In his last work, published posthumously in 1971, Abraham Maslow, who had become involved in the development of Transpersonal Psychology, proposed that some self-actualisers were able to transcend their own self and experience something beyond – effectively, in Maslow’s view, creating two qualities of Self-Actualisation – the higher level he dubbed ‘Self-Transcendence’. “I have recently found it more and more useful to differentiate between two kinds (or better, degrees) of self-actualising people, those who were clearly healthy, but with little or no experiences of transcendence, and those in whom transcendent experiencing was important and even central….” (Maslow, 1971)

Although Maslow did not say so explicitly, as such, this effectively gave him an eighth level to his Hierarchy of Needs - his 1970 7-level version being a formal revision of the 1943 original 5-level model. Many in the Maslowian tradition since - eg: Henry Gleitman, Alan Fridlund & Daniel Reisberg (1999) - have depicted Self- Transcendence (or ‘Transcendence’) formally as the 8th level.

Maslow (1971) had 24 things to say about ‘Transcenders’:-

1. For transcenders, peak experiences and plateau experiences become the most important things in their lives….

2. They speak more easily, normally, naturally, and unconsciously the language of Being (B-language), the language of poets, of mystics, of seers, of profoundly religious men….

3. They perceive unitively or sacrally (ie: the sacred within the secular) or they see the sacredness in all things at the same time that they also see them at the practical, everyday D-level….

4. They are much more consciously and deliberately meta-motivated. That is, the values of Being…, eg: perfection, truth, beauty, goodness, unity, dichotomy-transcendence, B-amusement, etc, are their main or most important motivations.

5. They seem somehow to recognise each other, and to come to almost instant intimacy and mutual understanding even upon first meeting….

6. They are more responsive to beauty. This may turn out to be rather a tendency to beautify all things… or to have aesthetic responses more easily than other people do….

7. They are more holistic about the world than are the ‘healthy’ or practical self-actualisers… and such concepts as the ‘national interest’ or ‘the religion of my fathers’ or ‘different grades of people or of IQ’ either cease to exist or are easily transcended….

8. [There is] a strengthening of the self-actualiser’s natural tendency to synergy - intra-psychic, interpersonal, intra-culturally and internationally…. It is a transcendence of competitiveness, of zero-sum, of win-lose gamesmanship.

9. Of course there is more and easier transcendence of the ego, the Self, the identity.

10. Not only are such people lovable as are all of the most self-actualising people, but they are also more awe-inspiring, more ‘unearthly’, more godlike, more ‘saintly’…, more easily revered….

11. The transcenders are far more apt to be innovators, discoverers of the new, than are the healthy self-actualisers… Transcendent experiences and illuminations bring clearer vision of the B-Values, of the ideal, …of what ought to be, what actually could be, … and, therefore, of what might be brought to pass.

12. I have a vague impression that the transcenders are less ‘happy’ than the healthy ones. They can be more ecstatic, more rapturous, and experience greater heights of ‘happiness’ (a too weak word) than the happy and healthy ones. But I sometimes get the impression that they are as prone and maybe more prone to a kind of cosmic sadness or B-sadness over the stupidity of people, their self-defeat, their blindness, their cruelty to each other, their shortsightedness…. Perhaps this is a price these people have to pay for their direct seeing of the beauty of the world, of the saintly possibilities in human nature, of the non-necessity of so much of human evil, of the seemingly obvious necessities for a good world…. Any transcender could sit down and in five minutes write a recipe for peace, brotherhood, and happiness, a recipe absolutely within the bounds of practicality, absolutely attainable. And yet he sees all this not being done… No wonder he is sad or angry or impatient - at the same time that he is also ‘optimistic’ in the long run.

13. The deep conflicts over the ‘elitism’ that is inherent in any doctrine of Self-Actualisation - they are after all superior people whenever comparisons are made - is more easily solved - or at least managed - by the transcenders than by the merely healthy self-actualisers. This is made possible because they … can sacralise everybody so much more easily. This sacredness of every person and even of every living thing, even of non-living things … is so easily and directly perceived in its reality by every transcender that he can hardly forget it for a moment.

14. My strong impression is that transcenders show more strongly a positive correlation  -rather than the more usual inverse one - between increasing knowledge and increasing mystery and awe…. For peak-experiencers and transcenders in particular, as well as for self-actualisers in general, mystery is attractive and challenging rather than frightening. … I affirm … that at the highest levels of development of humanness, knowledge is positively, rather than negatively, correlated with a sense of mystery, awe, humility, ultimate ignorance, reverence, and a sense of oblation [surrender to the Divine].

15. Transcenders, I think, should be less afraid of ‘nuts’ and ‘kooks’ than are other self-actualisers, and, thus, are more likely to be good selectors of creators (who sometimes look nutty or kooky). … To value a William Blake type takes, in principle, a greater experience with Transcendence and therefore a greater valuation of it…. A transcender should also be more able to screen out the nuts and kooks who are not creative, which I suppose includes most of them.

16. Transcenders should be more ‘reconciled with evil’ in the sense of understanding its occasional inevitability and necessity in the larger holistic sense, ie: ‘from above’, in a godlike or Olympian sense. Since this implies a better understanding of it, it should generate both a greater compassion with it and a less ambivalent and a more unyielding fight against it….

