As a young girl, I thought that being in love with the man I married would guarantee a life of eternal joy. I soon learned that there weren't too many - Nina Graboi

Before long, I read my first book on Hindu philosophy. It was like a blow to my solar plexus; it jarred me awake. Here, at last, was what I sought. Instead of an object of dispute and often ridicule, here, reincarnation was taken for granted. The teachings were logical, unsentimental, yet filled with the spirit of non-harmfulness, compassion, understanding, love. To my western ears, Hindu philosophy sounded naive. The world I knew, the "real" world, was ruled by money and desires. But the words in Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms struck a deep chord. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, which insist on unquestioning faith, Patanjali tells us to believe nothing without first testing it. This was just right for me. It was the way I had chosen long ago, when I was still a child. (Chapter Nineteen)

for me, my sensuous body was a liability-it seemed to attract the wrong men for the wrong reasons. (Chapter Three)

I avidly continued to read the arguments for and against Psi and reincarnation. I also read Walt Whitman, Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Edgar Cayce, and Richard Maurice Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness, A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. In the mid-fifties, books of that nature were as hard find as people who were interested in them. In the sixties the heavens opened up and scores of books, both old and new, showered down upon the waiting world. How much easier my search would have been if I had waited! But at that time, very little information was available about non-ordinary states. There was William James who got high on nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair and had an unforgettable glimpse of another reality; and there was C.G.Jung. Elsewhere, psychology dismissed transcendent states as oceanic feelings and regression to the womb. (Chapter Nineteen)