DISCIPLINING THE SPONTANEOUS

Maslow began thinking about how to benchmark “living a self-actualizing life” in the 1960s and so identified several. The first benchmark, according to Abraham Maslow, for living the self- actualizing life is a total absorption into a being-valued significance— the personal “genius” state of flow. The second and third ones focused on the ability to exercise one’s power of choice as you live your life responsibly. Maslow spoke about choosing growth and choosing one’s way as you learn to listen to your own internal voice. The fourth and fifth benchmarks were about courageous responsibility. Now for the sixth and seventh benchmarks which I have put under the heading of “Disciplining the Spontaneous.”

6) Expending Effort in the Ongoing Process “Self-actualization is not only an end state, it is also the process of actualizing one’s potentialities at any time, in any amount. It is, for example, a matter of becoming smarter by studying if one is an intelligent person. Self-actualization means using one’s intelligence. It may mean going through an arduous and demanding period of preparation in order to realize one’s possibilities. Self-actualization can consist of finger exercises at a piano keyboard. Self- actualization means working to do well the one thing that one wants to do. To become a second - rate physician is not a good path to self-actualization. One wants to be first-rate or as good as he can be.” (46)

Does this paragraph give you the impression that self-actualization involves work, effort, discipline? Good. Then you’re right—it does. The process of making something real (“actualizing”) requires effort and energy and discipline. It is for this reason that self- actualization doesn’t happen quickly, or automatically, and or even inevitably and it certainly does not happen without conscious awareness and choice. If you are to actualize your possibilities and potentials, you have to choose to do so, courageously take responsibility, and then give yourself to a discipline. In other words, there’s a price to pay and you pay it in the work and effort of discipline that you put forward to actualize your highest and your best.

And why? To be as “first-rate or as good as you can be.” That’s why you have to work to do well the one thing you want to do. And that’s why “to become second-rate” in your desired profession “is not a good path to self-actualization.”

7) Setting Up Peak Experience Conditions “Peak experiences are transient moments of self-actualization. They are moments of ecstasy which cannot be bought, cannot be guaranteed, cannot even be sought. One must be, as C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘surprised by joy.’”

There’s a special reward that will come to you when you are living a self-actualizing life, Maslow named that reward a “Peak Experience.” This refers to those special little moments of life where you are surprised by joy, where a rush of delight and love and awe comes over you, your hair stands on end, your spine tingles, and for that moment, you have an incredible sense of “Life is Good!” “Life is magical!” “I’m experience a taste of heaven!” These are not the same as a peak performance— that refers to the mastery that occurs after years and years of deliberate practice.

The peak experience is smaller, simpler, and much more available. It does not depend on expertise, it depends on allowing oneself to be bathed in meaning and meaningfulness. It arises from being able to appreciate— to see the everyday things of the world through the precious eyes of wonder and delight. And the peak experience comes to seduce you to keep in the path of self- actualization. And while you cannot control this, you can manage it.

“But one can set up the conditions so that peak experiences are more likely, or one can perversely set up conditions so that they are less likely. Breaking up an illusion, getting rid of a false notion, learning what one is not good at, learning what one’s potentialities are not— these are also part of discovering what one is in fact.” (46) The process of self-actualizing not only involves finding out what to do (a “toward” orientation), it also involves finding out what one is not good at, and of one’s own illusions (an “away from” orientation).

“Practically everyone does have peak experiences, but not everyone knows it. Some people wave these small mystical experiences aside. Helping people to recognize these little moments of ecstasy when they happen is one of the jobs of the counselor or meta-counselor.” (47) Here’s another step in making peak experiences more likely to occur and that involves learning to recognize them. The implication is that you can have them and not know it. But once we learn to recognize them, then we can acknowledge and honor them. The problem is that often they are such “small” things (i.e., a glorious sunset, a human touch of compassion, an act of thoughtfulness, a rush of emotion of joy in playing with a dog) that we dismiss them as nothing. And in the adult world of schedules and paychecks, this is easy and common. It is so easy to discount these things.

Actually, by using the meta-state process of what we call “The Personal Genius Pattern,” we can learn to identify the internal conditions that make the peak experience state so that it is more likely to occur in our lives. We can learn how to step in and out of them ... and at will. After all, it is just a state. And so as with any state, there is a dynamic structure that makes it happen. This is what Neuro-Semantics has contributed to the “flow” state, that is, the ability to choose it when we desire to.

These two benchmarks of self-actualizing speak about discipline and the spontaneous “surprised by joy” experience of the peak experience. How different these are! Yet what if we combine them? What if we were able to manage conditions so that the peak experience were made more likely to occur? Would that discipline then be a discipline for spontaneity? Would it be disciplined spontaneity?