I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them.

There are in me the seeds from which, if necessary, the universe could be constructed. In me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and a holograph for the whole world. Nothing is more important in my life than trying to discover these secrets.

Nobody is free… Everyone has a prison. Wife, parents, children, they all make prisons.

I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them.

To be worth making at all a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the world of objects and dimensions. What value can there be in seeing or experiencing anything for the first time unless it comes as a revelation? And for that to happen, some previously held thought or belief must be confounded, or enhanced, or even transcended. What difference can it make otherwise to see a redwood tree, a tiger, or a humming bird?

People who thought of my journey as a physical ordeal or an act of courage... missed the point. Courage and physical endurance were no more than useful items of equipment for me, like facility with languages or immunity to hepatitis. The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world.

It was chilling to realize that the sentimental qualities most valued between people, like loyalty, constancy, and affection, are the ones most likely to impede change.