Quotes from Conversations in the Spirit

Conversations in the Spirit: Lex Hixon's WBAI "In the Spirit" Interviews, A Chronicle of the Seventies Spiritual Revolution

Edited by Sheila Hixon; Foreword by Bernie Glassman; Preface by Paul Gorman

Monkfish Book Publishing Company, Rhinebeck, New York, 2016     269 pages

For seventeen years Lex Hixon conducted interviews of spiritual teachers and thinkers, representing different streams of mystical teachings in the United States during those years, for WBAI Radio of New York.  From an archive of over three hundred episodes, his wife, Sheila Hixon, selected thirty-three of the early interviews from 1971-1980 for this book.

In the Center's library, we offer the works of many of these teachers in our collection including:  Alan Watts, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Prof. Robert Thurman, Guru Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Joseph Goldstein, St. Teresa of Calcutta, Ram Dass, Dudjom Rinpoche, Kalu Rinpoche, Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak al-Jerrahi, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Roshi Bernie Glassman, Pearle (Epstein) Besserman, Huston Smith, Father Daniel Berrigan, Roshi John Daido Loori, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan and others.

To listen to the interviews selected for this book in their original unabridged form, you can copy and paste this link provided by the publisher:  https://www.mixcloud.com/max-smile/

Here are two quotes from the interview with Ram Dass 1931-2019:

"If you're in your living room, Volkswagon microbus, meditation room, beach house, office, or bathroom, you are here with us in the community of the spirit. What we share together is a sense of our being, and that being transcends all boundaries of time and space. This is our gathering space. This [radio show] is the place of the heart. And the music and words are merely the temporary abode bricks that we use to build the walls of a space where we can meet. And then, a moment later, the walls crumble back into dust, and the spirit loses that form to take another form.

We come and go, geographically and through life and death. But we stay together in the spirit. We're just getting to appreciate who we are. What a joyous, light, spacious quality. How free. We're incarnations, and we are having the fun of lila [Sanskrit word for "delight"], the play of forms. It's the dance of keeping it together all at once. We can keep our earthly game together.

Let's keep the joy of it. Keep the humor of the big cosmic joy, that we can play in forms and yet know that we're formless." (p. 170)

"I'll tell you from where I'm sitting, Maharaj-ji and Hanuman and Shiva are all the same being, just different forms of it. That's about it! It's a lineage of total love that has as its edge a certain kind of rascality or Tantric quality of playing with the elements for the purpose of purification. It isn't the fierceness of Kali, but it has that edge to it of impersonal fierceness along with an incredible amount of love. It's the loving of the love in another being. Because that love is the mirror of God, right in there." (p. 175)

-- review submitted by Jennifer Knight

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