinoza, with Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson, William James, Whitehead and others, as if they were really alive and were my close friends. In a sense, of course, this means that they are really alive.

Time can also be transcended by hard work for the benefit of future generations and successors of a useful and important work. The protagonist of Allen Wheels’ novel The Seeker reflects on this on the verge of death when he thinks that the best thing he could do in his life is to plant and grow a tree for his descendants.

4. Transcendence of culture

The self-actualized person, or, to be more precise, the self-actualized person who has transcended, is universal. It belongs to humanity. He is nourished by a certain culture, but he rises above it, in many ways he is independent of it. Such a person is related to the culture that has grown him, figuratively speaking, just as a tree is related to the soil that has grown him, his branches are directed upwards, towards the sun, they strive away from their roots. I have already mentioned the resistance of self-actualized people to the influences of their cultural environment. Such a person can evaluate the culture that has raised him in an aloof and impartial way. His view of culture is akin to a psychotherapeutic effect, when a person experiences a certain state and at the same time observes it with a critical, editorial, detached, impartial look, can criticize it, approve or condemn it, manage it, and therefore change it. The attitude of a self-actualized person to his culture, to those of its components that he consciously accepted, is fundamentally different from blind, thoughtless, unconscious, ignorant, uncritical and complete identification with the cultural environment and its traditions.

Others

1 TABLE

I get the impression that the closer a person is to self-actualization, to full incarnation, the more likely we are to discover the meta-motivation of his vocation, the less his choice of work is determined by basic needs. So, for self-actualized people, serving the “law” is a way to achieve justice, truth, virtue, while for non-self-actualized people, advocacy or judicial practice can act as a guarantor of financial well-being, a condition for social recognition, status, prestige, power over people, as a symbol of strength and masculinity. One has only to ask the person: what exactly do you like in your work? What do you enjoy the most? What excites you about your work? — and you will understand the difference between a self-actualized person and others. A self-actualized person will surely answer you in the language of essential values, in terms of transpersonal, unselfish, altruistic satisfaction, he will talk about destiny, about perfect incarnation, about striving for truth, about rewarding virtue and punishing evil, etc.

These core values ​​have much in common with the highest values ​​and, perhaps, are identical to them.

My «experimental data», if I can call them that, are not reliable enough for me to be able to make any categorical statements. So I keep talking about «assumptions». I admit that the classification of the highest values, the values ​​of Being, published by me (85), is very close to the list of essential or perfect values ​​of a self-actualized personality. Undoubtedly, these two lists have much in common, the same components occur in both lists, it seems that these two series tend to merge. It seems to me appropriate to speak here of the list of highest values ​​I have proposed, not only because it pleases my scientific vanity, but also because this series of phenomena is accessible to various approaches (85, Appendix O). In this case, I mean that there are many roads leading to the list of higher values ​​that I have proposed. I was led to him by thoughts about art and education, about religion and psychotherapy, about higher experiences, about science, about mathematics. If my approach is correct, then we will pave another path to the highest values ​​from the side of purpose and vocation, studying the attitude to work of people who have achieved self-actualization. (In this case, it is appropriate and expedient (in the sense of constructing a theory) to speak of higher values ​​also because self-actualized, or more humanized, people have a special love for these values, receive satisfaction from them both through work on a vocation and from the work itself, and regardless of it.)

In other words, people who have satisfied their basic needs become «metamotivated», turn to higher values ​​or to values ​​that are more or less high, more or less approaching the highest.

Or I will say this, self-actualized people are no longer primarily motivated (that is, motivated by non-basic needs), they are mainly metamotivated (motivated by metaneeds, higher values).

The introjection of the higher means the expansion of the “I”, the absorption of the external by it and therefore the transcendence of the differences between the “I” and the “not-I” (external, other).

Thus, the highest values ​​or metamotives cease to be only intrapsychic or inherent only in the organism. They become equally internal and external. The meta-needs that act on a person from the inside and the necessity coming from the outside whip each other up and respond to each other, act as a stimulus and reaction for each other. A person almost ceases to distinguish them, they merge for him, as well as for those around him when looking at him.

