Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
Abraham H. Maslow
Appendix F. Rhapsodic, Isomorphic Communications
In trying to elicit reports of peak-experiences from reluctant
subjects or from non-peakers, I evolved a different kind of interview
procedure without being consciously aware that I had done so.
The "rhapsodic communication," as I have called it,
consists of a kind of emotional contagion in isomorphic parallel.
It may have considerable implications for both the theory of science
and the philosophy of education.
Direct verbal description of peak-experiences in a sober, cool,
analytic, "scientific" way succeeds only with those
who already know what you mean, i.e., people who have vivid peaks
and who can, therefore, feel or intuit what you are trying to
point to even when your words are quite inadequate in themselves.
As I went on interviewing, I "learned," without realizing
that I was learning, to shift over more and more to figures of
speech, metaphors, similes, etc., and, in general, to use more
and more poetic speech. It turns out that these are often more
apt to "click," to touch off an echoing experience,
a parallel, isomorphic vibration than are sober, cool, carefully
descriptive phrases.
We are taught here that the word "ineffable" means "not
communicable by words that are analytic, abstract, linear, rational,
exact, etc."-Poetic and metaphorical language, physiognomic
and synesthetic language, primary process language of the kind
found in dreams, reveries, free associations and fantasies, not
to mention pre-words and non-words such as gestures, tone of voice,
style of speaking, body tonus, facial expressions—all these
are more efficacious in communicating certain aspects of the ineffable.
This procedure can wind up being a kind of continuing rhapsodic,
emotional, eager throwing out of one example after another of
peaks, described or rather reported, expressed, shared, "celebrated,"
sung vividly with participation and with obvious approval and
even joy. This kind of procedure can more often kindle into flame
the latent or weak peak experiences within the other person.
The problem here was not the usual one in teaching. It was not
a labeling of something public that both could simultaneously
see while the teacher pointed to it and named it. Rather it was
trying to get the person to focus attention, to notice, to name
an experience inside himself, which only he could feel, an experience,
furthermore, which was not happening at the time. No pointing
is possible here, no naming of something visible, no controlled
and purposeful creation of the experience like turning on an electric
current at will or probing at a painful spot.
In such an effort, one realizes vividly how isolated people's
insides are from each other. It is as if two encapsulated privacies
were trying to communicate with each other across the chasm between
them. When the experience one is trying to communicate has no
parallel in the other person, as in trying to describe color to
the congenitally blind, then words fail almost (but not) entirely.
If the other person turns out to be a literal non-peaker, then
rhapsodic, isomorphic communication will not work.
In retrospect, I can see that I gradually began to assume that
the non-speaker was a weak peaker rather than a person
lacking the capacity altogether. I was, in effect, trying to fan
his slumbering fire into open flame by my emotionally involved
and approving accounts of other people's stronger experiences,
as a tuning fork will set off a sympathetic piano wire across
the room.
In effect, I proceeded "as if" I was trying to make
a non-peaker into a peaker, or, better said, to make the self-styled
non-peaker realize that he really was a peaker after all. I couldn't
teach him how to have a peak-experience; but I could teach that
he had already had it.
Whatever sensitizes the non-peaker to his own peaks will thereby
make him fertile ground for the seeds which the great peakers
will cast upon him. The great seers, prophets, or peakers
may then be used as we now use artists, i.e., as people who are
more sensitive, more reactive, who get a profounder, fuller, deeper
peak-experience which then they can pass on to other people who
are at least peakers enough to be able to be a good audience.
Trying to teach the general population how to paint will certainly
not make them into great painters, but it can very well make them
into a better audience for great artists. Just as it is necessary
to be a bit of an artist oneself before one can understand a great
artist, so it is apparently necessary to become a small seer oneself
before one can understand the great seers.
This is a kind of I-thou communication of intimates, of friends,
of sweethearts, or of brothers rather than the more usual kind
of subject-object, perceiver-percept, investigator-subject relationship
in which separation, distance, detachment are thought to be the
only way to bring greater objectivity.
Something of the sort has been discovered in other situations.
For instance, in using psychedelic drugs to produce peak-experiences,
general experience has been that if the atmosphere is coldly clinical
or investigatory, and if the subject is watched and studied as
if with a microscope, like a bug on a pin, then peaks are less
apt to occur and unhappy experiences are more apt to occur. When
the atmosphere becomes one of brotherly communion, however, with
perhaps one of the "investigator-brothers" himself also
taking the drug, then the experience is much more likely to be
ecstatic and transcendent.
