In Chapter 3, excerpted below, the author includes a sensitive and telling portrait of Lex Hixon– his life and his philosophy.

You could compare the esoteric core of a religion to a very pure, highoctane fuel. Put it into an old Volkswagen, and the car will go like hell for a mile before it blows apart. if we're going to have a spiritual path for our culture, it needs to have levels that recognize where we are, and opens for us in stages that gradually move us upward.

Jacob Needleman, "In the Spirit of Philosophy,'
Free Spirit, Winter-Spring 1989-90

Lex Hixon lives with Sheila, his wife of twenty-five years, in a lovely old wood-shingled house near the historic Wave Hill section of Riv-erdale, New York, not far from the end of the Broadway IRT line. The house sits on a slight promontory overlooking the Hudson, its living- room window encircled by an enormous wisteria vine almost as old as the house, which dates back to the early part of this century and which, as I approached it, seemed suffused with mystery. Since it was the middle of January, the wisteria was not in bloom, but it did bear
a number of curiously shaped pods whose skin, Sheila said, is the texture of velvet. Seated in his study, Hixon looked casually resplend-ent in light blue flannel pajamas, white cardigan, and Birkenstock sandals, his large head framed by a mane of white hair. During the course of our interview, with the Metro-North train station and the Hudson River visible in the distance below, the daylight slowly faded to dusk and finally darkness outside.

Hixon practices Islam, the religion established in the Arabian desert in the seventh century by the Prophet Muhammad, and followed today by close to a billion Muslims throughout the world. Most of those are located in the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia, but there are several million Muslims in the United States, a number of whom, like Hixon, belong to Sufi Orders. Sufism is a classification of Islam that is sometimes said to emphasize a mystical expression and that has often strayed far from orthodox Muslim practices, especially in the West. Hixon doesn't much like the mystical tag applied to Sufis, since he feels that Islam is mystical enough; and he considers himself an orthodox Muslim. In fact, he is a sheikh (pronounced shake), or spiritual leader, who presides over mosques in Mexico City, Manhattan, and Newark, New Jersey-no mean achievement for a man born. fifty years ago in Los Angeles to nominally Episcopalian parents.

Among the key beliefs of Sufism. is a reverence for all the world's great religions. Unlike many of their more orthodox and even fundamentalist Muslim brethren, Sufis recognize that Islam is but one of the paths to God that men and women may follow. And so it is no contradiction that Lex Hixon is also a Christian, a member in good standing of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The practice of multiple religious formats also fits in with the philosophy of Vedanta, a kind of universalist branch of Hinduism which Hixon embraces and which teaches that all religions are valid and valuable. No good Vedantist would have a problem with the fact that, in addition to those three spiritual traditions, Hixon practices meditation as part of the Geluopa Order of Tibetan Buddhism.

Most of Hixon's teachers in the four disciplines feel that his multisectarian approach to devotion is, at best, fraught with danger, but he approaches the situation with what Da Kalki might call "Divine humor." When I asked how much time he devotes to each tradition on any given day, for instance, Hixon replied that he is like a migrant worker. "When the strawberries are in season, I'm mostly picking strawberries, and when the grapes are in season, I'm mostly picking grapes. For instance, right now Ramadan and Lent happen to be coinciding, and they will be for the next few years, which gives me a big scheduling headache."' He admitted that if holding a religious lineage is defined only by its external practices, he would be in trouble, because "there is no way to do all of those practices all the time to the greatest fullness. But if holding a lineage has to do with an inner spirit, an inner knowledge, then they are compatible. It's like saying you can speak French and Chinese and German and Hebrew, and then someone asks, 'Can you speak them all at the same time, every day?' Of course not, but you can know them simultaneously and be enriched by them without pitting them against one another. You could say that mine is. a general theory of relativity for religions."