The line between «I» and «not-I» is erased (or transcended). As a person includes particles of the external within the limits of his “I”, begins to define himself in the categories of the impersonal, there are less and less differences and contradictions between him and the world around him. We can say that the world itself becomes its «I», exalted and expanded its boundaries. If justice, or law, or justice is so important to a person, so inherent in him that he becomes the embodiment of these noblest aspirations of the human spirit, then tell me, where are they? In it or somewhere in some cosmos of higher humanity? This distinction becomes almost meaningless, because the essence of such a person is not limited by the limits of his body. And his microcosm, his inner light are indistinguishable from the radiance coming to him from the macrocosm of higher humanity.

When we look at such a person, we see that he has also transcended ordinary human egoism, his egoism needs to be redefined at a higher level. For example, it is known that a loving parent receives much greater pleasure (selfish or unselfish?) from food not when he eats it himself, but when he sees his child eating with what appetite and pleasure. The “I” of such a person has expanded so much that it embraces a beloved child with its joys and troubles. By hurting his child, you are hurting that person. It is clear that his «I» can no longer be identified only with his body, with his flesh and blood. His psychological «I» became more than his bodily «I».

Just as a person includes his beloved child in his «I», in the same way he embraces with his «I» goals and values ​​uXNUMXbuXNUMXbthat are dear to him. We know passionate fighters for peace, fighters against racial lawlessness, hard living conditions and poverty, so obsessed with their cause that it seems natural for them to give up the joys of life, from comforts and life itself for the sake of an idea. At the same time, the question does not even arise of how much the danger of war, racial injustice or poverty threatens their personal, their bodily well-being. The personal has become for them much more than their physical body. They fight for justice as such, for justice for all, for justice as a principle of existence. Any infringement of justice is perceived by such a person as a personal threat, since justice is incorporated into his «I». Injustice becomes a personal insult to him.

The identification of «I» with the highest values ​​always means to some extent merging with the «not-I». But the merger is not only with some abstract universal «not-I». It also leads to the merging of this elevated «I» with the highest particles of the «I» of other self-actualized people, to their mutual unity.

One can imagine other consequences of such an incorporation of higher values. For example, one can love justice as such, and one can love justice in one’s neighbor. You can get the highest satisfaction, seeing how people around you are filled with an understanding of justice, and you can grieve, feeling that a loved one is unfair. Surely everyone knows these feelings. But imagine that you have comprehended the highest truth, justice, beauty and virtue. I am sure that then, in some very special state of detachment and objectivity, you will love yourself and admire yourself, experience something like the healthy self-love that Fromm wrote about (36). Within our culture, perhaps, there is no worthy place left for self-respect, self-admiration, tender care for yourself, this feeling that you are your own reward, that you are good, deserve love and respect. Thus, a talented pianist will protect his talent and his hands as the embodiment of talent, as something that simultaneously belongs to him and to all mankind. That is, he becomes the guardian of his «I».

All other, less evolved people seem to satisfy lower, basic or even neurotic needs through work, they work to achieve some pragmatic goals, or out of habit, or following conventional requirements, etc. In this case, the only difference is to the degree of representation of certain motives. It can be assumed that all human individuals are to some extent (potentially) metamotivated.

Looking at a self-actualized person who performs a very specific work, serves the law, family, science, psychiatry, teaching or art, that is, obeys the conventional requirements of a profession or vocation, we cannot fail to notice that in fact his motives for work are more essential, higher than actually necessary, that service for him is only a means to achieve some other, higher goal (85, 89). I myself observed them at work and asked them questions. For example, I asked them why they like being a doctor, or what they find in housekeeping, or social work, or raising a child, or writing. And, based on their answers, I am ready to solemnly declare that they work for the sake of truth and beauty, in the name of virtue and legality, for the good of order and justice, in the pursuit of perfection. Indeed, it all comes down to a dozen or so higher values ​​(or values ​​of Being) — all hundreds and hundreds of specific and very different answers to my question about what they want, what they strive for, what gives them satisfaction, what they value, for the sake of what they work day after day and, in fact, why they work. (I am not taking into account inferior values ​​here.)

