Searching for Fire

A man once searched for fire with a lighted lantern in his hand.  Had he known what fire was, he could have cooked his rice much sooner.

– Old Zen Proverb

In a recent article, we explored a concept known as “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Psychologist, Abraham Maslow, believed that all humans are constantly striving to ascend up a hierarchy of desires, which begins with our need for security, then includes our desire for community and belonging, before we can finally achieve a higher state he called self-actualization. According to Maslow, we all yearn to reach this highest level of being, where we can be the person we want to be, living the life we want to live.

The journey towards self-actualization is not easy and can present various roadblocks. The first and most formidable one is Maslow’s lowest level – the need for security. Another recent post explored the psychology of this pursuit of security. In my latest piece, we explored Maslow’s next stage: the need for community and belonging.

This time, we will address the final, and most complex stage in Maslow’s hierarchy: the quest for self-actualization.

In my conversations with successful clients about what is important to them, it is common for the discussion to begin with a description of the various financial goals and objectives they want to accomplish so they can feel financially secure. As we continue to talk about what is important about security, it is also very common to hear clients articulate the various ways in which they hope to expand their personal relationships and sense of connection with others once they reach a state of financial independence. Finally, the conversation begins to trend to topics that imply a journey to self-actualization, such as accomplishment, contentment, fulfillment, enlightenment, inner peace, and spiritual attainment.

The concept of self-actualization is a tough topic to tackle because most people have their own unique definition of what it means to be enlightened or spiritually fulfilled – and opinions certainly differ on how one can achieve this state of being.

Dependence is when one person relies on another to get their needs met to be okay. Financially speaking, this is a state of being in which there is no security – we are at the mercy of other people for our daily needs. It is no surprise that most clients will insist that their one most important goal is that they cannot tolerate the idea of being financially dependent on their children or the government in their retirement and old age.

Independence is when a person relies on themself instead of others to get their needs met and to be okay. As we transition from dependence to independence, we learn to know ourselves well enough to distinguish ourselves from others — to learn what our desires are and what desires belong to others. We construct an idea of ourselves as an independent, separate-ego self who acts as a rugged individualist. This executive self wants to feel in charge of our own destiny and believes we have a whole set of skills and capabilities to act on the world and other people to get what we want. Very often, what we most want is security, and very often, that means we want to be “financially independent.”

Independence is the stepping stone between dependence and interdependence.

To Abraham Maslow, self-actualization was defined as the ability to become the best version of oneself.  He was quoted as saying that “This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” According to Maslow, self-actualizers all share the ability to achieve peak experiences, or moments of joy and transcendence.

Of course, we all hold different values, desires, and capacities. As a result, self-actualization will manifest itself differently in different people.

However, I have found that there is one thing in common among most spiritual traditions. This commonality, to some extent, is an important source of real durable well-being and contentment. It has to do with Maslow’s depiction of our constant quest to fulfill our desires.

Maslow’s primary insight was his observation that “man is a wanting animal and rarely reaches a state of complete satisfaction except for a short time. As one desire is satisfied, another pops up to take its place.” In his view, the fundamental truth of the human condition is that we are all in a constant quest to fulfill our desires, and that this quest is perpetual, because our minds are always constructing new goals and desires.  As soon as we achieve something we thought we wanted, we experience a brief period of satisfaction, until along comes a new set of desires that will require effort and striving to achieve. We are constantly seeking to put the worldly conditions in place, so that we can finally become happy.

However, it is also interesting that Maslow expressed this insight in the form of a hierarchy of needs, which is typically depicted as a pyramid shape, with the need for security at the bottom, the need for community and belonging in the middle, and self-actualization at the top. By using the visual of a pyramid, which has a finite “top,” Maslow seems to imply that there is in fact a place, which he calls self-actualization, where there are no further rungs on the pyramid we need to climb, and nothing more that we “want.” We have reached the summit of our human existence and achieved a sense of durable well-being and contentment that comes along with finally not wanting anything more than we already have.

So, the question that begs an answer remains:

“Do we cease our conditioned habit of always “wanting more” because we have become self actualized?”

Or is it the other way around?

“Do we become self actualized, fulfilled, and content because we have finally learned to cease being slaves to our desires?”

I believe it is the latter.

Continuing our pyramid analogy, the stages of development prior to self-actualization represent the constant struggle and striving to climb higher and satisfy our ever-present craving for more. These stages are fundamentally unsatisfactory, because there is always more we want – more money and possessions, better relationships, better experiences – and we cannot be satisfied and content until we achieve that “more” that we crave. It is the very pursuit of our desires, and the fact of being governed by our constant wants, that causes us to feel our present condition is unsatisfactory.

Self-actualization is a state of mind where our happiness and well-being are no longer being held hostage to the unmet demands of our desires, and we can achieve true contentment independent from the worldly conditions we think we need to be happy. We can be happy before anything happens, not because it happened. This kind of contentment cannot possibly be achieved through the satisfaction of our worldly desires – it will not come to us via more money, more possessions, better relationships, or even better experiences. As satisfying as these things may be, they are always not quite good enough. No matter which of these desires are satisfied in our lives, our mind will immediately tell us that there is something more that we crave in order to be happy.

Our efforts to become happy through the fulfillment of our desires are like the search for fire in the Zen proverb above. Our attention is constantly drawn to the fire that is “out there” – some new and much better set of conditions that we must strive for in order to be happy – and the search for that fire is the very thing that distracts us from seeing the lantern in our hand. But one cannot become happy, we can only be happy. Happiness cannot be found out there; it can only be experienced right here and now – just by being happy, no matter what conditions are arising in our lives.

The lantern of happiness is already in your hand; all you need to do to see that is stop being distracted by your search for fire.