Cat’s Cradle and the Threads of Maslow’s Humanistic Meditation

Abstract

Abraham Maslow used “Toward a Humanistic Biology,” published in 1969, to present his future vision of the challenges humankind would face in the growing isolation of persons from each other and themselves. Depersonalization, polarization, and loneliness amid the state of post-pandemic, mid-culture war, warring nations, plagues of economic hardship, racism, nationalism, immigration rejection, and wading deep into a climate cataclysm may cast people out of their societies, or, alternately, huddled alone within them. Ultimately, political power dictates outcomes, as Maslow points out, along with the fate of the world. Mindfulness and its capacity to create more serene and compassionate mind states may hold a model for a new humanistic revolution.

I am sitting here playing Cat’s Cradle, connecting the threads between Abraham Maslow’s prescient humanistic meditation, “Toward a Humanistic Biology,” published in 1969, and the meditations that some 20 years later came to be my own. I was drawn to humanistic psychology at mid-age, after a romance with journalism, working for CNN in its nascent days, and garnering a seat in plain view of the politically powerful celebrated by society. Investigative reporting and “the people’s right to know” was a mission then, in the same way qualitative inquiry and humanistic-existential psychologies became later, a people’s rights issue: seeking mental health justice for all, standing firm that the only mindful course is for everyone be treated humanely, that all be held with mutuality, no one be forsaken, and all beings honored, as Martin Buber (1958) described in his religiously regarded treatise, I and Thou.

So it is disheartening, then, to have recently read Maslow’s (1969) warning, his call to action, apropos both then and now, that “human specimens need good societies to permit them to actualize” (p. 726). Contemplating our current political and spiritual polarization, this gives me pause and worry.

The global crisis of isolationism and depersonalization—post-pandemic, mid-culture war, warring nations, plagues of economic hardship, racism, nationalism, immigration rejection, and wading deep into a climate cataclysm—may cast people out of their societies, or, alternately, huddled alone within them. Maslow (1969) warned, “isolated animals suffer the loss of various capacities, and beyond a certain point these losses frequently become irreversible” (p. 726). Similarly, when myopic focus is placed on alleged “evidence-based” findings (that is, until replication studies fail), this casts in just one direction the net of an entire field of study. By weighing only “validating, checking, verifying” and eschewing the deliberate investigative processes called for in more qualitative research inquiries, such as “pioneering, scouting, originating” (p. 724), science just gleans one small piece of the whole human story.

In a more heartening and hopeful vein, though, Maslow (1969) incorporated the insight that mindful presence and intentional being hold ancient secrets leading to a eudaimonic happiness and more transcendent well-being, known well before our time. And that in a humanistic sense, we have agency and autonomy to actually choose experiences of contentment, care, humility, and awe. By nurturing our brains in particular ways, Maslow noted, we “could produce . . . a state of serenity, meditativeness, even happiness. . . . it is already possible to teach people how to feel happy and serene” (p. 728). And, thus, “in a word, he lets himself be seen instead of hiding himself” (p. 731). This is the promise of the person-centered psychotherapeutic relationship, as “the mind-body problem, until now considered insoluble, does appear to be a workable problem after all” (p. 731).

Maslow sees the paradox, however, in solving the happiness problem once and for all. While he may not have had direct awareness of it then, the looming global change impacted by the invention of the internet and the rapid expansion of social media and artificial intelligence would change everything. Dystopian imagery of the chaos in the final days focuses rightly on the potential technological lethality of the end point rather than on the incremental nature of the means by which we get there. Such powerful weaponization of groupthink “in the hands of stupid or evil people simply make for more powerful stupidity or for more powerful evil” (p. 734). Do these words foretell Maslow’s premonition come to light, as billionaires purchase internet platforms for use as personal megaphones, and unchecked ambition and greed are seemingly lauded by a society trying to keep up with the Joneses? The U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, allowed politics to become a corrupt “kingmaker” system for party favorites who may or may not be committed to truth, to democratic norms, to integrity, dignity, and to the need for ever-important trustworthiness. “Sometimes,” Maslow foreshadowed, “the whole enterprise seems almost entirely immoral” (p. 734).

Of what, should we surmise, was Maslow trying to warn us in his speculation that “the whole human species might be wiped out” (p. 734)?

Perhaps, one way out of the despair before us is a mindful one, as Maslow described, a return to the sacredness practiced by the most contemplative of societies, such as our ancestors in ancient Egypt who discovered that in silence and stillness we may find God (Najovits, 2003), or come to see the reflection of ourselves in the other, or unflinchingly doing unto others only what we would want done unto us. Solely through mindful presence and its component part of compassion, can we hold onto Buber’s I and Thou intentionally, as one human people?

My personal, philosophic seeking for life’s answers led me to a decades-long commitment to mindfulness meditation practice, exploring the deepest recesses of my own mind—and in that silence and stillness, discover a non-agitated state, a place of calm abiding, with a preparatory vision of insight that the “right here, right now” of the moment delivers a transcendent power of presence (Kabat-Zinn, 2012). Maslow made note that science needs to reflect and represent a code of ethics based on such core values. Mindfulness of the present moment does that. In its clarity, mindfulness points out the basic inequity all around us, demanding in that acknowledgment a code of ethics that is inclusive, embracing, and caring for all. Maslow (1969) summed it up: “the loss of the basic-need satisfactions of safety and protection, belongingness, love, respect, self-esteem, identity, and self-actualization produces illnesses and deficiency diseases” (p. 733). As humanistic activists, our new call to action is that it is not enough to just leave things so.

Humanity needs to come together for the sake of humanity, for the sake of all of life. A polarized planet cannot nurture itself or, as Maslow predicted with dire concern, it may end in our ruination. How can we come together as societies that prosper, grow, and give credence to the best of our ethical yearnings for a whole, integrated, and healthily functioning human system? How can we forgo the economic, financial, and wealth-based intoxication with materiality to actually choose humanely, instead of selfishly? Will we consider the whole human story rather than just where alleged “evidence” directs us?

So I continue to sit in the still space of silent meditation, breathing, breathing, deeply breathing, weaving threads of inquiry into a tapestry of wondering, what of life’s ultimate fate? And grieving along with Maslow, I speculate that it may take an ethical humanistic revolution in the name of our children and grandchildren and all who come after, to advocate for a healthier, life-sustaining, humane and planetary whole.

“It is as if we’re helpless to master or to plan our own future,” Maslow decried, “as if we could not reverse present trends when we disapprove of them” (p. 734).

With hands now folded in my lap, I sit and pray, and ask, will we?