Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
Abraham H. Maslow
Chapter III. The "Core-Religious," or "Transcendent," Eperience
The very beginning, the intrinsic core, the essence, the universal
nucleus of every known high religion (unless Confucianism is also
called a religion) has been the private, lonely, personal illumination,
revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer.
The high religions call themselves revealed religions and each
of them tends to rest its validity, its function, and its right
to exist on the codification and the communication of this original
mystic experience or revelation from the lonely prophet to the
mass of human beings in general.
But it has recently begun to appear that these "revelations"
or mystical illuminations can be subsumed under the head of the
"peak-experiences"[1] or
"ecstasies" or "transcendent" experiences
which are now being eagerly investigated by many psychologists.
That is to say, it is very likely, indeed almost certain, that
these older reports, phrased in terms of supernatural revelation,
were, in fact, perfectly natural, human peak-experiences of the
kind that can easily be examined today, which, however, were phrased
in terms of whatever conceptual, cultural, and linguistic framework
the particular seer had available in his time (Laski).
In a word, we can study today what happened in the past and was
then explainable in supernatural terms only. By so doing, we are
enabled to examine religion in all its facets and in all its meanings
in a way that makes it a part of science rather than something
outside and exclusive of it.
Also this kind of study leads us to another very plausible hypothesis:
to the extent that all mystical or peak-experiences are the same
in their essence and have always been the same, all religions
are the same in their essence and always have been the same. They
should, therefore, come to agree in principle on teaching that
which is common to all of them, i.e., whatever it is that peak-experiences
teach in common (whatever is different about these illuminations
can fairly be taken to be localisms both in time and space, and
are, therefore, peripheral, expendable, not essential). This something
common, this something which is left over after we peel away all
the localisms, all the accidents of particular languages or particular
philosophies, all the ethnocentric phrasings, all those elements
which are not common, we may call the "core-religious
experience" or the "transcendent experience."
To understand this better, we must differentiate the prophets
in general from the organizers or legalists in general as (abstracted)
types. (I admit that the use of pure, extreme types which do not
really exist can come close to the edge of caricature; nevertheless,
I think it will help all of us in thinking through the problem
we are here concerned with.)[2] The
characteristic prophet is a lonely man who has discovered his
truth about the world, the cosmos, ethics, God, and his own identity
from within, from his own personal experiences, from what he would
consider to be a revelation. Usually, perhaps always, the prophets
of the high religions have had these experiences when they were
alone.
Characteristically the abstraction-type of the legalist-ecclesiastic
is the conserving organization man, an officer and arm of the
organization, who is loyal to the structure of the organization
which has been built up on the basis of the prophet's original
revelation in order to make the revelation available to the masses.
From everything we know about organizations, we may very well
expect that people will become loyal to it, as well as to the
original prophet and to his vision; or at least they will become
loyal to the organization's version of the prophet's vision. I
may go so far as to say that characteristically (and I mean not
only the religious organizations but also parallel organizations
like the Communist Party or like revolutionary groups) these organizations
can be seen as a kind of punch card or IBM version of an original
revelation or mystical experience or peak-experience to make it
suitable for group use and for administrative convenience.
It will be helpful here to talk about a pilot investigation, still
in its beginnings, of the people I have called non-peakers. In
my first investigations, in collaboration with Gene Nameche, I
used this word because I thought some people had peak experiences
and others did not. But as I gathered information, and as I became
more skillful in asking questions, I found that a higher and higher
percentage of my subjects began to report peak-experiences. (See
Appendix F on rhapsodic communication. ) I finally fell into the
habit of expecting everyone to have peak-experiences and of being
rather surprised if I ran across somebody who could report none
at all. Because of this experience, I finally began to use the
word "non-peaker" to describe, not the person who is
unable to have peak-experiences, but rather the person who is
afraid of them, who suppresses them, who denies them, who turns
away from them, or who "forgets" them. My preliminary
investigations of the reasons for these negative reactions to
peak-experiences have led me to some (unconfirmed) impressions
about why certain kinds of people renounce their peak-experiences.
