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At first you need to dabble in things a little bit; you need to learn more about your self and what brings you joy, passion, fulfilment, ect. Once you've figured out what you love most out of life (or better yet decided on a life purpose), start to focus more on those things and eliminate the rest. You must also dedicate a lot of their time to introspect, meditate, and just Be, if you are to be happy and actualise. Also remember that the greatest joy/fulfilment comes once you are very deep into area you are actualising (requires many years of work).

Music is great. It has the power to elevate your emotions to a blissful state, and evoke energy in your body especially through dancing or singing. A sad song can allow you to accept that emotion, removing your resistance to it. Listening to music can be a very powerful form of meditation. When listening you may find all of your attention focused entirely of the rhythm, placing you wholly in the present moment, ceasing your thoughts, forcing you to forget yourself for the time being. On a related note; I'm not sure why some people on this forum are so content on labelling so many things as a 'distraction', particularly hobbies, friendships and other things which bring joy and passion. Perhaps they haven't experienced the fulfilment and bliss which can come when really actualising these things (from a Being oriented perspective). Actualisation is the easiest path to Transcendence. People will naturally tent to Transcend when fully immersed in what they love.

So in the dream beforehand I was being chased by gangstas and suddenly decided I had had enough so I started flying around, using the powers I had other the dream to defeat them (I wasn't lucid though any of this), I would use the force (like Star Wars) to throw them around and try to crush them, ect. Anyway, I find myself at my grandparents house, except there's this strange, transparent sheet of something in front of me (almost like glass), and on the other side was my grandparents drive way and there was this entity, the likes of which I have never encountered before in a dream. If you've see the Saw movies, he looked like the doll, black body and mask as a head. For some reason I want to show him whose boss, so I flash through the glass sheet (like a short ranged teleport) and grab on to him using the force and throw him around and all that, only HE has powers and control over the dream too! This was no longer MY dream, he was equally or perhaps more powerful. So when I would grab him, he would fight back using his powers and teleport us to a different scene, and so we just started battling like that. I don't remember all of it. But there was this part that I do remember. I was inside a room, and at the end of the room was a large picture frame on the wall. In frame was another room, he was in it. As I walk over to the frame, he walks backwards to the back of his room (inside the picture) where there is another frame on that wall. I flash through the picture into the other room, but as soon as I do he flashes through the picture frame of that room. This happens a few times. Then as I approach the frame, he just stands there, as if he's planning something. I try flashing through again, but when I do, this time HE flashes forward into me at the same time, knocking me back onto my room (he is still on the other side of the frame). Now the whole frame is taken up by his mask, and I get the idea that I'll just get him from in here. So I grab a hold of him with the force (through the frame) and start crushing his head. This is where my memory ends. He was no ordinary dream character. There was no back story with him, no confusing him with someone in real life. He had just at much, possibly more control over the dream that I did. It's almost as if we started battling just to show who had more power over the dream realm.

The highest form I've experienced; you realise that everything is perfect just as it is, and always has been. Nothing needs changing. You love everything and everyone as they are. You appreciate the beauty of the world and feel a strong sense of gratefulness just from existing. I have not achieved this state permanently, but if I had to choose only one state to be in I know that would be it. I don't think you would necessarily just no nothing all day, although that is certainly be a valid option, your body and mind will keep doing what they do, only now your completely neurosis-free and what you're doing will now be highly aligned with your true values. It honestly felt like I became my higher self.

-A. Maslow; Toward a Psychology of Being I believe I've had a few experiences like this before; everything felt perfect just the way it is, everything beautiful, and I had a strong love for everything and everyone. I am awed by the fact that I exist, and feel a strong sense of gratefulness for existence and all that I've experienced and can only direct it to the universe as a whole. Nothing can harm me in such a state, no neurosis existed in my mind. I could have died right then and there and I would not have minded in the slightest. It was quite an experience, it is the state I would like to be in all the time. It's as if I become my higher self. My question: Is this what you would call an "enlightenment" experience or are you guys talking about something different? Often I find it difficult to understand spiritual teachers and some people on this forum when they talk about enlightenment. It seems like they are all speaking of different things, and are often quite vague. But when I read Maslow I feel like I can understand exactly what he means, I feel like I've had experiences of much of what he describes.

