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Lex Hixon, founder of this magazine and a spiritual friend to many died peacefully and consciously, surrounded by his family, at his home in Riverdale, New York on November 1, All Souls’ Day. He was 55. He had been in healing retreat at his home, withdrawn from what had become a busy schedule of travel and contact with his many students and colleagues, since the beginning of last year when he was diagnosed with cancer.

Lex was indeed a free spirit. He was the unique combination of an exuberant mystic in love with the divine, an initiate and practitioner of five diverse orthodox spiritual paths and an accredited scholar of the mystical traditions within the world’s, religions. He cared deeply about
Combining intellectual understanding with devotion and revelation. Author of seven books, his free translations and commentaries on central texts in the religions he practiced, written in his distinctive, poetic, luminous style, are respected for the insight and depth with which they make esoteric wisdom available to modern understanding, and are warmly appreciated by authorities in their fields as well as by the general reader.

Lex cared deeply about people. Many people, since his passing, have told how he just seemed to know who they were on first meeting and helped connect them with what they were searching for, or to connect more meaningfully with the path they were already on. He loved to help create and support communities where people could come together to honor and immerse themselves in individual traditions: he was a spiritual leader of the Masjida[-Farah in lower Manhattan, a founding member and on the board of directors of the Zen Community of New York, Naropa Institute, Tricycle Magazine, the SRV Retreat Center, and was the silent benefactor of many others. Throughout his life, he organized gatherings where people could. go beyond religious and spiritual separatism to celebrate, explore and debate in a spirit of ecumenicism. Countless people who passed through New York City in the seventies and early eighties, including the writer of this article, owe their first steps on the spiritual path to guidance they received and to connections they made from his weekly radio program on WBAI, “ln the Spirit.” Here, Lex interviewed many great spiritual teachers, as well as many seekers, in the beginning years of America's spiritual awakening.

'As a teacher, and in his own approach to ~the world, he combined a playful iconoclasm with a devotion to, preserving the integrity of each sacred tradition. Lex always walked the thin line between creative inspiration and tradition. Towards the end of his life he was delighted when Helen Tworkov, editor of Tricycle magazine, called him, in her introduction to his final book, Living Buddha Zen, "a conservative keeper of the Zen flame.”

Lex was born in Pasadena on Christmas Day, 1941. In an autobiographical sketch he wrote a few years ago, he spoke of growing up "in the cultural openness and wild sacred energy of southern California in a family whose philosophical keynote freedom." Childhood friends have spoken of his sense of enthusiasm and unconventionality, which he applied with as much pointed fervor to childhood concerns as he would later to spiritual life.

He came to the East Coast as a teenager to attend boarding school and then Yale University where he majored in Philosophy, and showed early promise as a poet and flamenco guitarist. His first steps in religion came under the guidance of his college roommate's father, Vine Deloria, a Lakota Sioux Episcopal priest, who introduced him to a non-European Christianity with roots in the Native American heritage of vision-quest. As he explored philosophy, the realm of the spiritual began to open to him, and shortly before his graduation from Yale, he petitioned to include a class in comparative religions as a part of his philosophical training. From an elective reading-list for that class, he chose The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

In a talk he gave many years later at the Ramakrishna Mission of CuIture in Calcutta, Lex described the first encounter with the blissful, unconventional nineteenth century Indian saint, whose worship of God as Mother and demonstration that all religions spring from the same source of nondual truth were to strongly influence his life:

'I ordered the Gospel from the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York, and I later come to know exactly where they kept these books– right near Mother's incense, that incense with the purple wrapper that has such a special fragrance. Therefore, when I received the Gospel in the mail, it exuded a wonderful fragrance. This was the first time I ever opened a book and smelled intense fragrance. It should have made me realize this was like no other book I had ever read before… I closed my eyes and put my face own on the open book. And after that I read a few lines. The first words I saw were. “God as Mother.” They leapt off the page. I had been raised in a liberal humanist background with a smattering of Christianity. In America, we have a general Christian/Jewish culture. These traditions have no reference to the Motherhood of God. I had never personally thought of calling God “Mother.” It never even once crossed my mind... Yet I did not feel any response of skepticism to Mother Kali. I felt it was perfectly natural, It was as if all my western barriers immediately fell away, and I accepted the idea of God as Mother. Then I closed the book.”

Following graduation Lex moved to New York City to continue his study of flamenco guitar with Carlos Montoya. There he searched out the great teacher and translator of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Nikhilananda, who was a direct disciple of, Sarada. Devi wife and spiritual partner of Sri Ramakrishna.
Lex and his wife Sheila received initiation into the Sarada/Ramakrishna lineage of devotion to the Divine Mother from the Swami, and studied, traveled, and meditated with him for the last seven years of the Swami’s life.

