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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the
Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of
Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe
SECRET
MATTER: updated, revised & expanded edtion from Lethe Press
with Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE
PLAGUE:
A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story
Books on Gay Spirituality:
Articles
and Excerpts:
Read
Toby's review of Samuel Avery's The
Dimensional Structure of
Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San
Francisco"
The
Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate
Why gay people should NOT Marry
Wedding Cake Liberation
Gay Marriage in Texas
What's ironic
Shame on the American People
The "highest form of love"
The
cause of homosexuality
What is homosexuality?
What Jesus said about Gay
Rights
The purpose of homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Waves
of Gay Liberation Activity
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
Easton Mountain Retreat Center
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
John Boswell was Immanuel Kant
Curious
Bodies
What
Toby Johnson Believes
The Joseph Campbell Connection
Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy
The Nature of Religion
Being
Gay is a Blessing
Freedom
of Religion
The
Gay Agenda
Gay
Saintliness
Gay Spiritual Functions
The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.
The Sinfulness of
Homosexuality
"The Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross &
the
Dark Night of the Soul."
Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.
Eckhart's Eye
Let Me Tell You a Secret
Religious Articulations of the
Secret
The Collective Unconscious
Driving as Spiritual Practice
Meditation
Historicity
as Myth
Pilgrimage
Next
Step in Evolution
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
The Life is in the Blood
Gay
retirement and the "freelance monastery"
Seeing with Different Eyes
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
The
mystical
experience at the Servites' Castle in Riverside
The
Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis
The Techniques Of The World Saviors
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus
and the Resurrection
Part 4: A
Course in Miracles
The
Secret of the Clear Light
Understanding the Clear Light
Mobius
Strip
Finding Your
Tiger Face
How Gay
Souls Get Reincarnated
About Alien Abduction
In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
More
about Gay Mental Health
Gay
Rap
Psych
Tech Training
C.I.A.S.
& C.I.I.S.
The
Rainbow Flag
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
About Dennis Paddie
About Sterling Houston
About Michael Stevens
About Ralph Walker
Our friend Tom Nash
About Eva Thayer
Second March on
Washington
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Andrew Harvey
Excerpted from an
interview with gay writer, mystic, guide Andrew Harvey on
 MyOutSpirit.com, conducted by Tom Cummisky.
"The more we
see gay people emerging with this kind of broad generosity of soul and
wild commitment to transformation and profound love and compassion for
all beings and justice for all beings, the more the fears of the
straight community about gay people will be healed."
"As victims of separation and victims of division and as victims of
unbelievable cruelty, it is up to us to really manifest the kind of
compassion, the kind of all embracing understanding and the kind of
commitment to love that will truly transform others. Take the
darkness we’ve been given and transform it into golden light."
Read
the whole interview
Join MyOutSpirit.com!
Harvey
has a new book on spirituality as activism, titled THE HOPE: A GUIDE TO
SACRED ACTIVISM
Toby Johnson comments
on the interview:
A wonderful statement by Andrew Harvey:
Spirituality not as rejecting the world, but as saving the world.
The natural evolution of
consciousness leads us to understand the human religious impulse to be
not about adhering to strict purity taboos and rules and restrictions,
especially about sex, OR about believing in certain mythological
doctrines, but about living in such virtuous ways that the problems and
suffering in the world clear up in the course of evolution itself AND
that human beings come to understand the world's mythological heritage
as metaphors, not dogmas, that are clues to the nature of consciousness
and of our oneness with "God." World changing, world saving, world
serving activism flows naturally from the realization of who we really
are at the level of spirit.
The goal of gay
spirituality, I think, is to find for ourselves--and to assist other
gay people to see--how our homosexuality can be understood as a clue
and an operative practice to experiencing that oneness with "God." The
goal of the spiritual life is to experience being in heaven now.
Meditation and spiritual practice serve to reveal this transcendental
reality; they transform experience so that the world DOES appear and
BECOMES heaven now. For gay people spiritual vision sees how the styles
of gay life can be perceived as--and thereby transformed into--clues to
heaven.
Gay spirituality, for
instance, sees that a frivolous whimsy of gay life, like drag (from
Radical Faerie-style genderfuck to stage drag and serious female
impersonation, from Halloween costume to personal effeminacy) resonate
with age-old myths of androgynous, bisexual gods and cross-dressing
shamans.
Gay patterns of free and
anonymous sex resonate with the mystical poetry of the Sufis and of,
specifically, St John of the Cross whose poem "On a Dark Night" is
about discovering that the man he has had anonymous "park sex" was
Jesus--for all of us, mystically, we are Jesus and Avalokiteshvara and
God-incarnate to one another, and should behave so!
The gay encounter with AIDS
in the last decades resonates with myths of asceticism, voluntary
suffering, mystical substitution and self-sacrifice for the salvation
of others--by both the "victims" and the caregivers.
Talents of gay personality,
like style, design and artistry and, perhaps even more important,
sensitivity, compassion and drive to service, show us the virtues we
can and should cultivate for our spiritual growth. Our gayness gives us
a perspective on life and cultural convention; we understand the world,
other people's lifestyles AND religious tradition from over and above;
we should strive to be visionaries and world-transformers. Our
attraction to same rather than opposite potentially makes us less
distracted and obsessed with duality; we are blessed, if we want to be
so, with clues to nondual vision.
The work that Andrew Harvey
is doing is so important because it demonstrates--both to the gay world
AND to the world at large--the evolution of religion and spirituality.
This is in line with the great tradition of homosexual and
gender-transcending prophets, seers, idealists and spiritual guides.
And Harvey reminds us that our spirituality must resonate outward from
us to save the world. This is where the evolution of consciousness is
taking us all as Earth/Gaia wakes up and we all see heaven now. And, I
think, it's a gay thing to point the way.
This is how we, as gay
people, give good service by being openly gay AND by transforming what
it means to be gay so everybody understands us not as sinners but as
saints. This is how we become saints. Spirituality IS self-fulfilling
prophecy IS activism in service of humankind.
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