Science of Mind: You're a practicing mystic. What spiritual traditions have you studied?

Lex Hixon: "At present, I am actively involved in four traditions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. However, I can’t claim to have plumbed the depth and richness of any of these traditions. I am just a very small point in them.

"I was born into a Christian environment, but my experience indicates that ultimately there is no separate membership in the different traditions. There is only the Great Tradition, which has many names. The notion of separate membership applies a social criterion to something which is mystical, an affair of the heart."

What have you found to be the central truth of all these traditions? Can you describe it in a word or a phrase, such as "enlightenment"?

Hixon: "I used that word in my first book, Coming Home, which is subtitled 'The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions.' So, yes, enlightenment is an appropriate - word.

"Yet as one advances spiritually, one is less and less able to give any simple answer to questions about the Divine Mystery, although I do see all the traditions as transparent to the truth. In other words, the truth shines through them, even if it caret be put into words, ultimately.

"Truth is not something which one can state completely. The saints of all traditions spent their lifetimes attempting to describe or turn people toward the ineffable truth. To say that we could state what the central truth is would, I think, be oversimplifying the richness of the traditions - almost abandoning them.

"The American Zen master, Bernard Glassman, wrote a book called The Hazy Moon of Enlightenment in which he indicated that the haziness, or the mystery, of a full moon that isif t quite clear in the sky is more profound than a clear glimpse of the moon itself. In Sufism, some of the adepts talk about entering states of bewilderment rather than clarity. If one thinks of spiritual enlightenment in terms of clarity or some sort of final answer, then one is still attached to limited ways of knowing. So this light which floods the mind and heart at the very center of all traditions and which, you might say, even is the nature of reality itself, does not produce an experience which is simple or easily communicable or categorizeable."

You used the word Light to indicate the ultimate nature of reality. Will you please expand on what that means?

Hixon: "Today is a very cloudy autumn day, yet without any electric lights, I'm able to read and write. The sun, which is not even visible to my eyes, is still providing me with enough light so I can function in all sorts of ways. Similarly, all the activities of human life are made possible by the light shed abundantly by Reality itself. All our intellectual efforts, all our science, all our ethical commitments are made possible only by this spiritual light. In that sense, you can say that everyone in the world is experiencing some of this enlightenment.

"In the case of the mystic, the clouds are parted and a direct vision of the sun occurs. In his dialogue, The Republic, Plato talks about the myth of the cave. We're like prisoners in a cave, with our backs to the sun, and all we see are shadows. Now and then someone comes out of the cave and sees the sun directly. Having seen the splendor of the sun, that person sometimes has difficulty going back into the cave - that is, into the conventional world - .and functioning there. So the mystic, who sees directly, sometimes becomes incapacitated in dealing with and enjoying the ordinary world.

"The most advanced mystics I know of, in all the traditions, are people who are capable of seeing that naked sun, that naked Divine Radiance, without being blinded or incapacitated. They are able to function joyously even in the tiniest details of life by understanding that every single detail of one's being and existence itself is enlightened by that primal light. The Christian liturgy speaks about Christ as the light that enlightens every soul who comes into the world. So human life itself is already enlightened and we shouldrft feel that enlightenment is some sort of special state that one or two mystics have experienced while the rest of us are living in darkness.

"When one studies and experiences the mystic traditions, one begins to appreciate human life more and more. One begins to appreciate the omnipresence of divine life, the extraordinary perfection of the design of creation which allows this divine light to constitute and to permeate every cell, every atom of the creation. The Koran says that as the bird opens its wings in flight, it is praising Allah. And it goes on to say that every motion of the creation is praising the source of creation."

Have you met the same idea expressed in other great traditions?

Hixon: "I mentioned Christianity and Islam. In Buddhism, the highest level of experience is tlie disappearance of the distinction between the absolute and the relative so we no longer think of the ultimate truth as being somewhere else - a realm which is spacious and full of light - and ordinary existence as being very cramped and obscure. For the Buddhist sage and also for the Confucian sage, there is no absolute distinction between activity and meditation. They are part of the same reality"

And that's expressed in the ancient Buddhist saying, "Nirvana is samsara, samsara is nirvana."

Hixon: "Right. Nirvana or ultimate reality is not essentially different from samsara or the ordinary, everyday world. I'm studying a book called Confucian Contemplation, written by an old friend, Rodney Taylor. Confucian thought influences all East Asian cultures very deeply. In the book he interviews a contemporary Japanese Confucian scholar who practices the quiet sitting of the Confucian tradition. He points out that in Confucianism, action and contemplation' must become each other. The difference between them must disappear. It is a model for moral action and contemplative quietude being unified."

So there is a transcendent unity to world religions and sacred traditions, though they express their understanding of what you call "the great mystery" in different terminology or metaphors.

Hixon: "If I were to answer in an academic framework, I would say that is correct. But, again, speaking as a practicing mystic, I caiYt even see that there are different traditions. There is simply one reality and we must go beyond the idea of dialogue between the great traditions, as useful as that is at one level, to the, very reality from which the traditions arise."

Nevertheless, in some sense, there is a clear distinction among the traditions.

Hixon : "Of course. For instance, a person might come to me and say,'You're Caucasian and I'm Asian! We certainly could recognize that we come from different races and cultures but that wouldift affect us at all as far as feeling we are both human beings. Mystics reach the level of awareness at which they feel there is absolutely no distinction between themselves, even though they belong to very different religions, just as an Asian and a Caucasian would not see any distinction between themselves as human beings. The Asian might return to his culture and the Caucasian to his, without thinking that either culture should disappear or that they should somehow merge the cultures to make something else."

So there is a unity underlying the multiplicity and diversity of forms.

Hixon: "When one says there is a unity underlying diversity, one implies there are two levels to reality. There is the level of diversity and underneath it is unity. This is the kind of dualism from which the mystic is gradually emancipated."

But for someone who has not yet realized that fact, the duality can at least be acknowledged. For instance, it is done in terms of the notion of esoteric and exoteric forms of religion.

Hixon: "I disagree with the analysis of religion as esoteric and exoteric. It is like splitting religion right down the middle. You can't say that religion contains mere dogmas on one level and high mystical experiences on the other. Religion is a unified body, with all its structures and functions in harmony. When I practice a tradition, such as Tantric Buddhism, I would never think of proceeding without having the initiations necessary to pursue a certain practice. It's the same with the other traditions. There's no sharp distinction between the externals of a religion and the internals of that religion. They are interdependent and both are necessary."

Isn't the statement from the Bible about the difference between the letter of law and the spirit of the law applicable here?

Hixon: "Yes, and there is indeed a difference between the letter and the spirit. But we also must realize that the letter and the spirit of the law are complementary. Let's look at law. As far as I can see, nature has certain patterns. We can discern their operation in the universe. They seem to be fluid and flexible to some degree and yet there is a kind of strictness in the way they function. In the same way, each religion is like a universe. The laws within that universe function very strictly, even though there is flexibility also. Someone who enters a religion has to be ready to submit to the organic laws functioning there. It is not just a matter of personal interpretation - whatever you want or whatever you think is best. There is objective truth and there is objective functioning of laws. There are also certain things which are just not permissible. There are certain mistakes for which you have to seek some sort of purification or repentance to clear yourself. So I think it is misleading to talk as if we can dispense with the letter of law and just have the spirit of the law."

Most people feel their particular sect or denomination is better, than others. They tend to look down on all the rest with some degree of superiority, and the result is religious intolerance and even open warfare. How can one get beyond that narrow sense of identification with religion to the deeper truth of it, without having to let go of one's religious roots?