At Swami Nikhilananda’s urging, Lex earned his Ph.D. in Religion at
Columbia University in 1976, with a specialization in Sanskrit. (During this time he also continued his musical studies learning classical Indian music under the master sarod player, Vasant Rai, who created an Indian tuning for Lex's flamenco guitar.) In, 1971, as if given the job of carrying on Sri Ramakrishna’s message of openness to all spiritual paths through twentieth century media, he, found himself hostiing “In the Spirit.” The radio program, which continued through 1984, not only introduced his listeners to some of the greatest representatives of world traditions who visited New York City including the Dali Lama, Mother Theresa and, Sheikh Muzaffer Effendi, as well as leading American figures such as Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Ram Dass, Catholic activist Daniel Berrigan, Western Zen Master Bernard Glassman, Hilda Charlton and Pir Vilayat Kharn but changed his own life as well. Some of his guests became his teachers, and his spiritual path expanded to embrace initiations into Islamic Sufism, Zen and Tantric Tibetan Buddhism.

It’s important not to forget what a pioneer Lex was in the then embryonic and marginal spiritual/new age movement. Although there were already several major teachers on the scene, and people on their own or in communities scattered across the country were following various spiritual paths and exploring ways of healing, information was not available in the mainstream as it is now. Communication happened mostly through word of mouth. Lex was constantly besieged by requests for information, and in 1977 he decided to start a publication to network all the emerging resources in spirituality and alternative healing. Free Spirit began as a newsletter with no articles, only listings. Lex did this with the enthusiasm with which he did everything. His friend Louise Riskin remembers him making all of the deliveries himself in a white van, someone always riding shotgun in the passenger seat being regaled with information as they rode along. They stopped at health food stores, restaurants, bookstores or any other place that caught his fancy to ask if he could leave some copies, plastic newspaper binders flying like streamers from the back of the van. His daughter India remembers that on the way home from making deliveries, he used to stop at a housing project in Harlem and go through the buildings, gleefully leaving a copy outside every apartment door. Allison Rich, the managing editor from 1979-81, says that during those years the newsletter grew rapidly, but when she needed to move on, and Lex felt Free Spirit had served its purpose, he wrote a farewell letter in what was to be its last issue. Paul English, then the assistant editor of a similar publication in Chicago, read the letter and called Lex to urge him not to let Free Spirit die. Paul was thinking of moving to New York and asked if Lex would consider selling the magazine. Lex gave it to him. Lex began several projects in this way, putting them in the hands of others once they were under way.

Lex began his life as a published author in 1978 with Coming Home. The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions, which grew out of material from courses he taught at the New School for Social Research and other learning centers. The book has been continuously in print since then– first with Doubleday, then with Jeremy Tarcher, most recently with Larsen Publications and is now a classic in its field, called by Ken Wilber, "Perhaps the single best introductory book ever written on the world's great mystical traditions."

As the new age movement gained ground and became more popular, Lex’s own energies moved from opening the field for others to concentrating himself more on the authentic practices of specific ancient sacred traditions. Initiated into the 700 year-old Khalwati Jerrahi Sufi Order of Egypt and Istanbul by Sheikh Muzaffer Effendi, Lex made the hajj, or traditional pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, with his Sheikh in 1980. On the Sheikh's passing a few years later, Lex accepted formal responsibility, under the spiritual name Sheikh Nur al-Jerrahi, for major communities of Sufis in New York City and Mexico City, and small circles across the United States. Three books emerged from his Islamic experience: Heart of the Koran (Quest, 1988), Recollecion de la Miel (Gathering Honey, written in Spanish, published in Mexico City in 1989), and Atom from the Sun of Knowiedge (Pir Publications, 1993).

Lex and his wife Sheila were longtime students of Tibetan Buddhism, taking initiations from many great lamas. They were involved in the rebuilding of the oldest Buddhist monastery of India's Himalayan border region with Tibet and the establishment in the United States of an important Buddhist organization. They made pilgrimages to Bodhgaya and Sarnath in India with their root lama in 1981. From his Buddhist experience emerged Mother of the Buddhas: Meditation on the Prajnaporamita Sutra (Quest, 1993). In addition, in 1983 Lex and Sheila entered a formal, three-year period of study of the mystical theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church at St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestwood, NY, and sacramentally joined its congregation, which they continued to attend until his passing. Lex made a pilgrimage to the monasteries on Mount Athos in Greece in 1983; the unfinished manuscript based on the journal he kept while he was there was to have been his next book project.

