TRANSCENDENCE AND PEAK EXPERIENCES

If we are wired for transcendence, if it is built into our very nature is seen by the fact that we have both a drive for it (the self-actualizing “being” needs) and a mechanism for it (our self-reflexive consciousness). Given this, there’s no escape from it. It is within our very nature to experience transcendence and so we naturally seek it. This is probably what drives all people to contemplate philosophical and theological issues to understand what transcendence means.

One of the ways that we all experience transcendence is in those everyday experiences that are moments of “peak experiences.” Maslow researched this and wrote extensively about peak experiences saying that these experiences have much to tell us about human nature and especially about human nature at its best.

By definition, a peak experience is a moment of high intensity (peak) that’s full of meaning which in turn, validates your life and making it worthwhile. No wonder we experience such moments as moments of transcendence. According to Abraham Maslow, in a peak experience you feel at peak of your powers—that you are using all your capacities at the best and fullest. You feel that you are fully functioning and there is no waste, that all of your capacities are being used. In a peak experience, what you do seems effortless as there is an ease of functioning. Everything “clicks,” everything seems to be “in the groove.” All of this makes a peak experience a moment of total life- affirmation and a moment of joy.

“Heaven, so to speak, lies waiting for us through life, ready to step into for a time and to enjoy before we have to come back to our ordinary life of striving.” (Maslow, 1968, p. 154)

And the amazing thing is that we have all had them — and probably we all have them all the time, we mostly just do not notice. In the training, Unleashing Vitality, the first of the Self-Actualization Trainings, I took Maslow’s following instructions and turned it into a pattern to facilitate the development of more peak experience states.

“I would like you to think of the most wonderful experience or experiences of your life; happiest moments, ecstatic moments, moments of rapture, perhaps from being in love, or listening to music or suddenly ‘being hit’ by a book or a painting, or some great creative moment. First list these. Then tell how you feel in such acute moments. How you feel differently from the way you feel at other times. How you are at the moment a different person in some ways.” (1968, p. 71)

Maslow described a peak experience as a term for the best moments of the human being, the happiest moments of life, for experiences of ecstasy, rapture, bliss, of the greatest joy. When do we experience such? Often times in a profoundly aesthetic experience, or in a moment of unexpected creativity, or in moments of mature love, perfect sexual experiences, parental love, natural childbirth, etc. (1971:101).

So regarding transcendence and peak experiences, because they emerge as those wonderful moments of ecstasy, they seem to be rewards of the meta-life which enable us to transcend the moment and not only feel more alive and full of vitality, but to raise us above the everyday to see the sacred in it.

“You see the world in peak experiences through the eyes of Being-cognition, through what the ancient philosophers defined as the good life (truth, beauty, and goodness): truth, beauty, wholeness, dichotomy-transcendence, aliveness-process, uniqueness, perfection, necessity, completion, justice, order, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, and self- sufficiency.” (1971:102).

“These are also the ‘highest’ values in the sense that they come most often to the best people, in the best moments, under the best conditions. They are the definitions of the higher life, of the good life, of the spiritual life.” (1971: 105)

Part of the inherent transcendence within the peak experience is the momentary experience of many of the characteristics of the self-actualizing life. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that peak experiences are integrative of the splits within a person and so can be used to move a person toward more mental and emotional health.

“Any person in any of the peak experiences takes on temporarily many of the characteristics which I found in self-actualizing individuals. That is, for the time they became self- actualizers.” (1968, p. 97)

Yet these are described as moments, not hours or days. Momentarily, they are peak experiences. So now the question, “Why are peak experiences transient and brief?” Again, Maslow took on this question and answered it: We are just not strong enough to endure more; it’s too overwhelming. There is also, with the ecstasy of these moments, the fear of greatness.

“We fear our highest possibilities ... We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of greatest courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.” (1971: 34)