Seeing Things as One

Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions by Lex Hixon.  Larson Publications.  215 pp.  $14.00.  ***1/2

Coming Home is simultaneously one of the most inspiring and frustrating books I’ve ever read.  Lex Hixon led a short life which he devoted to his conviction that all of the spiritual traditions have a common core.  His first spiritual teacher—starting him off in a mind-boggling way—was a Lakota Sioux elder and Episcopalian priest, and Hixon subsequently studied with Sufi teachers, Hindus, famous Buddhists, and in the Eastern Orthodox church.

For years he had a radio show in New York where he interviewed anyone and everyone who had a spiritual bent, from the Dalai Lama to Mother Theresa.  He actually had a different name as a Sufi teacher, contradicting my grouchiness about special spiritual names (and he had a real winner, Nur al-Anwar al-Jerrahi ).  His life was cut short by cancer in 1995, but by that time he had published eleven books and practiced in many of the world’s major religions.

Coming Home was his first book, which may be part of the problem, but the real problem may be with me: I have a strong affinity for down-to-earth spiritual practice, but the vaguer and stranger things get, the harder time I have.  Hixon obviously didn’t have the same problem; any writer whose first chapter is entitled “Contemplative Thinking,” and features two spiritual brothers (?) like Heidegger and Krishnamurti, does not have a problem with lofty thought.  He also includes chapters on Ramakrishna (probably the best example of his own all-embracing world view), Ramana Maharshi, Plotinus, and a Sufi teacher whom he knew personally named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

Plotinus, whom I’d never previously read, is a good example of my problem.  I can read, and essentially agree with sentences like, “Every inquiry is either about what a thing essentially is, or its quality, or its cause, or the fact of its existence, but none of this applies to the One,”  or “We should make no inquiry about It but simply touch It in our intellect and learn that it is a profanation to apply any terms to it,” but page after page of such statements wear me down, and I don’t necessarily feel enriched.  (If you can’t say anything about It, why do you keep saying things about It?)  I felt the same way about the Sufi teachings, which actually come from a personal letter the teacher wrote Hixon.  “The highest Treasure, Allah, is in the form of pure Love, existing with three thousand compassionate and beneficial qualities, existing as Love within love, embracing each life with patience, restraint, contentment, surrender, tolerance, peacefulness and the qualities which exist as the calming honey of grace.”  Again, I don’t disagree, but my eyes begin to glass over.  (At least he didn’t list all three thousand qualities.)

The commentary on the Ten Ox-Herding pictures, on the other hand, is one of the most helpful I’ve ever read.  It begins with the fact that we all have Buddha Nature, so why should we be searching for the Ox at all?  “Having turned his back on his true nature, the man cannot see it.  Because of his defilements he has lost sight of the Ox.  Suddenly he finds himself confronted by a maze of crisscrossing paths.”  We proceed from that early dilemma to our final glimpse of the sage.  “Bare-chested, barefooted, he comes into the marketplace.  Muddied and dust-covered, how broadly he grins!  Without recourse to mystic powers, withered trees he swiftly brings to bloom.”

Other chapters, like one where Hixon posed questions to the I Ching, and where he tried to devise a beginning spiritual practice out of whole cloth, were less successful for me.  But the major surprise of the book, for me a total shock, was a chapter entitled “The New Aeon Has Dawned,” about the letters of St. Paul.  I was raised in the Christian tradition, and have in recent years come to think of Jesus as the man who brought a message of love, Paul as the person who brought back all the rules and made the teachings into a religion, much to their detriment, but Hixon tells the story in a whole new light.  I’m not entirely convinced, but the man makes me want to read Paul’s letters again, a statement I never thought I’d make.

For one thing, Paul’s encounter with Christ was entirely mystical; he had been persecuting Christians, in effect denying his own Christ Nature, when his “resistance finally dissolved and the boundless radiance of the Messiah, or Christ Nature, opened before his inner vision suddenly and with such intensity that physical sight became impossible for three days.”  He realized that “Jesus of Nazareth had indeed been a full expression of the Christ Nature, the Divine Radiance which abides secretly at the core of human nature.”

This mystical experience changed who Paul was as a human being and changed all of his ideas.  The whole experience oddly parallels what Hixon had just said about the Ox-Herding pictures.  “All mystical teaching that reveals the Divine Ground of human nature must face the paradox of our blindness to the Divine or our sense of alienation from the Divine.  Human suffering and conflict are created by ignoring our rootedness in the Divine Ground.  For this chronic condition of ignorance Paul uses the term sin.”  This certainly wasn’t the concept of sin that my Christian background left me with.  But it makes perfect sense here.

I didn’t think that all Hixon’s attempts to cast the world’s spiritual traditions in this light worked as well, though the chapter preceding the one on Paul, about the Hasidic masters of the Hebrew tradition, was most inspiring, also a great prelude to a chapter about a man who abruptly converted from Judaism to a more universal view.  I profoundly agree with the attempt that Hixon made, and wish he were around today.  He would only be 77.  We need his voice in an age when religions don’t embrace their common ground, just want to snipe at each other.