Will The New You In This New Year Are Your Highest Self?

Article from L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

When it comes to self-actualization, the very term implies that we have a self to develop. It implies that there's a core you and that you, as a person, are made to develop. It implies that there are possibilities and potentials within you to unleash, to grow, to evolve, to develop so that you can become more and more you, more and more of what you can become. It implies that you are not finished.

Self-Actualization also implies that there is within you the possibility of your best self and a highest self. Now it might seem counter-intuitive, but an avowed atheist created this model! It was someone committed to the scientific model, who actually wrote a book on science (The Psychology of Science, 1966), someone who began as a Behaviorist and studied with leading Behaviorists in his time, and who launched a "third force" in psychology, who launched the Journal of Humanistic Psychology—it was that person who discovered through his studies of chimpanzees, female sexuality, and the needs that drive and motivates humans, that we have within our biology the possibility of a higher self.

For Maslow this was critically important because it meant that for science to be complete and true to the facts of human existence it must include values, peak or mystical experiences, and the experience that we call "spirituality." So surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) , this avowed atheist also wrote a book "Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences" (1964). He led out in the 1950s study human values, arguing that science inherently involves values as does education, politics and, in fact, everything human. And this is not because he believed in a God, but because he discovered that we are made with a higher self.

This higher self is biological and inherent in our nature. It emerges as a need, a higher need as we learn how to effectively and adequately gratify our lower animal needs. Both sets of needs (lower and higher) are equally valid and important because they work together as a system of drives. The lower needs create the foundation for the higher needs. And as we learn to adequately gratify the lower needs with "true satisfiers" (and not false substitutes) , the driving motivation of our lower needs go away. They disappear. And what emerges is the next level need, the next level drive. And it is in this emergence that the higher self arises.

So in self-actualizing, you learn about yourself—about your true nature. You discover your lower nature as an animal and how to cope with the lower needs of surviving (food, shelter, exchange, money, activity), safety and security (structure, order, protection), social (love, affection, bonding, connection), and self-regard (value, status, significance) . These are animal needs. All of the higher and more intelligent animals have these needs.

At the level of the lower needs, "knowing yourself" means knowing yourself in terms of these drives, what they are, how they work, what feelings they trigger inside you, how to satisfy them, how to get beyond them, etc. Regarding our lower needs, Maslow said that we need to be "good animals." That's because these needs are not bad or evil. They are just drives of our organism for living and thriving, so that we can feel good and make and effective adjustment to life as it is.

Yet these are also deficiency needs. That is, deficiency is the mechanism that drives us when we experience need at this level. We don't have enough. Enough food, enough water, shelter, sex, money, safety, structure, touch, contact, bonding, friends, regard, value, significance, etc. We lack. We are deficient of the very factors that satisfy the requirements of life. But, and this is an amazing thing, when we find a true satisfier and learn how to adequately cope with these requirements, the need goes away. At that point, we often then experience post-gratification forgetting—forgettin g how driving the need was.

At this point also that the truly human drives kick in. Each level of need is prepotent and keeps us occupied there until it is basically gratified. Once it is sufficiently satisfied then the next level emerges and with the gratification of the lower needs, the higher needs emerge. Now we need things that satisfy our best self, our highest self. And what are these things? They are the human drives for meaning, purpose, beauty, order, mathematics, justice, fairness, contribution, legacy, love, goodness, truth, honesty, aliveness, uniqueness, playfulness, completeness, etc. Maslow called these the being values (B-values) and in this Being-realm we experience B-love, B-cognition, etc.

It is at this level that you can discover and "know" your highest self. And this is where you can increasingly become more and more of who you really are. Nor is it a process that ever ends. What is the purpose of life according to Self-Actualization Psychology? It is to be and to become. It is to keep learning, growing, changing, and developing as you keep moving up higher and higher levels of the being-values and being-life. This makes life an adventure. It also keeps you young, curious, playful, and fascinated. It keeps you in the state of "continuous freshness of appreciation." It gets you thinking about collaborating, cooperating, giving, and contributing.

Neuro-Semantics is all about this— enabling ourselves and others to grow to our fullest humanness, to the greatest fulfillment and actualization of our highest potentials, to help us become the best we are capable of becoming and to becoming actually what we deeply are potentially. Welcome to the adventure!
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About the author: L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is an entrepreneur who lives in the Rocky Mountains of western Colorado where he had a private therapy practice for many years, operated an NLP Training Center, and from where he began trainings in Meta-States and Neuro-Semantics.