The ego, or the false self, is a thousand-headed hydra (Chapter Nineteen) - Nina Graboi

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

The one bond of love that seems inalienable is that of a mother to her child. Motherhood is one of the greatest blessings in life, I had always been told. And in many ways, it is. That it is also one of the heaviest burdens is kept secret from one generation to the next. The charming smiles, the adorable gurglings of your infant son or daughter are paid for with sleepless nights, and later with the inevitable clashes between you and your growing child. "Little children, little worries. Big children, big worries," isn't that how the saying goes? Yet so strong is the imperative of nature that women uncomplainingly carry out this task and hand down the myth of the joys of motherhood to their unsuspecting daughters. Today I know that the unconditional love a mother is supposed to bear her child is as much of a fable as that child's unconditional love for her. There is as much ambivalence in the mother-child relationship as with the rest of the family members. The nuclear family, so vital to the well-being of the growing child, is also the breeding ground for the psychological damage that characterizes so much of today's civilized society. By the time I was in my thirties I had already seen through these myths. (Chapter Twenty-two)

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)