If such an approach is not without its peculiar difficulties, for Hixon it represents a kind of "experiment," an attempt to see what happens when one maintains one's consciousness in distinct traditions, each of which has been widely accepted over many centuries. Whether the experiment will yield valuable spiritual data-he hasn't come to any conclusions yet-is less important than the fact that it keeps him actively engaged in the interdisciplinary dialogue that is an essential feature of the American religious landscape. And so, although Hixon may not be "typical" in any sociological sense, he is in an advantageous position not only to report firsthand on the course of four major rivers of faith, but also to evaluate the role of religion in American society in general. Besides his four practices, he holds a Ph.D. in comparative religion from Columbia University, and is gifted with a brilliant mind that is evident in the way he effortlessly interpolates ideas from one religion to another. Hixon likens his own role to that of United Nations interpreters: "You can have a UN only because of people who know how to translate between the different languages. We're just beginning to know how to translate between, say, Islam and Christianity, and that's one of the things I'm working on."

Hixon did a lot of translating in his first book, Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions, a fascinating if occasionally arcane overview of spiritual thinkers from Heidegger and Krishnamurti to Plotinus, St. Paul, and Israel Ba'al Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement in Judaism. At the time I first read Coming Home, I was- looking for someone who could explain and interpret the Islamic experience, and I began to think that Hixon was a prime candidate. He agreed to be interviewed and to speak openly about the often confusing subjects of Sufism, Black Muslims, Islamic fundamentalism, the Ayatollah and Salman Rushdie, among other things. I prepared myself by reading his second book, Heart of the Koran, a series of meditations on verses from the Islamic holy book, but I had trouble relating to it. Although the Koran is permeated with a tone of love and reverence evocative of Christianity at its most devotional, it also purveys some of that Old Testament windiness that can prove so tiresome at times. Hixon later assured me that I had at least gotten the basic point, since Islam, often mistakenly thought of as an Eastern religion, proceeds directly from Judaism and Christianity, and views itself as the final jewel in this triple crown of Western religious tradition.

So, when I met with Hixon at his home in Riverdale, I was eager to get his views on Islam, but things were not so simple. Before we could even begin, I had a problem with the tape recorder that turned out to be ridiculously elementary. As I fiddled with the various wires and plugs in my confusion and finally realized what I had done wrong, I explained the problem to Lex, but he was dismissive. "That's a good sign," he said. "It means we're already on the edge of some kind of mystery."

What was mysterious to me was that, despite my best efforts to get Hixon to talk about his spiritual evolution in biographical terms-his earliest religious impulses, first teachers, and so forth-he insisted on speaking only in general terms. As we talked, I was aware that the discussion was not at all going the way I had planned, yet I had a vague feeling (which I suppressed in my anxiety to get his history) that the things he was saying might have a deeper value than any biographical recounting. Not until I listened to the tapes the following day did I realize that he had given me a rich commentary on the place of religious practice in today's culture. He began by responding to my statement that my book would focus on the role of spirituality in everyday life rather than on monastic or esoteric experience.

"if we go back even fifty to a hundred years," Hixon said, "we'll see that what we know as the spiritual traditions, which we as modern intellectuals have become a little distanced from, are the world. These spiritual traditions are not only the grounds of the values by which people operate in their lives-things that surround birth, death, marriage, and livelihood-but also, in a subtler way, the very stuff and substance of our conceptuality. This includes even the way we physically perceive things, the way we look at a beautiful day or a beautiful person. So human experience is inextricably linked with the notion of a spiritual tradition and a spiritual vision. It isn't just something a culture can opt for or not opt for. Modem people have experimented with a secular approach that says, 'With science and law, we can build up our world.' But I think this was an aberration from the mature human standpoint, like saying we don't need art anymore. Religion, or the spiritual quest, is the very substance of our humanity, and there's no way to distance ourselves from it. If we reject it entirely, then we get pseudoreligions."

As previously suggested, those pseudoreligions can include political or social cults ranging from Maoism to the Ku Klux Klan. "But just as art needs criticism," Hixon continued, "spirituality needs its own form of criticism in order to keep it honest and authentic. If we don't have a critical enough view of religion, then we get fundamentalism and charlatanism and various forms of distortion. So there's no way we can ever relax as human beings. It's always a matter of vigilance and.constant efforts at reminding ourselves."

