Table of Contents
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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
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
Read Toby's review of Samuel Avery's The Dimensional Structure of
Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San Francisco"
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:
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
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
"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
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 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
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
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
The
Rainbow Flag
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
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A gentle
breeze blew threough the dawnsky-tinted blossoms of the pink cherry
tree, delicating provoking the flowers.
Beneath the tree, rapt in the reverie of the morning light and the
whispering coolness of the wind, Subhuti sat and watched the dancing of
the blossoms.
Suddenly, the whole tree began to tremble, the blossoms to sway and
frolic and then to fall all about the monk seated under the tree, like
the flowers strewn in processions before passing holy men or before the
images of the Incarnate Wisdom of Buddha.
Subhuti sat up, a little startled, and asked rhetorically of heaven,
"What is happening that this tree should shower me with its blossoms
that are so pure and perfect?"
To his surprise, the Voice of Heaven spoke and the Gods gave answer,
saying, "O noble Subhuti, do not be surprised, we are only manifesting
our appreciation of your glorious discourse on emptiness."
"But I was giving no discourse on emptiness," said the bewildered monk.
"You have given no discourse on emptiness," said the Gods, "and we have
heard no discourse on emptiness."
And the blossoms continued to fall, glorious in their appreciation,
cascading in torrents of beauty and all-surpassing wisdom.
Epistemological Vacuum
In order to decide what to do, one must first know what is true. One
must know what truth is. That is the issue of epistemology. And the
epistemological stance of most Americans is too simple and too
threatened to support an ethic that can deal with the complex questions
of the modern world.
But perhaps there is something hauntingly significant about our
epistemological vacuum. Perhaps, in order to find a resolution, we need
simply to reverse our attitude toward our confusion. Perhaps what seems
so to threaten belief is instead the condition in which insight can be
achieved. Perhaps the crisis of religion can be the source of spiritual
transformation. That has been a progression I have seen in my own life
and this is why my story may be of some interest.
From unquestioning belief I moved into confusion and dismay as the
religious tenets I held so dear seemed to conflict with the rational,
scientific principles I knew to be correct. My effort to be both a holy
and virtuous man and an intelligent, clear-minded thinker seemed
doomed. That confusion pushed me to grapple with the epistemological
issues that founded the problem. I saw that religion is only
superficially concerned with doctrine and behavior and much more truly
with spiritual awareness. I glimpsed the mystical substratum on which
belief rests and saw that the confusion and sense of the emptiness of
all truth need be a source less of apostasy than of ecstasy.
And I saw that this awareness of a mystical reality--not unlike the
critiques of modern philosophy--points beyond itself and beyond its
gods to a deep stratum of consciousness, the experience of which for
many has been the fruit of the mystical quest. For even in religious
language, this has sometimes been described as an experience of
emptiness. Thus, paradoxically, the sense of emptiness and
meaninglessness which has resulted from the attenuation of faith
brought about by the scientific age appeared to be, with only a slight
twist, the goal of religious experience. The twist, I discovered, is
that where for modern humankind the experience of emptiness is
frightening and demoralizing, for religiouskind it has been
metaphorized in ways that make it enlightening and liberating.
Self-referential Statements
The familiar example of the problem of self-referential statements is
the sentence: “This statement is false.” If the statement is true, then
it’s false. If the statement is false, then it’s true. The only way to
make sense of such a statement is to move up a level to a metastatement
observing the problem of self-reference. While the example seems mere
sophistry, the problem really has profound philosophical implications.
And these manifest the problem of modern consciousness’s ability to be
conscious of itself.
While this has become a problem of modern times, it’s actually quite an
ancient phenomenon. Those Hindu and Buddhist icons and statues of gods
and buddhas with multiple heads layered one upon another are depictions
of the experience in meditation of watching oneself watching oneself
watching oneself ad infinitum. That these depictions show up in such a
context indicates the religious implications of such questioning. There
was, for example, a time when many of us were satisfied with the
argument that the Bible must be the true revealed Word of God since it
says so right there in the Bible and the Word of God can’t lie. But as
soon as we got sophisticated enough to understand self-referential
statements, that polemic might have begun to seem as strong an argument
against the literal truth of the Bible as it had previously been in
support of it. We were forced up a level to a metaquestion.
