A funny thing happened to me on the way to the top of Maslow's pyramid of Self-Actualization

Is there anything more interesting than people? Perhaps just one thing: yourself?

I think the penny dropped for me on this one when a particularly entertaining sociology lecturer at college first started to explain Abraham Maslow and his hierarchical ideas of self-actualization. Wow, at the age of 20 after reading so many different books and having spent so many hours studying an incredible array of subjects at school, I had never heard that the human animal and its behavior patterns could be so neatly packaged in this at-a-glance digestible pyramid with brightly colored bands of decreasing size, realistically equating to the idea that as you go up things get tougher or at least there is less to share around. Apart from the visual attractiveness I also liked the idea that Maslow's analysis pretty much seemed to hold water. I was delighted to now have such a user-friendly frame of reference for doing my people watching. As an added bonus I found the whole explanation personally enlightening.

If you share the notion that what is good for one must be good for all I was convinced right then and there that such knowledge should be a ready part of standard education well before college age.

Now, a number of years passed by and the people watching habit never went away partly because of the constant but perhaps subconscious need of my own to try and understand my own behavior and motivations apart from my unabating interest in everybody around me. However, along with that passage of time my personal antenna was increasingly alert to that bit on the top of Maslow's pyramid and even what might be in the unmentionable blank territory outside Maslow's pyramid.

Many books, discussions, meetings with learned men and women and various shall we say "self-expansion" courses down the road and I stumbled across something that I hardly thought was even possible to look for. I suppose that the awareness of what I am leading up to was being inhibited by my adherence to giving undue importance to the traditional passage of time. It was really the final piece of the jigsaw for me because if I truly believed that everything was possible, as I did, then I would have to also consider dispensing with the idea that everything and anything had to be explained in tandem with a time continuum.

I imagine that while I was trying to climb up to the top of that comprehension pyramid I probably clambered on up with the not-very-lateral-thinking notion that the next pyramid would be right there waiting for me in the process of time but wait on... That whole less-than-real way of thinking came to a juddering halt when I realized the absolute and incontrovertible fact that there is only ever NOW! That is reality. All other times are merely expedient ways in which we formulate our behavior patterns from the very beginning of the physical needs on upwards. There is only, there was only and there will only ever be now! The splitting up of past present and future are merely useful creations of our minds.