Perhaps we'll never know how far the path can go, how much a human being can truly achieve, until we realize that the ultimate reward is not a gold medal but the path itself.

Mastery is the art of setting your foot on the path.

At the heart of each of us, whatever our imperfections, there exists a silence pulse of perfect rhythm which is absolutely individual and unique, and yet which connects us to everything else.

History tells us more than we want to know about what is wrong with man, and we can hardly turn a page in the daily press without learning the specific time, place, and name of evil. But perhaps the most pervasive evil of all rarely appears in the news. This evil, the waste of human potential, is particularly painful to recognize for it strikes our parents and children, our friends and brothers, ourselves.

Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.

The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.

It's fitting, then, that we begin this exploration of ourselves and of the world with music, and more specifically with a musical quality called vibrato. This pulsation that wells up within the sounded note can lead us to what is most spontaneous and creative in human life, and possibly even to deeper mysteries--to powers of knowing and doing which we have lost or given away during the epoch of civilization, and which perhaps we may now regain.