'resacralize' footnote: I have had to make up these words because the English literature is rotten for good people. It has no decent vocabulary for the virtues. Even the nice words get all smeared up - "love," for instance.
Behaviors Leading to Self-Actualization
What does one do when he self-actualizes? Does he grit his teeth and squeeze? What does self-actualization mean in terms of actual behavior, actual procedure? I shall describe eight ways in which one self-actualizes.
First, self-actualization means experiencing fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption. It means experiencing without the self-consciousness of the adolescent. At this moment of experiencing, the person is wholly and fully human. This is a self-actualizing moment. This is a moment when the self is actualizing itself. As individuals, we all experience such moments occasionally. ... The key word for this is "selflessly," and our youngsters suffer from too little selflessness and too much self-consciousness, self-awareness.
Second, let us think of life as a process of choices, one after another. At each point there is a progression choice and a regression choice. There may be a movement toward defence, toward safety, toward being afraid; but over on the other side, there is the growth choice. To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization. Self-actualization is an ongoing process; it means making each of the many single choices about whether to lie or be honest, whether to steal or not to steal at a particular point, and it means to make each of these choices as a growth choice. This is movement toward self-actualization.
...
Eighth, finding out who one is, what he is, what he likes, what he doesn't like, what is good for him and what bad, where he is going and what his mission is - opening oneself up to himself - means the exposure of psychopathology. It means identifying defences, and after defenses have been identified, it means finding the courage to give them up. This is painful because defences are erected against something which is unpleasant. But giving up the defenses is worthwhile. If the psychoanalytic literature has taught up nothing else, it has taught us that repression is not a good way of solving problems.
- Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature [ books.google.com ]
