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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
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
Psych
Tech Training
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
Our friend Tom Nash
Second March on
Washington
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What is Going To Be The Next Step in Evolution?
The step(s) in the evolution
of the human race is going to happen at the level of consciousness.
This is the concept proposed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. in his
mystical vision of the evolution of life on Earth from one-celled
microorganisms to human beings and beyond. Teilhard's vision proposed a
kind of collective consciousness in the future in which all individual
human beings and actively and directly perceive themselves as parts of
a planetary mind. Teilhard called this "The Omega Point" and identified
it as what we might call the metaphorand for the Mystical Body of
Christ and its status as something coming in the future as the
metaphorand of human evolution.
(The idea of "metaphorand" comes from Julian Jaynes who used it in the wonderful book of the early 1970s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
as for the word for the actual item in reality that the metaphors of
myth and religion refers to, since they can't be spoken of or conceived
of directly. To wit, metaphorize is to metaphorand as multiply is to
multiplicand: i.e., the thing meaphorized is to the thing multiplied).
I propose this next step
will show up as a common experience of irrepressible compassion. When
we see somebody else struggling with their experience, we will
automatically identify with them and feel the struggle as our own.
We will literally "feel" the sufferings and joys of others.
We do this now by effort and intention. A major function of religion is
to inculcate the motivation for being compassionate. And the central
rule of all ethics and morals is expressed in the Golden Rule: Do unto
others as you would have them do to you.
This IS what "love" means as a commandment and a virtue of religion.
Television is making us conscious of the experience of others in a way
no medium of the past ever could. Actually seeing others' plight makes
us feel the plight.
We currently tend to defend ourselves against this kind of experience
of compassion. It's derided as being a "bleeding heart." (Curiously,
religious "conservatives" dismiss the so-called "bleeding heart
liberals" even though a major icon of Christian religion is the Sacred
Heart--bleeding heart--of Jesus, saving the world through compassion
for sinners and forgiveness of sins.)
Interestingly, sexual identity is one of the major bulwarks against
compassion. Men show themselves "manly" by repressing these kinds of
sensitive feelings. And women, while feeling these feelings deeply,
show themselves subservient to men by repressing them out of
embarrassment.
That is, the duality that being male and female creates in human
consciousness creates a barrier to being truly compassionate and kind.
Indeed, this duality then shows up as the polarity of "good and evil"
and the justification for not being compassionate of others is the
judgment that they are "wrong" -- or that it's their own fault they are
suffering.
So the next step in evolution includes getting over the apparent
duality of the world into "good and evil" and "male and female."
The rise of gay consciousness and self-awareness of sexual orientation
is an evolutionary step in moving human consciousness beyond the
dualities.
Another element of the next step in the evolution of
consciousness (perhaps paralleling the self-awareness of
differing sexual orientations in different individuals) is the
self-awareness of consciousness itself.
This awareness of consciousness manifests as the realization and
understanding that consciousness is the metaphorand of "God." What the
myths and stories of religion are really about is the nature of
consciousness. The myths are true insofar as they describe states and
levels of human awareness. They are true insofar as they are about mind
and inner states.
A general principle in analyzing mythology (which I learned from Joseph
Campbell) is that the future represents depth of consciousness. When I
say to someone I am deeply
infatuated with: "I will love you forever," what I am saying really
isn't about future time but about intensity in the present. When we say
Jesus will come again, we really mean that our expectation of a better
world comes intensely and deeply out of our being.
So the next step(s) in evolution is: 1) irrepressible automatic
compassion for others and 2) waking up to the real meaning of religion
and myth as clues to the nature of consciousness.
And on an individual, sexual level, this is appearing as a realization
that sexual arousal and pleasure has deep value for its own sake (not
just for reproduction) because it makes us conscious of the dynamics of
consciousness. And valuing sexual pleasure as a good in its own right
moves sexuality out of biology and into mind and therefore beyond the
duality of heterosexuality.
I believe these three elements of evolution--feeling compassion,
understanding myth, and transcending heterosexual roles--are all
different appearances of the same thing: the self-awareness of the
cosmos. And this is what is metaphorized as God's love of creation.
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