I know that many of you have studied psychology to some extent, so you’ve probably run across “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”.

To explain briefly, this theory identifies priorities of needs in human psychology. The most basic, primal and important is physiological (body) — basic needs, such as food and air. From there, it progresses up through safety, love/belonging, esteem and culminates in self-actualisation.

I would describe the first two needs — physiological and safety — as the needs based on our physical survival. When one’s own survival is at stake, then these are the needs that dominate such a person’s minds. And logically so.

For most individuals and groups in our early history this was very much they way things worked. We created many codes of conduct — cultural customs and religious rituals, to ensure the physical survival of tribes. Relationships for example, there have been almost countless variety of relationships over the millennia.  Let’s look at the idea of polygamy, it could be seen as a system designed to serve a society’s best interest for survival. A man would take multiple wives in most cases, to ensure that the tribe had the best chance of survival and increased prosperity, by increasing the number of offspring. Because men fought wars and hunted dangerous prey, they often died much younger than women, so this made perfect sense at the time.  The number one assets of a tribe are its human resources, (in it's true sense) and polygamy was a good system for meeting that need when males were scarce.

When these "traditional" systems were developed, our  needs where very different to our present needs.  We live in so called "developed" societies where our physical survival is rarely a major concern.  Realistically (ignore the flood of fear mongering from vested interests here) I find that the third or fourth level (on Maslow's chart) love/belonging and esteem/self-trust, are the challenges most people struggle with throughout their lives. I think of these needs, as needs for our psychological survival.

Ok, that’s a lot to get our heads around, so have a break here and let it all settle in.

Simply looking after our physical needs does nothing towards meeting our psychological needs because they are so very, very different, in fact worlds apart.  of course, meeting our needs for physical survival, does affect our psychological survival needs. Our body needs to survive and be well for us to be able focus on our next level of needs. The trap is, when we focus exclusively on our physical we inhibit the development of a balanced, well-rounded psyche.

Let’s go back to our "traditional society for a moment. Imagine living in a tribe of hunter-gatherers where your role is defined strictly in line with your gender, physical attributes, and the family you are born into. You spend your years working away at your allotted, mundane and repetitive tasks, bear children in arranged marriages, because it meets the needs of the tribe.  Your place in society is secure as long as you remain useful to the survival needs of the tribe as a whole.  In terms of what you spend your life doing, your interests, gifts and talents are only considered as long as they are useful to the tribe.

Not really an environment for realising your full potential, is it?

You would be right to expect that in the 21st century these sorts of customs and rituals and other codes of conduct would have pretty much disappeared from "developed" societies. And yes, pretty much they have, at least superficially. But what do we find in we look just below the surface.

e find in fact, that they still have a much tighter grip on our society than we’d like to think.

Now, let’s jump forward a few thousand years for another example.  Henry Ford provided a great service to society when he introduced assembly line into the manufacturing process.  I'm sure he didn't intend it to be a disservice to humanity, it was efficient and very profitable but it was a system centred on the needs of the group or tribe rather than the needs of the individual.

To work on a "line", one becomes a specialist, a cog in the wheel, performing the same repetitive task day after day. Is this going to meet a person’s need for love/belonging or esteem/self-trust?  I think not.  I'm not saying that everyone who works on the line is a thoughtless automaton; in fact the social network in those situations can help to meet one's needs for love/belonging or esteem/self-trust. But not the actual activity, not the work itself.

After the initial period of learning to do the work at the required speed and quality it offers no stimulation. Any incentive for true growth and expansion of one’s capacity is curtailed, and there is little room for deviation from the process. Simply put, it creates material prosperity for the tribe by meeting nothing but material needs of its members, and it ignores its psychological survival. This process can be dangerous to one’s psychological prosperity, because such a system is simply dehumanising. It sacrifices higher-level in order to meet lower-level needs.

Many so-called "developed" countries are trying to cope with issues like overwork, exhaustion, depression and suicide and drug /alcohol dependence in older people.  As members of a modern society, our physical survival is pretty much a given (in Australia anyway), and still the old way of "collective-survival-first" priority is dominating.  This collective-survival-first priority is preventing individuals from meeting there higher needs. This is one cause, perhaps the main cause of imbalance — though physical/material needs are met, the emotional-spiritual-intellectual ones are not, and it results in lower drive to live. Really live.

While people might be fighting for their physical survival they don’t kill themselves. At that level, they are not concerned for or are not aware of their psychological needs. But once physical survival is assured, attention turns to the welfare of their minds.

Because their lives seem to be not quite as repetitive, it's likely that  bells are ringing yet for so called "white collar" workers.  Yet for these people the traps are the same.  Everyone is busy carving out their niche, their own specialisation.  Specialists are much more in demand than generalists.  All it means is that each person spends their day performing a narrow range of rigidly defined tasks, wearing a white collar.  More of those same tasks offer very little in the way of stimulation or incentive for growth.  We're forever reducing ourselves to smaller and shallower versions of ourselves, just to get by.

