Shall All Manner Of Thing Be Well?

A disorienting feature of Abraham Maslow’s classic essay, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, is that it begins in medias res. Maslow writes about “peak-experience”—a term he coined—as if we already know what it means.

The characteristics of peak-experience are described, eventually, in Appendix A: it’s an experience of reality as an integrated whole, independent of us, universal and eternal, intrinsically and perfectly good; in peak-experience, one transcends the ego in acceptance of, and reverence for, what objectively is.

Was it in the wake of peak-experience that Maslow wrote his book, transcending the dichotomies of past and future, self and other? That might explain why he wrote it backwards, as if we already knew his mind.

Maslow’s theory is that religions flow from the peak-experience of individual mystics, suppressed and then contained by fearful “non-peakers,” the bureaucrats of organized religion. Thus, religions come to suffocate the true religious impulse—the profound …