Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization

My 21st book this year titled above is a definitely excellent reading on humanistic psychology by Scott Barry Kaufman. It takes us to revisit Abraham Harold Maslow’s work, especially the infamous hierarchy of needs, and provide new science to elevate it into what Maslow’s actually intended it to be. It proposes a new metaphor of the hierarchy of needs, one that I do personally think more relatable and relevant. I am going to oversimplify here and only focus on summarizing the new hierarchy of needs. I do highly recommend you to read the whole book by yourself as you’ll get a lot of enlightenment from this, at least I know I do. 

The pyramid of the sixties told a story that Maslow never meant to tell: a story of achievement, of mastering level by level unit you’ve “won” the game of life. 

The human condition isn’t a competition: it’s an experience. Life isn’t a trek up a summit but a journey to travel through—a vast blue ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and discovery but also danger and uncertainty. In this choppy surf, a clunky pyramid is of little use. Instead, what is needed is something a bit more functional. We’ll need a sailboat. The sailboat isn’t a pinnacle but a whole vehicle, helping us to explore the world and people around us, growing and transcending as we do. The needs that comprise the boat itself are safety, connection and self-esteem. The sail represents growth, that can be broken into three specific needs for which there is strong contemporary scientific support: exploration, love, and purpose. Finally, at the top of the new hierarchy of needs is the need for transcendence, which is goes beyond individual growth (and even health and happiness) and allows for the highest levels of unity and harmony within oneself and with the world. Transcendence, which rests on a secure foundation of both security and growth, is a perspective in which we can view our whole being from a higher vantage point with acceptance, wisdom, and a sense of connectedness with the rest of humanity. 

First thing first, is about security.

1. Safety

The need for safety, and its accompanying needs for stability, certainty, predictability, coherence, continuity, and trust in the environment, is the base upon which all the others are fulfilled. The need for safety is tied to the struggle to make sense of experiences and a motivation to gain control over violated expectations. having a safe base allows a person to take risks and explore new ideas and ways of being, while also allowing the opportunity to become who you truly want to become. In the absence of that base, people become overly dependent on the protection, love, affection, and esteem of others, which can compromise growth, development, and meaning in life. 

2. Connection

The need for connection—to form and maintain at least a minimal number of positive, stable, intimate relationships—is a fundamental need that affects our whole being, permeating our entire suite of emotions, thoughts and behaviors. While individuals differ in the strength of this need, connection is an irreducible, undeniable human need. The need for connection actually consists of two subtends: (a). The need to belong, to be liked, to be accepted, and (b) The need for intimacy, for mutuality, for relatedness. 

3. Self-esteem

Modern research has identified two distinct faces of healthy self-esteem: self-worth and mastery. Self-worth involves the evaluation of your overall sense of self: Are you a fundamentally a good person with social value in this world? Feeling worthy of who you are as a person lays a healthy foundation for who you want to become. There are two forms of social value we can have in this world: relational social value (the degree to which we regard our relationship with others as personally valuable and important) and instrumental social value (the degree to which others perceive us as possessing resources and/or personal characteristics that are important for the benefit of the collective good). Those with a high sense of self-worth tend to like themselves, and view themselves as having high relational value. The second face of self-esteem—mastery—involves the evaluation of your overall sense of agency: Are you an intentional being who can bring about your desired goals by exercising your will?. A healthy self-esteem involves not only liking yourself but also having an overall feeling that you are a competent human being.

Now, it’s about growth.

