Yesterday, I finally finished reading The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, a book containing many of Maslow's later essays. (He died in 1970). I started reading it in August and then wrote a post, Maslow and the Creative Attitude. But I soon put it down after that to get ready for the fall semester. I read most of the rest of the book the last two or three weeks, after the semester had concluded. There are segments of the book that are very compelling, others which are quite dull. There is a lot of repetition on the B-Values and the D-Values, where B is short for Being (the higher level where values have an aesthetic quality) and D is short for Deficiency (a lower level - more or less, simply trying to survive).
The experiencing of the B-values happens via self-actualization - the person realizing his or her full potential - which quite often Maslow refers to as peak experiences. I was pleased to see in Appendix A, that Maslow also talks about plateau experiences. Peak experiences have some novelty to them. For the older self-actualizer the sense of novelty may not be present but the desire to live by the B-Values is quite strong. This is done via plateau experiences. (I would have been okay if he talked about gradual down-slope experiences, which seems closer to my own reality now.)
Most college students have at least a passing knowledge of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as do most working professionals, but I believe that for the vast majority there is a very mechanical understanding of what Maslow actually says on the matter. Anyone along the hierarchy can have a peak experience. But if the deficiency needs are not satisfied, then it is less likely that a peak experience will occur. Maslow also says that even if all the deficiency needs are satisfied, that is not sufficient to self-actualize. The person has to want to do that, to live the sort of life that enables self-actualization. Not all people have those wants.
There is an additional issue, about whether a third party (a trained psychologist or perhaps others) can tell if a deficiency need has been met, simply by observing the objective conditions in which the person operates, or if there is so much idiosyncrasy across people that whether the need has been met or not requires a deep understanding of the personality of the individual, the aspirations and the phobias, and other factors as well.
I want to illustrate the issue simply by comparing this to taking over-the-counter pain medication. I learned this from a doctor at Carle a couple of years ago. He said I should not rely on the recommended dosages written on the box with the medications. I'm a big guy and those recommendations are based on an average sized person. I needed a greater dose to have the same effect on me. If you then replace size with some other psychological variable, you can see that it is not just the environment but also the person's disposition that determines whether the need has been met. This makes applying the hierarchy much more challenging in practice than most people are led to understand.
It is my current belief that students in college should be encouraged to have peak experiences, and the survey I will discuss in the next section is aimed at doing that. But I also think this is true for working professionals. My sense of things, however, is that both school and work tend to block the peak experiences from happening. If there is no other way to envision school and work, then the peak experiences must happen outside these environments, after hours or on weekends. If students and working professionals come to believe that they should be having peaking experiences, then we might reasonably expect redesign of school and work to make that more likely.
Let me close this section by noting that I spent time trying to find whether individual chapters of the book could be found online. Those that were reprints of a previously published journal article certainly could be. And some others too. For the survey I'm borrowing from Chapter 21, Various Meanings of Transcendence, though only the first numbered item. The online version, unfortunately, seems to have a lot of typos. Those provide distractions, which I hope are mild only. The chapter is interesting because many of the forms of transcendence are fusion of what appear to be opposites, for example, selfishness and being publicly spirited. Maslow is very big on this type of fusion. I believe he chose the ordering of the items deliberately, about which type of transcendence might be experienced first, and other types of transcendence that might come later. The ones with fusion are closer to the end.
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Being fully absorbed in an activity is something that just about everyone has experienced at one time or another. So it is useful to survey on such prior experiences and then to get the individual to elaborate on the situation. I mean the questionnaire below to be suggestive only. If deployed primarily to educate the participants, the person delivering the questionnaire should feel free to modify questions, add others, and delete some of the questions given here. Of course, if the purpose is to do social science investigation across different audiences, the questions will need to be fixed to make useful comparisons. For now, I'm more interested in the educative value than in the social science.
1. Can you recall the last time your were fully absorbed in an activity? (Yes/No)
2a. If you answered yes, please elaborate on when that happened, the approximate duration of the state of complete absorption, and what you were doing when so absorbed.
2b. If you answered no, does this reflect a failure or your memory or do you think you never had an experience where you were completely absorbed?
(Comment: Those who report never having had such an experience should not go any further with the questionnaire. But there is a need to prevent sandbagging. If respondents find completing the questionnaire painful, they will need some reward for completing it. That reward should then not be available to the person who reports never having had such an experience. I don't want to get hung up on this issue here, but it must be resolved in an effective way to implement the questionnaire.)
3. After the experience of complete absorption had concluded, did you reflect on it at all. (Yes/No)
4. After the experience of complete absorption can you describe your mood. (Good Mood/Bad Mood/Something Else)
5. Please amplify on your answers to question 3 and 4 below.
6. Regarding the frequency in which you experience periods of complete absorption, which best characterizes your situation? (Very Frequent/Moderately Frequent/Not Frequent at All).
7. Regarding what causes these experiences of complete absorption, which best characterizes your situation. (I induce them by selecting the appropriate activity and environment. They happen for random reasons which I don't control. It's a little bit of both.)
8. Please amplify on your answers to questions 6 and 7 below.
9. Please list all factors that would block your ability to be completely absorbed in an activity.
10. Provide annotations/explanations for why these blockages stop you from being absorbed.
11. If the blockages were entirely absent, would you then want to be completely absorbed in an activity or not? Please explain your answer.
12. This is an open ended space for you to add any further thoughts on the matter.
Thank you for completing this questionnaire.
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I now want to briefly talk about my own blockages. Sitting in front of a computer screen for too long when I'm not writing a blog post like this one, I have found as a rather large blockage. Part of that is multi-processing. Another part is doing waste of time things as a form of procrastination. I am deliberately trying to read paper books, sit away from the computer, and not have my phone with me when I'm doing that to combat this blockage. But old habits die hard.
I was last totally absorbed, not with reading Maslow but rather reading Le Carre's latest novel, a Christmas present which I finished the day after. I'm somewhat conscious that I read fiction quite differently than non-fiction. With fiction I can let go and let the story take over. With non-fiction I tend to argue with what I'm reading, even if ultimately I'm largely in agreement with what is said (though that seems to be increasingly rare with current stuff). That last movie I saw that produced a sense of absorption, and a lot of tears, was the movie about Mr. Rogers. I don't go to the movies that often now and I rarely find watching a movie on my computer, which I do now and then, completely absorbing, mainly because of what I wrote in the preceding paragraph, also perhaps my selections don't match my current sense of taste.
I did the above because I want to encourage readers of this post to do a similar exercise for themselves. It then would be interesting to compare notes.
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