Now Is The Time

Yosemite

To Maslow, “transcenders” are regularly motivated by values and experiences that go beyond the satisfaction of basic needs and the fulfillment of one’s unique potential. These “metamotivations” include a devotion to a calling outside oneself, a seeking of “peak experiences”, and a commitment to the values of Being, or the “B-values”, including truth, goodness, beauty, justice, meaningfulness, playfulness, aliveness, excellence, simplicity, elegance, and wholeness — as ultimate goals in themselves.

Maslow observed that when he asked transcenders why they do what they do and what makes their life worth living, they often cited those values. There was no further reason why they devoted so much time to their work; the values were not in service of anything else, nor were they instrumental in achieving any other goal. Maslow believed that satisfaction of the “metaneeds” are necessary “to avoid illness and to achieve fullest humanness or growth. . . . They are worth living for and dying for. Contemplating them, or fusing with them gives the greatest joy that a human being is capable of.”

…grumbling about a lack of safety, status, money, power, respect, acceptance, and affection does seem to be of a different sort than grumbling about a profound lack of beauty, humor, goodness, justice, uniqueness, wholeness, and meaningfulness in the world. — Scott Barry Kaufman

The quality of our lives does not come from chance. It is created in spirit and detail by the quality of our thoughts. Our hearts think. The words we use in the privacy of our minds have karma. They have an aura that broadcasts our soul to the world. We ourselves may be shocked at what happens to us, but, if so, we haven’t been paying attention to the web we were weaving all along.

Cultures revolve around certain thought-forms. Language carries a vision for those who use it to think and communicate, but it’s more than code. It’s a dance of sound and gesture that puts forth a paradigm of meaning, a vision that has structure and limits.

Our Western culture believes itself complete, unconscious of all the relational beauty it excludes. Power, money and respect seem to be our focus. Play, humor, creativity, beauty, justice and meaning take a back seat to the mechanics of getting and keeping money, power and status.