Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
Abraham H. Maslow
Appendix D. What is the Validity of Knowledge Gained in Peak-Experiences?
This question is too huge and too important for a small space.
All I can do here is to try to make a prima facie case for taking
the question seriously. Both the question and the answers can
be more clearly conceived and phrased today than ever before.
This is so mostly because the mystic experience has been detached
from local religious creeds and brought into the realm of nature
and, therefore, of science. The questions can be more specific
and, furthermore, can often be phrased in a confirmable-disconfirmable
way.
In addition, it appears quite clear that the kind of (putative)
knowledge gained in peak-experiences can also be obtained from
desolation experiences. Furthermore, these insights may become
independent of peak-experiences, and thereafter be available under
more ordinary circumstances. (The way in which I have phrased
this in my own vocabulary is: B-knowledge, B-cognition, and peak-experiences
may occur independently of each other.) It is also possible that
there is a kind of "serene," non-ecstatic B-cognition,
but I am much less sure of this.
The question has to be differentiated still further. There is
no doubt that great insights and revelations are profoundly felt
in mystic or peak-experiences, and certainly some of these are,
ipso facto, intrinsically valid as experiences. That
is, one can and does learn from such experiences that, e.g., joy,
ecstasy, and rapture do in fact exist and that they are in principle
available for the experiencer, even if they never have been before.
Thus the peaker learns surely and certainly that life can be
worthwhile, that it can be beautiful and valuable. There
are ends in life, i.e., experiences which are so precious
in themselves as to prove that not everything is a means to some
end other than itself.
Another kind of self-validating insight is the experience of being
a real identity, a real self, of feeling what it is like to feel
really oneself, what in fact one is—not a phony, a fake, a striver,
an impersonator. Here again, the experiencing itself is the revelation
of a truth.
My feeling is that if it were never to happen again, the power
of the experience could permanently affect the attitude toward
life. A single glimpse of heaven is enough to confirm its existence
even if it is never experienced again. It is my strong suspicion
that even one such experience might be able to prevent suicide,
for instance, and perhaps many varieties of slow self-destruction,
e.g., alcoholism, drug-addiction, addiction to violence, etc.
I would guess also, on theoretical grounds, that peak-experiences
might very well abort "existential meaninglessness,"
states of valuelessness, etc., at least occasionally. (These deductions
from the nature of intense peak-experiences are given some support
by general experience with LSD and psilocybin. Of course these
preliminary reports also await confirmation. )
This then is one kind of peak-knowledge of whose validity and
usefulness there can be no doubt, any more than there could be
with discovering for the first time that the color "red"
exists and is wonderful. Joy exists, can be experienced and feels
very good indeed, and one can always hope that it will be experienced
again.
Perhaps I should add here the paradoxical result—for some—that
death may lose its dread aspect. Ecstasy is somehow close to death-experience,
at least in the simple, empirical sense that death is often mentioned
during reports of peaks, sweet death that is. After the
acme, only less is possible. In any case, I have occasionally
been told, "I felt that I could willingly die," or,
"No one can ever again tell me death is bad," etc. Experiencing
a kind of "sweet death" may remove its frightening aspect.
This observation should, of course, be studied far more carefully
than I have been able to. But the point is that the experience
itself is a kind of knowledge gained (or attitude changed) which
is self-validating. Other such experiences, coming for the first
time, are true simply because experienced, e.g., greater integration
of the organism, experiencing physiognomic perception, fusing
primary-and secondary-process, fusing knowing and valuing, transcending
dichotomies, experiencing knowing as being, etc., etc. The widening
and enriching of consciousness through new perceptual experiences,
many of which leave a lasting effect, is a little like improving
the perceiver himself.
More frequently, however, peak-knowledge does need external,
independent validation (70) or at least the request for such validation
is a meaningful request; for instance, falling in love leads not
only to greater care, which means closer attention, examination,
and, therefore, greater knowledge, but it may also lead to affirmative
statements and judgments which may be untrue however touching
and affecting they may also be, e.g., "my husband is a genius."
The history of science and invention is full of instances of validated
peak-insights and also of "insights" that failed. At
any rate, there are enough of the former to support the proposition
that the knowledge obtained in peak-insight experiences can
be validated and valuable.
This is also true sometimes for the awe-inspiring, poignant insights
(both of peak type and also of the desolation type) or revelations
that can come in psychotherapy even though not very frequently.
This falling of the veils can be a valid perception of what has
not been consciously perceived before.
This all seems very obvious and very simple. Why has there then
been such flat rejection of this path to knowledge? Partly I suppose
the answer is that this kind of revelation-knowledge does not
make four apples visible where there were only three before, nor
do the apples change into bananas. No! it is more a shift in attention,
in the organization of perception, in noticing or realizing, that
occurs.
