Throughout time, the greatest minds and prophets acquired their wisdom and knowledge through meditation. Every great culture has produced an oracle, a guru, a high priest; a Buddha, a Pythagoras, or a Christ. These teachers used the wisdom and insight realized through the practice of meditation to create a basis for morality and law, and taught that all human beings can use meditation techniques to connect with Universal Mind. As an age-old practice, meditation has many facets, many systems, and its techniques have, during the ages of verbal transmission, sometimes become confused -- even distorted. So how do we discover the underlying truths that lead to spiritual growth, knowledge, and wisdom?

In The Fifth Dimension, Vera Stanley Alder explores the variety of claims made about the effects of meditation -- what happens to the student, biological and physical changes, the practice of balanced living, subsequent stages of development, and the phenomena that leads to ultimate fulfillment and achievement. Alder says that we can test the process by choosing a subject we know nothing about, use her exercises to discover how much we can learn about this subject, and begin to actually see that we, too, have the ability to reach the universal Mind. Her book is an interesting approach to understanding the divine plan of human evolution and progress.