I did not conduct targeted studies of people who did not achieve self-actualization, I did not have a control group, an ad hoc control. On this issue, I undertake to assert that the overwhelming majority of humanity in this case is precisely the control group. As a control, I used a huge amount of experimental data obtained from the usual statistical study of the attitude to work of people not specially selected, as well as neurotics, psychopaths and people in borderline states, etc. Looking at the results of such studies even with the most cursory glance, one can notice that the attitude of these people to work is inseparable from money, which helps them satisfy basic (and not higher) needs, is explained by habit and addiction, neurotic needs, such as prejudice and inertia (unwillingness to experiment on their own life and question it), is determined by the desire to conform the expectations of the environment. I admit that I followed intuition and common sense, but those who doubt the legitimacy of such an approach can easily test it, confirm it or refute it.

I got the impression that there is no qualitative difference between self-actualized people and the rest of humanity, that it is impossible to draw a clear line between them. I have researched many self-actualizing people, and each one more or less fits my definition of self-actualization; but it seems to me correct to assume that some part of non-self-actualized people, some percentage of less psychologically healthy people are to some extent metamotivated, in some sense committed to higher values.

Metapathologies characteristic of rich and spoiled young people develop from the deprivation of essential values, from «idealism» — a frustrated clash with society, from disappointment that those around them, in their opinion, are concerned only with lower, animal, material needs.

The theory of metapathology allows us to put forward the following easily verifiable assumption. I believe that the social pathologies characteristic of rich people (people who have satisfied lower needs) are nothing more than a manifestation of a hunger for essential values. To put it another way: many of the bad traits of the wealthy, privileged, self-satisfied university and college students owe their appearance to the frustration of «idealism.» Thus, my hypothesis is that the behavior of wealthy young people may be due, on the one hand, to the tireless search for a creed, and malicious disappointment from the hopelessness of this search, on the other hand. (I have seen young people who are completely desperate and give up; they have lost faith in the very existence of this ideal, these higher values.)

Of course, such bouts of hopelessness, frustration of idealistic impulses are largely facilitated by conventional and limited theories of motivation. If you do not take into account the behaviorist and positivist theories of motivation, I would call them antitheories, because they, guided by a kind of denial of the psychoanalytic sense, refuse to see the existence of a problem, then what scientific knowledge can idealistically minded young men and women be armed with?

The main theories of motivation, not to mention nineteenth-century official science and orthodox academic psychology, either explain nothing, or present human motives in such a way that I cannot be surprised at the depression and cynicism inherent in our youth. Freudians (to judge by the officially accepted views in their environment, which they do not strictly adhere to in therapeutic practice) are still committed to reductionism in relation to any slightly high urge. In the deepest, most natural human motives, they see danger and destruction, and they deny the right to exist to the highest values, the highest virtues, with excitement exposing in their faces the disguised versions of “deep, dark and dirty”. For them, higher is synonymous with fraud and pretense. The representatives of the social sciences are also disappointing. The vast majority of sociologists and anthropologists are committed to the official, highly orthodox doctrine that culture is at the heart of everything human. This doctrine not only denies higher essential motives, it sometimes comes close to denying human nature as such. Economists, not only Western but also Eastern, are mostly materialists. I must state with all sharpness that today such a “science” as economics acts as a mathematical, technological justification for a false theory of needs and values, recognizing the right to exist only for lower, material needs (133,154, 163).

How can a young man not be disappointed, how not to give up hopes for the best? What other result can there be when all material or animal needs are satisfied, but there was no happiness and no, if teachers, parents and advertising promised him one thing, but in fact the opposite turns out?

Where is the place for «eternal values» and immutable truths? The whole society unanimously hands them over to the Church or some other dogmatic, institutionalized, conventionalized religious institution. Isn’t that a denial of human nature! It turns out that a young person who seeks the highest truth, by common agreement, will not find this in himself or in human nature, but must look for it in the extrahuman, in the supernatural, in what most educated young people today do not believe.

