A couple of years ago, I read a famous essay by the famed psychologist Abraham Maslow; it was recommended to me again recently by a reader who said it was important to him. It gave him a list of the values researchers found that many people live for.
I didn’t like them, this time or last.
The values are survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, and self-development. This list of values, I thought, values corporations promote, educators value, that the engines of popular culture promote again and again.
They left me empty; I felt there must be something wrong with me, they didn’t excite or inspire me, and I forgot about them over time.
America is a fearful as well as an angry and disenchanted society. I know lot sof people who agree with Maslow’s list of values, but very few are happy.
In fact, all of the people I knew to be happy with their lives had very different values from the ones Maslow listed.
I put this list aside until a couple of days ago when I was re-reading one of my ten most important books (they are on a special shelf in my bookcase), Joseph Campbell’s Pathways To Bliss, a book I can say help launch my rebirth, unraveled my life, and brought me to the country.
Campbell wrote about Maslow’s values, I found, but he had a completely different view of them, as did I.
Maybe I wasn’t crazy after all. Or maybe I was crazy, after all, and that was good.
“Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development — in my experience,” he wrote, “those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for.”
Maslow’s values, wrote Campbell, are the values for which people live “when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them; nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.”
Mythology and spirituality begin, Campbell wrote, where the madness starts.
A person who is truly gripped by a calling, a dedication, a belief, a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development.
“Christ gives us a clue, “wrote Campbell when he says, “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”
Campbell’s writing helped spark my decision to head out on the hero journey to find myself.
I did not find any security on this journey.
To me, the people who live to be secure are the hollow men and women, the bores of the world. Ortega Gasser once wrote that “a bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship.”
A bore in contemporary America is a CEO or far-out Trump supporter or Republican congressperson. They are not my enemies, but they have nothing to offer me that I want. The hateful and the aggrieved put me to sleep, repeatedly; I have nothing to say to them or learn from them.
For me, the madness began when I moved to a farm in upstate New York and left the familiar world behind. This journey was just as dangerous and frightening as Campbell said it would be.
And it is a journey that never ends; it only begins, again and again; the point isn’t the destination; it’s the trip.
I sacrificed my security, nearly sacrificed my life, I sacrificed my personal relationships, prestige, family, safety, wealth, and chose rebirth over the very idea of personal development.
And in the process, I encountered the awe of awakening, the magic of the mystical life. Campbell describes it this way:
“You have been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, and the experience of mystery – the awareness of your bliss. With that, you have the awakening of your own mind in its own service.”
This became my story and the story of the woman I came to love and live with. It is our story.
I gave up almost everything I had to accept a life of crisis, mystery, and meaning. I forgot all about Maslow’s values and the values I had been taught and began to live my bliss – a life in nature, a life of writing, a life of creativity, love, and wonder.
The more of Maslow’s values I gave up, the more values I found.
I entered the mythic world, a seizure, an experience that pulled me out of myself, beyond myself, beyond the rationality, fear, caution, and security I had been led to believe was the point of life.
Maria and I need to remind myself of this again and again because when the rest of the world is so often telling us something different, we can weaken or forget what values really are.
I gave up a life of warnings; I shed all the reasons I had for living other people’s ideas about life rather than my own.
For me, this journey never ends, but at least I found my bliss.
What you wrote is exactly what makes me feel alive
Hi Jon: So what are the other 9 most important books on your bookshelf — in addition to the Joseph
Campbell book? Just curious. Thanks
Marcia
I was exposed to Maslow’s hierarchy in some lame management class in business school. I couldn’t twig to it, but to get through the class (and through corporate America), I not only learned it for the final, but tried to adopt it as my life perspective. Many successful business people, when I expressed doubts about how my life was turning out, preached Maslow to me as if it were the Word of God. I used to stand in the shower before putting on a thousand dollars worth of clothes – all uncomfortable, and frankly, silly -and chant Maslow’s hierarchy to convince myself that my unease was unfounded. I’d replay in my mind, too, all my “mentors” advice: “Be a winner or a loser”, etc., then go to a cubicle without windows to pound out spreadsheets for 10-12 hours, living in fear that a manager would find an error, or worse – find me either not attractive enough or too attractive. I’m 70 now and know for a pure fact that Maslow and all them were full of it. I started living my way 10 years ago, only wish I started 40 years ago, but better late than never.
But once we are free of the expectations of others, we can afford the compassion that is at the core of a rich life.
I was taught that it was Maslow’s hierarchy of NEEDS not values and that as we progress from birth onward (safety, security, belonging..) we are expand to self esteem and finally (the pinnacle) self actualization, living an authentic life fully congruent with who you want to be. Isn’t that the path?
We need these things, and in order, as we go through the life cycle – each one builds the foundation for the next.
My heart feels so full after reading this. I learned of Joseph Campbell back in the 1980’s when my spiritual mentor shared Bill Moyer’s interviews with him, and I later found his book The Power of Myth.
I couldn’t agree with you more. I knew there had to be a reason you make me feel more like my real self. That sounds strange. Just hard for me to find the words.
Jon…
In his later work, Maslow recognized a higher level in his hierarchy of human needs. In “self-transcendence”, the individual is focused on addressing other than self-serving goals. At this level, the individual transcends from their own personal concerns to see things from a higher perspective.
Source:
“Rediscovering the Later Version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Self-Transcendence and Opportunities for Theory, Research, and Unification”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1037/1089-2680.10.4.302
The next to last sentence gave me pause. Did you mean “reasons other people had for living, that were not for me?”
The way it’s stated sounds like you might see no reason in living for other people, only in living for yourself.
May just be my reading. Clarify for me?
I’ve not been motivated to read Joseph Campbell because of his reputation as an antisemite. A snippet of discussion on this at https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Joseph-Campbell-accused-of-anti-Semitism. What are your thoughts, Jon?–Barbara in Cincinnati
Maslow is taught in history of psychology classes now as a prescience hypothesis, not even a theory, many of which dreamed up by grandiose cult like leaders. No one serious accepts such anymore without good science. The biz world still follows somewhat but that’s based much more on social class and capitalism.
The commonalities of what makes one happy based on science is JOY and fulfillment.
Science is always changing its results so nothing set in stone
? Be true to thine own self…