full humanness

A.H. Maslow coined a number of terms that have come into common parlance beyond academic psychology , including “hierarchy of needs”, “self-actualization”, and “peak experience”. In his last book, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow uses the term “full humanness” to describe psychologically healthy and mature people– those who are self-actualized and beyond. But what defines a self-actualized person?  And what lies beyond self-actualization?

Maslow understood the inherent difficulty of explicitly answering such subjective questions.  But he concluded that self-actualized people shared a number of common values, behaviors, and attitudes.

Self-actualized persons are involved in, and very often devoted to, a cause or causes they believe in, ideas that will improve our world and/or our relationships within it.  They almost invariably love what they do;  their work is their passion. In a way, it’s a definitional aspect of a self-actualized person:  all elements of their life blend together into a synthesis of purpose and connection.

Maslow identified a number of values that self-actualized persons universally demonstrate. He referred to these as Being-Values (often referred to as B-values): The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, p. 128 .

Truth (“honesty; reality; nakedness; simplicity”)

Goodness (“rightness; desirability; benevolence”)

Beauty form “aliveness; simplicity; richness”)

Wholeness (“unity; integration; interconnectedness”)

Dichotomy-transcendence (“acceptance, transforming opposites into unities…”

Aliveness (“spontaneity; self-regulation; changing yet remaining the same”)

Uniqueness (“idiosyncrasy; individuality; noncomparability”)

Perfection (“nothing superfluous; nothing lacking; everything in its right place”)

Necessity (“inevitability; it must be just that way…”)

Completion (“nothing missing or lacking; totality; fulfillment of destiny”)

Justice (“fairness; oughtness; suitability”)

Order (“lawfulness; rightness; nothing superfluous”)

Simplicity (“nakedness; essentiality; without ornament”)

Richness (“differentiation; complexity; intricacy; totality”)

Effortlessness (“ease; lack of strain, striving or difficulty”)

Playfulness (“fun; joy; amusement; gaiety; humor; exuberance”)

Self-sufficiency (“autonomy; independence; self-determining”)

Self-actualized persons experience life without an awkward self consciousness, “fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption.” They understand that life is an ongoing process of choices, and they take personal responsibility for the choices they make. They are honest, both with others and with themselves. And they work hard to be the best they can be at everything they do– striving to be the best in a cooperative, loving, and non-competitive manner.

Self-actualized persons are in touch with their inner self, and they tend to respond to that self rather than to the external pressures and expectations that are the stock and trade of our social and economic systems. Their value system comes from within; they simply know what is right for themselves. But where do these values come from, and why is there such consistency among self-actualized persons?

In comments about papers submitted at the Symposium of Human Values California State Psychological Association Meeting, San Francisco, CA, December 15, 1961, summarized in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, p. 143] , Maslow notes that all authors agree that the locus of values is a natural element of human reality, not some supernatural source. Moreover, the process of discovering these values is similarly natural– that they are not imposed by some supernatural source, but that they can be discovered (or uncovered) through individual effort. This requires, of course, that these values somehow exist independent of human activity; that we find them rather than create them.

This view aligns directly with the esoteric model in several key aspects. A self-actualized person is a living example of the higher level of human consciousness that naturally occur through a soul’s journey through human life. The values that we discover are true– they are as real in the subjective dimension as matter is in the physical (the physical and subjective dimensions, or planes, are different expressions of a single, continuous reality). But these values are only internally accessible, as it were, at a relatively advanced stage of spiritual development; they cannot be imposed or forced into the consciousness of someone who is working through more basic life lessons. Full humanness is the natural result of a evolving soul alignment, a reflection of the consciousness that inevitably evolves with progress along the path of spiritual growth.