if it feels good...

My musings yesterday about Abraham Maslow's psychological ideas were prompted by thoughts about motivation, or more generally: why do we do what we do?

As long as you don't look at it too closely, the question seems simple. I'm hungry, so I go into the kitchen to pull a slice of cold pizza out of the fridge and eat it. And yes that is simple: an instance of keeping one of the most basic survival needs satisfied. Without food, you can't pursue your other goals for very long. Before long, more and more of your attention and effort will be applied to the problem of getting fed, until that becomes the first, last, and only thing on your mind, and all of your ingenuity and effort are bent on it.

As we satisfy those more basic needs and move up Maslow's hierarchy, our behavior becomes more subtle and indirect. The higher needs involve other people, first singly, then as groups. The needs for belonging and esteem are social needs that can only be satisfied by numbers of people around us, each of whom is an individual and must be treated in an individualized way. You can't just go to people and say, "respect me" or "esteem me", and expect them to comply. On the contrary, you'll lower yourself in their esteem by doing so. Respect and esteem are gained only by reading the norms of one's society accurately, and consistently directing one's behavior to meet or exceed those norms.

At least, that's my first stab at suggesting how to gain respect and esteem--the need for which, according to Maslow, is innate for us all.

But, as I mentioned yesterday, Maslow was interested most of all in the needs that exist in us beyond those innate "deficiency" needs (D-needs): the holes in us that we try to fill up in order to feel healthy. When they're all (more or less) full, we're free to pursue our "being" needs (B-needs), which are unique to each of us. Just as our face and our fingerprint are unique, our purpose on Earth and our path to maximum fulfillment and self-expression are unique. I cannot follow your path and find fulfillment for myself; you cannot follow mine. We might travel together for a way, but at some point we must part company and go our own way.

And how do we know which is our own way? According to Maslow, our path is essentially the path of enjoyment. What we truly enjoy is our path forward to unique personal fulfillment.

Isn't this just the old 1960s ethos of, "if it feels good, do it"?

Well, yes, it is. But won't that just lead to a society of blissed-out drug addicts? Everyone getting their rocks off every which way? No, it won't.

Why not? Because (by the way, this is me talking, not Maslow--at least, as far as I know, being only 40% of the way through this first book!) being a drug addict is not really enjoyable. It might feel good to get high, but if one gets out of control with it, consequences ensue that feel very un-good. I remember the addiction expert Vern Johnson's description of the difference between the proto-addict and the non-addict. When the non-addict wakes up with his hangover, and is confronted with the fact that while drunk he embarrassed people by, say, hitting clumsily on the hostess, he feels remorse and resolves never to let that happen again. The proto-addict, on the contrary, rationalizes his behavior, or simply doesn't believe that he did anything wrong. In short, he resorts to the defense mechanism of denial--laying the groundwork for hanging on to his addiction.

The addict is stuck, with an ever-thickening wall of denial between himself and the misery of his existence. He has become estranged from himself, and clutches at short-term physical gratification as a compensation for having lost the path to his own actual enjoyment of life.

The kind of enjoyment that Maslow really means is the enjoyment of the "peak experience"--an event that particularly interested him. He conducted surveys, asking people questions about their experience at the most wonderful moments of their lives--times when they had felt most happy, joyous, and fulfilled. Everyone (or almost everyone) has such experiences in their lives, but people on the path of self-actualization--those attending to their B-needs--have them more often, and also regularly exhibit many of the mental traits that the rest of us take on only during those peak experiences.

I want to tune in to the wavelength of my own enjoyment of life. As I go about my day, I check my response to what I'm doing: how do I feel about it? Really, honestly? When I do certain things, I think, Yes, this is what I want to be doing; this is what I enjoy.

Writing is one of those. Even with the difficult struggle of a large, uncertain creative project, I still feel that it's what I want to be doing. If I were doing something else, no matter how "exciting" or rewarding in other ways (such as, say, financially), I would feel that was playing hooky. Something would nag at me, urging me to get back to what I want to be doing.

I feel the same way about reading. When I sit there with my highlighter, reading, I feel that I'm doing the right thing--right for me. I feel natural, at home, and I enjoy myself. For me, that's exciting.

