Peak Experiences & Abraham Maslow

Some quotes for instigating thought, from a branch of psychology still under-recognized and under-utilized: namely, the psychology of healthy and effective people. Most psychology today remains focused on pathology, on what has gone wrong, on dis-ease, on unhealthy problems. I find myself immersed by life in example after example of dementia and neurosis, mostly not my own, so I turn to the possibilities for a positive psychology with a sigh of relief and release. I turn away from pathology towards ecstasy, with my own health at stake.

Peak experiences are those highlights of our lives that give us awareness and insight into a deeper level of existence.

The peak experience is the event that changes our way of viewing reality. Peak experiences are similar to the transcendent awareness described by mystics and others who have undergone religious experiences. What makes the peak experience unique and different from the mystic and/or religious experience is its secular naturalistic nature.

Peak experiences do not require the presence of the supernatural. They are characterized by the spontaneous awareness of some or all of the following points:

unity
nonjudgmental perception
detachment and objectivity
ego-transcendence
self-trust
ends rather than means
time/space disorientation
receptivity
transcendence of dichotomies
strong self-identity
strong sense of "free will"
humility and surrender

I would add a few things to this list, and rephrase a few other things. Following in the footsteps of contemporary spiritual writers such as Frederick Franck, Matthew Fox, and others, I would include:

non-dual consciousness
awareness that everything is choice
awareness that everything is change
trust of the higher self, or what we perceive as something greater than ourselves

Peak experiences often occur during such diverse activities as making love, climbing mountains, experiencing or creating works of art, sailing, giving birth, reading, looking at a landscape, and listening.

For some people peak experiences can remain in the memory as a reference point, making further peak experiences more accessible.

This is an important point I want to underline:

Once you have had a visionary or peak experience, you are susceptible to having more, or to having repeats or flashbacks. Once those doors and windows have been opened, they tend to stay open. The more crap you shovel out of the communications room, the more genuinely honest and sincere you tend to become. It's not that you become incapable of dissembling; it's that you see no good reason to.

And you will encounter many more who still cling to their cynicism and denial of even the possibility of having a peak experience that they will do everything they can to discredit you, tear you down, make you doubt yourself, and try to get you to see your peak experience as a hallucination. Not least among this tribe are the materialist-oriented brain-chemistry logical-positivist neurophysiology crowd, among whom it has become fashionable to try to explain, or explain away, every human experience as a mere function of brain chemistry or neurological pathology. In other words, those who would deny ecstasy for pathology, whenever you try to exchange pathology for ecstasy.

But once you've had a peak experience, you can see how all these attempts to explain it away fall short of even describing the experience. Every mystic knows, just as every athlete who finds herself in the "zone" knows, that there is something more going on than just brain chemistry. There remains an unexplainable Mystery.


Abraham Maslow

The psychology of the peak experience is the major contribution to contemporary psychology of Abraham Maslow,

. . . who was basically a theoretical psychologist in that he did not develop a specific course of treatment for neurosis or psychosis. In fact, his most important contribution to the psychological sciences was his recognition that psychology was lacking a most important perspective, a perspective that had made most previous psychological contributions one-sided.

Maslow noted that all psychology was based on psycho-pathology, or the behavior and processes of sick people.

To this one might add the insights of Gail & Snell Putney in their book Normal Neuroses. This book is a remarkable deconstruction of what we as a culture view as normative, demonstrating how more often than not, what we think of as normative is suppressed, restrictive, neurotic.

As the existentialist aphorism goes: "In an insane world, the sane person is viewed as insane."

Maslow decided that a new psychology was necessary, a psychology based on healthy people. He called these people self-actualizers (a term first used by the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Goldstein, with whom Maslow studied and worked).

A major aspect of the lives of these healthy people was the propensity to have what Maslow called peak experiences. Peak experiences are experiences of wonder, awe, ecstasy, altered consciousness, universal oneness, revelation, or transcendental states of being. With his studies of self-actualizers and their peak experiences, Maslow was able to help direct the attention of the psychological world toward developing methods of becoming healthy. This led to the development of Third Force or Humanistic Psychology (as opposed to the behavioristic or psychoanalytic modes).

At the time of his death in 1970, Maslow was helping bring to birth the creation of a new psychology, ". . . a still higher Fourth Psychology, transpersonal, transhuman, centered in the cosmos rather than in human needs and interests. . . ."

