I don’t know what it is about breakfast, but when I’m making eggs is when I get hit with a lot of interesting ideas.

This morning’s was, “Abraham Maslow is upside-down! Stand his ideas on their heads and it’s more accurate.”

Any questions?

Okay, let me elaborate.

Maslow is famous for his Hierarchy of Needs (which became practically synonymous with the personal development movement).
One of his ideas is that until you get your “lower needs” met — physiological (water, air, food, etc.), safety, love & belonging, and so on — you don’t have enough energy available to use for getting your “higher needs” met (esteem and self-actualization).

Another way to think of it is that our natural way of being is HIGHER, unless we have to spend energy on the basic survival issues.

What I noticed as I was chopping up peppers and garlic shoots for my Mexican scramble is that all the “needs” are really manifestations of the same idea. That is, it’s as if we have this fundamental urge/movement toward keeping “I” alive.

Well, once we have that taken care of at the basic level and we have something to eat (did I mention the chipotle salsa I use?) and somewhere to sleep and someone to sleep and eat with, that same urge/idea/thought/movement is still active and just looks for something else to do.

So, it looks for another way to do the same thing — gets a job, protects the family, builds a McMansion.

Once that’s basically taken care of, that same fundamental thing just looks for another activity — maintains a personal identity, supports that identity, tries to get others to like that identity.

And so on, and so, on and so on.

There’s no hierarchy. There’s no evolving or growing. There’s just the same urge/idea/thought/movement going on with us acting on it in different ways. In fact, when I look at it this way, it seems quite un-evolved and non-growing. Without recognizing that we’re still just reacting to the same fundamental concept, no matter where on the ladder we think we are, it can look like growth. But seeing that it’s all just the same urge playing out, then the “top” of the hierarchy — self-transcendence — is really no different than the “bottom.”

Really, we’re not doing anything different than any other living thing on the planet. It just seems more complicated.

To mis-quote John Merrick, the “Elephant Man,” “I am an animal!”

(Oh, when I went on to having a banana and some cherries from the tree in our backyard, I had some fun thoughts about “free will.” But I’m saving those for later… or they’ll just happen when they do, without conscious intervention on my part )

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Evolutionary Psychology, Self-Improvement, Spiritual Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.