Human Transcendence

Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality: Toward a Positive Psychology

One of the earliest psychologists to focus attention on happy individuals and their psychological trajectory, in what he named Positive Psychology, was Abraham Maslow, who is most well known for his “hierarchy of needs.”

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Self-transcendence

In the original model, self-actualization is at the top, with esteem below it, then love/belonging, then safety, and physiological needs at the bottom. This indicates that physiological needs are vital for survival and that they must be sated before one can move up towards actualization and fulfillment. In his early work, Maslow considered self-actualization the pinnacle of human development and the highest human need: the realization of one’s full potential. He later recognized the need for one more level of development.

Self-actualization is indeed a lofty (and worthy) goal of development and should not be cast aside in favor of the shiny new need, but self-transcendence is truly the “next level” of development; it is other-focused instead of self-focused and concerns higher goals than those which are self-serving.

Abraham Maslow, The Importance of Transcendence

Maslow describes the importance of transcendence thusly:

“Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos” (Maslow, 1971, p. 269).

According to Maslow, self-transcendence brings the individual what he termed “peak experiences” in which they transcend their own personal concerns and see from a higher perspective. These experiences often bring strong positive emotions like joy, peace, and a well-developed sense of awareness (Messerly, 2017). Someone who is highly self-transcendent may also experience “plateau experiences” in which they consistently maintain or enter a state of serenity and higher perspective (Messerly, 2017).

Maslow’s addition of self-transcendence to the pyramid is not always noted in the literature when his theory is cited, but it has managed to make its way through the research community nonetheless.

—Courtney Ackerman [What is Self-Transcendence? Definition and 6 Examples (+PDF)].

Flow, Meditation, and Intuitive Channeling: Three Modes of Self-Transcending Awareness

Flow, meditation, and intuitive channeling can be understood as related ways of stepping back from the ordinary thinking self, though each does so differently. Flow is the state in which attention becomes fully absorbed in a meaningful activity, so that action and awareness begin to move together and self-consciousness recedes. Meditation develops the capacity to rest in present awareness with less attachment to passing thought. Intuitive channeling, as Helané Wahbeh defines it, belongs in this same broad family of self-transcending experience, yet it is distinct in its emphasis on receptivity. Rather than being centered in performance or stillness alone, it is centered in the felt experience of receiving insight, guidance, or meaning through forms of knowing that seem to reach beyond ordinary mental processing.

This comparison helps clarify the relative strengths of the three modalities. Meditation is especially strong in cultivating the inner traits of steadiness, clarity, and freedom from identification with the thinking mind. Flow is especially strong in integrating the self through wholehearted engagement, where challenge, skill, and purpose are joined in a single movement of attention. Intuitive channeling, in Wahbeh’s framing, adds a third strength: attunement to a receptive mode of awareness in which intuition is not separate from channeling, but part of a larger continuum of human capacities. In this sense, meditation trains presence, flow expresses absorbed participation, and intuitive channeling opens the possibility of receptive knowing. Each represents a different way the self may become less constricted and more available to a deeper current of awareness.

Seen together, these three modalities suggest that self-transcendence is not one single achievement but a family of related human possibilities. In meditation, one learns to become quiet enough to witness thought without being confined by it. In flow, one becomes so fully gathered into a worthy activity that the usual inner commentary falls away. In intuitive channeling, one becomes open enough to receive rather than merely produce, allowing insight or meaning to emerge in a way that feels given as much as made. Each, in its own way, points toward a more spacious understanding of selfhood: not the isolated self that manages and controls everything, but the self that becomes clear, integrated, and open to participation in something greater than its usual habits of mind.

Sources: Helané Wahbeh, The Science of Channeling as summarized by the Institute of Noetic Sciences; Wahbeh’s public explanation of channeling and intuition from the Institute of Noetic Sciences and interview transcript sources; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience; recent review literature on mindfulness meditation and network neuroscience, including findings on reduced default mode network intraconnectivity following mindfulness training. 

Additional Abraham H. Maslow Quotes

“Human life will never be understood unless its highest aspirations are taken into account. Growth, self-actualization, the striving toward health, the quest for identity and autonomy, the yearning for excellence (and other ways of phrasing the striving “upward”) must by now be accepted beyond question as a widespread and perhaps universal human tendency …”

—Abraham H. Maslow [Motivation and Personality, 1954] pp.xii-xiii.

“Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.”

—Abraham Maslow [The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971] p. 269.

“Every human being has both sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother’s uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self.”

—Abraham Harold Maslow [Toward a Psychology of Being].