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Overview
In his new book, Stephen Levine, author of the perennial best-seller Who Dies?, teaches us how to live each moment, each hour, each day mindfully—as if it were all that was left. On his deathbed, Socrates exhorted his followers to practice dying as the highest form of wisdom. Levine decided to live this way himself for a whole year, and now he shares with us how such immediacy radically changes our view of the world and forces us to examine our priorities. Most of us go to extraordinary lengths to ignore, laugh off, or deny the fact that we are going to die, but preparing for death is one of the most rational and rewarding acts of a lifetime. It is an exercise that gives us the opportunity to deal with unfinished business and enter into a new and vibrant relationship with life. Levine provides us with a year-long program of intensely practical strategies and powerful guided meditations to help with this work, so that whenever the ultimate moment does arrive for each of us, we will not feel that it has come too soon.Contemporary spiritual teacher Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (275,000 copies sold to date) dealt with how to use the consciousness of our mortality to live a better life. Now the author of the perennial bestseller Who Dies? tells us how to live mindfully each moment, each hour, each day as if it were all that was left. BOMC and QPBC Alternate Selection. 176 pp. National publicity & author tour.
Editorials
Library Journal
On New Year's Eve in 1994, Levine and his wife, Ondrea, vowed to live the next year as if it were their last. As a counselor for the terminally ill and author of many works on spirituality and dying, Levine has come to believe that preparing for or "practicing" death reminds one of the beauty of life. In this production of his book (Crown, 1997), Levine himself relates his experiences and emotions in his yearlong experiment in "conscious living." He emphasizes his philosophies about life and death rather than giving a month-by-month account. Drawing on the dogma of many faiths including Buddhism, Native American religions, and Christianity, Levine describes the dying process as a change of state. Laden with New Age terminology, Levine's prose tends to sound stilted. Recommended only where the author has a strong following.Beth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib., OhioBook Details
Published
January 1, 1998
Publisher
Thorndike, Me. : G.K. Hall, 1998.
Pages
224
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780783883267