Hixon: "That disharmony is regrettable but may be very natural. I doift see in nature or in human life any place where there's just clear sailing without conflict. We should not, in the name of mysticism , withdraw from the realm of conflict and try to make a utopia where there are no differences of opinions and no serious conflicts of values. I think there are serious conflicts of value."

How do the advanced mystics feel about traditions other than theirs which are recognized as having similar levels of accomplishment?

Hixon: "There is no question that great religions have often felt of a sense of superiority over all the others. Advanced Islamic saints or advanced Buddhist saints will most likely feel that their tradition is somehow superior to all the other traditions. It's not that they feel the other traditions have no truth or could not be a vehicle of spiritual development, but they feel they have gottew where they are because of the unique clarity or unique power of their own tradition. So it's a misconception to think that advanced spiritual mystics do not feel the superiority of their particular tradition over other traditions."

Do they, at the same time, reverence all other traditions?

Hixon: "Not necessarily. Some of them have highly critical attitudes about the other traditions."

One can be critical but nevertheless reverent.

Hixon: "Some highly evolved people I've met are very reverent toward all the traditions; it seems to be their nature. Others, however, don’t have that particular nature. They are more critically oriented and feel that some sort of critical dialectic is necessary to clarify the mind so, as not to fall into what they consider to be ~dangerous misconceptions held by other traditions."

But without raising a weapon in combat to force their ideas and traditions, religious or otherwise, on others.

Hixon: "I would hope at this point in history, when there are few official -state religions, that religion will not be forced on people politically. But this is something human nature is prone to, and there is still a danger that some state - Christian, Islamic, or any other - might attempt to force its religion on another state or its own citizens. Marxism, which is a quasi-religion, is an obvious example."

Let's explore some of the characteristics of those who truly apprehend the Great Mystery, regardless -of which tradition they come from. What do you see as qualities of mind and heart, and behavior which indicate enlightenment, God-realization, or whatever term might describe an experience of the transcendent unity of religions?

Hixon: "Just as I said earlier about -being reluctant to characterize central truth itself, similarly, as I have more and more experience, I hesitate to characterize what a holy person or a totally integrated person would be like or act like. There seems to be an infinite diversity of possibilities. Part of the narrow-minded ne s s you are legitimately concerned about would be the narrow-mindedness of traditions which say a holy person is someone who is celibate, doesift smoke, doesif t'eat meat, etc. That really is imposing the ideals of, a particular tradition on another tradition. There are saintly people who are warriors or scientists, revolutionaries or supporters of the status quo. St * Paul said that slaves should remain. slaves and not seek their emancipation."

In your use of the term "saintly people," I sense some concept of virtuous behavior that presumably would be discoverable in all the great traditions.

Hixon: "It is tempting to try to reduce. sainthood to some description we could all agree on, but I think we have to resist that temptation and allow the exploration of spiritual reality to be free and open. I feel that an enlightened person, whatever his or her external behavior, will be a blessing to the world. I'm reluctant to restrict how they should behave."

Can you name any qualities as hallmarks of enlightenment - for example, compassion, selfless service, discriminating wisdom?

Hixon: "Let's take compassion. Without a doubt, compassion is a primary characteristic of enlightenment. But compassion is expressed in many ways. To a child who is being forced to stay after school to do homework, this might seem like a great lack of compassion on the part of the teacher. Of course, the teacher may be extremely compassionate and may be making a lot of personal sacrifices to try to help the child along in his studies.

"The prophetic traditions tell us that God is infinitely compassionate and yet we see a world which is full of terrible things, so we have to assume this is somehow an expression of God's compassion. We see, as Job finally concluded, that God's ways are totally beyond human ways. So we must resist the temptation to put into reasonable human language this Great Mystery or the people who have tasted this Great Mystery and have become transformed by it. I think what we have here is precisely a mystery. And my way of safeguarding against the narrow-mindedness you are concerned about is to keep this mystery open.