In reading I also feel a big difference between different books. When I feel a book is not really taking me where I want to go--is not part of my path--I get a feeling of distaste and revulsion. Reading starts feeling like forced labor. Now, when I start feeling that, I put the book aside. That's why I leave so many books unfinished.

So that's today's hot tip: If it feels good, do it.

the psychology of health

I continue to read Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow. I find it fascinating, provocative.

One of his points is that he believes that Western psychology has missed a huge dimension of human nature in focusing on "motivated" behavior. He says that psychology takes it for granted that all behavior is motivated, in the sense of being done in order to attain some aim--to fulfill some need. But Maslow disagrees.

He says that motivated behavior (in this sense) occurs only to fulfill what he calls deficiency needs (or "D-needs"). This behavior is driven by a sense of lack: we lack physiological necessities, or safety, or love, or esteem, and do things to achieve these ends. But when all these needs are met (and for many of us, they seldom are), we don't stop doing things. We don't just like back on a couch waiting for another D-need to surface. Rather, at that point, we shift into the spontaneous expression of our nature. We follow our interests and curiosity, and our experience becomes deeper, more aesthetic, and less instrumental, less "means-to-an-end".

These self-expressive behaviors arise from what Maslow called our Being needs (or "B-needs"). When we're not driven by lack, our life becomes joyful and more fully human. We tend to do things for their own sake, and relate with others in a more total way--appreciating the individuality and totality of other people, rather than trying to use them as means to secure our own needs.

This is what Maslow means by a "psychology of Being": a psychology that looks at and comprehends this vast field of normal, healthy, fulfilled functioning. It's natural that psychology has focused on psychopathology: how to recognize and treat mental illness. But this focus has subtly enshrined the notion of "normal" (that is, not ill) as a mere lack of symptoms. And, to be sure, when you're ill, a lack of symptoms sounds great: you'll take it.

But the psychology of health is a field in its own right. And this was the field that interested Maslow, at least toward the end of his career (he died in 1970). What are the features of mental health? What are its aspects and behaviors?

As I read, I find many things that remind me of what I've learned from Buddhism and Shambhala Training. For example, when Maslow talks about how the experience of a person living according to his or her B-needs becomes more aesthetic--they appreciate experiences for their own sake--I remember reading in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa that the "warrior" (that is, one practicing the path of spiritual fearlessness) experiences the world as an artist does: in his sensitivity to his world, he finds the sound of raindrops hitting his coat to be almost unbearably loud.

When we're engaged with our B-needs, we hear the raindrops hitting our coat. When we're engaged with our D-needs, we're too busy worrying about making it to the presentation on time and making a good impression on the client. The rain is a threatening nuisance, wrecking our hair and damaging our chances of "success". We do hear the raindrops, for they trigger our worries and preoccupation with what we lack. But we don't tune in to them as an aesthetic experience. Instead, they're mere signals or alarm-bells alerting us to problems in our quest to fulfill our needs.

All of this is good news. First, Maslow is saying (and for that matter so is Chogyam Trungpa) that the "normal", fully human estate is one of joy and presence to life. And second, that you don't have to be completely fulfilled deficiency-wise in order to experience your Being nature.

I know this. For I myself have neurotic traits and behaviors, no doubt brought on by problems in dealing with my D-needs. And yet, nonetheless, I feel I have enjoyed a great deal of Being in life: in important ways I have done what I wanted, and enjoyed the ride.

But I'm eager to learn more about the psychology of health. Among other things, I suspect that this will be one direction in which East and West can fruitfully merge their outlooks.

It's raining out there. I must remember to listen to those raindrops hitting my coat.

do your own thing

Last night: half a Sleep Aid, followed by a much better night's sleep. Do I move thus down the treacherous slope of drug dependency, as so many artists (and others) have before me?

What a difference to my outlook it makes, though. Instead of being buffeted by feelings of helplessness, inadequacy, pessimism, and guilt, I feel a kind of composure and even enthusiasm for my life and its quirks--warts and all, you might say.