—quotes are from Edward Rosenfeld, The Book of Highs: 250 methods for altering your consciousness without drugs, published by Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company, 1973.

As a note on Maslow's books that are the sources of these ideas, I just want to mention that Maslow's work in this field begins with Motivation and Personality (1954; second edition 1971), finds its full flowering in Toward a Psychology of Being, and develops further in Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences. I read the last book mentioned simultaneously with Rollo May's The Courage to Create, and the synergy between the ideas of these two humanistic and existentialist psychologists left a lasting impression on me, strongly shifting my worldview of psychology towards healthy functioning, as opposed to the usual post-Freudian psycho-pathology. Some other notable philosophers and psychologists whose writings also are connected to Maslow's work include existential psychologist Viktor Frankl, whose book Man's Search for Meaning is fundamental reading; Stanislav Grof, who went from working with LSD as a tool for psychological transformation to non-drug based transpersonal therapies such as Holotropic Breathwork, which Grof co-founded; the subpersonality work of Roberto Assagioli and his mentor Piero Ferrucci; and of course Freud's original breakaway pupil of the transpersonal, Carl G. Jung.

Maslow's books are clear and straightforward in their prose style, not at all mired in jargon or technical minutiae. His mission was to present his research and data as clearly as possible. The result is some of the more readable books of modern psychology you will encounter.

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I leave us with a few selected quotes from Abraham Maslow, some more aphoristic than others, all full of his typically insightful use of metaphor:

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

We may define therapy as a search for value.

Does the Audience Matter? 2 (Further Notes)

My intention is to invite all of us to make a certain evaluation of why we artistically do what we artistically do. The results of such self-contemplation are bound to be surprising at times, but perhaps worthwhile.

It gets to hidden intentions, personal motivations, private agendas, things like that.

I found at a thrift store some weeks ago Abraham Maslow's book The Psychology of Science: A reconnaisance. This book is an examination of why, while some scientists are moved by the joys of adventure and discovery, many use science as a defense mechanism against uncertainty, error, and chaos, or as a means of controlling their surroundings. Maslow, in looking at a cross-section of the science world, finds the scientific method as it is ideally conceived to be less influential, in practice, than the nature of the human being who is doing the science. The way in which a scientist tackles a subject of inquiry—bit by bit, or grasping the whole; describing things as they are, or seeking to master and synethsize new knowslgde—these are the results of personality, and of personal values that have been largely unexamined and underestimated. Maslow specifically challenges the dominant mechanistic mindset that governs the definition of problems and methodologies concerned with human personality and behavior, and finds them inadequate to explain the whole person.

At that same thrift store, I also found a festschrift on Octavio Paz. Skimming, I come away with these quotations about how and why poets order the universe with words.

Octavio Paz: There are two silences: one, before speech, is an attempt at meaning; another, after speech, is the knowledge that the only thing worth saying cannot be said. Buddha said everything which it is possible to say with words: the errors and achievements of reason, the truth and lies of the senses, the illumination and void of the instant, the freedom and slavery of nihilism. Words filled with reasons that cancel themselves and of sensations that consume each other. But his silence says something different. . . .

Language is the kingdom of dialectics which ceaselessly destroys itself and is reborn only to die. If Buddha's silence were the expression of this relativism, it would not be silence, but word. This isn't so: with his silence, movement, operation, dialectics, word, all cease. At the same time, it is neither the negation of dialectics nor of movement: Buddha's silence is the resolution of language. We come out of silence and return to it; to the word that has stopped being word.

I suspect that poets get too enraptured with their own voices, the words, their tools, their language, and forget about, or deliberately ignore, this necessary silence. I am reminded of cocktail parties in which people keep chattering about nothing, because moments of silence are perceived as being awkward or painful. I'm very comfortable with silence; I recognize this is not a common attribute of citizens in most urban settings. I am drawn to writing nature poetry in part because of the silence: when I'm out there in the wilds, or driving along the seacoast, I can go for hours and days without saying anything to anyone. It's out of those silent times that poems arise, for me. I often think of Yeats' poem Long-Legged Fly in this context.

What's intriguing to me, as Maslow explicitly and Paz implicitly agree, is how scientific rationality is often used as a shield against fears of the unknown, the uncertain, the mysterious, the unconscious, and the personally chaotic. I have more than once challenged certain formalist poets of my acquaintance to address this issue about their own motivations, and rarely received an answer.

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Personal ego can be transcended, in moments, in enlightenment, in satori—but not permanently and for all times thereafter. Ironically, it egoistic to think so. Spiritual materialism and spiritual arrogance lead us to believe that once we're enlightened, we're done: you've reached you goal, here's the brass ring, you're done. I've certainly made my mistakes on these fronts, and no doubt will again. The truth is: after you're done, you go on as before. Chop wood, carry water. After the ecstasy, the laundry.

I don't think ego is meant to be transcended. It is after all the necessary interface between presonality and world: rather like the computer's screen, a similar kind of interface between self and world. We need an ego, or we couldn't function. The problem is, personality-ego tends to get puffed up and overly-inflated. The goal is integrate it, keep it in balance, keep it small, reduce it: keep it in perspective. Much of the back-biting among poets is all about puffed-up egos colliding, and getting pricked. Not that poets are unique in this matter, not at all. Frankly, I see it mostly as insecurity and a lack of self-esteem, which everybody just needs to grow up and get over. (Do I exclude myself from any such formulation? Never.) Stupidity makes me impatient, and impatience is of course a terrible vice, an addiction I am working to overcome.

I am actually not antagonistic to ego. My position is more in that of the honorable tradition of loyal dissent, in which faults are examined in order that the overall system might be improved.

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I don't believe that it's egotistical or bad to write with an audience in mind, to tailor an eesay or poem towards an intended audience: but I do believe it's beside the point, even irrelevant. I think about the audience when I'm editing or rewriting, but not when I'm writing. If I think too much about the the audience when I write, it can stifle the act of writing itself. The internal editor can be a block rather than an assist, if called upon too soon. This has all been said before, of course.

What I don't believe is that writing for an audience makes any difference to what I write. Otherwise, one can end up compartmentalizing one's writing into "public" and "private" bins. Lots of writers do do that, it's true. But after a writer is dead? It all tends to come out, anyway. Especially in the case of any writer who develops anything like a sizable public following; the biographers will dig, even into the zones of discomfort and shame.

I firmly believe, based on experience, that control is an illusion—especially in the long haul. Attempts to control the world, and especially attempts to control what the world thinks about oneself, are doomed to failure, simply because people can be contrary and stubborn, and as ample evidence will always show, are not likely to share one's own opinion. All one can really address is what is in the present moment: what I'm writing now; my craft; my subject matter; my artistic desire. the eros of creation. You can't control what other people think of you, or your writing. All you can control is your own response to their opinions. That's a basic fact of life, in relationship with other sentient beings.

Where is the line between making oneself into a better writer, and pandering to fashion in order to get published? I think it's preferable to pursue becoming a better writer, and not to pander. Does this then lead to becoming the stereotype of the starving artist, laboring in solitary obscurity? No, I think that's irrelevant, too: it's a romantic delusion, a cultural stereotype. It's an archetype I actively repudiate. (I ain't starvin'.)

The point is, I think the true balance-point lies in writing what you want to write, following your muse (speaking of literary stereotypes), and not dwelling on the outcome.

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We also write to discover: I have heard it expressed by writers, "I write to know what it is I'm thinking about." We discover our own processes, through which we also discover the world.

We also write to experience, through the process of writing, some connection with the archetypes that transcend our oridnary selves.

If there were no numinous, liminal experience of discovery in writing, in music, in making art—then I wouldn't bother doing any of those things. The numinous is very real to me. It lies at the root of everything I do, and I can say with literal truth that I have written poems that were nothing more than records of visionary experiences.

Which is why I say that poetry is more than merely communication. Of course it is communication, but it is so much more than only that.

Visionary Poetry 10: Embodiment

A merely psychological explanation for visionary poetry is no explanation. The body has to be included.

Nonetheless, I reject the idea of biological determinism, the idea that consciousness consists only of the brain and biochemistry. I reject the notion that all things human can be reduced to biochemical triggers. Neurological medicine has become dominated by the purely mechanistic viewpoint, and I think that's a tragedy. Consciousness is what in cognitive studies and artificial intelligence studies they refer to as an emergent phenomenon: a synergistic result that is more than the sum of its parts.

There is also the holographic paradigm, as seen in laser holography: every part of the finished image contains the whole image, but the smaller the part, the more fuzzy the image is; full resolution can only be obtained from the whole. (Break up a developed hologram slide into smaller parts, and every part contains the whole image, but the focus gets fuzzier the smaller the part gets.) Lay a neuron on the table, and show me what part of my mind and soul it is? You can't; no one can.

I think neuroscience is a red herring, when we talk about visionary states. I think you can make a case for the brain and the mind interacting, and reflecting one another. The brain-mind system is recursive, and integrated. But even though we know that brain chemistry affects mood, state of mind, and so forth, it still does not account for the emergent phenomenon of consciousness. Brain chemistry by itself is an incomplete picture of what's really going on.

The left-brain/right-brain hemispheric model is an interesting model of consciusness functions, but it is not after all reflected all that strongly in the actual brain. Since this model was originally proposed, following early PET scan research in the 1970s and 1980s, when for example it was noticed that the left hindbrain "lit up" during linguistic activity—since then, more research has been done, a lot more detailed active-scan photos have been taken, with higher resolution, and it turns out these hemispheric functions are in fact more diffuse, and more generally distributed than the early, crude (low resolution) images made them appear to be. Another example of an early model based on poor data. The hemispheric concept has entered the folklore now, though, and may even have descended to the level of myth or archetype. Western discourse has a strong tendency to model everything as a binary polarity in opposition, from heaven/hell to god/man to man/woman to left-brain/right-brain. It's no wonder then that the hemispheric brain model would then become part of the folklore.

But folklore doesn't always reflect detailed, accurate science.

I read a book several years ago with a truly hefty title, that was nonetheless a real page-turner, proposing a hemispheric model for the history of human consciousness; this theory has largely been supplanted or refuted, but the book itself remains one of the better-written science volumes of all time, and still reads well as literature: Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

What I find so interesting about materialistic, reductionistic explanations of human consciousness as nothing more than biochemistry is how ridiculously far out on a limb they go to try to explain things like near-death experiences as simple oxygen starvation. Even if one could account for spiritual experiences as simple brain dysfunctions—the similarities between some mild forms of epilepsy and shamanism have been noted before—one cannot account for the emotional and spiritual impact these experience have on the minds and hearts of the people who survive them. Oxygen starvation cannot in and of itself account for the peacefulness many NDE surviviors describe, or their changed attitudes towards life and death, after their return.

What I find intriguing is the reversal of attitudes in the sciences themselves. 150 years ago, physics was a completely mechanistic (Newtonian) and deterministic field, while biology presented a more spiritual, organic, near-mystical worldview. Now, 150 years later, those worldviews have become completely reversed! Physics, since the advent of atomic physics, quantum mechanics, and string theory, has as one of its root tenets the concept that the consciousness of the observer directly affects the outcome of the experiment; while biology has become completely dominated by the deterministic, mechanistic, biochemical worldview.  (cf. Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on creation, darkness, and the soul in spirituality and science)

I find this flip in worldviews in biology to be particularly ironic, when it isn't purely alarming. Since, after all, physical principles, the universe's physical laws, ultimately underlie biology—we are all made of elementary particles, or star-stuff, of the same elements as everything else in the Universer—it's particularly blind of biology, it seems to me, to adopt a totally mechanistic worldview, when everything they are studying is ultimately based on physics.

The observer rule in theoretical physics seems to imply a direct connection between consciousness and the fabric of spacetime, albeit not a deterministic one—physical determinism is based on the idea that the creation of consciousness only flows one way, from matter towards mind; the observer rule contradicts that, showing that the information flow goes both ways, since mind can affect matter—thus, the observer rule implies that consciousness, even if it is an emergent phenomenon, is able to affect that which it emerges from.

There have been a few brain-mind studies that have shown that experienced meditators can affect the structure and chemistry of their own brains. A study of Tibetan monks has validated these conclusions, and linked strong theta-wave function in the EEG of a meditating monk to alterations in brain neurochemistry. So much for one-way determinism. Even if one argues that these are exceptional cases, it remains true that they are within the realm of human possibility, therefore, anyone who really wanted to, could do it, too—therefore, determinism is not in operation, because one exception to a deterministic rule means that the rule needs to be re-formulated.

Therefore, even if visionary states are reflected in brain chemistry, there is still something else going on. Something that science might be able to explain someday, but that it cannot at this time. Emergent properties are syngeristic, more than the sum of their parts, and transcendant of their origins. We cannot explain what our own consciousness is, even as we experience it.