What is commonly thought of as love in our society is the 'in love' experience or infatuation. It is very different from genuine love and in many aspects even opposite. The 'in love' experience is a temporary insanity designed to facilitate breeding. Some characteristics of this are: it is highly possessive/needy, neurosis develops when the need is not satisfied, it can develop for literally anybody no matter how compatible they really are, it lasts a maximum of 2 to 3 years. Real love is very different. Maslow explains it well:

I find that summaries just aren't enough to give you the full, in depth, rich understanding of the topic. A summary will leave out a lot of valuable information. You will also be relying on someone else's interpretation on the text, I believe it to be much more beneficial to read the book for your self and form your own interpretation and see how it merges with your experiences and existing knowledge. One thing I've noticed is how there is really no decent summary of the concept of self-actualisation, peak experiences, or Being-cognition. Most don't even come close. Even Leo's video don't give a full understanding. The only way I've found to gain a rich understanding of these topic has been to read Maslow's books for my self. Also reading is enjoyable.

@FindingPeace I studying neuroscience at the moment and we learnt that by measuring a persons brainwaves with EEG it shows that neurons will fire synchronously when they are asleep but not while awake. Awake EEG measurements appear almost like random firings. It says something interesting about sleep, but I don't think you can draw any conclusions about conciousness though. Perhaps we are actually concious while we sleep but just have no memory of it? We cannot know.

Depression and anxiety, yes. Although I cannot say for any other mental illness. Look up Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, it's by far the most effective treatment for depression and anxiety, much more effective than drug treatment, with a success rate of about 8/10 including severe cases. CBT basically involves replacing distorted automatic thoughts with realistic thoughts. I have had first hand experience with depression and have seen how significant of a role thoughts play in depression. Thoughts and emotions are interconnected. "Bad psychology" is accurate for this instance. Schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, on the other hand, seem a bit more complex. I don't understand much about it, but schizophrenia seems to me to be more of a malfunctioning of the brain, possibly owing to genetic factors, rather than "bad psychology". I haven't heard of anyone curing schizophrenia by fixing up their psychology, CBT is ineffective, but perhaps it's possible. The brain is highly plastic after all, its structure is constantly changing with everything you do.

We know that memory, sensory perceptions, thought, emotion, and logic are all functions of the brain. Imaging you fall asleep, into deep sleep, just after you become unconscious of you perspective you wake up as somebody else. You spend an entire day concious from someone else's perspective; their memories, their thoughts ect. Then they fall asleep, the same thing happens and you spend the day as the awareness of another person. This cycles through everyone who has existed, until finally you're back to you, the next day after you fell asleep. You have no way of knowing that you are the awareness of everybody else, no memory exists, nothing to indicate that that happened. Of cause I'm being purely hypothetical here. Whether conciousness is a function of the brain or if it exists outside of the brain, there's just no way of knowing. As for the patients with their hemispheres severed; did they have one original conciousness which slit into two? Were there two conciousnesses already present? Are there hundreds, thousands, or infinite conciousnesses in everybody? Did the original conciousness die, leaving two unconscious hemispheres? Am I the only one who is concious? Another thing; why do we only experience one moment in time? Why aren't we experiencing all of time at once? To me, it makes more sense that nothing should exist at all, let along that there is awareness of it. It's so weird that stuff exists, much more so that conciousness exists. Conciousness and existence is a really mystery to me. So many questions, so few answers.

-Maslow, in Toward a Psychology of Being Self-actualisation is much more than just improving your life circumstances, it is a profound change in your psyche, a different way of approaching life. Self-actualising people are motivated differently. They are not motivated by lack; the need to fulfil a deficiency. They are Being motivated, they do things simply because they love to. Maslow puts it much better than I could possibly hope to. Deficiency-motivation vs Being-motivation: Self-actualising people are not as much dependent on others: There are differences in their interpersonal relationships: They are more often ego-transcending: There is a difference in perception (Deficiency-perception vs Being-perception): Self-actualising people are more capable of real love: Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being is without a doubt the most important book you will read in your self-actualisation journey. Maslow goes into a lot of depth into the differences in cognition of self-actualising people. This book will give you insight into what it is means to be more fully human. Motivation_and_Personality.pdf Here (in chapters 11 to 13) Maslow gives an in-depth description of the characteristics he found self-actualising people to possess. I strongly recommend reading it now.

