Goines On: Lowlands

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Goines was struck by another point psychologist Maslow made, that a person can learn to enjoy sacral experiences almost at will. Goines’ own experience seemed to confirm or validate that. A person could obviously choose to listen to “Clare de Lune” whenever he wanted to. A person capable of compassion could open the faucet of his compassion rather than keep it closed. (Goines realized he was “thinking faucets” because he put away the garden hoses that morning and turned off the water to the outside faucets in preparation for the freezing nights ahead. And, now that he thought about it, that simple, seasonal chore had had its sacral aspect. How many seasons had Planet Earth experienced in its eons of rotating and revolving about the Sun?)
    Certain frames of mind, or attitudes, or ways of looking at and experiencing the world seemed conducive to sacral experience. One’s sense of the wholeness, the interconnectedness of life on the planet. One’s sense of justice, of fairness, of just deserts, of not being more deserving than the next person (or creature). One’s sense of the beauty of truth and acceptance and goodness.
    But Goines frequently also felt elevated to a plateau, or ennobled, when he immersed himself in feelings of sadness at the suffering that pervaded everything. Maslow had positioned sacral experience in the top layer of his “Hierarchy of Needs” – the layer of self-actualization. If Goines could indulge himself in self-actualization (and self-transcendence), it was because the lower layers of his needs were sufficiently met: He had self-esteem, and he was esteemed by others. He loved and was loved; he belonged to his family, to his community. He lived a safe neighborhood, in a secure home, a stable society, a prosperous region. He was in good health, he had enough to eat, he had money to meet both his needs and his modest wants.

    But these layers of needs went unmet for many other people (and certainly for creatures lower on the food chain), and Goines frequently suffered at the thought of them. These were not peak experiences for him. They were not joyous, they were not “positive.” They were “nadir” experiences, sad, “negative.”
    And yet. And yet, a consequence of opening himself to the lowlands of human experience, of subjecting himself to them, seemed to be that, longer-term, he had become less judgmental of others, more empathic toward them, more accepting of his relative powerlessness to do anything about it. By growing in these area, Goines actualized himself further, transcended further beyond himself, experienced more terrain of sacral plateau.
    Goines thought that he might have discovered the secret of Mona Lisa’s smile.

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