Apart from the Sleep Aid, another source of uplift yesterday was reading further into Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow. This book came out in 1962 as a follow-up to his seminal Motivation and Personality, published in 1954 (a copy of which is now winging its way to me via the mail). It's actually a compilation of lectures on various aspects of his psychological thinking, fleshing out and extending some ideas from the earlier work. My copy, a 1968 Insight paperback, is in bad shape--two edges have been blackened with felt pen in an effort to obliterate the name of a previous owner, a certain Kratz; and the glue on the spine has turned brittle so that the pages snap away from it as I turn them--indeed the worst of any book I've bought online, such that I think the seller misrepresented its condition and should not have offered it sight unseen. But the content is excellent, and I'm drinking it in avidly.

"What makes people neurotic?" With this question Maslow launches chapter 3, "Deficiency Motivation and Growth Motivation". He sketches in the answer he found:

My answer was that neurosis seemed at its core, and in its beginning, to be a deficiency disease, born out of being deprived of certain satisfactions which I called needs in the same sense that water and amino acids and calcium are needs, namely that their absence produces illness. Most neuroses involved, along with other complex determinants, ungratified wishes for safety, for belongingness and identification, for close love relationships, and for respect and prestige. When these deficiencies were eliminated, sicknesses tended to disappear.

Maslow does not use the word need to point vaguely at our various wishes, hopes, demands, or cravings. Rather, it points to a specific thing the lack of which results in characteristic types of illness, in exactly the same way that a lack of water, vitamin C, or calcium leads to characteristic illness in the body. We need water, vitamin C, and calcium in order to be healthy; the Buddha and Jesus also needed them. Maslow says we also need safety, belonging, love, and respect in order to be healthy. If these needs aren't met, then we develop deficiency syndromes which broadly can be called the neuroses.

When we lack any of these things, they motivate our behavior. If we're not loved, then our lives become shaped by that lack, how we seek to fill the void, or compensate for not having it.

But these "deficiency needs" are not the whole story. When they're all satisfied, we don't simply come to rest and do nothing. Rather, a new set of motivations or needs opens up: what Maslow calls the "being needs"--the drive for self-actualization. These needs are manifested by psychologically healthy people, and they are never gratified in the sense of "plugging a hole", as are the deficiency needs. With being-needs, the more gratified they are, the more intensely the need is felt, and the more it serves as motivation to go further with it.

In addition, while the deficiency needs are generic, or "species needs", in the sense that they are needed by everyone just by virtue of being a human being, the being-needs are highly individual; their exact direction varies according to the talents, interests, and vocation of the specific person. With the being-needs, it's really different strokes for different folks. You might be fulfilled by tightrope-walking across a canyon; I might be fulfilled by designing origami airplanes. These interests arise from the peculiarities of our individual natures.

Maslow goes on to list 13 characteristics of psychologically healthy people--those who have (more or less) gratified their "D-needs" and are attending to their "B-needs":

1) Superior perception of reality.

2) Increased acceptance of self, of others, and of nature.

3) Increased spontaneity.

4) Increase in problem-centering.

5) Increased detachment and desire for privacy.

6) Increased autonomy, and resistance to enculturation.

7) Greater freshness of appreciation, and richness of emotional reaction.

8) Higher frequency of peak experiences.

9) Increased identification with the human species.

10) Changed (improved) interperonal relations.

11) More democratic character structure.

12) Greatly increased creativeness.

13) Certain changes in the value system.


Here is a cornucopia of things to think about. I'll single out three items from the list: spontaneity, privacy, and resistance to enculturation. Briefly put, the healthy person, even while feeling more fellowship with the human race as a whole, seeks autonomy from it in order to pursue his own interests and passions. The healthy person, recognizing both the uniqueness and the validity of his particular interests, engages with them fully and unapologetically, while acknowledging and appreciating the right of everyone else to do the same.

Sounds good to me. It puts me in mind of a quote attributed to Einstein that I found recently:

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Summing up: My worries and angst are symptoms of neurosis which is the product of certain deficiencies. The inspiration, interest, and passion I feel for working on my creative projects, regardless of how strange, implausible, or irrelevant they may seem from a culturally normal perspective, are signs of mental health--following the path of self-actualization.

I do have to see to my deficiencies. But never should I stop actualizing myself!

And friends, that goes for all of us. Do your own thing, and I'll do mine.