Maslow's analysis of peak experience meshes well with the descriptions of great experiences at music festivals, which I had corroborated by the information in my survey. I've pulled a few quotes from his work which echo the sentiments I saw in the responses to my survey on music festival experiences below.
The huge number of people who suggested that they *do* feel more positive, confident, inspired, open and accepting of others after a music festival seems to parallel Maslow's descriptions of the healthiest states of being and cognition (the highest moments of which are peaks - or peak experiences). I argue that a good music festival experience is akin, or simply is, one arena in which many people may simultaneously share a peak life experience.
On the aftereffects of peak experiences:
"The person is more apt to feel that life in general is worth while, even if it usually drab, pedestrian, painful or ungratifying, since beauty, excitement, honesty, play, goodness truth and meaningfulness have been demonstrated to him to exist." (pg.95)
"The peak experience is felt as a self-validating, self-justifying moment which carries its own intrinsic value with it.
....
The contrast is very sharp with the ordinary experiences of life, especially in the West" (pg. 75)
Maslow writes further about how in our daily lives and behaviors, nearly everything we do "is done for the sake of some further goal, in order to achieve something else." (pg 75). It seems to me that the ideal music festival experience is its own goal, and usually not pursued by individuals and audiences for any reason other than to have the experience of being there (and the music, of course!). The goal is the experience, and the experience of living and being at a music festival, unwinding in real-time, is the goal. Seen this way, the behaviors indulged in by participants at a music festival are not necessarily goal-oriented as they are undertaken in the span of time in which a person may be actually 'living' in a goal state.
I think this is a unique and powerful thing. Maslow continues to describe the elements and attributes of a highly actualized person, or the Cognition of Being (he calls it B-cognition) and the cognitive processes he sees as the highest health and goal for humans in general. People in B-cognitive states are "universally tolerant, B-amused and B-accepting". (These sound a lot like the things people said over and over about changes in perception and outlook after a music festival in my survey.)
"There seems to be a kind of dynamic parallelism... here between the inner and the outer. That is to say that as the essential Being of the world is perceived by the person, so as does he concurrently come close to his own Being (...to being more perfectly himself). ... this thereby enables him more easily to see the B-values in the world. A he becomes more unified, he tends to be able to see more unity in the world." (pg 90)
He also writes about the maturity of the highly actualized individual; but that this maturity is unique in the following sense: "they were very mature ...at the same time, also childish. I called it "healthy childishness," a second naivete".
And this seems to suggest why a good music festival experience, with all its challenges and novelty, can actually inspire confidence: "Only the flexibly creative person can really manage [the] future, only the one who can face novelty with confidence and without fear." (pg 15)
Finally, this seems to speak to the high numbers of people who reported 'wanting to be a better person' or 'share the positivity' after a music festival experience; "Very often this feeling of gratitude is expressed or leads to an all-embracing love for everybody and everything, to a perception of the world as beautiful, and good, often to an impulse to do something good for the world, an eagerness to repay, even a sense of obligation" (pg 107).
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