The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Abraham H. Maslow.
An Esalen Book/The Viking Press. N.Y. (1971)
ISBN 670-00360-3 (paperbound) Library of Congress: 75-158417

pg266

This is all related to my conception of the creative personality as one who
is totally here-now, one who lives without the future or past. Another way of
saying this is: "The creative person is an innocent." An innocent could be
defined as a grown person who can still perceive, or think, or react like a
child. It is this innocence that is recovered in the "second na‹vet‚," or
perhaps I will call it the "second innocence" of the wise old man who has
managed to recover the ability to be childlike.

Innocence may also be seen as the direct perception of the Being-Values, as in
the Hans Christian Andersen fable of the child who was able to see the King
had no clothes on, when all the adults had been fooled into thinking the
King was clothed (just as in Asch's experiment[7]).

Innocence on the behavioral side, is unself-conscious spontaneity when
absorbed or fascinated; i.e., lack of self-awareness, which means loss of
self or transcendence of it.  Then behavior is totally organized by
fascination with the interesting world outside the self, which then means
"not trying to have an effect on the onlooker," without guile or design,
without even being aware that one is an object of scrutiny. The behavior is
purely experience and not a means to some interpersonal end.

"Goals and Implications of Humanistic Education"
pg 181
...a psychology class played a joke on their professor by secretly conditioning
him while he was delivering a lecture on conditioning. The professor, without
realizing it, began nodding more and more, and by the end of the lecture
he was nodding continually. As soon as the class told the professor what he
was doing, however, he stopped nodding, and of course after that no amount
of smiling on the part of the class could make him nod again.

...
The difference between the intrinsic and the extrinsic apsects of a college
education is illustrated by the following story about Upton Sinclair. When
Sinclair was a young man, he found that he was unable to raise the tuition
money needed to attend college. Upon careful reading of the course college
catalog, however, he found that if a student failed a course, he received
no credit for the course, but was obliged to take another course in its
place. The college did not charge the student for the second course,
reasoning that he had already paid once for his credit. Sinclair took advantage
of this policy and got a free education by deliberately failing all his
courses.

pg 183
What do we mean by the discovery of identity? We mean finding out what your
real desires and characteristics are, and being able to live in a way that
expresses them. You learn to be authentic, to be honest in the sense of
allowing your behavior and your speech to be the true and spontaneous
expression of your inner feelings. Most of us have learned to avoid
authenticity, You may be in the middle of a fight, and your guts are writhing
with anger, but if the phone rings, you pick it up and sweetly say hello.
Authenticity is the reduction of phoniness toward the zero point.

pg 184
Presently a lot of research is being done on the relationship between
creativity and high IQ in children. Creative children seem to be those
who have strong impulse voices that tell them what is right and what is wrong.
Noncreative high IQ children seem to have lost their impluse voices and become
domesticated, so that they look to the parent or the teacher for guidance
and inspiration.

Healthy people seem to have clear impulse voices about matters of ethics and
values, as well. Self-actualizing people have to a large extent transcended
the values of their culture. They are not so much merely Americans as they
are world citizens, members of the human species first and foremost.
They are able to regard their own society objectively, liking some aspects
of it, disliking others. If an ultimate goal of education is
self-actualization, then education ought to help people transcend the
conditioning imposed upon them by their own culture...

p186
The American humanistic psychologists and existential psychiatrists are mostly
closer to the psychodynamicists than they are to Sartre. Their clinical
experiences have led them to conceive of the human being as having an essence,
a biological nature, membership in a species. It is very easy to interpret the
"uncovering" therapies as helping the person /discover/ his Identity, his
Real Self, in a word, his own subjective biology, which he can /then/ proceed
to actualize, to "make himself", to "choose".

The trouble is that the human species is the only species which finds it hard
to be a species. For a cat there seems to be no problem about being a cat.
It's easy; cats seem to have no complexes or ambivalences or conflicts, and show
no signs of yearning to be dogs instead. Their instincts are very clear.
But /we/ have no such unequivocal animal instincts. Our biological essence,
our instinct remnants, are weak and subtle, and they are hard to get at.
Learnings of the extrinsic sort /are more powerful than our deepest impulses/.
These deepest impulses in the human species, at the points where the instincts
have been lost almost entirely, where they are extremely weak, /this/ is
where I speak of introspective biology, of biological phenomenology, implying
that one of the necessary methods in the search for identity, the search
for self, the search for spontaneity and for naturalness is a matter of
closing your eyes, cutting down the noise, turning off the thoughts, putting
away all busyness, just relaxing in a kind of Taoistic and receptive fashion
(in much the same way that you do on the psychpoanalyst's couch). The 
technique here is to just wait to see what happens, what comes to mind.
This is waht Freud called free association, free-floating attention rather than
task orientation, and if you are successful in this effort and learn how to
do it, you can forget about the outside world and its noises and begin to
hear these small, delicate impulse voices from within, the hints from
your animal nature, not only from your common species-nature, but also from
your own uniqueness.

There's a very interesting paradox here, however. On the one hand I've talked
about uncovering or discovering your idiosyncracy, the way in which you are
different from everybody else in the whole world. Then on the other hand
I've spoken about discovering your specieshood, your humanness. As Carl Rogers
has phrased it: "How does it happen that the deeper we go into ourselves as
particular and unique, seeking for our own individual identity, the more we
find the whole human species?" Doesn't that remind you of Ralph Waldo Emerson
and the New England Transcendentalists? Discovering your specieshood, at a
deep enough level, merges with discovering your selfhood. Becoming (learning
how to be) fully human means /both/ enterprises carried on simultaneously.
you are learning (subjectively experiencing) what you peculiarly are, how
you are you, what your potentialities are, what your style is, what your
pace is, what your tastes are, what your values are, what direction your
body is going, where your personal biology is taking you, i.e., how you
are /different/ from others. And at the some time it means learning what
it means to be a human animal like other human animals, i.e., how you
are /similar/ to others.

pg 188 ...Colin Wilson (159) in his book, Introduction to the New
Existentialism, pointed out that life has to have meaning, to be filled
with moments of high intensity that validate life and make it worthwhile.
Otherwise the desire to die makes sense, for who would want to endure
endless pain or endless boredom?