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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062517456 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 02/04/2003 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 1,017,288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.62(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Breathing In
I was born a hungry ghost.
Ill from a protracted digestive disorder that, after more than two years of the old doctor's insistence on absolutely nothing but mashed bananas and skimmed milk, left me severely malnourished. Pleading for food, I am told, when I smelled dinner being served to the family downstairs. My beleaguered parents, on taking me to a new physician, were told that the problem was no longer the celiac condition, but slow starvation.
I had a pocketful of stolen candy bars by the age of four.
By eight years old I walked nine blocks to and from P.S. #16 with one of two neighbors nearly every day.
Tommy was a friend I had known since I was a toddler. A wistful, obsessive, deeply internalized, oxygen-deprived-at-birth fellow. For years during our walk home he would at times pass on, in an obsessive-compulsive flow, more than I will ever need to know about the fine points of automobile chrome plating. By sixth grade his interest had shifted to the microdesign of various fountain pens. Because he dragged one foot slightly it was a slow walk home. It was a teaching in warmth and patience. It was the path with a heart.
The other fellow, named Hap, lived up to his name -- smart, a joker, stimulating playmate, and fellow shoplifter. We had a penchant for stealing war toys and, for some reason, stuffed olives. Ours was the fast, look-over-your-shoulder path home.
My best friend Eric died when we were nine. We used to sit on his front porch two blocks from P.S. #16, watching the cars going by and imagining whowe might be when we grew up.
He was the only person I knew with an accent. We laughed a lot. He had an unusual generosity. He would often hand me what I wanted before I mentioned it. He was my favorite playmate.
I learned some time later that he died of "the sickness," probably leukemia, acquired two years earlier when subjected to chemical experimentation in Auschwitz.
Every few weeks my father smelled of vanilla.
He had built up a small household chemical-manufacturing business. Developing, among other products, a line of blueing and ammonia, a remarkably effective vitamin B-12 plant-growth additive, and a chemical stew for the nickel-plating industry that eliminated the need to polish after plating. And, too, imitation vanilla on a bottling line of his own design and construction.
His small factory was in a hundred-year-old brick building in the oldest part of town. On its cellar walls could still be seen the faint remnants of "party painting" from the days when it was a speakeasy run by Legs Diamond.
Two blocks from his factory was a once elegant, now quite dilapidated movie theater that showed mostly westerns and war movies.
At a Saturday matinee western when I was thirteen, an older man sat next to me and offered me some popcorn. He asked if I would I like to go for a ride, even drive his panel truck parked just outside. I pretty much knew what he was up to. Reaching into my jacket pocket to touch the small pistol I had stolen in a burglary, I considered robbing him and taking his truck. I told him I'd be right back after I went to the bathroom.
When I opened the door to the dingy men's room walled in soiled, cracked, and stained tile, I was immediately enveloped in acrid smoke. Bent over the sink a hunched figure was burning a small pile of what I now understand was belladonna, stramonium, inhaled for what must have been a severe asthma attack.
The broken old room full of bitter smoke from what seemed some drug demon hovering in the corner, and me with a loaded pistol, and someone waiting back in the dark for me to rob him, or worse.
My chest burned with fear and belladonna. It was unmistakably hell.
I slipped out the side door into the sunshine.
A few months later I was arrested for carrying that gun. I was surprised by the feeling that somehow it really didn't matter because my life was already over.
At the time I thought a gun was some sort of magical talisman, a symbol of safety and autonomy.
I had not realized yet that a gun was just a second spine. It was going to take me a while.
Ghost though I was, nonetheless I was blessed. Though it would be a very slow revelation, unexpected imperatives about noninjury and the unanticipated sacredness of life arose from a heart I did not even know I had. They were lifelines from the mystery by which I began to pull myself up and out of the primal ooze of my fear and isolation.
The first of two mantras that gravitated into my world came just before I was arrested. In a moment of stress and grace, with the police not far behind, "God Is Love" reached me. It spoke to me from a crocheted sampler on the wall behind the kindest adult I had yet met while he held me as I wept trembling in fear.
As my concepts of God have changed over the years, these words have meandered through many levels of meaning. But always love has been as good a word for the Divine as I could imagine.
Love is the emptiness of everything but love.
For as long as I can remember the alternate antics of the wounded child and the investigations of the ageless Universal played through me.
In the beginnings of my secluded cellar laboratory, which my chemist father had mostly provided, these two tendencies were clearly acted out. On the one hand, I experimented making gunpowder pyrotechnics, while, on the other hand, I was carefully constructing an Archimedes' Vertigo to see what was to be found at the hypnotic center of the spinning concentric circles.
Turning Toward the Mystery. Copyright © by Stephen Levine. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.What People are Saying About This
“A remarkable, awesome book written with a poetic velvet pen and a simplicity and honesty that is powerfully inspiring.”
"No Small Feat. A Spiritual masterpiece filled with honesty, insight and meaning.
"Stephen Levine is one of our wisest living teachers...With Turning Toward the Mystery, he continues to inspire.
“Levine continues where Jack Kerouac left off...Breathtakingly honest, deeply moving, highly recommended.”
"An account from the heart about the process of opening by a well-known and much loved teacher.