The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
In 1967, Abraham Maslow gave a lecture in San Francisco, later published as “The Farther Reaches of Human Nature” in the first issue of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. It is short, nine pages, but do not let that fool you. It is one of the most important things Maslow ever said, because in it he tells us, plainly, that a revolution is underway.
Not a political revolution. Not a military one. A Humanistic Revolution.
A Revolution is Underway
Maslow’s claim is simple. A comprehensive new way of thinking is developing, he says, “like a fruit tree beginning to bear fruit on every branch at the same time.” Every field of science and human endeavor is being affected. Psychology, yes, but also social institutions, work, leisure, education, philosophy, and religion. And here is the fascinating part. The people doing this work often do not even know each other. They are scattered across disciplines and countries, yet linked by what Maslow calls a common core of belief and intention.
What is that common core? A turn back to human needs and human experience. That is what “humanistic” means here. Western thought had long been dominated by an abstract, top-down style of thinking, where you start with big abstract words and derive your answers from them. Maslow calls these “helium-filled words.” They float right off the surface of the earth and have no ties to it. The Humanistic Revolution reverses this. It starts with real, concrete, lived human experience and builds its concepts upward from there.
Human Nature Has Been Sold Short
Maslow’s central claim is a radical one. Human beings have higher needs, and these higher needs are biological.
Read that again. The need for love, for friendship, for dignity, for self-respect, for individuality, for self-fulfillment, these are not luxuries. They are not cultural add-ons or icing on the cake. They are part of our species character, built into us, what Maslow calls “instinctoid,” instinct-like, rooted in our biology.
The implications are enormous. As Maslow puts it, the need for dignity is a fundamental human right in exactly the same sense that it is a human right to have enough calcium or enough vitamins to be healthy. And just like with vitamins, if these needs are not met, pathology results. Sickness. Stunting. Damage.
Think about what this means. We have, as a civilization, misunderstood and fundamentally underestimated what a human being is. “ human nature has been sold short,” Maslow says. . We have treated the higher reaches of our nature as optional, as decoration, when in fact they are the main event. We are far more glorious than both religion and mainstream science would have us believe.
From the Third Force to the Fourth
What happens when those higher needs actually are met? Maslow studied people who feel loved, safe, and respected, and he asked them a simple question. What are the moments that make your life worthwhile?
The answers were not about food, money, or status. The answers were about what Robert Hartman called the “intrinsic values.” Truth. Goodness. Beauty. Justice. Excellence. These fortunate, self-actualizing people, Maslow found, are motivated by values that transcend the self, values that make you a part of something bigger, something that you are responsible for.
This is where Maslow announces something new, but not really. Humanistic psychology, the so-called Third Force, was giving rise to a Fourth Force, a transpersonal psychology dealing with transcendent experiences and transcendent values–mystical experience, basically. This lecture, in fact, is the first public presentation of transpersonal psychology. It happened right here.
A New Image of Humanity
Why does all this matter for society, for Eupsychia, for “The Lightning Path”? Maslow is explicit. “We are dealing with a new image” of humanity, he says, and from that image, everything else flows.
Think about it. Every institution we build, our schools, our workplaces, our governments, is built on some assumption about what a human being is. If you believe humans are selfish animals who must be controlled, you build a control society, like what we have now. If you believe humans have higher needs for love, dignity, and growth, needs that produce pathology when suppressed and goodness when met, you build something entirely different.
Interesting, in this article, Maslow says we now have the tools to judge societies. One society can be judged better than another, healthier than another, possessing more “growth-fostering potential.” The value of a society is its function, and that function is “the greatest coming to fulfillment of the people in the society.” A good society is one that helps its people grow. A bad society is one that stunts them. That is not opinion. That is science.
This is not starry-eyed optimism. Maslow studied what he calls “growing tip” statistics, the healthiest, most creative, most fully human one per cent, the way a biologist studies the growing tip of a plant where all the action is. When Maslow was young, a four-minute mile was humanly impossible. Then somebody ran it, and the ceiling lifted for every baby born after. The best specimens show us what the whole species can become, if the conditions are good and we get out of the way.
The Resacralization of Everything
Finally, Maslow points to something I find deeply significant. When you open the door to values and peak experiences, you find that the reports of ordinary people parallel the reports of the great mystics. What religion called sacred never belonged to the churches in the first place. These experiences can happen at any time, in any place, to practically anyone.
The implication? All of life can be sacralized, educationalized, religionized, philosophized. The sacred, the meaningful, the transformative, these do not belong in special buildings on special days administered by special experts. They belong to life itself, to everyone, everywhere.
Scientific Justification for Hope
Maslow ends on a note of careful, grounded hope. The bombs and the buttons are still waiting, he admits. None of this is inevitable. But the higher reaches of human nature are not pipe dreams. They are clear, demonstrable, empirical possibilities, and once we see them as possibilities, we bring them within the realm of human action.
That is the heart of it. There is, Maslow says, scientific justification for much of what we hope for in each other and for all mankind.
A revolution in how we see ourselves. A society built not on control but on growth. That was Maslow’s vision in 1967.
Unfortunately that vision, and his psychology, has been suppressed. Despite the theoretical and empirical significance of his work, nobody really knows who he was. We need to change that. His aim was to revolutionize human society. More half a century later, I would say this a revolution still waiting for its full flowering. it is one worth recovering and one worth finishing.
Maslow AH (1969a) The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1(1), 1–9. https://www.humanpotentialcenter.org/articles/fartherreaches.pdf