17. Transcenders … are more apt to regard themselves as carriers of talent, instruments of the transpersonal, temporary custodians so to speak of a greater intelligence or skill or leadership or efficiency. This means a certain peculiar kind of objectivity or detachment toward themselves that to non-transcenders might sound like arrogance, grandiosity or even paranoia…. Transcendence brings with it the transpersonal loss of ego.

18. Transcenders are in principle (I have no data) more apt to be profoundly ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ in either the theistic or non-theistic sense. Peak experiences and other transcendent experiences are in effect also to be seen as ‘religious or spiritual’ experiences….

19. Transcenders, I suspect, find it easier to transcend the ego, the self, the identity, to go beyond Self-Actualisation. … Perhaps we could say that the description of the healthy ones is more exhausted by describing them primarily as strong identities, people who know who they are, where they are going, what they want, what they are good for, in a word, as strong Selves… And this of course does not sufficiently describe the transcenders. They are certainly this; but they are also more than this.

20. I would suppose… that transcenders, because of their easier perception of the B-realm, would have more end experiences (of suchness) than their more practical brothers do, more of the fascinations that we see in children who get hypnotized by the colours in a puddle, or by the raindrops dripping down a windowpane, or by the smoothness of skin, or the movements of a caterpillar.

21. In theory, transcenders should be somewhat more Taoistic, and the merely healthy somewhat more pragmatic. B-cognition makes everything look more miraculous, more perfect, just as it should be. It therefore breeds less impulse to do anything to the object that is fine just as it is, less needing improvement, or intruding upon.…

22. ‘Postambivalen[ce]’. …Total wholehearted and unconflicted love, acceptance, … rather than the more usual mixture of love and hate that passes for ‘love’ or friendship or sexuality or authority or power, etc.

23. Mystics and transcenders have throughout history seemed spontaneously to prefer simplicity and to avoid luxury, privilege, honours, and possessions.…

24. I cannot resist expressing what is only a vague hunch; namely, the possibility that my transcenders seem to me somewhat more apt to be Sheldonian ectomorphs [lean, nerve-tissue dominated body-types] while my less-often-transcending self-actualisers seem more often to be mesomorphic [muscular body-types]… it is in principle easily testable.

Maslow’s description of Transcendence was based on a study of 12 people he believed possessed the qualities of Self-Transcendence. Many of the qualities were guilt for the misfortune of someone close, creativity, humility, applied intelligence, lack of prejudice and divergent thinking. They were mainly loners, had deep relationships and were very normal on the outside. Maslow estimated that only 2% of the population will ever achieve this level in their lifetime, and that it was absolutely impossible for a child to possess these traits.

It is worth noting here that Clare W Graves (1971/2002) claimed to have influenced Maslow’s acceptance of something beyond Self-Actualisation; and his descriptions of his own H-U level (TURQUOISE in Spiral Dynamics) - as far as he got in describing it - seems to fit with Maslow’s Transcendence. As regards the ‘spiritual’ nature of much of Maslow’s description, he had spent much of the late 1960s exploring spirituality from a psychological perspective; so it is perhaps unsurprising that there is a considerable element of this in his last works. However, Graves reputedly was not interested in ‘spiritual things’ - yet he still acknowledges this quality in H-U: ‘They’re beginning to think in a way that intuition, subjectivism plays a great deal more in their behaviour....You go into an almost mystical conception where the guy says he has a sort of *feeling* what a healthy human being is....they think in many respects in a higher order magical superstitious way....”  (Graves, 1978/2005, p396). “The H-U person can turn off other levels of consciousness at will. He can go out of this world and go off into other levels of consciousness and come back at will. Instrumentally you have that..." (Graves, 1971/2002, p67)

However, for all the talk of consciounsess and the transpersonal, Graves (1971/2002, p68)) also found some real physiological differences when H-U (Transcendence) was dominating - as measured by galvanic skin resistance: "Oh, my God, it becomes so high you can't hardly get it. I'm talking 2-3-4 standard deviations. This thing has really jumped."

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996 p290-291)), whilst acknowledging the spiritual elements of the eighth level of thinking, also emphasise a sense of planetary connectedness: “In part, a Gaia view emerges, one that centres on life itself - all forms of life (not just humans). Every person, every creature, every species belongs. The planet itself is seen as a single ecosystem. Individuals are not separated; neither are national boundaries, ethnic peculiarities, nor elitist privileges allowed to divide people destructively....There is a constant attention to more expansive implications and the unavoidability of connections among actions and actors....everything somehow connects to everything else.”

Jane Loevinger (1976) is the stages-of-development theorist whose mapping most closely matches Graves. Her eighth ‘Integrated’ level shares most of its attributes with Maslow’s Transcendence and Graves H-U. In extending his Stages of Moral Development model, Lawrence Kholberg (1986) proposed a stage of Transcendental Morality (linking spirituality with moral reasoning) which could well be seen as an output of H-U – only for it to be withdrawn in his posthumous work with Anne Colby (1987) because he didn’t feel he had enough statistically-significant evidence.

Numbers of people demonstrating this quality of thinking is a real problem in getting to grips with just what this vMEME, its needs and its outputs, is like. Maslow only studied 12 people.By the time of his aborted 1978 book, Graves confessed to having only met 6 people he genuinely considered to think in a way beyond G-T (Self-Actualisation). Maslow (1971) estimated that perhaps upto 2% of the world’s population might come to think this way. In 1996 Beck & Cowan hazarded a guess that probably less than 0.1% of the world had reached this level of thinking.