"You might very well ask then: How do we deal with charlatans or people who make spiritual claims but who doiYt have anything really to back them up? I would answer that there is very little way to defend against.these people."

Should they be allowed to operate without restriction or punishment if they take advantage of people or violate.their trust or cheat them of property - things of that sort?

Hixon: "If you get them on tax evasion or professional malpractice, you can bring them into the norm of social and civil law. Then, of course, they have to stand up to the same strict standards everyone else has to stand up to in society. But as far as legislating holiness, it carft be done. The spiritual path is as dangerous and as narrow as a razor's edge.

"So religion is an area of great risk in a persoifs life. How do you find a marriage partner? How can you trust someone you fall in love with? Well, sometimes it doesht work out; sometimes you have to get a divorce. But you doift necessarily take that person to court because you feel the person used you or represented himself in false colors. It is an affair of the heart. So, too, with religion, which is ultimately an affair of the heart. The more restrictions and safeguards you put on religion, the more danger there is of institutionalizing it entirely and then losing the spark and mystery of it."

How do the people you've spent time with show their realization of tlW Great Mystery? What are some of the notable qualities you observed in them?

Hixon: "Id have to say the boldness and richness of their humanity, of being human. Any quality one might admire about a person who is a real human being is just intensified in the saintly person. So it turns out that we are not running away from our humanity when we become mystics. We are really running toward our humanity. We are not becoming superhuman beings; we are simply becoming human beings."

Well, human beings show a great range of emotion, from a mother's tenderness toward her child to a raging madman7s anger and violence. Is the latter also intensified in saints?

Hixon: "Some of the saints I've known have had a tremendous temper. The idea that a saint has to be sweet and mild all the time is a misconception. I've seen saints who scold their disciples fiercely. But the difference is that in the saint, such behavior comes from compassion and it somehow is healing for the person who receives it. Saints show the full range of human emotion. The prophet Mohammed, for instance, often visited all his nine wives in a single night before going on pilgrimage, so the idea that a saint cannot be sexual or cannot have that kind of intense loving human experience is also a false conception.

"To give you another example, Roman Catholic Christianity accepts the idea that priests should be celibate. Actually, this is an idea that was introduced in the eleventh century as a form of discipline. In the earlier days of Christianity, when the Church was new, the bishops were married. One of things that qualified them as bishops was that they were married men who could keep their households in harmony and therefore they were qualified to keep a spiritual community in harmony.

"Now, if you talk aboutMohammed's nine wives to someone who was raised in a Catholic context of celibate priests, he would probably think Mohammed wasrit really a propbet but a madman. Whereas we know that Mohammed was one of the most exquisite of all the prophets~. Now, fourteen centuries after his passing away, his community consists of a billion people, so there is no question that he was a real prophet. As you said earlier, if someone has been raised in a particular religious framework, he is likely to be very narrow-minded about other types of spiritual manifestation."

Then let me ask what may be the central question in exploring the notion of diverse traditions which nevertheless have the same truth at their heart. Is the loss of narrowm mindedness and dogmatism characteristic of a saint?

Hixon: "When you say narrow-mindedness and dogmatism, you are using two negative terms. But must the processes we're discussing be viewed as negative? As I said earlier, a saint or a realized person may retain a hypercritical attitude toward practices of other traditions or even practices in his or her own tradition which.seem to be a -distortion. So two Islamic saints or two Buddhist sages could seriously disagree with each other on very key points in their own tradition. Hopefully, they would not resort to violent means to settle the disagreement, but short of that they would use every bit of personal power and verbal facility to uphold their point of view.”

That's formalized in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, where debate between novices in training is a common practice. Likewise, Christian priests and ministers in seminary are taught argumentation and rhetoric in order to defend their faith.

Hixon: "Yes. And that suggests something about the value of a rigorous exploration of spiritual ideas. For instance, in the New Age movement today, almost anything goes in the name of spirituality, no matter how foolish or dangerous it may be.

