Turning Toward the Mystery: A Seeker's Journey [Hardcover]

Stephen Levine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 2002

Stephen Levine has led an extraordinary fife. One of North America's revered spiritual teachers shares the "heart's hunger" of his troubled youth, his work with the seminal figures of the Beat poetry and jazz scene in New York and the psychedelic sixties in San Francisco, and the seeker's journey that led him to encounters with Ram Dass, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and the Dalai Lama.In this intimate account of compassion and healing, Levine's narrative turns progressively inward as he describes his life's path toward a deeper understanding of "the way of things." A former drug addict become spiritual teacher, Levine describes how he learned to use his life as a jumping-off point from which to teach healing principles and guided meditations. The author lays bare his own understanding of mindfulness, loving kindness, and service (the fundamental pillars of Buddhism) in an account of a life rich with characters immediately recognizable as leaders of the modern Eastern spirituality movement. Levine, through his life and work, embodies the message that personal peace and transcendence are possible for all.

Editorial Reviews

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

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.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1 edition (April 16, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062517449
• ISBN-13: 978-0062517449
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,254,368 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Turning mystery into memoir., April 20, 2002

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Turning Toward the Mystery: A Seeker's Journey (Hardcover)

"I walked through half my life as if it were a fever dream, barely touching the ground," Stephen Levine writes in his 252-page memoir, "my eyes half open, my heart half closed. Not half knowing who I was, I watched the ghost of me drift from room to room, through friends and lovers, never quite as real as advertised" (p. 37). Levine is a Buddhist meditation teacher who also works with terminal patients. I discovered him through his 1997 book about conscious living, A YEAR TO LIVE. His memoir offers Levine's intimate account of his "wandering awareness gradually drawn toward the light. The process of a long spiritual practice steadily met by a mysterious grace" (p. xii).

In his memoir, Levine frequently finds himself "up a dark river, but not without a paddle" (p. 90). And that's really the whole point of his book. "No matter how closed the mind or frightened the heart," he tells us, "the mystery is always at play" in our lives (p. 20). Levine was "born a hungry ghost" (p. 3), carried a stolen gun throughout his youth (p. 5), and was arrested four times before he was nineteen (p. 9). After being incarcerated in Rikers Island Penitentiary for drug possession (p. 25), Levine then moved to psychedelic, tie-dyed San Francisco in 1965, where he met Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Timothy Leary, Wavy Gravy, and Neal Cassady, while the Grateful Dead jammed on (pp. 64-5). He was divorced twice before meeting his soulmate, Ondrea, at a Conscious Living, Conscious Dying retreat in 1979. "I write about early internal struugles," Levine says, "not to add to the self-serving drama of a memoir, but for the benefit of any who might find in my confusion some way out of their own" (p. xii).

Along the way, we find Levine turning inward and embracing "the way of things" through meditation practice. "Turning inward," he observes, "leads to the uncovering and healing of our small self, our personal myth, the mental construct in which we mistakenly believe our true self is housed. And as we look deeper for something yet more real, in sudden wordless understandings, levels of awareness are revealed that direct the pilgrim home" (p. xi). It is Levine's journey inward that transforms mystery into a larger-than-life memoir.

G. Merritt

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for life (mid?), October 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Turning Toward the Mystery: A Seeker's Journey (Hardcover)

Levine makes a statement about a third of the way through the book that we have to distinguish between the "action," and the "person." Indeed we have to see "pain" as not personal, but as impersonal so that we don't associate pain with our own little ego struggle, which is filled with fickle judgements, moral values, and fears -- all of which do not qualify as "universal." If pain is "our" pain, then we can't open to the wider Pain and hence cannot feel empathy for the world - which is the ultimate "goal." Our struggle is the world's struggle and our pain can parodoxically open us to the world. James Hillman, in Soul's Code and other writings comes to this through philosophical roots (phomenological) and wrote bestsellars - so there is something striking a chord here.
This is essential mid-life stuff, and I recommend it hardily. Think about someone in your life you have trouble forgiving. Then ask if you want to go to your grave not forgiving? I don't, but I can't guarantee I won't - or that it will make a difference. But somehow at the stage in my life ( I am 56) I recognize this struggle to forgive as not a moral issue ("should" message), but a basic "life" issue. It isn't about thinking thoughts, but feeling deeply. Levine lays bare the essential stuff that is being indirectly and obscurely and misguidedly being talked about today in the frame of "personal relationships." This is not the place to uncover these issues because, again, personal relationships are small and impoverished if they don't move to the the big relationship between you and the world. Sounds like mumbo-jumbo? The book isn't. This really is essential reading, particularly for those in mid-life who stand at the mid-point between looking back and looking forward. How do we do this? Levine's book demonstrates how.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars enlivens our enlightenment!, August 10, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Turning Toward the Mystery: A Seeker's Journey (Hardcover)

What a delight to read and to savor the messages in this writing. The author clearly reveals his own journey through the somewhat messy process of becoming more fully human and holy. These revelations are minor compared to the wisdom that is distilled in wonderful reflective statements about the entire process of growth. Reading this book is a most useful and prayerful exercise