← Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Soul Sessions with Creative Mind with Deborah Burndt Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of CreativeMind. Join us each week for an inspiring conversation about personal development based on Jungian philosophy, Eastern spirituality, and social neuroscience. Spend each week with us to explore deep topics in a practical way. Let's begin.
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B
Hello. Welcome to our next episode of Soul Sessions. I am Deborah Maldonado.
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C
And I'm Dr. Rob.
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B
And we are here to finalize our series on emotions. And today we are talking about peak experiences. We'll talk about Maslow and how he talked about them in his 1964 book. And then also, what does that mean for you and your life? And you could start thinking about some peak experiences you had as you're thinking of them. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast. If you are listening to us on one of the podcast services or if you're watching us on YouTube on the video version, please click the link in the corner and make sure you subscribe to our channel. All right. So, Rob, what are peak experiences?
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C
I know.
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B
Well, is it climbing to the top of the mountain and going, yay?
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C
That's what it's about, right? Jumping up and down? No. Yeah. So let's talk about Maslow so we can get a kind of a background on him. So he's considered a humanistic psychologist. Humanistic psychologists were very much into kind of moving beyond the traditional psychoanalysis of the time and also beyond the behaviorism of the time, which was very. These two opposing camps at each other's throats kind of. And the humanistic psychologists, for a while, they were called the third force, because here was something different. They weren't behaviorists and they weren't psychoanalyst. They were something different.
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B
And they really didn't work with the unconscious. Right. They were more kind of human experiences on a conscious level.
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C
That's a good question. There. There was a few people that were into transcendental kind of psychology and existential questions. So they delved into it in their own way. Not the. Not the traditional psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung. In other words, they were deep. They weren't just on the surface, like the. Like the behaviorists.
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B
The behaviorists just motivate yourself.
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C
Yeah, exactly. They were. They were deep. They. They. They brought all the. The power of philosophy and the power of literature into the mix to say, we're human beings, you know, and like the. Like the renaissance is that we as human beings, it's up to us to make our destiny on the planet.
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B
Would you say, like, his idea? Well, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is there's layers of, you know, survival and then the needs to, you know, have a family and the needs to be belong in a community. And then the highest is self actualization. He's the one who came up with that term or coined that term. And so it is sort of a spiritual psychology too. Because humans have spiritual religious tendencies.
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C
Yes, it was very much like a humanistic spirituality. So it, it didn't point to a deity somewhere else. It pointed to human beings in their, their capacity to be compassionate towards each other, to generate love and alternative kind.
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B
Of like higher states kind of thing.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And so I want to describe the peak experience as the definition. They're rare, intense moments of heightened awareness, unity and joy. Times when individuals feel fully alive and at one with themselves, others and the universe. They're characterized with feelings of awe, timelessness, loss of ego boundaries and a profound sense of meaning. And they could consider them the moments of the highest happiness and fulfillment integral to his vision of self actualization. So those. That's a term. So if you had that experience. Most of us had, had a peak experience in our life, even if we didn't know it at the time, what it was. That moment where time stops and you feel this sense of oneness, your egos, it's not about you. It's something greater than you. It's like a transpersonal experience.
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C
Absolutely. And they're, they're indescribable, essentially. You know, we can't really do them justice. Like I always remember that movie Contact, where she gets to travel in this interdimensional machine of some kind. And she says they should have sent a poet because I can't describe any of this. You know, it's just beyond words. It's so beautiful and transcendent that, you know, you can't, you can't really put words to it. But yeah, we all kind of know what it means. It's. It's this ability, this like you say, time stands still, or you have a flash of insight about yourself and your purpose in life, or you feel connected to nature in profound, mysterious ways. That's why a lot of people are seeking ayahuasca and psychedelics because it gives them a chance at those peak experiences. It's not guaranteed. Right. But it gives them a chance to. At those peak experiences.
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B
But we can have them naturally, without intervention or.
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C
Yeah, of course, you think about love, women talk about their, their having a child or that, that experience of holding the baby in their hands. All those are peak Experiences.
