... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities.

Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.

When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.