The vision quest is a model for any inner journey:
“The individual undertakes his inner quest, without any show of heroic strength and achieves it, not as a triumph, but as a submission to powers higher than himself.
He accomplishes nothing by guile, which would be merely another form of heroic trial of strength. He is essentially a suppliant, not a man of power.
He can count only upon his own intrinsic human worth and is of necessity his own teacher.
He may be allowed to see the object of the heroic quest but not to possess it, or he may possess it briefly before losing it again, or he may derive spiritual insight from it as a talisman which comes and goes” (Henderson, 141).