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Rating: 
Summary: Turning mystery into memoir.
Review: "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
Rating: 
Summary: Essential reading for life (mid?)
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: disjointed
Review: This is an autobiography of the author's spiritual journey to enlightenment - in the end it is not clear to me whether he ever became fully enlightened. He has certainly recounted numerous experiences that naturally lead to enlightenment. I found this book interesting in parts, but not consistently so. I did not like the writing style which seemed disjointed, and so the story did not flow for me. The book is OK, but now that I have read it, I feel my time would have been more productively employed reading something else.
Rating:
Summary: enlivens our enlightenment!
Review: 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
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