By way of example, Hixon mentioned the Islamic practice of praying five times a day, which the Prophet Muhammad borrowed and expanded from the daily Office of the Christian monks whom he encountered in the Arabian desert. These can be, Hixon said, "very brief flashes of prayer. They don't have to last for more than ten minutes, although they can be elaborated by people who want to spend more time at it. But these five bursts of formal prayer every day have a tremendous power to remind people that they can never take a vacation from vigilance, from commitment to the highest values. So Islam is very strongly integrated into daily life, family life, the life of social responsibility. But it's not superior to any of the other noble traditions, which have different methods and configurations. And it doesn't call itself superior, either. The Koran states that prophets have come to every nation, bringing essentially the same message: Turn your limited life in the direction of the limitless Source of life, and submit to that. That is what I mean by human vigilance, which is not just a luxury for a few people who are especially gifted, but is the very stuff and substance of our world. The Buddhists call this mindfulness, or attention."

As Hixon sees it, Westerners would like to practice this kind of attentiveness without having a large religious superstructure and the traditions and scriptures and ceremonies that go with it. But, he insisted, you can no more have spirituality without the traditions than you can have ordinary awareness "without all the neurons in your brain functioning, all the synapses in your nervous system, all the complicated organs of your body." Spiritual awareness is the source of our values, "the inner ear which keeps us balanced as we walk through life, whether we're walking through Wall Street or through the jungles of Vietnam. This sense of balance, this inner ear of spiritual awareness, relies upon a whole complex, organic body of doctrine and practice and spiritual leadership and spiritual study."

Seen from Hixon's viewpoint, both secular humanists and religious fundamentalists are hiding behind the same fallacy. The idea that we can do away with religion is as naive to him as the notion that traditional religion should be in the driver's seat, running society at every moment. Furthermore, religion's built-in "self-critical function" that prevents the abuse of spiritual power must be complemented by our own internal sense of truth that will warn us when something seems to be going awry. "Ultimately, the spiritual truth of any teacher or tradition has to be corroborated with our own internal mechanisms," he said, "such as conscience and compassion for others and certain precious sensibilities we were given." Dangers arise when immature spiritual teachers or religious communities say we shouldn't trust ourselves because we're sinful or haven't developed the particular sensi.tivity that they recommend. Then we have to stand up for our own integrity, while remaining aware that we can also deceive ourselves at times. "'One has deceptive thoughts or impulses, too," Hixon added. "When one is integrated into a religious tradition which is functional and benign, one has to be willing to renounce those deceptive notions and not just say, 'This is the way I see it. This is my integrity, so I should do it this way.' There has to be a subtle balance, a different kind of critical faculty employed in each instance."

"Subtle" is certainly the word for it. But as fine as some of Hixon's distinctions are, balanced and counterbalanced like the steel plates and dingleberries of a Calder mobile, they are also both self-evident and essential. To my mind, they represent the difficult kinds of things that need to be said plainly in the arena of spiritual bluster, somewhere between the hectoring gush of the fundamentalists and the cheery vagueness not only of the New Age but also of the highly accommodating mainstream churches that too often tailor their spiritual directives to fit the audience of newly religious baby boomers they hope to attract. Hixon's comments also recalled something I'd read in an interview in the Winter 1989-90 issue of Free Spirit with the Jewish scholar Jacob Needleman about striking a balance between esoteric and exoteric practices of religion. "Christianity, Judaism, and Islamic belief all provide people with moral precepts," Needleman says, "ways of living meant to be obeyed by the masses." These exoteric religious practices are intended "to give balance and steadiness to our experience," not "to transform us, to give us nirvana or Godrealization." He acknowledges that esoteric disciplines do exist within mainstream Western religions, but that, as many teachers have said, "the esoteric work is only for,those who have been through the exoteric, and have achieved the necessary balance." What is arriving nowadays in the West, Needleman concludes, is "a lot of information about inner practice, available to people who haven't really had an outer practice."

I asked Hixon for his thoughts on Needleman's cautionary distinction between inner and outer practices. "I don't think it's useful to talk about opposing dimensions of a phenomenon," he said, seemingly sidestepping the question. "Take, for instance, the left brain and the right brain. I'm sure that there's some biological basis to the fact that we have very subtle, complex modes of thinking and that some of them appear to originate from one side of the brain one time, and the offier side of the brain another time. But if we start thinking that we're two-sided brains, we're actually driving ourselves a little crazy. We must feel that we are integrated beings, not that impulses are coming from different places, because ultimately they're coming from the very core and root of our being. Similarly, in religion, it's wrong to separate exoteric and esoteric, or the daily disciplines from the hidden mystical teachings. That's separating something which isn't separable."

