THE AMERICAN HUMAN DREAM What Are You Dreaming About for Your World?

You have a higher nature! What you are in your essence—in your human essence—is more than just an animal. Yes, you have the lower animal needs to survival, to feel safe and secure, to belong to a family, a group, and to have a place in that group so that you know your place and have a sense of importance and status. All of that is important. But none of that is sufficient if you want to live human life fully and experience everything that’s available to you. You need more.

You and I also, in the very essence of our human nature, we have higher needs—we have meta- needs. Among these meta-needs is the need to grow, to learn, to think, to actualize our self, to become all that you can become. Maslow called these meta-needs and self-actualization needs.

To strive nly to fulfill the lower needs will actually undermine you and diminish your life as a human being. It works fine for animals, but when a human does that, it neuroticizes life and values. It makes you neurotic so that you and your lifestyle becomes sick.

Maslow addressed this once in an article in which he challenged “the American Dream.” Today these words apply far beyond the borders of the US. Today I’m writing to a much broader audience, an international community, so this applies not only to the people of one nation and what they might envision, but the dream that transcends every nation and yet includes all of them— so, to an International Human Dream!

“The American dream is typically expressed in lower-need terms (e.g., in terms of income) and almost entirely in materialistic terms. That is, personal success is generally defined in terms of the amount of money one receives, and along with it, the number of symbolic, status objects that one has attained in life, such as a fancy automobile, a boat, a big house in an upscale neighborhood, lavish vacations, and fine clothes. “But to enjoy a good life, all of these status objects are expendable. Not one of them is actually necessary for true fulfillment. [italics added] Psychologists know that what is necessary for human nature is that, as our material gratifications are satisfied, we move upward in our needs through belongingness (community, brotherhood/ sisterhood, friendliness), to love and affection, to achievement and competence with ensuring dignity and self-respect, and then on up to freedom for self-actualization and for expressing and resolving our unique idiosyncrasies. And then upward, still higher, to our meta-needs (the Being-values). “But where has this conception been at all meaningfully articulated? ... No governmental official is speaking in these crucial terms. There is no official track toward the attainment

of these goals. . . . “In other words, the young adults today who are confronting American society are not being offered the meta-values of a formal goal. For them, the higher values are therefore, not part of the formal U.S. value system. Consequently, these youth perceive the United States as a limited system of lower motivation, lower needs, lower aspirations, and lower goals that any self-respecting, mature human being would despise and reject. Anyway, the whole American dream thing today is phrased materialistically. “Moreover, there is no clear track in our society upward to the B-values. ... There is not even a language yet to deal with it meaningfully.” (1996: 141-143)

This sad critique is just as true in 2010 as it was back in 1965—probably more so, and not only in America, but most everywhere in the world. Limiting life to just the material satisfactions of the lower needs keeps you at the animal level of existence. The higher intelligent animals needs these things. That does not differentiate you from them! There is so much more within you seeking —clamoring—for self-actualization. Maslow called these higher needs the being-needs and the being-values because they are about using all of your doing and achieving so that you can move up to the meta-levels where you can be all that you are— to be fully alive/ fully human.

And just as it was true in 1965, so it is today. There are no government officials or departments speaking in terms of self-actualizing. There is still no official track in most companies that enables people to reach their highest and best. Here then is a real and definite need, one built into our nature, and one that will increasingly emerge as the standard of life rises around the planet. And it is a biological need that cannot be covered up with more material comforts. Try as you may, you cannot meet your high being-needs via shopping.

What are we to do? First we can raise our perspective to envision a new dream about what it means to be human, and to be fully alive as a human being. Then we can use the Self- Actualization Quadrants to diagnose where we are and the direction where the pathway to self- actualizing lies. In Neuro-Semantics we are committed to changing all of this ... to creating self- actualizing lives, companies, leaders, and countries. Come join us!

Neuro-Semantic News — June 14, 2010 June 10, 2010 was the Graduation Ceremony in Hong Kong for 45 new Neuro-Semantic/ NLP Trainers. Most (37) are from Hong Kong and are part of the Institute of Neuro- Semantics—Hong Kong. We also have 2 from Egypt, 2 from Indonesia, 1 from the Netherlands, 1 from Japan, 1 from Malaysia.

Mandy Chan, the organizer, made this happen from her vision at NSTT in 2005 in South Africa. As a Trainer herself, she has sponsored Self-Actualization trainings, she negotiated the sponsoring of Meta-Coaching in China, and has demonstrated the leadership criteria of collaborating, contributing and communicating (the “doing” criteria of a Neuro-Semantic Leader) and because she also is real (authentic), congruent, and operates with integrity, she has become the newest member of the Leadership Team of Neuro-Semantics.