Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
Abraham H. Maslow
Chapter VIII. Conclusions
There is, then, a road which all profoundly "serious,"
"ultimately concerned" people of good will can travel
together for a very long distance. Only when they come almost
to its end does the road fork so that they must part in disagreement.
Practically everything that, for example, Rudolf Otto (78) defines
as characteristic of the religious experience—the holy; the
sacred; creature feeling; humility; gratitude and oblation; thanksgiving;
awe before the mysterium tremendum; the sense of the divine,
the ineffable; the sense of littleness before mystery; the quality
of exaltedness and sublimity; the awareness of limits and even
of powerlessness; the impulse to surrender and to kneel; a sense
of the eternal and of fusion with the whole of the universe; even
the experience of heaven and hell—all of these experiences
can be accepted as real by clergymen and atheists alike. And so
it is also possible for all of them to accept in principle the
empirical spirit and empirical methods and to humbly admit that
knowledge is not complete, that it must grow, that it is in time
and space, in history and in culture, and that, though it is relative
to man's powers and to his limits, it can yet come closer and
closer to "The Truth" that is not dependent on man.
This road can be traveled together by all who are not afraid of
truth, not only by theists and non-theists, but also by individuals
of every political and economic persuasion, Russians and Americans,
for instance.
What remains of disagreement? Only, it seems, the concept of supernatural
beings or of supernatural laws or forces; and I must confess my
feeling that by the time this forking of the road has been reached,
this difference doesn't seem to be of any great consequence except
for the comfort of the individual himself. Even the social act
of belonging to a church must be a private act, with no great
social or political consequences, once religious pluralism has
been accepted, once any religion is seen as a local structure,
in local terms, of species-wide, core-religious, transcendent
experience.
Not only this, but it is also increasingly developing that leading
theologians, and sophisticated people in general, define their
god, not as a person, but as a force, a principle, a gestalt-quality
of the whole of Being, an integrating power that expresses the
unity and therefore the meaningfulness of the cosmos? the "dimension
of depth," etc. At the same time, scientists are increasingly
giving up the notion of the cosmos as a kind of simple machine,
like a clock, or as congeries of atoms that clash blindly, having
no relation to each other except push and pull, or as something
that is final and eternal as it is and that is not evolving or
growing. (As a matter of fact, nineteenth-century theologians
also saw the world in a similar way, as some inert set of mechanisms;
only for them, there was a Someone to set it into motion. )
These two groups (sophisticated theologians and sophisticated
scientists) seem to be coming closer and closer together in their
conception of the universe as "organismic," as having
some kind of unity and integration, as growing and evolving
and having direction and, therefore, having some kind of
"meaning." Whether or not to call this integration "God"
finally gets to be an arbitrary decision and a personal indulgence
determined by one's personal history, one's personal revelations,
and one's personal myths. John Dewey, an agnostic, decided for
strategic and communicative purposes to retain the word "God,"
defining it in a naturalistic way (14). Others have decided against
using it also for strategic reasons. What we wind up with is a
new situation in the history of the problem in which a "serious"
Buddhist, let us say, one who is concerned with "ultimate
concerns" and with Tillich's "dimension of depth,"
is more co-religionist to a "serious" agnostic than
he is to a conventional, superficial, other-directed Buddhist
for whom religion is only habit or custom, i.e., "behavior."
Indeed, these "serious" people are coming so close together
as to suggest that they are becoming a single party of mankind,
the earnest ones, the seeking, questioning, probing ones, the
ones who are not sure, the ones with a "tragic sense of life,"
the explorers of the depths and of the heights, the "saving
remnant." The other party then is made up of all the superficial,
the moment-bound, the here bound ones, those who are totally absorbed
with the trivial, those who are "plated with piety, not alloyed
with it," those who are reduced to the concrete, to the momentary,
and to the immediately selfish.[1] Almost,
we could say, we wind up with adults, on the one hand,-and children,
on the other.
What is the practical upshot for education of all these considerations?
We wind up with a rather startling conclusion, namely, that the
teaching of spiritual values of ethical and moral values definitely
does (in principle) have a place in education, perhaps ultimately
a very basic and essential place, and that this in no way needs
to controvert the American separation between church and state
for the very simple reason that spiritual, ethical, and moral
values need have nothing to do with any church. Or perhaps, better
said, they are the common core of all churches, all religions,
including the non-theistic ones. As a matter of fact, it is possible
that precisely these ultimate values are and should be the far
goals of all education, as they are and should be also the far
goals of psychotherapy, of child care, of marriage, the family,
of work, and perhaps of all other social institutions. I grant
that this may turn out to be an overstatement, and yet there is
something here that we must all accept. We reject the notion of
distant value-goals in education under the penalty of falling
into the great danger of defining education as mere technological
training without relation to the good life, to ethics, to morals,
or for that matter to anything else. Any philosophy that permits
facts to become amoral, totally separated from values, makes possible
in theory at least the Nazi physician "experimenting"
in the concentration camps, or the spectacle of captured German
engineers working devotedly for whichever side happened to capture
them.
Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce
the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society.
Renouncing this is like renouncing the reality and the desirability
of morals and ethics. Furthermore, "An education which leaves
untouched the entire region of transcendental thought is an education
which has nothing important to say about the meaning of human
life."—Manas (July 17,1963).
Footnote
1. Baumer (6) speaks of such people who can
"be recognized precisely by the fact that the fundamental
questions are no longer mentioned at all by these true secularists"
(p. 234). (back)