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B
And so why do they matter for us to have them? What is the reason why we should pay attention to this for our own growth?
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C
Yeah.
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B
Instead of just waiting for them to happen, I'm like, oh, that's. That was a peak experience. Okay. Go back to work on Monday.
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C
I know. It seems to reset the mind and put it in its. In its rightful place, almost like its natural state.
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B
I know Swami Tiananda, one of our guru guys in Vedanta, he talks about the natural mind being that natural mind of bliss and that what we experience is an unnatural mind. And most of the time that anxiety and stress and busyness and there's the natural mind that is always there, just present, but we can't access it because everything else is so noisy.
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C
Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's becoming more, or it appears anyway to me to be more rare these days that human beings experience this connection with the universe, with nature, with each other, because of the nature of our societies. We're highly technical, a high, highly technological society that values material and values material wealth above almost everything. Which is strange. Right.
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B
But, well, I keep looking for that money to get that peak experience. I'll go on that really expensive vacation. I'll go travel to these mystical places in the five star hotels or try to force it to happen, like seeking it in a way. I think the more you seek it, the less you have an opportunity to actually experience it.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Because they're looking for it in things out there or even an experience out there. It's more of a presence with yourself.
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C
Yeah. And we can see the disconnect with nature just by the statistics. Right. Of how most people live in cities. Most people don't go out to other countries or camping or hiking and all that stuff, on and on. But the personal experience, of course, of our individual lives is full of these potentially peak experiences that we can tap into, that we can start to pay attention to and say, how can I, how can I take this to the next level? I always tell people, okay, so if you're studying yoga, for example, that's a profound study. It goes back thousands of years and has deep philosophical roots. Take it to the next level in any way you can. Right. Just go to the next step. What is it? Learning meditation, learning pranayama, learning new techniques, traveling to India, whatever it is, follow that right until it gives you its peak experience.
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B
I remember well when I coach people, when I did a lot of private coaching, I still do this with our students and the groups is I asked them a lot of the People I worked with, one on one, what was a happy time in your life? I would try to anchor it in with a visual and like emotion, anchoring that feeling in. And what was really interesting, you know, thousands of people I work with and I would say the three peak experiences that people shared were, number one, the birth of their child and holding that baby in the arm. So for women, that was like the big thing. And then for men, actually was their wedding day. A lot of the men said their wedding day or when they wanted, you know, trophy or something with some kind of sports winning. I don't know trophy. I don't know what. How to explain it. And then. And then also just being in nature, I think that's like when I go to the lake, when I go into the mountains. When I was in Colorado, every. When I go on this one hike and I get to this one point and it's just this beautiful scene that just takes your breath away. There is actually one. There's two places in Colorado and Denver that. Going over the hill into Boulder and you're going up that hill and down into Boulder on. I think that's not I25, but that Route 36, I think it is. And you see the mountain range and it's just this beautiful. The Flatirons. It's just like. It is one of those incredible views. And then the other one, when you're going over the Continental Divide and you're just like seeing that on that highway on. I can't remember the name of the highways over there anymore, but that. Those big like. Wow. Like connecting with nature and being in awe of the magnificence of this beautiful planet that we're on. Those moments can be really powerful too.
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C
Yeah. Yeah.
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B
It's kind of like connecting to. To this. To a deeper our soul or God or the higher self or the higher power within us when we have those experiences.
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C
Yeah, nature is definitely. I always think of when. When I was younger, I traveled through Mexico and South America a lot and I got to meet a lot of native people. And it became clear to me that when we left nature, we gave up something amazing that we don't even remember what we gave up. It was because being in. In those natural worlds, in that frame of mind of being connected to. To the Earth, it's something indescribable. You. It's something very much alive that people don't experience anymore. It's not the same to go camping or to go hiking than to be living in kind of that connection to nature so closely so it's all like a cultural experience. Yeah. It reveals something that you can't get in the city. Right. And you can't get through drugs and you can't get through pleasure. It's something so, so private that it reveals to you as an individual when you are there. It's one of those peak experiences.