“Abundance thus leads to an ever more total dominance of material values. The thirst for spiritual values ​​remains unquenched. The development of civilization has reached a level, beyond which the outlines of an impending catastrophe are clearly visible ”(Schumacher).

I focused on youth “frustrated idealism” due to the importance and urgency of studying this problem. In fact, any metapathology of any person can be characterized as «frustrated idealism.»

Not only does external pressure lead to the deprivation of higher needs, causing a thirst for values, but a person also suffers from internal ambivalence and from counter assessments.

It is impossible to consider the movement towards metapathology, towards the deprivation of values ​​only in a passive way, as a result of the influence of external conditions on a person. Often a person is frightened by the demands of the higher, sounding in him and from the outside. He is attracted to the higher, but at the same time he trembles before him, feels horror, fear, fright. I’m talking about the ambivalent attitude of man to the higher and about the internal conflict. Man is protected from higher values. Suppression, denial, reactive formations, any of the defense mechanisms described by Freud, can be awakened and turned against the higher as well as against the lower.

Escape from the higher can be caused by counter-assessments and a sense of one’s own insignificance. Or the fear of not meeting the requirements of the higher, the fear of a possible inconsistency.

Thus, metapathology must be considered simultaneously as the result of an externally imposed deprivation of values ​​and as a result of self-deprivation, an internal deprivation of values.

III. Higher values ​​or values ​​of Being (as descriptions of the world that opens up in moments of higher experiences)

The characteristics of Being are at the same time the values ​​of Being. (These are the characteristics of humanness, this is what humanized people strive for; these are the characteristics of self-identity in moments of highest experiences; the characteristics of ideal art; the characteristics of the ideal child; the characteristics of the best proofs of mathematical hypotheses, ideal experiments and theories, ideal science and knowledge; the highest goals of the best ( Taoistic) types of psychotherapy; characteristics of the ideal environment and ideal society.)

1. Truthful: (honesty; reality; openness; simplicity; necessity; beauty; purity; complete and genuine wholeness).

2. Good: (truth; desirability; obligation; fairness; kindness; honesty; pleasantness).

3. Beautiful: (correctness; formality; spirituality; simplicity; richness; integrity, perfection; completeness; uniqueness; sincerity).

4. Whole: (unity; integration; desire for unification; interconnectedness; simplicity; organization; structure; order, association; synergy; desire for homonomy).

4a. Overcoming the dichotomy: (fusion; resolution; integration or overcoming fragmentation, polarity, opposites, contradictions; synergy, that is, the unity of opposites, cooperation of antagonists and partnership).

5. Alive: (process; denial of death; spontaneity; self-regulation; full functioning; variability while maintaining essence and integrity; expressiveness).

6. Unique: (idiosyncrasy; individuality; incomparability; novelty; originality; dissimilarity).

7. Perfect: (no excesses, no shortcomings; embodiment; impossibility of improvement; correctness, necessity, conformity, justice, completeness, sufficiency).

7a. Necessary: ​​(inevitability; correctness; impossibility of correction; correct implementation).

8. Completed: (completion; finality; harmony; perfection; invariance of the gestalt; lack of flaws; totality; destiny; cessation; pinnacle; final form; death for rebirth; stop at the peak of growth and development).

9. Fair: (rightness; obligation; conformity; structured property; necessity; inevitability; detachment; impartiality).

9a. Harmonious: (legality; correctness; absence of excessive; absolute order).

10. Simple: (honesty; openness; essentiality; abstract infallibility; framework of being; core of problem; directness; only essentials; no embellishment; nothing superfluous or excessive).

11. Rich: (diversity; complexity; branching; inclusiveness; prosperity and transparency; presence; «all-importance» — still highly valued; no secondary; everything above improvement, simplification, abstraction, rearrangement).

12. Free: (lightness; no effort, struggle, overcoming, no difficulty; grace; perfect and perfect functioning).

13. Playful: (fun; joy; pleasure; humour; fertility; lightness).

14. Self-sufficient: (autonomy; independence; self-absorption; self-determination; detachment from the environment; separateness; life according to one’s own laws; identity).