But isn't it a fact, I wondered aloud, that the mystical aspects of mainstream religions are divorced from the daily laws and practices by the institutions themselves? Christianity, for example, has a long tradition of meditation, from the early Desert Fathers through twentieth-century contemplatives like Thomas Merton and Basil Pennington, but this tradition is not taught in parochial schools or preached from the pulpit.

"There's a problem with that," Hixon replied, "because, for instance, communion is an intensely mystical practice of Christianity. In fact, it's more mystical than meditation. People have somehow forgotten that conununion is a level of mysticism even more advanced than many forms of yoga and Zen in other cultures. In Islam we have a similar problem whereby people occasionally think the five-timesdaily prayers are only for beginners, whereas under advanced Sufi guidance you might be repeating some of the divine names of Allah with every breath, and you might be moving and breathing certain ways. But the fact is that the prayers of Islam themselves are motion, are breath, are chanting the divine names, and have access to the most radical levels of the religion."

When a culture subtly desacralizes or demystifies; certain areas of religion, possibly in an effort to control them better, then the daily dimensions of religion, which Hixon called "the most radically mystical practice," somehow get "dirnmed down or concealed. And then people begin to look at it as institutionalized or, maybe, institutionalizable." But since everyone is completely different in the expression of his or her beliefs, Hixon argued, mechanical repetition runs counter to the spiritual sensibility. "Ibn el-Arabi, the great mystic from Andalusia in the twelfth century," he said, "taught very clearly that Allah or God recreates the universe every split second, and never creates it in the same way twice. This kind of heightened attention takes great effort to sustain. Sometimes cultures as well as individuals lose nerve and are not willing to try to sustain it, and so, for institutional purposes, they might try to c over over the radicalness of religion."

Going deeper into this problem, Hixon objects to the term "mysticism" being used for only certain specialized dimensions of a religious tradition. A believer who knows nothing about special meditative exercises can still be a radical mystic by virtue of his or her simple belief in God. "A Buddhist, who doesn't have the same structure of a creator God as Christians and Muslims," he said, "is still convinced that the state of complete enlightenment is possible and indeed inevitable for every living being, given enough evolution, and he is seeing this potentiality for Buddhahood even in a cat or a mosquito. This is as mystical as you want to get. In fact, human life itself is mystical beyond all imagination. How can you, sitting over there right now, just with your eyes and ears, be in such a full state of comprehension of all of these things that I'm thinking and that are emitting from my mouth as sounds? This is extraordinary beyond any kind of analysis. But we take daily conversation for granted, forgetting that maybe just two human beings communicating, with each other is a sacrament. So the sacramentality of daily life is also dimmed down, not only by our cultures or institutions but, frankly, by ourselves, out of a personal laziness and egocentricity that wants to have a habitual life pattern in which we can feel comfortable."

Religion, like art, is a means that human beings use to restimulate their sense of the extraordinariness of daily experience, Hixon reasons. Hence his reluctance to separate the mystical and the mundane. Among other things, religion is the source of our commitment to justice, of our sense of beauty, and of our sense that another human being is more than just. a lump of flesh. Even mankind's most secular understanding of the sanctity of life is in itself a religious sentiment. "We can't necessarily rely on a religious tradition outside of us to come in and cultivate these special sensibilities," Hixon said. "We have to take the responsibility ourselves. But the religious traditions are our greatest friends and supports in these efforts."

The balance between personal practice and communal participation within a given tradition can also be difficult to maintain. The emphasis on meditation and mystical union described in many of the books I came across in religious bookstores gives the impression that belonging to a community of believers is sometimes secondary to developing an internal mystical life-a notion that Hixon categorically rejects. "Religion is not primarily about doctrines," he said. "It's about living in religious communities. It is not about private practice at all. Privacy is some sort of modem concept of the alienated, isolated individual. This doesn't mean that one doesn't have the precincts of one's own heart to which to retire in every tradition. But working out some sort of private understanding of one's own religion that one makes up oneself and maybe attracts a few people to-that's not the way the history of religion has developed. Those peripheral developments have always occurred, but the main forces within religion have been vibrant communities, rich in depth, and not simply circling around one charismatic individual."