@Saarah @Huz88 Nature is another artificial label. Everything humans do or build is natural. There is no distinction between us and everything else. Nothing can be unnatural, the universe just is as is it.

Nope. I just love to learn about the human psyche. I love to experiment and experience altered states of perception. I love developing my own psychology to experience what is possible for a human to become. I love to observe and figure out all the different aspects of my own psychology and see how they all work and interact together. I love to read about other people's experiences and theories of the psyche and see how they integrate with my own. It just seems to be leading me down a path of self-transcendence and there's nothing I can do about it at this point.

I believe you are still able to conceptualise, the key difference is that you see concepts for what they are, merely models/abstractions, and do not confuse them for reality itself.

The original thread was deleted since it was hi-jacked, so I have reported it here. On a side note, I don't agree with the censoring of Ant/Socrates. He may have been rude/an asshole when expressing his opinions, but surely we are capable of handling that without letting our egos get offended. Conflicting opinions ought to be viewed as a good thing. They stimulate discussion, show you ideas which may not have been presented to you before, and hopeful trigger you to question your own beliefs.

Your thoughts and emotions are very interconnected. You thoughts which arise automatically. They've found that people who are depressed will constantly think distorted thoughts. This could involve constantly making negative judgements of their own character and/or of others; constantly putting themselves down, even when they only made an insignificant mistake they may greatly exaggerate the implications, they may turn a complete non-issue into a disaster though distorted thinking; ignoring the positives in themselves/others/life or even managing to turn them into negatives; it may also include a depressive or nihilistic outlook of life/existence overall. Cognitive-Behavioural therapy is the most successful treatment for depression available. It basically involves (1) noticing when an automatic distorted though appears, and (2) countering that thought with one that is realistic. Overtime (a few months or even weeks), their automatic thoughts will become much more realistic. This is an instance where changing your thoughts is highly beneficial and necessary; when they only involve unrealistic judgements. At the same time you must accept the way you are feeling completely; zero resistance to your emotions. If you have a neurosis you can take steps to solve it but you must accept that it is that you are feeling that way. You cannot repress one emotion without repressing them all. Bottling up your emotions is never a good thing, they will always be their and repression will only make them worse. You must face your neurosis head on and work to solve them legitimately, while completely accepting that they are there without providing any resistance. Depression is a case where that emotion is caused by an obvious distortion. There will be many times when feeling sad emotions is entirely legitimate and healthy, ie it is healthy to be mournful when a loved one dies or to feel remorse when you've wronged someone. Completely feeling into these emotions can be a form of healing, you may gain some insight. Emotions are often you subconscious trying to tell you something. With enough acceptance of your emotions, you will come to a stage where sad emotions are no longer perceived as being negative. You can still be happy even while feeling down.

@step1 Because they accept themselves as they are. They aware of their capabilities and their potentials. They are more focused on their own values, focused on doing what they believe they should be doing, rather than worrying about other people's or societies expectations, or what other people perceive/think of them. They simply see no need to rank themselves against others. They realise that there are people out there who are more successful than them and better at certain things, but this does not concern them because they are secure in who they are and do not need to chase external sources of validation.

Another thing about psychedelics is the potential therapeutic benefits. I find that they can often force you to view things from another perspective, which can help solve your problem psychologically or even see that it was, in fact, a complete non-issue in the first place. I also find that they can bring up repressed neurosis or other psychological problems you've been neglecting or didn't know about. This can be highly beneficial if you are 100% ready and willing to face what comes up. You may find that you solve the neurosis that evening. However, if you resist this, I find this is when you may have a bad trip. Psychedelics must be taken with complete openness to the experience and 100% non-resistance. To find the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic it must be done under the right setting, with the right mind set, and with the right intention.

