The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

To our readers:

 

The first week of school is pivotal in sharing with students the explicit architecture of their new learning environment. So I begin each semester with a philosophical orientation founded on this quote: 

"All life is education and everybody is a teacher 

and everybody is forever a pupil." 

--Abraham Maslow

Here is the landscape: I dream that each of you will teach me something this year, something profound or a thought as simple as a quotation.

One of the reasons I've gotten smarter over the years is that I have 200 students teaching me so many important things.  While you have six teachers this semester, I have 200 of you each teaching me some thing I never knew.  Let's make the most of it!  You now know that I will become wiser because of you.

Important to me was setting into motion a properly planted seed, a thought that might grow into a theme to frame for students the passing of our time together.  

So now, I hope to continue  that tradition with you.  Though you are reading this little book, learning some of what I have learned, I too hope to learn from you.   Keep in touch.
          --Toby Manzanares

To overcome our fear of greatness, we must learn to move boldly towards our goals, while simultaneously maintaining humility in the awareness that we are all after all “human, all too human”. Or as Maslow explained:

“For some people this evasion of one’s own growth, setting low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling…are in fact defenses against grandiosity, arrogance, sinful pride, hubris. There are people who cannot manage that graceful integration between the humility and the pride which is absolutely necessary for creative work. To invent or create you must have the “arrogance of creativeness” which so many investigators have noticed. But, of course, if you have only the arrogance without the humility, then you are in fact [delusional]. You must be aware not only of the godlike possibilities within, but also of the existential human limitations….If you can be amused by the worm trying to be god, then in fact you may be able to go on trying and being arrogant without fearing [delusions of grandeur]…This is a good technique.”   -Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Abraham Maslow was a leading-edge teacher who frequently asked his students: 

“Who among you will write a great novel, or become a great leader or composer?  Generally everybody starts giggling, blushing, and squirming until I ask:  'If not you, then who else?' If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.  You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.”                               --From his book: The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

 

While Maslow's iconic actualization hierarchy is widely known, I just learned that Maslow never himself depicted his Hierarchy of Needs as a pyramid. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/who-created-maslows-iconic-pyramid/#:~:text=We%20traced%20the%20pyramid%20that,motivation%20at%20the%20lowest%20cost”.

And while this revelation is surprising, what is most interesting to me is that in 1938 Maslow spent 6 weeks living in Siksika learning the Blackfoot way of life. In this context, Maslow's work on self actualization can be reinvigorated with the Blackfoot Community Actualization as a way of life. It's time for a new biography of Abraham Maslow. It's time for Community Actualization to become the new icon for the Farther Reaches of Human Nature.