Let try looking at something else, school.  We have developed a well-oiled, efficient education system, but to what end? We expect, even demand, that the education system takes children and turns them into functional and useful members of the society.  Or, put another way we expect schools to make children "useful to the society".

Most of us subscribe to the idea that every child is different, unique even.  We generally believe that he or she has different needs, different learning styles, etc, etc - the differences are as many as the number of kids out there.

If only most of that is true, why do we insist on trying to cram them through a system that teaches them in such uniform way. We expect them to ingest the same information using the same curricula so we can judge them based on how well they retain that information using that one approach/teaching method.  Then we have the gall to label as “problematic” or “learning disabled” any individual child fails to memorise the information using any particular method employed by schools at the time.

This is a good system, not perfect, but it is efficient and convenient for churning out little cogs guaranteed to spin on one direction for the rest of their lives. It’s easier to turn them into little specialists, rather than prepare them to fully experience self-actualisation. We teach them that our collective physical survival is our first priority.

What do we expect, when we don’t know any better ourselves? How can we prepare our children for self-actualisation when we don't actually know what it is?  We’ve never experienced what it’s like to have a society where most individuals achieve self-actualisation?

So we’re stuck, recreating systems that, no matter the individual costs, ensure our collective physical survival.

Now, for the first time in history, large numbers of the human population on this planet are able to look beyond mere survival. To actually flourish and grow in every aspect of who they really are.  We humans are able at last, to fully realise the potential of what we as human beings are capable of.

But we’ve never achieved that state on societal level.

We’re anchored to a state of distrust, having to maintain systems that ensure everyone becomes and remains “useful” to society by inhibiting their individuality.

Small wonder so few actually rise to fulfil our highest and most mature need for self-actualization.  Our society hasn’t evolution that far, yet.

Don't get me wrong, I’m suggesting we all ignore our needs of physical well-being, both as individuals and as communities. For larger societies to function well, many systems are necessary even vital.

As we create communities and whole societies in which every individual is empowered to realise their full potential, many of the old “enforcement” mechanisms become obsolete and recede for collective memory.

Let’s think about that for a few moments.If you click on the image below, you’ll see a slightly different version of Maslow’s original model.  It shows what happens when we eventually attain self-actualisation. By Self-Actualising we become transcendent and, we gain the ability to help others Self-Actualise.  Now it seems to me that is far me use to society than being just another cog in the wheel. OK, lets move on again.

What label we give to this state seems to depend on which side of the street you walk on, some call it Self-Actualisation, others call it Peak Performance. It is also described as a state of euphoric joy.

When that state is achieved consistently and regularly, the triggers that drive people to rob a bank, plan a terrorist attack, take out their anger on their children are no longer removed. You just simply don’t "feel" the need. Your "feelings" of abundance and generosity are such that the natural outpourings of your happiness drive you to do something that is good for a greater group of people beyond yourself.  You begin to see the possibility of working for "something bigger than yourself, outside of yourself".  And that is the beginning of real acceleration in your growth.

So, the really big question is;”how do you create a society where every individual can experience this?”

This is the question those of us who are on that path will have to wrestle with. I’ll be writing more articles on this in an on-going basis. This is part of the reason I started this started this website.  It's also the reason I run the programs seminars I do.

It is safe to say however, that we do need a fundamental paradigm shift as a society. Instead of being bound by a belief system that motivates us material gain and collective physical survival, we have to switch to a system where individual self-actualisation is the main goal.

Living comfortably can’t be confined to a privileged few, it must be a fundamental human right for all, so that we are free to explore the deeper reaches into our own potential, instead of toiling away at earning our right to live.

Good examples of how to do this are difficult to find, one I did read was from Deepak Chopra.  He pushed this concept a long way when he told his children not to worry about having to earn a living. He told them that I, the parent, will pay for your expenses for as long as you need me to. What he urged his children to do instead, was to work at finding what they wanted to do with their lives, and then to pursue it without worrying about whether it would make enough money to sustain them or not.

His children became very successful in their own right.

With the higher needs taken care of, the lower needs are not only met also, but they leave the circle of concern — they don’t even enter one’s mind.

So what, you might say. Why all these words about what’s wrong with the society? Well, it helps to understand where the challenges, or the opposition, are coming from, the reason why, until now, it’s been hard for people to realise their full potential.  And, it is because society is not particularly well set up to allow or encourage that.

Even if society does seem to be in opposition, self-actualisation is still a very possible and worthy goal. The fact that it is so challenging, is reason to begin the journey.  I've always loved the phrase -"I am the essence of the reality I encounter"-. All change in an inside job, it must begin with self, each of us needs to focus on our own self-actualisation.  When enough of us are in motion towards that goal, the few will become a flood and that I believe, produce a profound change in the world.  Each and every human being will experience the fulfilment of the promises they were born with.

While that maybe an idealistic, ultimate goal, we all have to keep our destination in mind.  For me it’s only the intro to the story.  The big story is in the journey.