But it was always the Rama-krishna lineage, and its connection to the ancient tantric Bengali tradition of Divine Mother worship, that was the center from which his life unfolded. (It is notable that on the lunar Hindu calendar, the day he died was Jaggadatri Puja, the festival for the form of the Divine Mother worshiped in Sarada Devi's village in India.) Lex felt very strongly that Sri Ramakrishna's life and teachings in the nineteenth century prepared the way for the spiritual expansion we are experiencing in our time, as well as for the rise of the feminine spirit. Lex often said that the women's movement, in both its political and spiritual manifestations, is the mostimportant movement on the planet today, and was enthusiastic in his support of the emerging leadership by women in the various religions. It could be said that all his work was involved in uncovering the core of feminine wisdom hidden at the heart of ancient sacred traditions.

To his own surprise, in 1990 Lex spontaneously began writing dramatic dialogues which took scenes from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, incorporated material from other accounts of people who had firsthand encounters with the great master, and brought them into modern expression. The book became Great Swan: Meetings with Ramakrishna (Shambhala, 1992), which Lex said "Holds the key to unlock all my life experiences." It felt like a landmark to Lex, who finished it in his fiftieth year; it was published on the fiftieth anniversary of his own teacher's translation of The Gospel, which had brought Sri Ramakrishna into American consciousness and preceded by a year the centennial anniversary of the Parliament of World Religions, the great convocation which opened this country to an influx of teachers and traditions from the east and where Swami Vivekananda, Sri Ramakrishna's emissary to the West, had won the hearts of Americans. Lex decided to devote a year of his life to Sri Ramakrishna, and traveled across America with the musicians of Jai Ma Music, reintroducing Sri Ramakrishna's teachings through words, music and meditation to generations who had received his spiritual legacy, but many of whom had never been introduced to him. Following his American tour, Lex, his family and musicians went to India, bringing his book to Calcutta one hundred years after Swami Vivekananda had brought Ramakrishna's teachings to the West. Lex gave talks and performances with Jai Ma Music at several Ramakrishna centers and was warmly received by the swamis, devotees and scholars there.

Sri Ramakrishna would often break into song, singing ecstatic love poems to Divine Mother Kali written by the 18th century poet and tantric initiate, Ramprasad. In the early eighties, working from a literal translation from the Bengali, Lex had begun putting these poems into modern English, and some were included as part of the text of Great Swan. A full collection of Lex's translations, Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment, was published by Quest Books in 1994. Lex encouraged people to read them aloud, and he himself loved to hear them read in women's voices. He would urge women to find their connection to Kali through the poems, explaining that though the poems had come through two men, they were direct transmissions from Goddess Kali and vessels of the authentic Bengali tantric tradition, the oldest unbroken living tradition of Divine Mother worship on the planet.

One of the last times I saw Lex, a little less than a year before he died, was at a performance where the Indian dancer Prema Dasara danced to the poems. Prema, Lex and members of the audience took turns reading aloud from the book. Towards the end, he could contain himself no longer, and grabbed a huge Nepali mask of Kali-long, thick, coarse black hair hanging on both sides of her face, mouth gaping wide-off the wall of the gallery, and holding the mask over his face, he himself danced as Kali while we all chanted her mantra, bringing the audience to a high point of both laughter and awe.

The final project Lex completed was publication of Living Buddha Zen, the fruit of years of koan study with his teacher and friend, Bernard Tetsugen Glassman Roshi. The book is an inspired translation and commentary on the Denkoroku, a classic Japanese text that follows Shakyamuni Buddha's transmission of light through fifty-two generations of Indian, Chinese and Japanese masters who form the Soto Zen lineage. Lex was to have gone to Japan last October 1st to be initiated as a novice priest into the 82nd generation of that lineage, the second generation of its American branch, and was to have received dharma transmission in New York on December 8th. Although he never received the first initiation, the ceremony of dharma transmission was performed on December 8th at an interfaith memorial service held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Tetsugen Roshi told the gathering of hundreds of Lex's friends, students and colleagues that because Lex no longer had physical form, the transmission was for all to receive.

In the last few years, Lex was constantly on the go. Not only did he complete five books, but he practically commuted from coast to coast taking care of his Sufi circles, conducting ongoing discussions on nonduality with groups in Los Angeles and Woodstock, NY. He engaged in dialogues at conferences and spiritual centers with practitioners of all paths, and promoted not only his books but the ideas in them. He felt this was crucial to understanding how to prepare the foundation for world peace and a new global culture that would no longer be based on separatism, yet would still preserve the uniqueness of each individual tradition and culture. Plans were under way for a bicoastal radio program with Dr. Mari Womack of UCLA, loosely based on "In the Spirit" but syndicated nationally, to be called "Religion on the Edge."

At the Centennial Parliament of World Religions in 1993, Lex presented a dialogue with his friend Jonathan Granoff entitled "The Open Space Beyond Religion." That open space was an image he would return to often in the next years when discussing the nondual basis of being, the lack of separation between oneself and the divine, or oneself and enlightenment. Diagnosed with cancer when it was already too late for western medicine to offer options, Lex chose to work with an alternative who ordered him to cease all his outward activity and draw his energy inward for healing. What was to have been a three-month healing retreat wound up lasting the remaining nine months of his life. It was difficult for him at first to stop the work he had felt so called to do in the world and withdraw from the many people who clamored for his attention. But as time went on, surrounded by his wife and four grown children who all stayed close, supporting his process, he surrendered to a peace and an inner contemplativeness he'd never been able to give himself the time for. Under doctor's orders not to discuss religion for more than five minutes, he would watch a sunset for two hours. He seemed in his last hours, according to his wife Sheila, to have blissfully merged into light. Conscious to the end, which in many traditions is in itself the worthy achievement of a lifetime, as he left he was able to give a moment-to-moment description of what he was experiencing to his wife and three daughters who were in the room with him.

I want to close this recollection with some words about Lex as I knew him. Although I listened to his radio program for the first of its nine years when I was in the city, and from it received powerful guidance and introduction to my spiritual teacher, I never thought of meeting him. However, in 1988, 1 feel we were personally introduced by Goddess Kali. Through a series of "coincidences” having to do with Kali, I attended a puja, a ceremony for Her commemorative day, at the SRV Retreat Center in Greenville, NY, Which Lex, a founder of the center, also attended. That initial meeting was the beginning of a warm friendship in which, in his inimitable stye he did everything he could to encourage my connection and devotion to Sri Ramakrishna, Sarada Devi and Goddess Kali.

A couple of years later, I unexpectedly walked out of the job I'd had for several years. I felt incredible relief, but wondered how I was going to make a living. The next morning Lex appeared in my house. We hadn't been in touch for about eight months, and I live two hours from his home. He and his wife happened to be passing through town and decided to drop in on me. He had in his hands the handwritten manuscript of Great Swan, from which he'd read excerpts to me over the years, and which he'd just completed. I said, "Oh! Is that for me7?" He clutched it to his chest and said, "No! This is my only copy!" His car had been stolen in New York the week before, and even in my relatively peaceful upstate village, he didn't dare leave the manuscript in his new car. We chatted, and within a short time, when he learned I had just become unemployed and could type, we agreed I would type the manuscript.

If I ever doubt that God works in my life, I remember that day. It was the most beautiful illustration of the teaching that you have to empty the vessel for God to fill it, because it was as though Sri Ramakrishna and Goddess Kali herself had moved into my house, and on a borrowed computer I was taking their darshan, the blessing of their presence, from a computer screen. Lex played the part in many peoples' lives of being agent for the spiritual path closest to them to become more real and intense for them.

We worked together for a little over five years, during which he completed and published five books, and I did whatever needed to be done in relation to them. I took it for granted at the time, but in retrospect it seems amazing for someone to have published a book a year of such depth and scope, and I've wondered if he knew on some inner level that he had to do his work quickly.

Our work together was a luminous experience, a very unusual apprenticeship, the full gifts of which I know I can't yet fully comprehend, but which I trust will unfold in coming years. I was already a writer and spiritual practitioner when we met, but he opened opportunities for me in both on a heightened level. He thanked me copiously for everything I did, as if I were doing him a favor; I always felt he was doing me a favor, allowing me to earn my living by immersing myself in such divine material.

We did much of our communication over the phone. Actually being with him was a dynamic, exhilarating and sometimes exhausting experience. He would appear in town like a whirlwind of light, sweeping whoever was around into some blissful adventure in nondualist philosophy and devotion to the divine. These adventures took place in restaurants, living rooms, monasteries, ashrams, and shrine rooms, but seemed to take one zooming to expansive levels of the cosmos at a high vibratory rate. (Is it any wonder that his favorite TV program was Star Trek?!) He was very loving, quietly charismatic and mischievous, with seemingly never-ending energy to meet with people and discuss teachings of truth.

Since his passing, many of us who knew him have found ourselves going through a deep grieving process. For myself, as I slowly emerge from it months later, I'm beginning to see even this as his gift, because in that dark void that no one approaches willingly, where there is always further to go, also access to that treasure chest of feminine wisdom whose mystery brought us together. I feel like he's taken my hand and led me there, encouraging me, encouraging us all, to pick up where he left off, and say it and live it in our own ways. My sense about Lex-whether it's the inspiration of our memory of him or the actual action of his being-is that he will go on doing on the other side what he did so magnificently on this side-supporting our beings, ever leading us to our souls' aspirations, and helping us to achieve on this side what we came here to do. I thank him with all gratitude of my heart, and pray that we will build from his rich legacy a way to live the highest truths on Earth in an integrated way. And to do it exuberantly.

Cassia Berman is a poet (author of Divine Mother Within Me), writer and editor who lives in Woodstock, NY where she also teaches t'ai chi, qi gong, and workshops on Divine Mother spirituality.