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
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
The
Rainbow Flag
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
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The following essay was prepared for "The Ways of the Spirit: A
Course in Spirituality for LGBT People" created by Harry Faddis and Patrick Cheng for
broadcast (and podcast) on WRPI
radio, March 2006
The
Word:
Historicity is a Myth of Creativity
by Toby Johnson
The development of speech and writing were two major steps in the
evolution of consciousness.
Speech changed everything. How human beings are special in planetary
ecology is that we are able to communicate complex experience to one
another. We are able to share experience. And so our learning can
"stand on the shoulders of giants"; we can remember the past and learn
from the experience of our forebears and communicate the lessons to our
descendants. We can transcend individuality.
Writing allowed speech to be concretized. Speech that was written
endured through time and resisted change. Writing--in a very literal
way--created history.
So by the Word, human consciousness creates and shapes its experience.
Other people tell us of their experience, and we factor that report
into our own concept of what reality is. We tell other people of our
experience, and so our experience influences the world beyond us. We
tell ourselves about our experience, using words in our minds, and so
are able to understand and shape--and change--that experience.
We write things down and so create stability and preserve evidence of
past decisions and agreements. Lawyers tell us to get things in
writing, because writing them down guarantees persistence of memory and
endurance of agreement.
The "Word," then, has sacred power. It is literally true--and there's
even a pun in that comment--that the word creates the universe.
This is a recognizable theme in the Sacred Scriptures of the West. God
creates the universe by His Word, and His Word becomes incarnate in a
person who interprets and explains the lessons. Those lessons function
as self-fulfilling prophecies and so change the world. Indeed by
speaking the "good news" the world is saved.
This is "literally" true about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, though
what "incarnates in a person" is different in each. In Judaism it's a
genetic heritage, a tribe. In Christianity, it's the person of Jesus.
In Islam, it's the instruction/Law of the Koran revealed ("literally")
to the Prophet.
The Bible is true because it's been written down. "True" means the
wisdom and meaning intended has been preserved relatively unchanged
from the original revelation to the individual writer who put the words
on paper (or parchment or papyrus or whatever).
The point of the writer preserving his (or in very rare cases, it has
unfortunately turned out, her) experience of mystical consciousness and
fulfilling sense of meaning was to share it with others. Sages and
oracles and prophets and priests wrote down their most sublime
experiences and realizations, using symbols and metaphors and even what
we'd now understand to be pop slang, to elicit that same experience and
vision in others.
The power of the "Word" is that it allows mystical vision and
realization about the meaning of life to transcend individual seers and
to endure the passage of time. It is then "literally" true to say that
writing down the Sacred Scriptures of religion creates the God and the
cosmic worldview of the various religions.
The "God" we understand and experience today is a heritage of
visionaries and seers before us.
What those visionaries and seers wanted to communicate is the meaning
and significance of their lives.
At the time the Bible was written, it was effectively the only book. So
when it was said the Bible was the word of God, what was really meant
is that what's written down becomes everlasting, i.e. achieves eternal
truth.
The original emphasis was on the meaning of the words, the experience
they conveyed, not on the words themselves.
Modern-day Christian (and Islamic) Fundamentalist Scriptural literalism
has, unfortunately, confused the "literal" truth of the Scriptures with
the facticity of science and intentional observation of phenomena. Thus
we see such things as "Scientific Creationism" pitted against "The
Theory of Evolution."
What compounds this problem is that the religions of the West claim
historicity as their proof of veracity. Jesus really lived, died, and
rose again. Mohammed really received the Koran from God. John Smith
really dug up the gold tablets at the instruction of the angel Moroni.
Historicity is itself a mythic symbol.
The message of historicity--at least as it was originally applied by
people who had only "one book" and for whom writing was itself
mystical--is the excellence of the message.
The "historical truth" of the Resurrection of Jesus, for instance, is
the meaning of the symbol, not the event. Whether Jesus rose from
dead is a different kind of question than whether Napoleon died on Elba
or St. Helena. Napoleon's death (on St. Helena) didn't mean anything.
It was just a fact. Jesus's Resurrection (probably, not a fact) means
something: that life endures individual death and, even more important,
that Jesus's teaching that love transcends and trumps the Law is the
ultimate commandment. All the stories about Jesus are not about Jesus
the man, but about the excellence of the teachings of Jesus the
visionary. What "rose from the dead" was the truth of Jesus's message
about the nature of law and love.
The way to read "The Word" is to understand what the original writer
was trying to convey, and then to put oneself in a state of
consciousness in which one can share the writer's mystical vision.
The Resurrection of Jesus is only indirectly connected with the death
and survival of the man who lived 2000 years ago on the other side of
the planet in a culture so alien to ours we can barely imagine it.
That's all too far away and too long ago to matter anymore. What rises
from the grave and transcends death is that part of you that is
symbolized in the story of Jesus, i.e., that part of you that has the
same mystical realization that Jesus had--and that the Apostles had and
tried to convey by repeating (and poetically elaborating) their
experience of knowing Jesus. And that mystical realization is that you
are one with "God the Father" and one with all who believe in love and
compassion as the pillars of religion (not sexual purity and obedience
to the law). What Jesus realized, we can all realize. We are all Sons
(and Daughters) of God.
Our experience as gay people in modern society helps us to understand
this phenomenon. In our very fleshly experience, we have evidence that
the Scriptural literalists are patently wrong about homosexuality and
the nature of our lives. Our homosexuality itself provides us with a
lesson about the nature of truth.
Our writing down our gay wisdom--and sharing it on the Internet and
radio--quite "literally" creates the gay-positive environment we long
for. And our longing for such a loving, peaceful and harmonious state
of being is an experience of God's evolving itself through human
consciousness. Understanding the excellence of this message, as part of
the contribution of gay consciousness to the transformation of human
nature, creates the future.
The "Word" creates the universe.
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