MOVING UP TO A CLEARER PERCEPTION

Repeatedly in his writings, Maslow said that self-actualizers see reality more clearly and accurately. From his studies of self-actualizing people, he concluded that they are “able to see concealed or confused realities more swiftly and more correctly” than most people. He saw this leading to several other benefits. First, living life more efficiently since “they do not have to spend any time laying the ghost, whistling past the cemetery, or otherwise protecting themselves against imagined dangers.” And secondly, solving problems more effectively and creatively since they are more problem-centered rather than ego-centered.

But what leads to this clearer perception of reality? What enables a self-actualizer to have this ability to see reality more clearly?

While I don’t think that the answer will surprise you, I suspect that it will delight you and may even create an Aha! moment. It did for me.

The answer involves the level of need at which you live. If you are still living and operating at the level of the basic needs of hunger, thirst, shelter, sex, money, safety, love, self-regard, etc., then you experience life in terms of need and deficiency. You need something. And all such deficiency motives color and distort our perceptions of reality by causing us to make demands on it. At the basic needs level of lack, we look at our world through our needs and so make demands: “Feed me! Clothe me! Protect me! Love me! Respect me!”

There’s a principle in operation here: The greater our need, the greater that need colors our perception. At this level, we also see others as the gratifiers of our needs. This explains the stereotype of the red-blooded male who sees females as nothing more than sex-objects. At the lower basic needs, we see others as those who are givers (or withholders) of affection, esteem, safety, etc. We don’t see people as ends-in-themselves, we see them as means to our ends and of our objectives. This is what makes life at this level ego-centric.

Maslow’s point is that as long as deficiency motivation drives us we look out upon the world through clouded lens. He called this level the instrumental level. By way of contrast, the higher level of the self-actualization needs he called the being level. It’s at that level that we are not striving or seeking to do anything, we are just being, just expressing ourselves, and non- purposefully perceiving nature and human reality for what it is.

When we move to this higher being level, it is as if we remove the clouded lens of instrumentality and means-to-ends thinking and that, in itself, enables us to see the world more clearly. We no longer see the world through the deficiency-motivated demandingness of our needs. We can now see what is so that we can observe it, witness it, and even appreciate and enjoy seeing whatever we see.

This level of the self-actualizing life changes the very quality of our life. Now instead of being driven by deficiency motivation, we are driven by expressive motivation, being motivation. We shift to a non-striving accepting, noticing, and appreciating motivation. Instead of “striving” we live a different kind of life, we live a life of “unfolding.” Our highest potentials and best values simply unfold as we express our gifts, talents, and possibilities.

Now if there are wonderful possibilities in all human beings and yet so few actualize their potentials, what explains this gap? There are many answers to this, one of which is that most people live their lives at the more prepotent levels of deficiency motivation. This means they see themselves, others, social reality, nature, etc. through the ego-centric lens of their own demanding deficiencies. This means that they live life “striving” as if they are deficient. And that’s because they have given too much meaning and importance to the lower need, attempting to use it for some higher self-actualization need.

So instead of eating for fuel and vitality, they eat for love, fulfillment, the good life, reward, and many other psycho-logical reasons. So sex is used for proving self, achievement, etc. Money is used as power, achievement, success, etc. Yet these psycho-logics (the reasoning, understanding, and meanings that we give to the basic needs) over-load them making them other than they are and locking us into the lower needs. Our psycho-logics leash us to the deficiency level because they distort the actual need and prevent us from adequately gratifying it with a true gratifier.

Why self-actualization? Why move to that level? Why move beyond the deficiency needs? To move into the truly human level of the higher self-actualization needs where you can take off the clouding lens of deficiency and demandingness and see reality clearer. Then you will be able to live and express your full humanness, live more efficiently, and solve the real problems of life rather than the pseudo-problems.

Our basic needs are legitimate needs. They are our biological needs, the needs of our physiological well-being, and the needs that we share with the animals, especially the higher intelligent animals. And at any moment, we can be sent back to these needs. These needs are always with us and can ascend to dominance. They are the foundation for life and vitality and to that extent, good, valid, and important. But they are not the purpose of life. We humans are made for something much more— to be fully human / fully alive, to experience and express our full humanness. We call this experience self-actualization.