There are two components to self-esteem; self-efficacy and self-acceptance. I don't agree with Eckart in the video posted above. He seems to confuse a weakened ego (which arises from low self-esteem) with healthy self-esteem. What he describes is not healthy self-esteem, but rather the opposite. Someone with healthy self-esteem is secure enough in themselves that they see no need to rank themselves against others. Nathaniel Branden studied self-esteem and found that it rested upon six pillars (which he writes about in The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem). These are: 1. The practice of living consciously 2. The practice of self-acceptance 3. The practice of self-responsibility 4. The practice of self-assertiveness 5. The practice of living purposefully 6. The practice of personal integrity I highly recommend reading his book, it will give you a much greater insight into what all these points really mean. There are a lot of misconceptions about what self-esteem really is. However, it is still important in everything you will do in your life. You must build healthy self-esteem (real self-esteem, not pseudo-self-esteem as Eckart described) if you want to live a happier and more fulfilling life. I believe that having a healthy self-esteem makes it much, much more likely to self transcend. One of the seemingly paradoxical things Maslow found while studying self-actualising people was that self-actualisation tended to naturally lead to self-transcendence. It is very hard for someone with damaged self-esteem to transcend, they are too caught up in their ego.

Ah psychedelics... There's a lot I could say about them, but I'll try to keep this brief. Personally my motivation for consuming hallucinogens has been largely out of pure interest. I'm very fascinated by the brain, conciousness and psychology. I find that psychedelics can really mess with many of your brains processing, which can really provide a lot of insight into how it all works. I particularly enjoy trying link back what I've experienced with my knowledge of neuroscience. One example would be the sheer amount of processing which goes into your visual perception of faces. There is a region of the brain in the visual cortex which is responsible for processing peoples faces. I have noticed while on a psychedelic that peoples faces can become greatly distorted, to the point where they no longer look human. I interpreted this as the drug stopping or altering the processing of faces, leaving more raw sensory input, the data is no longer being as processed to make them look more 'human'. They look much more ape-like. My own hands have looked more like monkey's paws than human hands. One thing that psychedelics can do is induce a peak experience (including the mystical experience). Often when I come down from mushrooms, everything about the world will feel perfect just the way it is. I'll feel an intense love for everything and everyone. I'll look at a rock on the ground and feel that that rock is perfect as it is. Nothing could possibly harm me when in such a state, no neurosis at all, things which I was previously trouble with will now seem like complete non-issues. I will feel like I could have died right then and it wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest. I haven't done a psychedelic for a while now, but I feel that I'm getting closer to having that state while sober (although not nearly as intensely). @Henri Your initial comments to DreamSpirit was a little judgemental. I'm detecting a bit of ego coming through your comments. A subtle type of 'my spirituality is superior to yours'. Maybe there's something here which you ought to examine. If you've never done a psychedelic you cannot possibly know what the experience is like. Many of the same things reported in the enlightenment experience are also reported in the hallucinogenic experience; feelings of oneness, egolessness, unconditional love, ect. Personally, I believe it to be preferable to accept that you do not know rather than labelling other peoples experiences as not 'spiritual'. Another thing to be mindful of is that you, along with everybody else, will have a bias when determining which teachers are genuine or what beliefs to subscribe to. Often you will only see what you want to see and disregard the rest. Your brain is very good at shaping your own reality. One of the good things about psychedelics is that by providing an experience of such an altered perception of reality they can make a person much more open to new ideas and experiences, and much more critical of their existing views. As David1 said, stay away from anyone who claims to know absolute truth.

