The P.E. has continued to provide me with a strong motivation to pursue and understand the meaning of the experience. I was motivated to write this book. I have been continually motivated to attempt to achieve transient periods of supraconsciousness, during which I continually seem to improve my understanding of reality. The more I learn, the more I want to know. It is my belief that our collective understanding and description of reality is increasing exponentially, and will continue to do so in the future.

I embarked upon this project because I am now convinced that the attainment of a P.E. is the most important single experience that anyone might ever achieve. Through the knowledge of how it has impacted my life, I must assume that others would be affected similarly. It has changed my priorities as well as my behavior, so that I am much more society-oriented. I feel compelled to establish myself as part of lifekind's solution rather than living as part of its problem.

It is my perception that over time there will be increasing numbers of individuals who will have a P.E. and will be motivated to act more positively toward the preservation and improvement of humankind. In fact this shift has already begun. A book has recently been written by Yatri, who, I believe, unquestionably had a peak experience. The book is entitled Unknown Man: The Mysterious Birth of a New Species. The information contained in his book, including the description of the event which led to its generation, establishes this fact. Although the content of his book is different from mine, his conclusions are very similar. He traces the evolution of humankind, and sees beings of higher consciousness developing. He clearly understands that there is an underlying unity and interrelationship of all things. It is apparent that the P.E. completely changed his perception of reality, which in turn has resulted in a change of behavior. He was motivated to write a book that is designed to help improve humankind's chance of survival. He is extraordinarily well enlightened in the understanding of many scientific, spiritual and philosophical concepts, even though he describes himself as an agnostic sculptor at the time of his P.E.¹²

John Weir Perry also has stated that it was during a "peak experience" as defined by Maslow, that, "I perceived that the thrust of evolution toward higher levels of order and complexity was now pointing toward its next phase, the creation of a new superorganism. I saw that if the highest achievement of this creative process so far has been the extraordinary configuration of energies that form mankind's consciousness, then surely the next step is that of bringing together the individual psyches into an organic whole, which I saw as the `social organism'... The gift of this vision of creation I not only treasured; I found it my vocation. This was to explore the dynamics of social and psychic evolution, and I hoped, to reach some comprehension of how it could be that society might become increasingly such an organism whose members lived cooperatively for the well-being of the whole. My question was that if this is indeed our evolution's next level of order and complexity, where in the human psyche would the dynamics originate that might motivate individuals toward furthering such a future?".¹³

Richard M. Bucke, M.D., in his book Cosmic Consciousness, first published in 1901, described his own supraconsciousness experience, which he had in the spring of 1872. He is the first scientifically oriented individual I am aware of who described his experience in some detail. The description fulfills Maslow's criteria of a peak experience, a term not to be defined until several decades later. His experience closely paralleled my own, with the exception that I did not observe the bright light that he and others have mentioned.

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