Composed, in a stitched-together manner, in the 1960s by Abraham Maslow (famous for his Hierarchy of Needs) from a collection of his speeches and previously published articles—Toward a Psychology of Being is a valuable examination of how one extraordinarily intelligent clinical psychologist, with a keen awareness of how to differentiate the discrete variations between traits displayed by human minds that other human minds (namely, his own and those of his colleagues who would have attended his lectures/speeches as well as read his published articles) had chosen to label "healthy" (which would include his own and those of his colleagues) compared to those he and they had chosen to label "unhealthy".
While I read these 175 pages, I came to realize what it must have been like to possess an overly-academic worldview **self-constructed by an ego that had learned to recognize its own accomplishments and knew it was genius-level, while at the same time was now aware there was a higher accomplishment, which was beyond its current capabilities: that of a self which had become actualized and/or fully conscious.** and THIS TOPIC was what he decided to research, further-study, and then write articles and give speeches about. It is as if you (dearest reader) decided to interview, and test, and observe, and experiment on, all the humans who have travelled to space, and the moon, and the space-station, and then compile their responses and your conclusions into "scientific findings" which describe what it must be like to be an astronaut. Without you ever leaving Earth.
It is slightly confounding to read these collection of papers (peppered with the occasional printing error and typographical mistake) and not wish that a keen editor would have fixed the missing or mis-spaced punctuation marks; would have added the 't' in front of the 'he' so that I would not have to lose my train-of-thought (?what person is being described as a 'he' in the middle of this? . . . oh . . . Maslow meant to write 'the thought about' not "he thought about".) But the overall gestalt of this book is the perfect preface for the next book in the Go On Reading Curriculum. Read it.
If, however, you find that you can not; that this book is too complicated for you to read? It means this is your bridge-too-far, and you will not Go On. A terrible man (depicting a more-terrible character in a relatively-terrible film) once said, "A man has got to know his limitations." Every dangerous or risky or complicated endeavor has some form of built-in warning. Like cartoon characters with their wing raised and a sign reading: MUST BE TALLER THAN THIS TO RIDE THE ROLLER COASTER in order to prevent children from slipping out of the safety harness at the top of the loop-to-loop, this imperfect book contains much needed information for your imperfect self to become more aware of itself. It is difficult-but-not-impossible to read, cover-to-cover, while you spend as much time as you need contemplating everything it communicates. But. For those who still want to Go On: read, study, think about, discuss, and read more of everything (philosophy, theology, psychology, biology, physics, etc) and then come back to Maslow when you have spiraled up and out of blue, orange, or even green [although most shades of green, (and even some orange-green's) are already capable of comprehending Maslow enough to Go On]. You did read the first book in the Reading Curriculum, right?
As a side-note: Abraham Maslow wrote (in a different book) "If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail". This is known as the Law of the Instrument. A few years ago, I wrote the article: Don't Act Like a Nail and Complain About Hammers describing a debilitating affectation, which is worn like underclothing by a few people with whom I was once affiliated, known as Vulnerable/Covert Narcissism (which Maslow would have labelled as an "unhealthy mental affliction"). At the time, I did not attribute the title of that article to Maslow, because I took it way out of his intended context, as well as because other authors had also used it within their own contexts.
complexly-connected:
