Human Potential: Difference between revisions
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Latest revision as of 16:54, 10 January 2026
Human Potential
The phrase Human Potential refers to the innate capacities, abilities, and possibilities that reside within each person.[1] It encompasses the totality of an individual's physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual capabilities which can be developed and maximized over a lifetime given full satisfaction of one's Seven Essential Needs.
Concept Map
Key Terms
- Abraham Maslow
- Eupsychian Education
- Eupsychian Management
- Eupsychian Psychology
- Eupsychian Theory
- Eupsychian Therapy
- Humanistic Psychology
- Transpersonal Psychology
- Human Diminution
- Diminished Human Being
- Big Problem
- Individual Potential
- Species Potential
- Actual Realization
- Human Flourishing
- Potential Realization
- Fully Functioning Person
- Full Realization
Related LP Terms
Human Potential > Graduation, Toxic Socialization
Non-LP Related Terms
Notes
Maslow had some intimations about human potential. He believed humans were capable of far more than currently instantiated.
...we have to start seeing ourselves in a different light. This is what I mean by saying, “For centuries, human nature has been sold short.” For my theory is implying that in a certain sense, every newborn baby is a potential Plato. Every child has an instinctive need for the highest values of beauty, truth, justice, and so on. If we can accept this notion, then the key question isn’t “What fosters creativity? How was a Beethoven created?” But it is “Why in God s name isn’t everyone a Beethoven?” That is what has to be explained now. Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it was a miracle if anybody created anything. [2]
What this potential might be (the question "What would a fully realized human look like") is hard to theorize. Maslow pointed out that in states of chronic needs deprivation, we get a "lopsided view" of human motivation (and human potential).
Obviously a good way to obscure the 'higher' motivations, and to get a lopsided view of human capacities and human nature, is to make the organism extremely and chronically hungry or thirsty. Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one, and who will measure all of man's goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly being blind to many things. It is quite true that man lives by bread alone- when there is no bread. But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?[3]
The human species has never enjoyed an optimal environment. We've never had a society that has the capacity to meet all Seven Essential Needs and we've never had a society that prioritizes their satisfaction. Until we do, we can only speculate what's possible. In fact, it may be easily argued that our current consumer focused societies completely fail to meet most of the Seven Essential Needs of an individual providing us with a sad caricature of what human potential might be. In current conditions, even the peak specimen, the Aggridant as Maslow took to calling them, are not accurate representation of full human potential.
That said, we may theorize that.
- Human potential may be broken into Individual Potential and Species Potential.
- Human potential consists of Actual Realization, which is what an individual and a society is able to achieve, and Potential Realization, what is possible.
- The goal of societal development is to create conditions for the Full Realization of human potential.
- According to the Lightning Path Human Development Framework, actuation of full potential requires Sufficient Satisfaction of the Seven Essential Needs, from birth through old age.[4]
- Failure to meet essential needs undermines potential, stunts development, and leads to the 5Ds of Toxic Existence
- Current socialization systems are toxic (see Toxic Socialization and intentionally designed to thwart needs satisfaction and full realization of human potential.
Abraham Maslow provided some speculations.[5]
Nasa scientists Dr. George Land has some thoughts.[6]. View his brief talk below where he suggests that all children are born creative geniuses but that something (i.e., The System) dumbs them down.
Abraham Maslow Index
- Aggridant
- B-Cognition
- B-Needs
- B-Realm
- B-Values
- Being-Guilt
- Big Problem
- D-Cognition
- D-Realm
- Deficiency Diseases
- Diminished Human Being
- Eupsychia
- Eupsychian Education
- Eupsychian Management
- Eupsychian Psychology
- Eupsychian Theory
- Eupsychian Therapy
- Good Chooser
- Good Person
- Good Science
- Good Society
- Good Specimen
- Growing-Tip Statistics
- Hierarchy of Basic Needs
- Hierarchy of Cognitive Needs
- Horticultural Model
- Human Diminution
- Human Motivation
- Human Potential
- Humanistic Psychology
- Inner Signals
- Intrinsic Conscience
- Jonah Complex
- Metapathology
- Motivation
- Normalcy
- Normative Biology
- Peak Experience
- Plateau Experience
- Real Self
- Sculptural Model
- Self-Actualization
- Transcending Self-Actualizers
- Transhumanistic
- Transpersonal Psychology
Citation and Legal
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Footnotes
- ↑ Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (January 1, 1969): 167–91.
- ↑ Maslow, Abraham H. “Higher Motivation and the New Psychology.” In Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow, edited by Edward Hoffman. Sage Publications, 1996. p. 95.
- ↑ Maslow, A. H. “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (1943): 370–96. doi:10.1192/bjp.bp.115.179622. p. 375.
- ↑ Mike Sosteric and Gina Ratkovic, “It Takes a Village: Advancing Attachment Theory and Recovering the Roots of Human Health with the Seven Essential Needs,” Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work, 2022, doi:https://doi.org/10.11157/anzswj-vol34iss1id887.
- ↑ Maslow, A. H. “The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature.” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 1, no. 1 (1969): 1–9.
- ↑ Engels, Coert. “We Are Born Creative Geniuses and the Education System Dumbs Us down, According to NASA Scientists - Ideapod.” Ideapod (blog), December 16, 2017. https://ideapod.com/born-creative-geniuses-education-system-dumbs-us-according-nasa-scientists/