Many neuroscientists appear to want to dsiprove the existence of spirit or soul—they are in some extreme cases rabidly anti-mysticism—but they are hampered by the nature of the question: You cannot definitely prove a negative. You cannot prove that something does not exist, because you would have to have analysed and catalogued the entire universe before you could definitively state that—and the universe is very large, resisting comprehension by the single human mind. (Try to imagine the time-span of a million years, much less a billion. Geologists get used to working in deep time, as they call it, but it requires an imaginative effort that I have noticed can sometimes impair their ability to cope with the here-and-now of the present moment.) Astrophysicists and astronomers continue to discover new and bizarre phenomena on a regular basis; the skies are full of wonder. How then, should the human spirit be less wondrous?

The truth of vision remains an open, unanswered, equivocal question. It remains an issue of qualitative study, rather than a subject of quantitative analysis.

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I don't think it's necessary to "explain" visionary states as psychopathology or neuropathology, as it then becomes all too easy to explain them away. Exalted state or food-poisoning? People who want to believe only one of those choices will not be easily convinced of the other choice also being present. While the turn towards ratonal science in the 17th century, and away from Medieval mysticism, was in part prompted by the Church's attempts to stifle heresy, and as such was a justifiable endeavour, scientific rationalism is and never has been the root of all knowledge. (Newton also studied alchemy and astrology, for example.) So, I find the attempt to rationalize visionary experiences as products of either cognitive or neurological causes to equally miss the point.

You see, reducing visionary states to psychological dysfunctions is no better than reducing them to neurological dysfunctions. There is something missing in all such reductionist thinking‚—and that is the quality of the experience, and the effect it has on the experiencer, short-term and long-term both. Even most brands of modern psychology would discard spiritual experiences as readily as the neuroscientists do, because most brands of modern psychology are inheritors of the medical tradition which in the tradition of Western medicine assumes pathology and dysfunction as root causes, or at least more interesting to study, and usually does not consider healthy function.

This is why Abraham Maslow's work was such a breakthrough: his was first psychological tradition to study healthy function rather than pathological dysfunction. The transpersonal psychologies follow in this wake. One of the most interesting areas of study in psychology, in connection to visionary poety, is Stanislav Grof's work. He began in the 1950s by studying regular people taking LSD to promote visionary experiences in controlled settings. (Back when it was still legal to do so.) He began noticing many patterns emerging from this case work, which led to the development of his theory of perinatal experiences, and eventually, in collaboration with his wife, Cristina, to holotropic breathwork. (cf. Grof, The Adventure of Self-Discovery; and Grof and Grof, editors, Spiritual Emergency)

Maslow also wrote a book, The Psychology of Science, which is relevant to this discussion. He discusses education in some detail in this book, but the main thrust is how personality affects the way people do science. Some workers in science even use scientific rationalism as a defense mechanism against uncertainty and error—which can lead to the elevation of Science to the status of a religion, complete with unquestionable articles of faith.

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I have used this analogy before: the ego-personality likes to think it is the whole system, and/or the part of the system of the Self that is in control at all times. But the ego-personality is like the screen on your compiuter monitor: it's the part that interfaces with the rest of the world, that looks outward onto the world, that seems to be all there is to the computer, or in some magical way embodies personality of the computer. The screen is what seems to link us to cyberspace. But it's only the interface. By itself, it has no existence: it is merely projected light on a screen, with no physical substance. It's a valued, important part of the overall system, but not the most important part even, just the most visible part. What really makes the system work the way it does is largely invisible and hidden—the famous nine-tenths of the iceberg below the waterline. There is a great deal going behind the scenes of which the ego-personality is unaware.

So, if the entire system were able to self-integrate and become self-aware of all its parts (the purpose of the opus, the work, of psychological integration), it would become more than it was, synergize into something greater—and the visionary experience is an emergent property of the result of this integration.

Some of Maslow's work on self-actualization and peak experiences ls very much in this terrain, as well, and quite supports this conception of transcendence. His studies of "oceanic" or peak experiences are worth looking into.

