...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.

Emotion operates, very often when you think about how you react to the world, you know, something is happening to you, you're simply going along and you're being confronted by different things, not necessarily very important or significance for your ultimate life, but you are constantly reacting to the world.

Writing long hand is the last refuge. One needs the time it takes to put pencil to paper and let it run along the ruled line.

Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would be unthinkable without this representation.

We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.

There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.

People who are great thinkers, in science or in art, people who are great performers, have to have that kind of capacity. Without that kind of capacity, it's extremely difficult to manage a high level of performance because you're going to get a lot of extraneous material chipping away at the finery of your thinking or the finery of your motor execution.