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A
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B
And I think if you're like a leader or you do retreats and you want to create those experiences, you can't force it. You have to basically allow it to come when it comes. And if you try to plan it out or do these rituals and then kind of it stimulate their imagination sometimes it, it, it's not as the same as it spontaneously showing up at different times. Sometimes too when you're in doing groups and to allow the person to have that experience going. We have clients sometimes on our retreats and they'll go in and go do a hike in the morning and that's their peak experience is just thinking of everything they learned and then they see this beautiful bird or an eagle fly by and the, you know, there it is. So it's about not forcing it, but being open to remember it. And I know for me, when I do have those peak experiences, I hold the moment. If you can hold it and just be present and just be thinking. I remember there's certain times where I said I'm going to remember this moment for the rest of my life. I'm going to remember this time. And you want to hang onto it, but then it goes away. But to be almost like helping you remember and anchoring it in while you're having it.
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C
Yeah. So why do peak experiences matter for growth? Let's see expansion of perception. It changes your perception. In other words, it changes the way you see yourself, the way you see the world. And it stays with you. Like, like you say, right. It, it's something that rewires your brain. You Know, it totally rewires your brain for, for good. You're, you're, you're a different person at the end of the experience than you were before.
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B
Well, it's like Jung says, you experience the other than yourself experiencing you. You get to be like almost out of body in a way. In those experiences you get to have an expanded view. Like you said, it can dissolve the.
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C
Inner conflict and reconnect us with wholeness, offering insight into the deeper self. The self with capital S. Right, That, I mean, that is really, if you think about what was the purpose of meditation or what is the purpose of meditation? Yoga. What is the purpose of medicinal plants and ritualistic psychedelic plants? It is for this transcendent integration that reveals the self to you in a very direct way. That's why it's, that's why people seek it out and have continued to seek it out. There is one theory in biology, this is an obscure one, goes back to the 60s, but it's the idea that we as apes started to experiment with hallucinogenic plants and the plants begin to teach us through those peak experiences and transformed our mind. And therefore we're, we're the, the apes that, that the naked apes with psychedelics. We like to transform our minds with these medicinal plants.
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B
And if you think about it, human race has been around for millions of years and we evolved over so many, so many decades of experiences and stages of evolution. And often it's the basis of the foundations for the indigenous, the tribal that really give us the best healing because it's like the truth was always there. And I think as modern humans have gone further and further away from our natural self, our instinctual nature, our intuition, our mystical and imagination, now we're letting AI write stuff for us and come up with ideas versus us using our brain and being imaginative or being inspired. So these peak experiences can be a turning point in people's lives that you can't really manufacture with technology. So how do we do this? How do we have more peak experiences? Like I talked about earlier, you don't want to force it. Like, I'm going to have a peak experience today. I'm going to follow five steps to have a peak experience. I think, well, for me the best thing you can do to have a peak experience is to study like, who you are and ask the questions of life and, and be curious about life in general. And like we talked about in the last episode about anxiety to be or open to when things come. And I think having that kind of flexibility in life brings in More. More space for us to have those experiences versus that hyper control that most of us have in the modern world.
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C
Yes. I mean, one of the reasons we follow the wisdom tradition of the Upanishads is because they appear to be like the oldest manual for consciousness that human beings produced. The oldest manual for consciousness or understanding our own consciousness that human beings ever developed or produced. And they might be older ones, but they weren't written down or we don't have access to them. And so this. The instructions that they give are so clear on the idea that we are not perceiving reality as it is through our senses. We can't. It's. They're not. Our senses are not designed for that. And we know there's good neuroscientific evidence now that that's true. Our senses are not designed to give us a direct experience of the truth. They're designed simply for survival in a multicolored world. Right. But the Upanishads insist that there is a way to perceive the truth and to experience it directly for yourself. Clearly directly for yourself. Not through a teacher, not through some kind of medium, but direct experience of reality, the absolute reality.
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B
And what is that, Dr. Ron?
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C
Well, the absolute real.
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B
Tell us your secret.
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C
It is you. Like, if you ask me, who is Debbie? How. How is she able to live her life? It's the self in you.