From my interpretation, I don't think Maslow necessarily said that they didn't desire, but rather that they are motivated differently. A deficiency-motivated person will see some 'lack' they have and will be motivated to fulfil their lack, the process or journey is not important to them it is just seen more as a tool/method or an annoyance in the way getting what they desire. On the other hand a Being-motivated person simply does things because they love to be doing it, for the mere joy of it; they value the activity for its own sake. The reward is not important to them, it's the process that they love. The 'desire' for them is largely internal, rather than external. It's a bit like the difference between studying hard at school in order to win you parents respect/love/admiration/approval, or studying because you find the world interesting and wish to learn more about it. Another example would be the difference between starting person development for the external benefits like gaining more money and getting better with the opposite sex, or developing yourself because, as Maslow puts it; "growth is, in itself, a rewarding and exciting process, eg., the fulfilling yearnings and ambitions, like that of being a good doctor; the acquisition of admired skills, like playing the violin or being a good carpenter; the steady increase of understanding about people or about the universe, or about oneself; the development of creativeness in whatever field, or, most important, simply the ambition to be good human being." As an example: Personally, I have found that when you are just starting out in a new field, like learning about a new topic or getting started in a new art, you initially know so little about it that you cannot possible appreciate the full beauty of it. It is only once you are years into it that you can begin to realise just how vast the field is and get a slight idea of just how much you still don't know about it. When you're deep into mastery you will find that you are intrinsically driven to keep doing it. This drive can never be satisfied, but rather only grows greater the further you go. You find that you just can't get enough of it. It is a very pleasurably sort of desire.

Honestly, not really. I see no reason to value the way a person looks. I see nothing special about it, some people were born with right genetics others were not. Really, I see nothing intrinsically valuable in that. There are many other traits which I value highly in people, mainly concerned with their inner beauty. Also, a persons attractiveness is completely subjective and will change depending on how you perceive their inner beauty (personality, behaviour, values, ect.) I think you ought to examine why it is you are attracted to looks and feel the need to sleep with women you are emotionally and intellectually detached from. Are these really your values, or have you just adopted the values of you culture without stopping to examine them?

@Neuroticon The majority of people are insecure and neurotic regardless of their gender or attractiveness. There is just that <1% of the population who have largely sorted out their psychology and are onto self-actualisation. Haven't you ever observed the behaviour of males in that age range, they are just as neurotic and insecure, perhaps just expressed a little differently. Self-actualisation is more likely with age though, Maslow was only able to find a few (or maybe it was none?) college students who fit the description. This doesn't mean that older people are self-actualising, sadly very few people will ever reach this state (still only that <1%). I think you ought to examine why this has been your experience of women. Like attracts like, after all why would a self respecting person spend their time around neurotic individuals?

@Will Motivation and Personality.pdf chapter 12 - Love in Self-actualising People will give you a better understanding then I can. You make a very good point. We should definitely remain humble, no one can ever be superior or inferior to anyone else. I think Maslow uses 'healthy' to refer to people who have fulfilled their base need (physiological, safety, belongingness, love, and esteem) and are pursuing self-actualisation and self-transcendence needs. I guess I am just inspired by Maslow's model/description and have personally chosen it as my own path of development. But you are absolutely right! I should recognise that everyone's paths are all equally as valid and not evaluate people according to my own. Thank you for pointing it out to me.

@Will Perhaps this model could help someone at a very low stage of development, but I don't think it would be much use after that. From my own personal observations I don't this model to be particularly accurate at all, at least not among healthier people. I believe this model is rather hindering for the higher levels of development is this area, and I have only found a few people on this forum who seem to have transcended these concepts. It seems many people here are taking this model quite literally. I'm not quite sure how this was out of context. I interpreted it as them being so secure in themselves and their sexuality that they were comfortable in taking on roles which their culture has deemed to be for the opposite sex, both inside and out of the bedroom. They are comfortable in being either active or passive in love-making and they find pleasure in both, preferring not to limit themselves to only one. They have resolved the dichotomy and are nurturing both "masculine" and "feminine" traits. I think Maslow was specifically trying to say that the polarity had been transcended. In chapter 11 under the subtitle "Resolution of Dichotomies" (I'll only quote part of the text since I don't have the time right not to type it out, I highly recommend reading it for yourself): What I quoted in my first post was from chapter 12 under "Sexuality". I strongly recommend reading all of chapters 11 and 12, it is were Maslow describes the characteristics of self-actualising people, it's so inspiring.