Amazon.com Review
"I was born a hungry ghost," is the opening line of renowned Buddhist teacher Stephen Levine's memoir
Turning Toward the Mystery. By the time Levine was 2 years old he was starving to death because of a doctor's bungled attempt to treat a digestive problem in infancy. This early starvation prepared Levine for stealing candy bars at age 4, toting a gun in his teenage years, and eventually turning his hunger toward the sacred journey into the unknown--that which he calls the mystery. When the drama of Levine's life story (heroin addiction, a stint at Riker's Island penitentiary for drug possession) falls away, we are left with the universal story of human longing. In this way Levine continues to be a teacher, using his life story to speak to the
constant desire that feeds addictions, materialism, envy, and self-pity, to name a few collective demons. "The more we want food, love, sex, courage, the greater the feeling of not having them," he writes. "I saw desire as an undulating nausea in the pit of the hungry ghost's belly." Levine, who has devoted much of his life work to the care of the dying (
A Year to Live,
Who Dies?), teaches the path of compassion, how suffering is caused by attachment, and how pleasure is the absence of desire. Because of his leanings toward poetry and Buddhism, Levine's writing is vivid, clean, and filled with lots of white space. The layering between personal story and spiritual teaching is well separated on the page, and yet the beauty of this memoir is that they unfold together so perfectly, not unlike the petal-by-petal opening of the lotus.
--Gail Hudson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Levine, a Buddhist teacher, bestselling author and caregiver for the dying, reviews the circumstances and events in his life as one long, ongoing lesson in "the process of opening," as fellow Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg notes in her endorsement. Levine has his spiritual roots in the contemporary flowering of Eastern spirituality in America; he also has his roots in the Rikers Island Penitentiary, where he spent time in the spiritually fermented 1960s for drug possession. This is a man who has known fear, craving and fire in the belly and learned bravery and transcendence of self. Also a poet, Levine is able to convey his unfolding insights in fresh language that breathes unique vitality into the sometimes cool idiom of American Buddhist writers. The book is marred at times by a tendency toward sentence fragments, a literary tic that makes meaning murky. Still, he knows his way around, literarily and spiritually, having stumbled there with innate persistence, a beloved spiritual guide, some famous friends along the path and many lessons from the dying, whom he and his wife, Ondrea a soul mate found after a few tries have served and consoled for years. The book has some excesses "mystery" as central concept and conceit is amply ambiguous but less than fresh but it offers an affecting case study in the lotus-flowering of truth rooted in sentient life and death. (Apr.) Forecast: Levine's Gradual Awakening has sold more than half a million copies, so this should easily sell through its first printing of 50,000. Advertising is planned in periodicals such as Body and Spirit, Tricycle and Shambhala Sun.