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B
I love the idea, like you had said once, that just be in awe that you're in this. You're on this rock, flailing through space, clinging to this rock. You are conscious of your experience. You're able to create things in your life, have this life with all the ups and downs. Instead of looking to escape the world, it's finding it in the world without being attached. That's the caveat.
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C
Yeah, that's right. Because the. The Upanishads are very clear also on stages of growth, that they don't expect you to just get rid of your delusions, you know, just because you want to. That it's a practice and that it's a process of going through these stages. And what. In the beginning. It begins with this idea of Maya, meaning that you're. You're experiencing a hallucination, a type of your own projection kind of thing. Later on, it becomes that. But that hallucination itself is an expression of the self. Therefore, it is the self. So it ends up that the hallucination of our world is actually looking directly at the self when you see it, when you see it through the lens of the absolute reality.
- [20:08]
B
And I think that is what makes our Jungian coaching or our theory different than any other Jungian theories. Because we don't, you know, we don't see anything as negative or positive. It's that non. Dual experience. So when we think about the shadow, I would say that's the first step someone can take. Like you said, their stages and the shadow work is really to see that everything's. You're projecting all these things that there's parts of yourself that you suppress and you ask why, you know, why am I, you know, playing, you know, with one hand tied behind my back like what's happening? And it's to reintegrate those things. And that I think it's not about judging anything as good or bad and then seeing that it's all part of this one wonderful self. And I think that many of our clients say that that was the one thing that changed for them, is that you're not broken and that there's. Everything's an opportunity. It, it gets out of that dual thinking of there's this positive energy or negative energy or, or the right thing to do, higher vibrations or whatever that is. We're really looking at everything as one. The good, the bad, the ugly. All is part of the self. And I think it's hard for us because most people were conditioned to see everything in that duality. And so it's about basically merging our self back to the oneness that we originally were, were born into or born from.
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C
Yes. So from that perspective, then we can think of all these. The seeking right of, in, in religious experiences, in, in plant medicine experiences in pleasure and even in creativity in art. All these are aiming at the same thing. It's to experience that transcendent self. They're all pointing in that direction.
- [21:54]
B
It's, it is a hard concept to grasp, but the more you play with it, the more you ask the, like you said, the self inquiry and the more present you can be to those peak experiences that. Oh, this is almost like you're experiencing the truth for a moment. You're getting a glimpse of the, of who you are on a deep, profound level. Like you're seeing the world as the self sees it in a way.
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C
Yeah. And, and that is the ultimate peak experience that we're, we're all seeking transcending of our limited ego self as Persona, not rejecting it. Right. We, we understand we have to take care of this body and respect it, but that there's, there's a deeper reality right in front of us or right within us that is always there for us and that accessing that is the ultimate peak experience for human beings.
- [22:44]
B
I love it. Well, I loved this series on emotions. If you missed any of the previous episodes, please go back and check them out. We did a lot. Eight. Eight episodes. I can't remember how many, but talked about fear, we talked about love, we talked about anger, we talked about guilt, all the fun ones. We talked about peak experiences and anxiety and surprise. So I think it's so close to our everyday experience that these past episodes are very accessible for people. So I'm hoping that you all received some insight from them and continue on your individuation journey. We always encourage you to do that and if you have any questions you can always visit our website. There's some links in the show notes to find out more about us this first time finding us Be surprised at what what we have lots of free resources on our website and we're getting ready for our next series. We all love also love to hear from you. If you have a subject or topic you want us to touch on, Jungian psychology, Eastern spirituality, or neuroscience, let us know. We'd love to hear and we thank you for listening to us and being open to receiving this wonderful information.
- [23:56]
C
Yeah, thanks for spending some time with us. Appreciate it and we'll see you next time.
- [24:02]
B
Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Bye bye.
- [24:06]
A
Thank you for joining us. And don't forget to subscribe to CreativeMind's Soul Sessions and join us next week as we explore another deep topic where you can consciously create your life with creative mind Soul Sessions.
- [24:19]
B
See you next time.