Any person whose character structure (or Weltanschauung, or way
of life) forces him to try to be extremely or completely rational
or "materialistic" or mechanistic tends to become a
non-peaker. That is, such a view of life tends to make the person
regard his peak-and transcendent experiences as a kind of insanity,
a complete loss of control, a sense of being overwhelmed by irrational
emotions, etc. The person who is afraid of going insane and who
is, therefore, desperately hanging on to stability, control, reality,
etc., seems to be frightened by peak-experiences and tends to
fight them off. For the compulsive-obsessive person, who organizes
his life around the denying and the controlling of emotion, the
fear of being overwhelmed by an emotion (which is interpreted
as a loss of control) is enough for him to mobilize all his stamping-out
and defensive activities against the peak-experience. I have one
instance of a very convinced Marxian who denied—that is, who
turned away from—a legitimate peak-experience, finally classifying
it as some kind of peculiar but unimportant thing that had happened
but that had best be forgotten because this experience conflicted
with her whole materialistic mechanistic philosophy of life. I
have found a few non-peakers who were ultra-scientific, that is,
who espoused the nineteenth-century conception of science as an
unemotional or anti-emotional activity which was ruled entirely
by logic and rationality and who thought anything which was not
logical and rational had no respectable place in life. (I suspect
also that extremely "practical," i.e., exclusively means-oriented,
people will turn out to be non-peakers, since such experiences
earn no money, bake no bread, and chop no wood. So also for extremely
other-directed people, who scarcely know what is going on inside
themselves. Perhaps also people who are reduced to the concrete
a la Goldstein, etc. etc.) Finally, I should add that, in some
cases, I could not come to any explanation for non-peaking.
If you will permit me to use this developing but not yet validated
vocabulary, I may then say simply that the relationship between
the prophet and the ecclesiastic, between the lonely mystic and
the (perfectly extreme) religious-organization man may often be
a relationship between peaker and non-peaker. Much theology, much
verbal religion through history and throughout the world, can
be considered to be the more or less vain efforts to put into
communicable words and formulae, and into symbolic rituals and
ceremonies, the original mystical experience of the original prophets.
In a word, organized religion can be thought of as an effort to
communicate peak-experiences to non-peakers, to teach them, to
apply them, etc. Often, to make it more difficult, this job falls
into the hands of non-peakers. On the whole we now would expect
that this would be a vain effort, at least so far as much of mankind
is concerned. The peak-experiences and their experiential reality
ordinarily are not transmittable to non-peakers, at least not
by words alone, and certainly not by non-peakers. What happens
to many people, especially the ignorant, the uneducated, the naive,
is that they simply concretize all of the symbols, all of the
words, all of the statues, all of the ceremonies, and by a process
of functional autonomy make them, rather than the original
revelation, into the sacred things and sacred activities. That
is to say, this is simply a form of the idolatry (or fetishism)
which has been the curse of every large religion. In idolatry
the essential original meaning gets so lost in concretizations
that these finally become hostile to the original mystical experiences,
to mystics, and to prophets in general, that is, to the very people
that we might call from our present point of view the truly religious
people. Most religions have wound up denying and being antagonistic
to the very ground upon which they were originally based.
If you look closely at the internal history of most of the world
religions, you will find that each one very soon tends to divide
into a left-wing and a right-wing, that is, into the peakers,
the mystics, the transcenders, or the privately religious people,
on the one hand, and, on the other, into those who concretize
the religious symbols and metaphors, who worship little pieces
of wood rather than what the objects stand for, those who take
verbal formulas literally, forgetting the original meaning of
these words, and, perhaps most important, those who take the organization,
the church, as primary and as more important than the prophet
and his original revelations. These men, like many organization
men who tend to rise to the top in any complex bureaucracy, tend
to be non-peakers rather than peakers. Dostoevski's famous Grand
Inquisitor passage, in his Brothers Karamazov, says this
in a classical way.
This cleavage between the mystics and the legalists, if I may
call them that, remains at best a kind of mutual tolerance, but
it has happened in some churches that the rulers of the organization
actually made a heresy out of the mystic experiences and persecuted
the mystics themselves. This may be an old story in the history
of religion, but I must point out that it is also an old story
in other fields. For instance, we can certainly say today that
professional philosophers tend to divide themselves into the same
kind of characterologically based left-wing and right-wing. Most
official, orthodox philosophers today are the equivalent of legalists
who reject the problems and the data of transcendence as "meaningless."
That is, they are positivists, atomists, analysts, concerned with
means rather than with ends. They sharpen tools rather than discover
truths. These people contrast sharply with another group of contemporary
philosophers, the existentialists and the phenomenologists. These
are the people who tend to fall back on experiencing as the primary
datum from which everything starts.