Something similar has been discovered by the Alcoholics Anonymous
and by the Synanon groups for drug addicts. The person who has
shared the experience can be brotherly and loving in a way that
dispels the dominance hierarchy implied in the usual helping relationship.
The reported reciprocal interdependence of performers and audiences
could also serve as an example of this same kind of communication.
The existential and humanistic psychotherapists are also beginning
to report that the "I-Thou encounter" can bring certain
results which cannot be brought about by the classical Freudian
mirror-type psychoanalyst (although I feel sure that the reverse
is also true for certain other therapeutic results). Even
the classical psychoanalysts would now be willing to admit, I
think, that care, concern, and agapean love for the patient are
implied, and must be implied, by the analyst in order that therapy
may take place.
The ethologists have learned that if you want to study ducks and
to learn all that is possible to know about ducks, then you had
better love ducks. And so also, I believe, for stars, or numbers,
or chemicals. This kind of love or interest or fascination is
not contradictory of objectivity or truthfulness but is rather
a precondition of certain kinds of objectivity, perspicuity, and
receptivity. B-love encourages B-cognition, i.e., unselfish, understanding
love for the Being or intrinsic nature of the other, makes it
possible to perceive and to enjoy the other as an end in himself
(not as a selfish means or as an instrument), and, therefore,
makes more possible the perception of the nature of the other
in its own right.
All (?), or very many, people, including even young children,
can in principle be taught in some such experiential way that
peak-experiences exist, what they are like, when they are apt
to come, to whom they are apt to come, what will make them more
likely, what their connection is with a good life, with a good
man, with good psychological health, etc. To some extent, this
can be done even with words, with lectures, with books. My experience
has been that whenever I have lectured approvingly about peak-experiences,
it was as if I had given permission to the peak-experiences of
some people, at least, in my audience to come into consciousness.
That is, even mere words sometimes seem to be able to remove the
inhibitions, the blocks, and the fears, the rejections which had
kept the peak-experiences hidden and suppressed.
All of this implies another kind of education, i.e., experiential
education. But not only this, it also implies another kind of
communication, the communication between alonenesses, between
encapsulated, isolated egos. What we are implying is that in the
kind of experiential teaching which is being discussed here, what
is necessary to do first is to change the person and to change
his awareness of himself. That is, what we must do is to make
him become aware of the fact that peak-experiences go on inside
himself. Until he has become aware of such experience and has
this experience as a basis for comparison, he is a non-peaker;
and it is useless to try to communicate to him the feel and the
nature of peak-experience. But if we can change him, in the sense
of making him aware of what is going on inside himself, then he
becomes a different kind of communicatee. It is now possible to
communicate with him. He now knows what you are talking about
when you speak of peak-experiences; and it is possible to teach
him by reference to his own weak peak-experiences how to improve
them, how to enrich them, how to enlarge them, and also how to
draw the proper conclusions from these experiences.
It can be pointed out that something of this kind goes on normally
in uncovering, insight psychotherapy. Part of the process here
is an experiential-educational one in which we help the patient
become aware of what he has been experiencing without having been
aware of it. If we can teach him that such and such a constellation
of preverbal subjective happenings has the label "anxiety,"
then thereafter it is possible to communicate with him about anxiety
and all the conditions that bring it about, how to increase it,
how to decrease it, etc. Until that point is reached at which
he has a conscious, objective, detached awareness of the relationship
between a particular name or label or word and a particular set
of subjective, ineffable experiences, no communication and no
teaching are possible; so also for passivity or hostility or yearning
for love or whatever. In all of these, we may use the paradigm
that the process of education (and of therapy) is helping the
person to become aware of internal, subjective, subverbal experiences,
so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction,
of conversation, of communication, of naming, etc., with the consequence
that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control
to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable
processes.
One trouble with this kind of communication, for me at least,
has been that I felt rhapsodizing to be artificial when I tried
to do it deliberately and consciously. I became fully aware of
what I had been doing only after trying to describe it in a conversation
with Dr. David Nowlis. But since then I have not been able to
communicate in the same way.