Sustained Peak Experience
Maslow defined lengthy, willfully induced peak experiences (plateau experiences) as a characteristic of the self-actualized. He described it as a state of witnessing or cognitive blissfulness, the achievement of which requires a lifetime of long and hard effort, and also self-actualization.
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Famous quotes containing the words sustained, peak and/or experience:
“Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)
“I think I’ve been good, but I want to be better. I think women reach their peak in their mid-thirties.”
—Mary Decker Slaney (b. 1958)
“I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with its hard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it—the Bovary syndrome.”
—Angela Carter (1942–1992)