"And though I've just said that I'm against restrictions and prohibitions in the practice of religion, I must say clearly that the traditions state - and my personal experience confirms - that you can make mistakes about spiritual matters and that these mistakes can and should be refuted. The question becomes then: Whose refutation do you accept? Whose authority? Debates inside, say, the Buddhist tradition, are one thing, but to have a debate between the traditions in which, let's say, Buddhism refutes Christianity or Christianity refutes Buddhism, is untenable. The refutation is really not valid because it is not based on a shared set of laws or shared principles of logic. The different traditions, you might say, have different logics. Therefore, I caif t see how it is possible to have a valid debate between traditions. Each will refute the other one, according to its own logic."

You’re an academic and a spiritual practitioner, familiar with a broad range of religions and sacred traditions. Have you found commonalities which can be used to validate the legitimacy of a tradition - any tradition?

Hixon: "I think we have to rely on our humanity. As human beings we have a sense of truth, a sense that there is truth. We have a sense that there is such a thing as, say, the dignity of being. No matter what tradition we're in, no matter what culture we're in, we have various deep feelings and we should stick with our human feelings. If our conscience bothers us about something, then we should reject that thing. If we feel that a particular quality in a person is attractive, if we feel it radiates beauty and joy, then we should accept it.

"In order for us to make these kinds of evaluations, our feelings, our sentiments, have to be educated. Take someone who is a wine taster. When he was a child, he probably took his first sip of wine and spit it out, feeling that it tasted terrible. So a wine taster has to be educated into the taste of wine and how to differentiate between good wine and bad wine. Likewise, our feelings must be educated. That's why we should enter some path of spiritual practice - to refine ourselves, to refine our sensibilities to the point where we can really discriminate between what might be a very fine vintage or a poor vintage in a particular religious tradition."

In my own survey of sacred traditions and world religions, I see two things held in common. The first is some form of what can be called the Golden Rule. The second is what you just touched on, namely, some form of spiritual discipline. They have both a theory and a practice intended to humanize people - to reduce the violence and the bloodshed and the egotism through experiential realization of the Divine.

Hixon: "I agree with your analysis. And for that reason, I think religious traditions are absolutely essential for the future of humanity on this planet and, through the instrumentality of what you just described, they offer the only way powerful enough to turn around the divisiveness and destructiveness of human beings. Some people point out how many have been killed in the name of religion. I doift deny that, but if you just add up the numbers of people that Stalin and Hitler executed - these were men who had no religion, who had no religious restraints and no religious vision - it would far exceed the number of people who have been killed in all religious wars in history. So rather than looking upon religion as something from the childhood of humanity that we can dispense with now in favor of some rational, scientific international diplomacy, human beings should reexamine the possibility that religion as a training and as a transcendent expression of our unity is the way of the future.”

"Religion is the way for future peace and harmony on the planet. The age of science has ended and the age of religion has begun. That doesift mean science worft go on finding very interesting things, but the time has passed when human beings should define themselves in terms of science. We should now think of ourselves as visionary and elevated and transcendental beings in terms of religion. As religion unfolds, it will continue to need bishops, swamis, and rabbis, and all the rich particularities of the traditions will continue to exist. But somehow all of this has to become transparent to the reality of religion itself, to the reality of transcendent vision as being the way humanity should envision itself and go forward together in the future."

So in the "new age" or "new aeon," there will continue to be a multiplicity of traditions and sects and denominations.

Hixon: "Yes, and this multiplicity should be seen as healthy and natural and very positive. The fact that certain charlatans may creep into the picture shouldrft upset us or terrify.us. We just have to keep our efforts at discrimination going simultaneously with our sense of tolerance and openness and, gradually, like weeding a garden, we'll learn to pull out the weeds and leave the flowers to grow. And that will enable us to distinguish genuine spiritual traditions from the inauthentic."