4. Exploration

There are five subneeds of exploration that cover both behavioral and cognitive forms of it:

• (1) Social exploration. There are two aspects on social exploration, which are social curiosity (which involves a general interest in gathering information about how other people feel, think and behave) and the drive to actively engage in novel social and physical environment (making a new friend, engaging in new discussions, volunteering for a new organization, or even trying out a new dance club).
• (2) Adventure seeking. Scientists defined “adventure seeking” as the willingness to risk physical, social, and financial safety for varied, novel, exciting, intense and challenging sensations and experiences.  
• (3) Post-traumatic growth. It is defined as the positive psychological change that is experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. There are seven areas of growth have been reported to spring from adversity: greater appreciation of life; greater appreciation and strengthening of close relationships; increase compassion and altruism, the identification of new possibilities or a purpose in life; greater awareness and utilization of personal strengths; enhance spiritual development; and creative growth.
• (4) Openness to experience. This concept played a central role in the thinking of the founding humanistic psychologists. For both Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, the height of self-actualization was creativity, and one of the key drivers of creativity was openness to experience. Rogers conceptualized openness to experience as a mode of cognitive processing where one is open to all of one’s personal experiences, receiving conflicting information without forcing closure, tolerating ambiguity, and seeing reality clearly without imposing predetermined categories onto the world.
• (5) Intellect. There are many aspects of the human intellect, but some of the most well-studied facets include IQ, intellectual curiosity, and the need to know solutions to problems. Long-term studies have found that even though IQ is a strong predictor of academic achievement, intellectual curiosity is also a significant predictor of academic success, independent of IQ. And when it comes to real-life creative achievement, intellectual curiosity predicts the creative achievement of inventions and scientific discovery even better than IQ.       

5. Love

Maslow explicitly distinguished “needing love” from “unneeding love” and referred to the former as D-love (deficiency love) and the latter as B-love (“love for the being of another person). Whereas D-love can be gratified, the entire concept of gratification hardly applies to B-love. Those who love from a place of B-love do not need to receive love except in “steady, small, maintenance doses and they may even do without these for periods of time.” Instead of needing, B-love is admiring, and instead of striving for satiation, B-love usually grows rather than disappear. As a result, B-love is typically a more enjoyable experience, as it is intrinsically valuable (not valuable as a means to some other end). B-loving people are high in universal concern (commitment to equal opportunity, justice, and protection for all people), universal tolerance (acceptance and understanding of those who are different from oneself, and promoting harmony and peace among diverse groups), trustworthiness and dependability for close loved ones, and  benevolence and caring toward close friends and family. The greatest character strengths of B-loving people are kindness, love, zest for life, gratitude, perspective, forgiveness, social intelligence, appreciation, teamwork, hope, fairness, curiosity, judgment, humility, love of learning, humor and spirituality. B-loving people also score high on some agency-related traits such as grit, industriousness, productiveness, organization and responsibility. B-loving people are also authentic, but in a healthy fashion. Healthy authenticity involves understanding, accepting, and taking responsibility for your whole self as a route to personal growth and meaningful relationship. Healthy authenticity is an ongoing process of discovery, self-consciousness, and responsibility taking and is built on a secure foundation of a personality structure not dominated by the needs for safety, connection and self-esteem. 

6. Purpose

The need for purpose can be defined as the need for an overarching aspiration that energizes one’s efforts and provides a central source of meaning and significance in one’s life. Having a purpose often causes fundamental reordering of the most central motives associated with the self. Things that once preoccupied you suddenly cause you little concern and may even seem trivial. Having a purpose fuel perseverance despite obstacles because perseverance is seen as worth the effort. According to research, the most growth-fostering purpose is one that is built on a strong foundation of secure environment, belonging, connection and a healthy self-esteem and is driven by exploration and love. It requires a deep integration of many needs. In order to experience the fully transformative benefits of satisfying the need for purpose, we need to ensure that we’re striving wisely  and pursuing wisely. Striving wisely involves choosing overarching strivings that (a) really fit your deepest growth impulses, (b) feel enjoyable and freely chosen, (c) help you move toward a future self that will continue to grow and and contribute to society, and (d) are well integrated with your other strivings in life as well as your basic needs. Pursuing wisely in about living your purpose in the way that will lead to optimal health, growth and well-being. Some characteristics that is essential for that are: SMART Goals; Grit and Equanimity; Harmonious passion; Exercising your signature strengths; Hope; Being Supported and; Knowing when to move on.

