A Biography of Abraham Maslow
“I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away. The average man is a human being with dampened and inhibited powers”.
“It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”
“The search for the exotic, the strange, the unusual, the uncommon has often taken the form of pilgrimages, of turning away from the world, the ‘Journey to the East,’ to another country or to a different religion. The great lesson from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists – that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard, and that travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred – this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.”
“Perhaps the most moving comment came from someone who had barely known Maslow, but seems to have spoken for the many individuals whom he touched in his impassioned life and career.
“It felt good to be human in his presence. In a disturbed world, he saw light and promise and hope, and he shared those with the rest of us.”
To be continued, I sidetracked by Self Reliance…
Photo by Jon Butterworth on Unsplash