The global goals set by a new kind of education, understood as the formation of a “creative”, “humanistic” or “holistic” personality, especially its non-verbal methods (learning through art, dance, etc.), largely coincide with the list of higher values ​​or even identical to them, and also identical to the goals of that psychotherapy, which does not limit itself to the achievement of a specific therapeutic result. What I mean to say is that this kind of education almost unconsciously aims at the same result as psychotherapy, presented ideally. Therefore, the conclusions of already produced or only planned studies of the effects of psychotherapy, in principle, can be transferred and used for a better understanding of the effectiveness of «creative» learning. Both in psychotherapeutic practice and in the process of education, one can use a common and natural principle — only such education can be considered “good” that “elevates” the student, that is, helps him become more honest, better, more beautiful, more integral, etc. This thesis is equally applicable to vocational education, if we do not consider it only as a process of acquiring skills and abilities, but see it as a means for a person to achieve his highest destiny.

Approximately the same can be said about some varieties of monotheistic and polytheistic religions, both about their canonical versions and apocrypha. In almost every religious scripture you will find: a) God, who is the embodiment of all the highest values, b) an ideal, righteous, god-like person, who serves as an example to follow, corresponds or at least strives to correspond to these «divine» values, c) rites, ceremonies , rituals, commandments, helping to get closer to these values, d) paradise, as a place or state, or time to acquire these values. Salvation, redemption, conversion — all these are options for gaining the truth given to man from above. And since religious dogmas are usually argued by very specific factual data, they also need a specific approach to what happens outside their competence; so, for example, their main theses are combined with the main theses of the psychology of being, but religious figures continue to assert that the latter are incorrect. Religious literature can become a treasure trove of data if you know exactly what you want to find and use there. Let’s try to do the same in the specific way described above, turn everything around 180 degrees and propose the following theoretical turn for consideration: the highest values ​​are the characteristics of a «truthful» and functional, practical and useful religion. This criterion is perhaps best met by a combination of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Humanism.

13. It is my impression that most people are driven away from higher values ​​by difficult or poor environmental conditions that threaten the satisfaction of their basic needs, such as in a concentration camp, in prison, hunger, disasters, horror, environmental hostility, social isolation, insecurity in the future, the now widespread sense of the collapse of values, the lack of a value system, hopelessness, etc. It is not clear why, but some people manage to remain striving for higher values ​​under the same “bad” conditions. However, both the striving for the values ​​of Existence and their rejection are quite amenable to research.

V. Can sublime love give a person independence, open-mindedness, clarity of perception?

Is it true that love is blinding? In what cases does it contribute to a clearer perception, and in which less clear?

The focus of these questions lies in the moment when love turns into something huge and pure (non-ambivalent), when it turns to the very essence of the object, when its best qualities become exactly what we want, when we stop evaluating it for possible usefulness and it is transformed from a means to an end into a desirable end itself (with our benevolent connivance). Take, for example, an apple tree: after all, we can love it so that we do not want anything from it, if only it exists; we can rejoice already in the fact that it simply is. Everything else turns out to be superficial and external (“imposed”), harms it and prevents it from remaining an apple tree, prevents it from existing according to its own internal, biological laws. She may become so perfect in our eyes that we shall beware of touching her, lest we diminish her perfection. Really, can the perfect be made even more perfect? Any attempt to improve (decorate, for example) indirectly indicates that the object is not perceived as perfect, that a person has some idea of ​​uXNUMXbuXNUMXb»perfect», different from what exists in reality, which seems to him more beautiful and better than a specific embodiment of a living apple tree ; such a person thinks that he understands more about apple trees than the apple tree itself, that he can create an apple tree better than the apple tree does. Admit it, you probably had a feeling, almost unconsciously, that a person who wants to “correct” the nature of a dog, to make his pet more beautiful, does not really love him. Anyone who loves his dog will simply shudder at the mere thought of docking the tail or ears, of selection aimed at resembling some sample of the ideal dog from a kennel magazine, of all these activities that make the dog nervous, sick, sterile, incapable of procreation, epileptics, etc. (Note that people who bring a dog to this state insistently call themselves dog lovers.) Absolutely the same can be said for people who grow bonsai trees, people who teach birds to ride a bicycle or chimpanzees smoking.