Now, It’s time to integrate the entire hierarchy of needs, it is time for transcendence.   

Maslow proposed that transcenders are “metamotivated” by higher ideals and values that go beyond the satisfaction of basic needs and the fulfillment of one’s unique self. These metamotivations include a devotion to a calling outside oneself, as well as commitment to the ultimate values, or the B-values, the values of Being. Maslow’s list of B-values includes truth, goodness, beauty, justice, meaningfulness, playfulness, aliveness, uniqueness excellence, simplicity, elegance and wholeness. Maslow’s, some, characteristics of transcenders are:

• For the transcenders, peak experiences and plateau experiences become the most important things in their lives, the high spots, the validators of life, the most precious aspect of life. 
• The trancenders speak easily, naturally, and unconsciously the language of Being (B-language), the language of poets, of mystics, of seers, of profoundly religious people, of those who live under the aspect of eternity.
• They perceive the sacred within the secular, i.e., the sacredness in all the things at the same time that they also see them at the practical, everyday level.
• They are much more consciously and deliberately motivated by B-values, such as perfection, truth, beauty, goodness, unity, dichotomy-transcendence, B-amusement, etc.
• They somehow recognize one another and to come to an almost intimacy and mutual understanding even upon first meeting.
• They are more responsive to beauty, or rather they tend to beautify all things—including things that may seem ugly to most people.
• They are more holistic about the world than are the “healthy” or practical self actualizers (who are also holistic in the same sense). Humankind is one, and the cosmos is one, and such concepts as the “national interest” or “the religion of my father” or “different grades of people or of IQ” either cease to exist or are easily transcended.
• They transcend the ego more often and more easily.
• Not only are such people lovable, as are all of the most self-actualizing people, they are also more awe-inspiring, more “unearthly, more easily revered.” They have more often produced the thought “This is a great man.”
• Transcenders are far more apt to be innovators, discoverers of the new, of what actually could be, what exists in potential—and therefore of what might be brought to pass. 
• They are less “happy” than the healthy ones. They can be more ecstatic, more rapturous, and experience greater heights of “happiness,” but they are as prone—or maybe more prone—to a kind of cosmic sadness or B-sadness over the stupidity of people, their self-defeat, their blindness, their cruelty to one another, their shortsightedness. Perhaps this comes from the contrast between what actually is and the ideal world that the transcenders can see so easily and so vividly, and which is in principle so easily attainable. 
• They find that increasing knowledge is associated with an increased sense of mystery, awe, humility, ultimate ignorance reverence and a sense of oblation. Most people pursue knowledge to lessen mystery and to reduce anxiety. But for peak experiencers and transcenders in particular, as well as for self-actualizers in general, mystery is attractive and challenging rather than frightening.
• They are more likely to be good selectors of creators (who sometimes look nutty or kooky). On the flip side, they are also more able to screen out the nuts and kooks who are not creative.
• They tend to be more “reconciled with evil” in the sense of understanding its occasional inevitability and necessity in the larger holistic sense. Since this implies a better understanding of it, it should generate both a greater compassion with it and a less ambivalent and a more unyielding fight against it. To understand more deeply means, at this level, to be more decisive, to have less conflict, ambivalence, regret, regret, and thus to act more swiftly, surely and effectively. One can compassionately strike down an evil person if this is necessary. 
• They are more apt to regard themselves as carriers of talent, instruments of the transpersonal. This means a certain particular kind of objectivity or detachment toward themselves that to nontranscenders might sound like arrogance, grandiosity, or even paranoia.
• Transcenders, because of their easier perceptions of the B-realm, have more experiences, more of the fascinations that we see in children who get hypnotized by the colors in a puddle, by raindrops dripping down a windowpane, by the smoothness of skin, or by the movements of caterpillar.    

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