Psychology of Religion

Maslow's Religion, Values, And Peak Experiences

In Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences Maslow makes one primary argument, that the church is making real religious understanding impossible to achieve for most individuals. To make this argument, first Maslow describes how the church separates organized religion from inner religious experience. Maslow then shows how people exist in two states, either a deficiency or a being mode. This leads to the idea that true religious understanding exists via the peak experience, an experience that is achieved via self-actualization and the understanding of the self. Finally, Maslow links this self-actualization to organized religion, showing how the emphasis only on carrying out certain behaviors takes people away from the inner knowledge that will offer them real religious understanding.

One of the major ideas that Maslow expresses is that the church may be responsible for destroying the religious experience for the average individual. Maslow describes how the church becomes an institution of religion, basing itself not on the religious experience, but instead on sets of rules and procedures. The church separates organized religion from true inner understanding, accepting organized religion while rejecting anything that falls outside that. In doing this, the church separates two things that should not be mutually exclusive. Instead of recognizing that inner spirituality and organized religion are the two parts of religion, it accepts only organized religion, basing the religious experience only on the rules and procedures set out by the church.

While the extremely religious person is capable of recognizing that these rules and procedures are linked to the internal religious experience, the average religious person is not. Instead, the average person begins to see religion not as something internal, but as a set actions. Maslow calls these actions the behavioral components of religion, including the rituals and ceremonies associated with the church. As Maslow says, "Most people lose or forget the subjectively religious experience, and redefine Religion as a set of habits, behaviors, dogmas, forms, which at the extreme becomes entirely legalistic and bureaucratic, conventional, empty, and in the truest meaning of the word, anti-religious" (VIII). The organized religion of the church then, by rejecting the experience of religion and focusing on the behaviors of religion, reduces religion to a meaningless set of actions for most people. The church rather than providing religion to the people, actually takes it away from them, by rejecting the real inner meaning that makes a person truly religious.

Another major idea in Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences is that people experience the world in one of two states. The first mode Maslow calls the 'deficiency mode,' which is where people are motivated by a need to acquire things to meet their needs. The second mode, Maslow calls the 'being mode,' which is where people feel an inner peace and lose the need to acquire things. This second mode is where people feel complete and at peace with themselves. This higher state is characteristic of the self-actualizing individual. The advanced self-actualizer has peak experiences, profound experiences that reaffirm their state of completeness. Maslow describes this experience saying, "the peak experience is felt as a self-validating, self-justifying moment which carries its own intrinsic value with it. It is felt to be a highly valuable - even uniquely valuable - experience, so great an experience sometimes that even to attempt to justify it takes away from its dignity and worth" (62). Maslow recognizes the powerful nature of these experiences, as not only reaffirming the existence of God, but reaffirming the value of life:

my feeling is that if it were never to happen again, the power of the experience could permanently affect the attitude toward life... It is my strong suspicion that even one such experience might be able to prevent suicide, for instance, and perhaps many varieties of slow self-destruction, e.g., alcoholism, drug-addiction, addiction to violence, etc. I would guess also, on theoretical grounds, that peak-experiences might very well abort "existential meaninglessness," states of valuelessness, etc." (76).

The peak experience then, offers people what they seek through religion, the powerful belief in something greater, in the value of life and a sense of peace and contentment.

Maslow's third important idea is that these peak experiences do not occur through either ritual or supposed higher-order actions. Instead, Maslow argues that they can be triggered by anything. Some examples Maslow give include being with nature, listening to music, being with friends, essentially, by any of the ordinary moments of life. The first thing this means is that these peak experiences are available to everyone. They do not require a great commitment to the church, nor any particular actions that either a church or another group may require. Instead, the peak experience is a state of mind that can be achieved by anyone at any point in time. With Maslow's focus on the power of the peak experience, this also means that the beliefs of religion can be experienced by anyone and does not require a belief in religion first. Essentially, the peace that is part of religion is achieved through a higher state of mind. Not higher in regards to awareness of religion, but higher in regards to awareness of self. This individual awareness results in the peak experience, with the experience granted to anyone that reaches that higher state of mind, no matter how they achieve this state of mind.