User:MetaValuesguy/Maslow on B values

Abraham Maslow's ideas about self-fulfillment, creativity, and well-being still influence not only psychology, but also modern health care, education, managerial theory, organizational development,and even theology. However, the concept of Being values was what Maslow called his most important finding:

“Perhaps my most important finding was the discovery of what I am calling B-values or the intrinsic values of Being … this list of described characteristics of the world as it is perceived in our most perspicuous moments is about the same as what people through the ages have called the eternal verities, or the spiritual values, or the highest values, or the religious values [truth, beauty, and goodness].” ,

According to Maslow, Being values, (or what he sometimes termed B values or metavalues) drive and inspire the top one percent of the world’s achievers, people Dr. Maslow designated as Self-Actualizers. metavalues will one day lead to an explosion of human potential that will revolutionize the world we live in and foster “A new image of man, a new image of society, a new image of nature, a new philosophy of science, a new economics, a new everything…”

Being values are a triad of core principles that Maslow believed are biologically embedded in all normal minds: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. He declared that Being values: "are perceived, not invented … They exist beyond the life of the individual. They can be conceived to be a kind of perfection. They could conceivably satisfy the human longing for certainty."

Maslow was a pragmatic scientist and a professed atheist. Abraham Maslow believed that values should not be the exclusive domain of religionists. He advocated a science of values. Yet he also grasped that metavalues transcend the disciplines of science, theology, and philosophy: “I [have] pointed out that both orthodox science and orthodox religion have been institutionalized and frozen into a mutually excluding dichotomy. This separation into Aristotelian a and not-a has been almost perfect … Every question, every answer, every method, every jurisdiction, every task has been assigned to either one or the other, with practically no overlaps. One consequence is that they are both pathologized, split into sickness, ripped apart into a crippled half-science and a crippled half-religion.”

Near the end of his life, in August of 1966, Maslow gave a lecture at the University of Main that was not published until 30 years later. In it he stated that metavalues were the most important element in the self-actualizer's psyche: “Rather, what constituted the big difference for self-actualizing people was that their activity became a channel or medium for expressing the eternal, ultimate values—the true, the good, the beautiful, the just—in everyday life … This realization astounded me. I remember rereading Plato’s Republic, in which he stated that the ultimate good involves the contemplation of the ultimate values. What was so amazing was that I had found men and women in everyday life who were embracing, actually living, these ultimate values … They could be attorneys, educators, scientists, or grocery store owners, but in a real sense, they were sages and saints.”