A sense of emptiness arises from such questioning of the explanations
of reality that we have traditionally held. For they force us to
suspect, at least, that the explanations, especially religious
explanations, are merely images, fairy tales that satisfy specific
needs but that possess of themselves no real truth.
This questioning has been done in the past not only by the opponents of
religion but, as well, by religious mystics and visionaries. These were
men and women not satisfied with the simple, superficial beliefs of
their families and neighbors. Fascinated with what seemed to lie behind
conventional religious teaching, they sought some direct experience of
Truth and of God instead of mere images. They might have said that God
had called to them from behind the stories and images that those around
them accepted complacently as Truth.
Some of these seekers then tried to explain how their experiences of
God were different from what they had been taught and how the images
had both helped and hindered their mystical quest. Some, trying to cut
through the use of myths and images altogether, used words like
“emptiness,” “nothingness,” and “the Void” to describe their experience
of the Ultimate. Thus some of the most famous religious figures sounded
very much like modern skeptics who declare that the myths of religion
are false, that the gods do not exist, and that Ultimate Truth is
empty--if only because it seems to go on forever.
Nagarjuna and Sunyata
In his major work, the Mulamadhyamakarikas (Fundamentals of the
Middle Way), the first century Buddhist sage, Nagarjuna cut through the
distinction between two conficting theological schools of early
Buddhism, the Abhidharma and the Prajnaparamita, by denying that either
doctrine had any substantial reality.
Nagarjuna taught the principle of sunyata. Sunyata is usually
translated “emptiness,” or “nothingness.” Perhaps a more intelligible
way of translating sunyata would be “contentlessness.” For in
Nagarjuna’s thought it meant that the metaphysical and religious
notions of Buddhism are only temporarily useful concepts that have no
content and that refer to no objective existence--in the contemporary
lingo of Marshall McLuhan: no message, only medium.
Nagarjuna taught that all ideas, philosophies, and beliefs are empty
because everything is relative. According to his principle of “mutual
co-origination,” no experiences are more basic than any others because
all are intelligible only in terms of each other. He maintained that,
since the very existence of the world itself arises from the mutual
interaction of the relations within the world, enlightened
consciousness should not focus on individual objects and experiences.
Thus Nagarjuna’s reality shifted from the world of nouns to a world of
verbs or, even more properly, to a world of adverbs, devoid of substantives.
What was significant about Nagarjuna’s teaching was not his elaborate
and convoluted refutations of Buddhist thinking. These seem merely like
clever sophistry. But the implication of this teaching was that what is
important about religious doctrine is not what it teaches about the
universe, but how it works to bring about release from illusion.
Nagarjuna taught that the distinction between nirvana and the world of
suffering exists only in the mind. He maintained that nirvana--the
state of not clinging to anything, including belief in the Buddha and
in nirvana--was achieved when one realized that there is not the
slightest difference between samsara (the world of flux) and nirvana
(the state of release), between time and eternity. This was the transforming
vision of the bodhisattva. Indeed, in the end, the bodhisattva
would discover the emptiness on which his whole sensibility was based
and would see that there had never been any suffering beings, nor any
bodhisattva to save them.
Nagarjuna concluded that the aim of Buddhism was not the achievement of
some holy ideal but the destruction of all viewpoints. From there,
enlightenment would follow of its own accord. This is the kind of
thinking responsible for such curious Buddhist ideas as that if one
meets the Buddha on the road, one should kill the Buddha, and that
sitting in meditation can no more make one enlightened than polishing a
floor tile can make it a mirror--and this in a religion the major
practice of which is sitting meditation. A Zen drawing depicts a
bullfrog sitting on a lily pad, with the caption: “If sitting could
make a Buddha, I, foolish old frog, would have been enlightened long
before now.”
According to Nagarjuna, enlightenment comes from seeing that all views
and opinions are just views and opinions and have no real substance.
They are empty. Truth is empty. It is appreciation of this emptiness
that brings release.
A Course in Miracles
The first aphorism of the Workbook -- the meditation practices taught
by A Course in Miracles--is: "Nothing means anything."
The second is: "I give everything all the meaning that it has for me."
That is what "Emptiness" means. This is what creative intentionality is
about: Human beings create in their own experience of consciousness
what their lives mean. We are responsible for our own experience. There
is no god to blame.
That is why the Gods rain down blossoms of
pink cherry upon Subhuti for saying nothing about God and simply being
present in the moment.
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