Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions

This book is about spiritual enlightenment but, as Ken Wilber points out in the Foreword, Hixon's approach is fresh. He takes 10 of the world's major spiritual traditions and in each case presents its teachings and precepts with the aim of leading the reader to "release [him- or herself] into spirit as it manifests itself through each of those traditions" (p. xiii). Hixon is not concerned with the historical and doctrinal trappings of these disciplines but with the timeless awareness that is at the core. Each discipline serves as a vehicle for realization, or as Wilber puts it, "experimental practices. They are experiments to perform (and thus see through form). They are something to do and then be, not something to merely think and then believe" (p. viii). Hixon himself writes: "These essays present several universes or languages of Spirit whose central theme is Enlightenment. Each is unique, yet all are rich with mutual correspondences because they reflect one primal awareness. The spiritual dimension of culture is not an array of dogmatic world views bristling with contradictions but a spectrum of contemplative practices, equivalent in essence, which lead toward experience rather than toward doctrinal assertion. Coming Home attempts to open various doors into this spiritual dimension" (p. xi).

The teachings covered are the "European and Asian Approaches of Heidegger and Krishnamurti," "Ramakrishna of Bengal," "Ramana Maharshi," "Zen Ox-herding," "Plotinus and the Metaphysics of Spiritual Quest," "Jewish Soul Masters of the Hasidic Way," "Letters of Saint Paul," "Teachings of the Contemporary Sufi Bawa Muhaiyaddeen," "The Oracle Text of the I Ching," and "Toward the Turiya of Advaita Vedanta."