Actualizing
By Bob Barzan
In the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Abraham
Maslow was watching a parade of citizens marching to patriotic tunes.
Deeply moved, he resolved at that moment to explore a “psychology of the
peace table”, to discover the best and loftiest ideals and
possibilities of the human species. It was clear to him that to learn
about the complete and authentic individual he had to study men and
women that were remarkably healthy. He offered this analogy for what he
was to do.
“If we want to know how fast human beings can run, we don’t study a
runner with a broken ankle or a mediocre runner. Instead, we study the
Olympic gold medal winner, the best there is. Only in that way can we
find out how fast human beings can run. Similarly, only by studying the
healthiest personalities can we find out how far we can stretch and
develop our capacities.”
This new perspective, a focus on health and thriving, and the best that
we are rather than the common focus on illness and surviving, gave
birth to a new school of psychology that came to be known as
“humanistic”. This perspective, in turn, became popular through the
human potential movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Psychotheorists gave
different names to this healthy life. Maslow called it the actualized
life, Karl Jung, the individuated life, and Carl Rogers the fully
functioning life, but what they described are individuals with very
similar characteristics.
Healthy individuals are men and women who are, first of all, authentic.
They do not try to live lives denying who they are in order to please
society or others, but rather they live lives that are true or faithful
to their inner callings. And here a distinction was made between a
person’s true inner self and a superficial self. Second, these people
excel, or strive to excel in the virtues that make it possible for us to
live together harmoniously; love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness,
joy, courage, patience, truth, peace, tolerance, generosity, and other
similar virtues. The presence of these two characteristics, authenticity
and what I call healthy spiritual virtues became for me indicators of
what it means to be a healthy man or woman and they became the bases for
my definition of spirituality.
For more than twenty years I’ve been aware that most people make at
least one false assumption in the area of spirituality. Most people
assume that all things having to do with spirituality, and they usually
mean religion, are good and beyond judgment or evaluation. As I
reflected on my own life, on my own coming out as a gay man, and on my
experience of eleven years as a Jesuit, it became clear to me that
spirituality and religion are not the same; rather religion is just one
of many spiritual paths. More importantly I saw that some spiritual
paths, including many religions, are not helping people live actualized,
fully functioning, in other words healthy, lives, but making them sick
or unhealthy. Instead of helping them live authentic lives characterized
by healthy spiritual virtues, some spiritual paths encourage hate,
greed, revenge, intolerance, and all the characteristics that make it
impossible for people to live together in peace.
Like many gay men, I had tried to live in a society that made me
suppress my own sexuality, my own identity. It was a society that
deceived me, and told me that being gay is bad, unnatural, a sin. It was
a society that encouraged me to be alienated from my self, and so was
in violation of the first principle of healthy living, authenticity.
Right from the beginning I was living a lie, truth had been sacrificed
for some other priority, and I was expected to build a healthy
spirituality on this false foundation. I realized that a spiritual path
that had me denying the truth, especially about myself, may bring me all
sorts of “benefits” like acceptance, security, position, and power, but
it wasn’t life giving, it was making me sick.
Several years ago a wonderful story circulated in San Francisco about
the opening of a new Zen center. A distinguished straight Zen master
addressed the assembly of mostly gay Zen practitioners. Everyone
expected he would give a typical dedication address, saying nothing of
consequence. He astounded everyone, however, by proclaiming that unless
you are out of the closet you are not practicing Zen. These are amazing,
insightful, and rare words from a religious leader. But in these words
he confirms what Maslow and others discovered years ago; the importance
of authenticity for a healthy life. A healthy spirituality then is
really about two major concerns; authenticity and the development of
life giving spiritual virtues. An unhealthy spirituality is the
opposite.
There is a tendency in our society to compartmentalize our lives so
that spirituality has little or nothing to do with how we live
day-to-day. Spirituality, however, is not something we do only when we
are meditating, analyzing our dreams, or worshiping on any given day.
Our spirituality is our whole way of life and that includes our
sexuality, our play, how we make our money, how we spend our money, how
we use our time, drive a car, make decisions, and how we treat people
every day. Everything that is part of our life is part of our
spirituality whether we are conscious of it or not. And everything we do
can either help us live more authentically, help us develop healthy
spiritual virtues, or it can do the opposite.
Over the years I have learned to discern when I am on or off a healthy
spiritual track by watching the results of my decisions, my attitudes,
and way of living. A healthy spiritual life manifests itself differently
in every individual, but in general you can recognize it because you
will see an increase in love, compassion, generosity, kindness, courage,
patience, and an ability to live harmoniously with other people and all
of nature.
Bob Barzan lives in Modesto, California where he created the Modesto Museum of Art.
