Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization

distorts reality, making demands on a person’s whole being: “Feed me! Love me! Respect me!”28 The greater the deficiency of these needs, the more we distort reality to fit our expectations and treat others in accordance with their usefulness in helping us satisfy our most deficient needs.

working on a series of exercises to transcend the ego and live more regularly in the “B-realm”—the realm of “pure Being.”

growth-wisdom is more about “What choices will lead me to greater integration and wholeness?” rather than “How can I defend myself so that I can feel safe and secure?”29

Life isn’t a trek up a summit but a journey to travel through—a vast blue ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and discovery but also danger and uncertainty. In this choppy surf, a clunky pyramid is of little use. Instead, what is needed is something a bit more functional. We’ll need a sailboat.

There is a general consensus that optimal functioning of the whole system (whether humans, primates, or machines) requires both stability of goal pursuit in the face of distraction and disruption as well as the capacity for flexibility to adapt and explore the environment.31

Becoming fully human is about living a full existence, not one that is continually happy. Being well is not always about feeling good; it also involves continually incorporating more meaning, engagement, and growth in one’s life—key themes in humanistic psychology.

you open your sail, just like you’d drop your defenses once you felt secure enough. This is an ongoing dynamic: you can be open and spontaneous one minute but can feel threatened enough to prepare for the storm by closing yourself to the world the next minute. The more you continually open yourself to the world, however, the further your boat will

Maslow observed that self-actualization seems to be a “transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity.

“How do you define the word ‘friendship’?”12 Maslow began by defining a friend as someone who is truly “need-gratifying” and whose needs you want to gratify in return. He then defined the friendship of lovers as one where each other’s needs melt into one, as the partner’s needs become your needs.