Yet many other roads lead to visionary experience, not just this one. There is the Via Positiva, the way of positive experience and knowing. Yet, there are also the roads of darkness and unknowing (Via Negativa), the roads of creativity as a spiritual path in and of itself (Via Creativa), and the roads of transforming the world and all those in it via healing and social justice (Via Transformativa). When we discuss visionary poetry, we are largely discussing the Via Creativa, but since everything is connected, we also have to discuss the others. I don't think any one of these paths is more important than or superior to the others; furthermore, we all cycle through each path, at different times, although not everyone experiences the same pattern or cycle. The Via Negativa is a particularly harrowing route to vision, and not recommended to everyone; it requires a great deal of preparation. But then, so do the others, in their own ways.

I dispute the ultimate usefulness of mechanistic assumptions about the nature of mind, body, and consciousness, because we are also organic gardens of many parts working together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Synergies and emergent properties are still not accountable for in strictly mechanistic models.

Chaos theory talks about zones of stability and turbulence, wherein as you add energy to a system, it stays turbulent until it reaches the next dynamically stable state, which can usually be expressed as a mathematical power of the initial state. This is dynamic stability, because it is always in motion, always energzied, never in a stable state akin to some Platonic ideal form.

If we continue to integrate aspects of ourselves previously undeveloped and/or suppressed (what lies in the Shadow), it's quite likely we can continue to feel these exalted states, every time we pass through a zone of turbulence into a node of high-energy stability. Perhaps there continue to be ever-higher levels of evolution, not one final ultimate level of total integration of everything—unless we were perhaps to call that state the Unified Field Theory of Everything—or God. So, each time you attain a node of dynamic stability you have a vision, and you have to keep climbing up the ladder to attain more visions.

Yet this does not account for why unevolved, unintegrated, messed-up and generally unenlightened individuals also get visions. It does not account for why some visions only come from the darkness, and only appear in the darker times in a life. It also does not account for some of the results of vision, which can lead, via inspiration, to increased awareness of social justice, and also to the spiritual state of being open to life in emotional ways that one may never have experienced before (the sacred heart; bodhichitta; compassion).

So, mechanistic models don't work for me, because they still don't account for the actions of spirit in all this.

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All of this brings us back to embodiment. We have visions, and we also have bodies. We are not disembodied consciousness free-floating in a grey sea of mentation.

Let's talk about a fundamental body act of creativity: sex.

One Indonesian/Malay word for "sex" is "bersetubuh." The root word is "tubuh," which means body, flesh. The "se" is a prefix used as a contraction for "satu," which means the number one. "Ber" is a prefix used to turn a noun into an active noun, that is, a verb. "Bersetubuh" means "to make one body." This is a profoundly enfleshed way of presenting the concept of sex.

Poetry that is only of the head—words alone that are unbodied, poetry that is not somatic, not enfleshed—cannot achieve this connection. A visioanry poetry that is only pretty images, nice little angels or angles, something floating up there somewhere above the earth, is incomplete. It is a fiction. Visionary poetry needs to get its feet dirty, have its metatarsal digits touch the ground, get a little grimed the way barefoot children run home in summer with blackened soles and broken toenails. A visionary poetry that is too perfect, too perfected, too heavenly without being earthly as well, too removed from the heart with its blood pumping everywhere, is incomplete, unfinished.

I keep hearing many poets claim that poetry is the highest artform; I've discussed this earlier in this Chataqua. These poets describe Poetry as if it were an ideal, Platonic form—perfect on some ethereal plane of existence, not dirtied or messed up by the hard pains of stubbed toes and broken jaws. Such poetry is not a complete poetry, because it is not somatic.

If a poem doesn't enflesh itself in us, the readers, if it doesn't make us feel the experience being described or told or foretold in the poem, then the poem is nothing. Literally: nothing. If it doesn't leave a mark on you, it won't last in your memory, to be sought out later for re-experiencing and re-tasting.

A visionary poem has to engage more than just the mind. It must engage all the sense, and the heart, as well as the mind, to enwrap us in its existence. Only then can it lift us up, or take us down, raise us to the heavens, bury us alive in the moist soil freshly opened by the gravekeeper's spade. We lower ourselves into the earth, covered with white butterflies. We are lifted by white ballons rising into white winter skies, everything going white. Angels see only in black and white; they listen, they attend, they assist, but they are not soiled by living. A poem needs to soil you, a visionary poem needs to explode in you like a loam bomb.

A merely psychological explanation for visionary poetry is no explanation. The body has to be included.