It was just really crazy. I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it. That was when I realized things have actually changed.

When I first went there I discovered an entirely new approach of looking at life. It was as if I had sudden awakened from deep slumber.

A vast gap between who I was and who I could be had opened up. I saw that we humans carry within us the potential for a greatly expanded awareness of reality that embraces levels which are not accessible to ordinary consciousness. The cosmic nature of the reality that the books described dwarfed the microscopic portion of it that I knew. More than anything, I longed to look into the invisible realm. (Chapter Nineteen)

I looked, and, behold, a new world!

The experience of high-dimensional spatial sense was a spiritual baptism. In one moment, concepts like freedom, openness, profundity, and infinity all gained brand-new meanings.

When we fell in love, it was like discovering a new world. It was one that I had hoped was possible but had never been to before.

I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.

I had to get married to learn how to see the world properly.

I felt the need, in order to widen my field of observation and to refresh my vision in front of new sights, to take myself away for a while from the area where I was living, and to make some trips lasting several weeks in , and elsewhere..

It amazed me how a diverse perspective utterly changed the meaning of every significant event in the world.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently.

Because I like reading, I travelled in my mind and got into the world the book talked about. That gingered my power of imagination and broadened my outlook.

now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened