Natural Ease

“I was meditating in our loft on the Bowery that had a big storefront window. The sun was floating in. We had been taught to meditate by concentrating on keeping a still flame in our heart. I was deep in concentration when suddenly the perspective changed. I saw that the flame was actually an open portal. I looked through this open portal, and inside I saw Ramakrishna sitting in meditation. His body was golden, the color of the flame. Everything around him was golden too. I stepped in through this door and when I looked down, I saw my body was also golden. Everything was this golden flame color. I went to Ramakrishna and sat down near him. As I looked around, all I could see was a little black flame in the brightness, which was the way back into the realm of ignorance.

I stayed there as long as I could. It began to fade out, but the bliss that I experienced stayed with me for hours and hours. I wandered around the mid-’60s East Village in a state of inebriation. I tried to order a sandwich at the deli, but I couldn’t even speak so I had to leave. Nothing like this has ever recurred, but at the time I didn’t realize how special it was. It was not imagination in any ordinary sense. Since then, I’ve realized that insight, preparation, and balance are all important in spiritual life. Meditation on Ramakrishna and studying his life has been profoundly purifying, gradually changing our lives.

I went back to graduate school at Swami’s request, though I had left the New School, thinking that I was rejecting academic life. Swami regarded study as a suitable austerity for the contemporary environment—more meaningful, in my case, than walking barefoot through India. One day I shaved my beard, just because I didn’t want to create any feeling of separation from other people. We moved out of the Bowery. Sheila and I found a quiet place up on the Hudson. We had three babies and I watched them being born. We made a special meditation room in our house.

Life became more and more mellow. We spent almost every summer at a retreat with Swami on the St. Lawrence River. Worldly friends wandered away and spiritual friends appeared. Academic life became enriching for me. The insight was deepening. A natural ease was arising. There was a simplifying of speech and thought.”

~ Lex Hixon, Conversations in the Spirit: A Chronicle of the Seventies Spiritual Revolution
“Lex Hixon affected many lives in different ways. In the course of his own studies, he became an accomplished adept in (among other traditions) Zen, Vedanta, Sufism, and Russian Orthodoxy. His house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx often functioned as a haven for people who represented religion at the crossroads. A robed Tibetan high lama would be coming in one door as a disgruntled runaway from a Zen community would be entering through another, and Lex’s magnanimity extended equally to each.

Of all the roles that Lex played, none surpasses in significance the post he held at WBAI, the public radio station in New York City where, from 1971 to 1984, he conducted a weekly radio show called “In the Spirit.” He interviewed rabbis, sheiks, priests, ministers and representatives from an impressive range of religious traditions… Using the medium of radio technology to transmit the dharma, Lex Hixon introduced virtually thousands of listeners to their spiritual guides.”