Although many of the world's great religions did originate around charismatic individuals-Moses, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, Hixon is referring to the long, vital process of development, growth, and self-regulation these traditions all underwent. That is why he feels that the so-called New Age-a loose aggregate of religious and psychological groups which I will explore later-is wrongheaded in its emphasis on accelerated spiritual growth and a modest level of commitment. "Spiritual development does take a minimum of ten or fifteen years," he said. "You don't necessarily have to be living in a cave or washing the feet of a guru. You can be attending mass every Sunday or the mosque every Friday, but it does take many years to get any sort of maturity. Ask a concert pianist or a dancer. It's obvious that by. practicing twenty minutes a day, you cannot become Nureyev. "

Some of the religions that have emerged in the last fifty years or so, such as Eckankar, which calls itself a "New Age religion," advance the idea that twenty or thirty minutes a day of contemplation is a sound base for spiritual growth (although Eckankar does advise other spiritual exercises). "This is what classifies Eckankar as a part of the New Age mentality," Hixon said, "and hence, as far as I'm concerned, not really a part of the fully authentic spiritual traditions. New Age people are going to have to go back and renew themselves at the roots of tradition again and again. People will realize that you can't exist in some modem nonritual, nonceremonial mode, that you have to have that sacramental life, just as marriage is coming back in again, and people want to have singing and reading from the Scriptures. That sacramental atmosphere is as necessary to the human soul as oxygen is necessary to the human organism."

I wonder about his comparison. The resurgence of interest in the social traditions of marriage and monogamy may represent some kind of reaction against the freewheeling days of the Sexual Revolution, and its attendant dissatisfactions. But rather than signaling a return to religion, the new focus on marriage is more likely just a return swing of the pendulum, acquiring momentum from a growing fear of AIDS as much as from anything else, and is apt to be followed in time by a swing back the other way. I would argue instead that the search for a spiritual base to life is ongoing and incremental, and does not necessarily respond to blips in the curve of social fashion-which is not to say that the growing interest in both traditional and New Age religions is not connected to this ongoing human search. As Hixon himself admitted in concluding his thoughts about less traditional paths to God, "Some wonderful help can come from all different areas, because the religious person believes that everything is coming through God's will, that the divine presence is carried in everything. If someone beats you on the street, or if someone comes up and help you when you need it, both of those things come from God as teachings. 'Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there,' Jesus said in the Gospels. But he also said, 'Not everyone who calls unto me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' You have to balance those things out. Christ is present everywhere, even where the most ornery, rebellious sect of Christians may be. But they may be shouting, 'Lord, Lord,' and he won't acknowledge them on the day of the Ki ngdom."

It was nearly dark by the time Hixon finished his preamble. "'That's a long monologue," he said. "'And that's about all I have to say regarding the whole thing." Of course, it wasn't quite all. We pursued a lengthy list of topics that evening, including, at last, his personal background and his experience of Islam, and continued the dialogue in his mosque some weeks later, and again by telephone. In retrospect, the process of interviewing him seemed to replicate in some microcosmic way the difficulty outsiders face in exposing themselves to any great religion with which they are not familiar. Spiritual teachers can appear elusive, contradictory, purposefully mystifying, even vaguely threatening, and Hixon was all of that in my first encounter with him. But they can also be generous, kind, merciful, and illuminating, and Hixon was all of that, too.

I left his home that evening feeling confused and irritated, yet the more I pondered his words in the months that followed, the more I appreciated the perspective they provided for me. He had a way of mixing the esoteric and the everyday that paralleled what I was seeking to do. And I find Hixon's outlook of particular value precisely because it goes against the grain of mainstream America's attitude toward religion, and undercuts the extremes of spiritual ideology represented by atheistic secular humanism at one end of the spectrum and Christian fundamentalism at the other.