Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
by Noah Levine
In his 2004 memoir Dharma Punx, Noah Levine revisited his past as a troubled punk rock kid desperate to rebel against the “oppression and ignorance” of “the material world.” Levine’s chaotic, drug-fueled lifestyle soon landed him in juvie, where he finally listened to the advice of his father, a prominent Buddhist teacher, to use meditation as a way to let go of his paralyzing fears and regrets. Emerging from jail transformed, Levine became a Buddhist counselor and founded the Dharma Punx movement, which offers floundering punk rockers (as well as the untattooed) a constructive, non-violent way to struggle “against the stream.”
Like all Levine’s books, films, and workshops, Against the Stream is a call for a “spiritual revolution” whose “point…is not to become a good Buddhist but to become a wise and compassionate human being, to awaken from our life of complacency and ignorance and be a buddha.” According to Levine, by understanding and living “the eightfold path,” we can learn to “accept pleasure as pleasure” and “pain as pain” without needing to “resist or attach to anything.” Once we stop struggling against or toward negative or positive sensations, we, like Buddha, can begin to “[radiate] care for the suffering in the world” and to heal it. In Against the Stream, Levine carefully lays out the path to enlightenment, including instructions for meditations and guides for action tailored toward just how Buddha-like readers want to be: for example, “vows of celibacy for long periods of time” are for radicals, but lying and stealing are off limits to everyone. Although Levine is gentle, thoughtful, and compassionate, he is preaching a dogma, and not surprisingly his book has its dogmatic overtones. Fortunately, these are minor in the face of the real help he offers anyone (which is to say, everyone) who is suffering in the world. Readers will find much to admire and emulate in this helpful book by a decent and sane (and insanely cool) man.
