Gregory Blann

Introduction
 

     Lex Hixon was an American pathfinder in the art of living in the open space beyond religions, a natural lover, drawn to experience the mystical heart of all the world’s sacred traditions. Behind the diversity of religious teachings and practices he discovered one luminous Reality with many names and forms, one superessential light shining at its core, the same light that shines through all conscious beings. Deeply inspired by this vision of religious unity, he passionately embraced all of the world’s great traditions without blending them, firm in the conviction that the religions of humanity, when renewed and lived in their authentic mystical depths, are still the vehicles that will lead us collectively to a better world. Through writing, teaching and radio hosting, Lex dedicated his life to promoting the essential Truth of the world’s religions, always striving to free them from arcane language, triumphalist tendencies, and various limited cultural and androcentric accretions that had accrued to them over the course of time.
    Though he passed from the physical world over two decades ago, Lex’s pluralistic approach to spirituality presciently anticipated the impulse that is moving a growing number of people in our time to explore the sacred dimension through multiple traditions in order to more fully celebrate and richly experience the underlying non-dual Reality at their core. The idea of embracing multiple spiritual paths is not entirely new; a number of twentieth century spiritual leaders can be cited as exemplars, such as Sufi Murshid Samuel Lewis, who was initiated and authorized to teach in a number of sacred traditions, and Father Bede Griffiths (Swami Dayananda), whose Benedictine ashram in South India practiced Hindu meditation and scriptural readings along with the Christian mass and Biblical readings. Teachers such as Hazrat Inayat Khan, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Thomas Merton, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Swami Satchitananda, the 14th Dalai Lama, and many others have all emphasized spiritual universalism, while Vedantists in India have long endorsed religious pluralism; yet this approach has only recently begun to gain wider acceptance in the United States.
    During the current era, this expanded universalist way has been steadily gaining ground among progressive spiritual practitioners in the West, revealing what may be the next global paradigm in spirituality—cutting across cultures, language and spiritual borders between religions which were once assumed to be unbridgeable. Certainly not everyone will embrace universalism—we will always need those who are firmly established in one life-long religious tradition and those who preserve the orthodox approach—but in time, hybrid interspiritual connections will almost certainly continue to become more common among thoughtful religious leaders and seekers who are sincerely committed to spiritual unfoldment.  Already we are seeing a number of accredited interspiritual universities and seminaries in the United States offering master’s level and doctoral degrees in interspiritual ministry and counseling, with diverse faculties, deeply rooted in the world’s various religions, who celebrate the essential commonalities and diverse complementary perspectives of these great traditions.
    Some call this phenomenon interspirituality; others call it universalism, spiritual pluralism, polydoxy, and hybrid (or hyphenated) spirituality. When seen through this perspective, these time-honored spiritual repositories of wisdom we know as the world’s religions are neither in conflict nor ends in themselves, but are like fingers pointing at the moon of Reality, doorways to Truth, musical motifs in a grand symphony. Shining at their common luminous core is the ungraspable, blissful Source of Being, a Singular Reality in which we collectively live, move and have our being—and we can find the light of this Essential Reality in ourselves. This ever-present, Infinite Source reveals itself to humanity through an essential stream of love and wisdom which has been called the perennial wisdom, the way of non-dual realization, and the primordial, natural religion, of which the Prophet Muhammad said, “Each child is born with the primordial nature, but it is his parents that make of him a Jew, Christian or Magian.”
    This book is a dual celebration of Lex Hixon’s life and his important contribution to contemporary interspirituality, in which he lovingly donned the garland of various religious traditions, penetrated to their heart, and revealed for us their highest ideals and unitive essence.For the lovers of universal Truth, the Divine can never be circumscribed by any theology or confined to a single revelation, for the Spirit of Truth always speaks to humanity through myriad channels of revelation and inner wisdom and is never exhausted by any singular approach to Truth.

    Lex Hixon was a scholar with a doctorate in comparative religion and for many years, the popular radio host of the In the Spirit radio program on WBAI in New York City, which featured interviews with many of the great spiritual teachers of his time. Commenting on his love and passionate advocacy of all the world’s authentic sacred traditions, Lex once jokingly referred to himself as the “Sierra Club of religions.” He also offered: “I’m an orthodox member of every sacred tradition.My one unorthodox point of view is that all of them are true and so therefore they should share resources, but I don’t think they should merge together.”
    By nature a generous and loving soul, Lex’s passion was to dive deeply into a number of different spiritual paths in which he felt a calling so that he might experience and incorporate their transformative power and share it with others. He lovingly studied and participated in dozens of spiritual ways, from the traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of America to Kabbala and Christian Science. He was a devoted lover of Ramakrishna and Kali, the Divine Mother, a Tibetan and Zen Buddhist practitioner, an Orthodox Christian, and an Islamic Sufi sheikh, the latter being the context in which I knew him best.
    As sheikh, he attracted a broad cross-section of humanity united by the religion of Islam and its mystic orders. At Dergah al-Farah in lower Manhattan, where he presided for over a decade, one always found a wide spectrum of ethnicities represented including Turkish Sufis, African and Causcasian American Sufis, Egyptian and Mexican Sufis, as well as a variety of interested visitors from other spiritual traditions. Having for years studied and practiced many of the world’s religions and inspired by his sheikh, Muzaffer Efendi, Lex was able to see Islam and Sufism—its mystical heart—as a universal expression of essential non-dual Reality and confirmation of religious unity which is compatible with America’s highest ideals of democracy and religious freedom.

     Lex emphasized that this path was “Universal Islam,” neither a religion of violence nor a time-frozen spiritual legacy suitable only for the cultural and historical milieu of the Middle and Far East. Those who studied with Lex found that his broad, culturally-inclusive approach opened doors into the world of mystic Islam that would otherwise have been closed to them. Visitors of every religion, including secularists and non-theists, were welcomed and unconditionally valued for their intrinsic humanity, regardless of their creed.
    After his first book, which contained a series of chapters on various spiritual paths, Lex was careful to preserve an inward separation between his many religious affiliations, focusing on each sacred world individually in the remainder of his books. But toward the end of his life he began to emphasize the confluence of the great spiritual traditions of humanity and their common grounding in the open space beyond the boundaries of any particular religion. In this volume, we bring all of his traditions together again to celebrate the rich symphonic polyphony of his spiritual life. I have also included in this account some of my own interactions and conversations with Lex on the Sufi path, with an emphasis on the universal, interspiritual dimension.
    Lex’s long-time spiritual colleague and primary successor in the Sufi lineage, Sheikha Fariha, describes Lex—or Sheikh Nur as he was known in Sufi circles—as a “modern day sage,” one of those human beings in each era who are “entrusted with keeping the transmission of divine knowledge alive.” In the introduction to 101 Diamonds from the Oral Tradition of the Glorious Messenger Muhammad, she writes: