If all the Jews were like you, there wouldn't be any anti-semitism," she said fondly. From then on, I was to hear these words frequently. They were m… - 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)

Throughout this, I kept paring away at the accretions of my conditioning. I subjected all my beliefs to radical doubt and questioned the values by which I lived. Were they truly mine? Or had they been foisted on me, as on everybody else, by the culture? I had questioned before, but not nearly enough. I discovered new possibilities, alternative approaches to almost everything I had hitherto taken for granted, and I saw the hypocrisy and the phoniness of much that made up the image I presented to the world. I called it "peeling the onion" and worked diligently to free myself of robot prejudices and responses. These inner events took place over a period of years, and they are still going on. (Chapter Nineteen)

Rereading these pages, I am struck with a sense of unfamiliarity with the feelings I then harbored. Here was a woman not yet forty who believed her life to be over because her children had grown! Did I really experience these sentiments? It seems so alien to me now; again, I am reminded of how little of what I call myself is permanent. (Chapter Twenty)