A similar split can be detected in psychology, in anthropology,
and, I am quite sure, in other fields as well, perhaps in all
human enterprises. I often suspect that we are dealing here
with a profoundly characterological or constitutional difference
in people which may persist far into the future, a human difference
which may be universal and may continue to be so. The job then
will be to get these two kinds of people to understand each other,
to get along well with each other, even to love each other. This
problem is paralleled by the relations between men and women who
are so different from each other and yet who have to live with
each other and even to love each other. (I must admit that it
would be almost impossible to achieve this with poets and literary
critics, composers and music critics, etc.)
To summarize, it looks quite probable that the peak-experience
may be the model of the religious revelation or the religious
illumination or conversion which has played so great a role in
the history of religions. But, because peak-experiences are in
the natural world and because we can research with them and investigate
them, and because our knowledge of such experiences is growing
and may be confidently expected to grow in the future, we may
now fairly hope to understand more about the big revelations,
conversions, and illuminations upon which the high religions were
founded.
(Not only this, but I may add a new possibility for scientific
investigation of transcendence. In the last few years it has become
quite clear that certain drugs called "psychedelic,"
especially LSD and psilocybin, give us some possibility of control
in this realm of peak-experiences. It looks as if these drugs
often produce peak-experiences in the right people under the right
circumstances, so that perhaps we needn't wait for them to occur
by good fortune. Perhaps we can actually produce a private personal
peak-experience under observation and whenever we wish under religious
or non-religious circumstances. We may then be able to study in
its moment of birth the experience of illumination or revelation.
Even more important, it may be that these drugs, and perhaps also
hypnosis, could be used to produce a peak-experience, with core-religious
revelation, in non-peakers, thus bridging the chasm between these
two separated halves of mankind.)
To approach this whole discussion from another angle, in effect
what I have been saying is that the evidence from the peak-experiences
permits us to talk about the essential, the intrinsic, the basic,
the most fundamental religious or transcendent experience as a
totally private and personal one which can hardly be shared (except
with other "peakers"). As a consequence, all the paraphernalia
of organized religion—buildings and specialized personnel, rituals,
dogmas, ceremonials, and the like—are to the "peaker"
secondary, peripheral, and of doubtful value in relation to the
intrinsic and essential religious or transcendent experience.
Perhaps they may even be very harmful in various ways. From the
point of view of the peak-experiencer, each person has his own
private religion, which he develops out of his own private revelations
in which are revealed to him his own private myths and symbols,
rituals and ceremonials, which may be of the profoundest meaning
to him personally and yet completely idiosyncratic, i.e., of no
meaning to anyone else. But to say it even more simply, each "peaker"
discovers, develops, and retains his own religion (87).
In addition, what seems to be emerging from this new source of
data is that this essential core-religious experience may be embedded
either in a theistic, supernatural context or in a non-theistic
context. This private religious experience is shared by all the
great world religions including the atheistic ones like Buddhism,
Taoism, Humanism, or Confucianism. As a matter of fact, I can
go so far as to say that this intrinsic core-experience is a meeting
ground not only, let us say, for Christians and Jews and Mohammedans
but also for priests and atheists, for communists and anti-communists,
for conservatives and liberals, for artists and scientists, for
men and for women, and for different constitutional types, that
is to say, for athletes and for poets, for thinkers and for doers.
I say this because our findings indicate that all or almost all
people have or can have peak-experiences. Both men and women have
peak-experiences, and all kinds of constitutional types have peak-experiences,
but, although the content of the peak-experiences is approximately
as I have described for all human beings (see Appendix A), the
situation or the trigger which sets off peak-experience, for instance
in males and females, can be quite different. These experiences
can come from different sources, but their content may be considered
to be very similar. To sum it up, from this point of view, the
two religions of mankind tend to be the peakers and the non-peakers,
that is to say, those who have private, personal, transcendent,
core-religious experiences easily and often and who accept them
and make use of them, and, on the other hand, those who have never
had them or who repress or suppress them and who, therefore, cannot
make use of them for their personal therapy, personal growth,
or personal fulfillment.
Footnotes
1. If we were to go further with our analysis
we should find that succeeding upon the discovery of the generality
of all peak-experiences there are also "specific" factors
in each of the peak-experiences which differentiate them from
each other to some extent. This relationship of specific to general
is as figure to ground. It is something like that described by
Spearman for "g" and "s" factors in intelligence.
I do not discuss these "s" factors here because the
"g" factor is far more important for the problem at
hand and at this stage in its development. (back)
2. I have made no effort in this chapter,
or in the next, to balance accounts by detailing the virtues and
even the unavoidable necessity of organizations and organizers.
I have written about these elsewhere (69). (back)