True love is in any case not aggressive and not demanding, it admires the object in itself and therefore can perceive it without ulterior motives, without plans and calculations of an egoistic nature. It allows you to view it not as some kind of abstraction (by dismembering it and examining its constituent parts, qualities and attributes), but perceives it as a whole and indivisible. We can say that it is less active, does not make energetic efforts to squeeze the object into the Procrustean bed of an abstract idea about it, does not strive to organize and remake it, give it a form or fit it into theory, that is, allows it to remain whole, unified, independent. Love will not evaluate him according to the criteria of importance or insignificance, figure or background, usefulness or worthlessness, value or worthlessness, advantage or disadvantage, «good» and «bad», or other criteria of selfish human knowledge. Love does not seek to place its object on a certain shelf, to classify it, to determine its place in the historical process or in the chronological series, for it it ceases to be an ordinary member of a class, an example, a representative of a type.

This means that all (both important and unimportant) properties and qualities of the (solid) parts of the object (both peripheral and central) are equally significant and deserve attention, that any of its sides deserves admiration and surprise; sublime love, whether love is for a man or a woman, for a child, a picture or a flower, almost always means this kind of admiration, scrupulous and spellbound.

Minor flaws seen in such inseparability from the whole will surely seem cute, charming, if only because they are idiosyncratic, express the character and individuality of the object, give it originality, or maybe simply because they are so small, secondary, insignificant.

Thus, a person capable of sublime love (to the comprehension of Being) will be able to see something that is inaccessible to the gaze of an unloving person. In addition, it is easier for him to comprehend the nature of a particular object, to know the object in its undisturbed legitimacy and in the measured course of its undisturbed existence. The shy and hidden essence of the object is more likely to be revealed to receptive admiration, not active, not aggressive, not impudent. With a loving comprehension of Being, even the form of the perceived object is closer to real outlines than in the case when the perceiver imperatively imposes on the object a structure alien to him and, following it, unceremoniously and impatiently rushes to the far-fetched essence, like a butcher carving a carcass, like a conqueror demanding surrender. cities, like a sculptor dominating a piece of clay, weak-willed and pliable.

It would also be fair to argue that the classical theory of economics in its current form is based on an inadequate understanding of human motivation56 and therefore must also change radically. To do this, she only needs to accept as reality the highest human needs, including the need for self-actualization, the desire and love of a person for higher values. I am sure that the same is true of political science, sociology and all other social and humanistic sciences and professions.

I say all this to emphasize once again that the problem of management is not at all inventing new management techniques, not in cunning tricks or ingenious techniques with which you can get people to do better what they do not need. Management theory cannot be a guide to the exploitation of man by man.

No, the problem is rather that now we can observe a direct collision of a set of orthodox values ​​with a new system of values, which turns out to be not only more effective, but also more true. In this clash we can see some of the truly revolutionary consequences which we are about to flourish if we recognize that human nature has been underestimated, that man has a higher nature that is just as «instinct-like» as his lower, and that it is precisely in this the need for meaningful work, responsibility, creativity, the need for conscientiousness and accuracy, the need to do worthwhile work and do it well is born to the highest nature of man.

It is enough to understand this, and we will agree that it is no longer possible to talk about remuneration for work, meaning only «salary», «bonus» and other ways of material incentives. Of course, basic needs can be bribed with money, but as soon as a certain u.u.j. is passed, it is worth satisfying them, and it turns out that people are also interested in higher forms of “reward”, such as a sense of community, love, respect, self-respect, honor, such as an opportunity for self-actualization, for comprehending higher values ​​- truth, beauty, perfection, justice, order, legality, etc.

Undoubtedly, there is something to think about here not only for Marxists or Freudians, but also for politicians, and the military, and the biggest bosses, and even liberals.