In peak-experiences, several kinds of attention-change can lead
to new knowledge. For one, love, fascination, absorption can frequently
mean "looking intensely, with care," as already mentioned.
For another, fascination can mean great intensity, narrowing and
focusing of attention, and resistance to distraction of any kind,
or of boredom or even fatigue. Finally, what Bucke (10) called
Cosmic Consciousness involves an attention-widening so that the
whole cosmos is perceived as a unity, and one's place in this
whole is simultaneously perceived.
This new "knowledge" can be a change in attitude, valuing
reality in a different way, seeing things from a new perspective,
from a different centering point. Possibly a good many instances
could come under the head of gestalt-perception, i.e., of seeing
chaos in a newly organized way—or of shifting from one gestalt
to another, of breaking up an imbeddedness or creating a new one,
changing figure-ground relationships, of making a better gestalt,
of closure, in a word, of the cognition of relationships and their
organization.
Another kind of cognitive process which can occur in peak-experiences
is the freshening of experience and the breaking up of rubricizing
(59). Familiarization dulls cognition, especially in anxious people,
and it is then possible to walk through all sorts of miraculous
happenings without experiencing them as such. In peaks, the miraculous
"suchness" of things can break through into consciousness.
This is a basic function of art, and could be studied in that
realm also. This kind of "innocent perception" is described
in one of my articles (63). It is a kind of perspicuity which
contrasts with what can only be called "normal blindness."
A subcategory of this renewed perception of what lies before our
eyes is the peak-perception of the fact that truisms are true,
e.g., it is wonderful to be understood, virtue is self-rewarding,
sunsets are beautiful, money is not everything, etc. These "platitudes"
can be rediscovered again and again in peak-moments. They, too,
are examples of the new depth and penetration possible in such
moments when life is seen freshly as if for the first time, and
as if never seen before. So also is the experience of gratitude,
of appreciation for good fortune, of grace.
In Appendix I and elsewhere in this essay, I have spoken of unitive
perception, i.e., fusion of the B-realm with the D-realm, fusion
of the eternal with the temporal, the sacred with the profane,
etc. Someone has called this "the measureless gap between
the poetic perception of reality and prosaic, unreal commonsense."
Anyone who cannot perceive the sacred, the eternal, the symbolic,
is simply blind to an aspect of reality, as I think I have
amply demonstrated elsewhere (54), and in Appendix I.
For "ought perception," "ontification" and
other examples of B-knowledge, see my article "Fusions of
Facts and Values" (54). The bibliography of this paper refers
to the literature of gestalt psychology for which I have no room
here. For "reduction to the concrete" and its implications
for cognition of abstractness in various senses, Goldstein (23,
24) should be consulted. Peak-experiencers often report something
that might be called a particular kind of abstract perception,
i.e., perception of essence, of "the hidden order of things,
the X-ray texture of the world, normally obscured by layers of
irrelevancy" (39, p. 352). My paper on isomorphism (48) also
contains relevant data, of which I will mention here only the
factor of being "worthy of the experience," of deserving
it, or of being up to it. Health brings one "up to"
higher levels of reality; peak-experiences can be considered a
transient self-actualization of the person. It can therefore be
understood as lifting him "higher," making him "taller,"
etc., so that he becomes "deserving" of more difficult
truths, e.g., only integration can perceive integration, only
the one who is capable of love can cognize love, etc.
Non-interfering, receptive, Taoistic perception is necessary for
the perception of certain kinds of truth (49). Peak-experiences
are states in which striving, interfering, and active controlling
diminish, thereby permitting Taoistic perception, thereby diminishing
the effect of the perceiver upon the percept. Therefore, truer
knowledge (of some things) may be expected and has been reported.
To summarize, the major changes in the status of the problem of
the validity of B-knowledge, or illumination-knowledge, are: (A)
shifting it away from the question of the reality of angels, etc.,
i.e., naturalizing the question; (B) affirming experientially
valid knowledge, the intrinsic validity of the enlarging of consciousness,
i.e., of a wider range of experiencing; (C) realizing that the
knowledge revealed was there all the time, ready to be perceived,
if only the perceiver were "up to it," ready for it.
This is a change in perspicuity, in the efficiency of the perceiver,
in his spectacles, so to speak, not a change in the nature
of reality or the invention of a new piece of reality which wasn't
there before. The word "psychedelic" (consciousness-expanding)
may be used here. Finally, (D) this kind of knowledge can be achieved
in other ways; we need not rely solely on peak-experiences or
peak-producing drugs for its attainment. There are more sober
and laborious—and perhaps, therefore, better in some ways in
the long run—avenues to achieving transcendent knowledge (B-knowledge).
That is, I think we shall handle the problem better if we stress
ontology and epistemology rather than the triggers and the stimuli.