I’ll confess. When Dawnrose sent me the topic “Higher Self” and invited me
to write something for this month’s column I chuckled over several possible
approaches. As a child of the fifties and sixties, the word “high” conjured up a
concept that I was sure she didn’t have in mind but invited some entertaining
thoughts. Entertainer Steve Allen used to say, “All seriousness aside…”
As a student of human potential, I also instinctively thought of “self
actualization” and an opportunity to write about Maslow and the hierarchy of
needs. I chuckled at the notion I could probably bore Dawnrose’s readers to
death with a treatise on that one. I don’t think that’s what she had in mind
either. So instead I decided to see what might leak out of my brain if I just
played with these concepts and kept it simple.
Maslow describes human needs as a pyramid and suggests that one’s
lower needs (these include physiological, security, acceptance) must be met
before one self-actualizes. The concept of self-actualization can be thought
of as a state of “Wow! I’m actually who I want to be!” (In the sixties vernacular,
“Far out!”) For those who are students of motivational psychology (there
must be one here!), I think it makes sense to view Maslow’s Pyramid as a
dynamic model—not in a linear fashion. Thus our aspirations (whether to self-
actualize or achieve a higher self) are greatly influenced by our needs. If we
are not self-aware can we ever self-actualize? We’re not free; we’re limited by
our own lack of self-awareness. How can we find a higher self if we aren’t
aware of our “lower” self? And the dynamic model suggests we are free to
move about—we don’t for once achieve a state of “higher self” and stay there.
If your eyes haven’t glazed over yet, here’s a wonderful example of how the
mind works when we allow it to work. I was going to keep this simple, right?
The irony here is just too good. I think I figured out a lot of this stuff while
“getting high” some years ago. No, I wasn’t smoking snorting or sniffing
anything, I was climbing a mountain. It was “…no great journey--a mile and a
half if I did the whole thing. An hour or two at the most. And yet like a lifetime
in miniature.”
The very search for higher self can actually prevent us from achieving it.
You’re invited to discover my “Lesson on the Mountain” by reading the short
journal I wrote of those few hours that represented “a lifetime in miniature.”
http://walter.boomsmaonline.com/subpage2.html
“Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.”
-Emilie Cady
Brain Leaks and Leaps on the topic of “Higher Self.”