The Doctrine of the Moulting of the Holy Ghost

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Toby Johnson's books:

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FINDING YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III

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, a sci-fi novel with wonderful "aliens" with an Afterword by Mark Jordan

GETTING LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE:  A Fantastical Gay Romance set in two different time periods

THE FOURTH QUILL, a novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil

TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams




CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into Gold: GaySpirit in Storytelling, a collaboration with Steve Berman and some 30 other writers

THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell

IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: A Mystical Journey

Unpublished manuscripts

About ordering

Books on Gay Spirituality:

White Crane Gay Spirituality Series

  Articles and Excerpts:

Review of Samuel Avery's The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness

Funny Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San Francisco"

About Liberty Books, the Lesbian/Gay Bookstore for Austin, 1986-1996

The Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate

A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality

Why gay people should NOT Marry

The Scriptural Basis for Same Sex Marriage

Toby and Kip Get Married

Wedding Cake Liberation

Gay Marriage in Texas

What's ironic

Shame on the American People

The "highest form of love"

Gay Consciousness

Why homosexuality is a sin

The cause of homosexuality

The origins of homophobia

Q&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness

What is homosexuality?

What is Gay Spirituality?

My three messages

What Jesus said about Gay Rights

Queering religion

Common Experiences Unique to Gay Men

Is there a "uniquely gay perspective"?

The purpose of homosexuality

Interview on the Nature of Homosexuality

What the Bible Says about Homosexuality

Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men

Varieties of Gay Spirituality

Waves of Gay Liberation Activity

The Gay Succession

Wouldn’t You Like to Be Uranian?

The Reincarnation of Edward Carpenter

Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality as Artistic Medium

Easton Mountain Retreat Center

Andrew Harvey & Spiritual Activism

The Mysticism of Andrew Harvey

The upsidedown book on MSNBC

Enlightenment

"It's Always About You"

The myth of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara

Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara

Gay Spirituality

Curious Bodies

What Toby Johnson Believes

The Joseph Campbell Connection

The Mann Ranch (& Rich Gabrielson)

Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy

The Two Loves

The Nature of Religion

What's true about Religion

Being Gay is a Blessing

Drawing Long Straws

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

Proposal for a study of gay nondualism

Priestly Sexuality

Having a Church to Leave

Harold Cole on Beauty

Marian Doctrines: Immaculate Conception & Assumption

Not lashed to the prayer-post

Monastic or Chaste Homosexuality

Is It Time to Grow Up? Confronting the Aging Process

Notes on Licking  (July, 1984)

Redeem Orlando

Gay Consciousness changing the world by Shokti LoveStar

Alexander Renault interviews Toby Johnson

Mystical Vision

"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

No Stealing

Next Step in Evolution

The New Myth

The Moulting of the Holy Ghost

Gaia is a Bodhisattva

The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey as archetype -- GSV 2016

The  Gay Hero Journey (shortened)

You're On Your Own

Superheroes

Seeing Differently

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

Facing the Edge: AIDS as an occasion for spiritual wisdom

What are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?

The Vision

The mystical experience at the Servites'  Castle in Riverside

A  Most Remarkable Synchronicity 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

Karellen was a homosexual

The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance

Intersections with the movie When We Rise

More about Gay Mental Health

Psych Tech Training

Toby at the California Institute

The Rainbow Flag

Ideas for gay mythic stories

People

Kip and Toby, Activists

Toby's friend and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.

Harry Hay, Founder of the gay movement

About Hay and The New Myth

About Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first man to really "come out"

About Michael Talbot, gay mystic

About Fr. Bernard Lynch

About Richard Baltzell

About Guy Mannheimer

About David Weyrauch

About Dennis Paddie

About Ask the Fire

About Arthur Evans

About Christopher Larkin

About Mark Thompson

About Sterling Houston

About Michael Stevens

The Alamo Business Council

Our friend Tom Nash

Second March on Washington

The Gay Spirituality Summit in May 2004 and the "Statement of Spirituality"

Book Reviews

Toby Johnson's Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:

Gay Perspective

Things Our [Homo]sexuality
Tells Us about the
Nature of God and
the Universe

Gay Spirituality

Gay Identity and 
the Transformation of
Human Consciousness

Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling

edited by
Toby Johnson
& Steve Berman








Secret Matter

Lammy Award Winner for Gay Science Fiction

updated








Getting Life in Perspective

A Fantastical Romance

The Fourth Quill

originally published as PLAGUE

The Fourth Quill is available as an audiobook, narrated by Jimmie Moreland. Click here

Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo

with Walter L. Williams

Two Spirits  is available as an audiobook  narrated by Arthur Raymond. Click here

Finding Your Own True Myth:

The Myth of the Great Secret III









In Search of God  in the Sexual Underworld












The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell.

This was the second edition of this book.

The Holy Spirit as Third Person of the Trinity

The idea in the Christian mythos of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity is an excellent example of how doctrine and myth change AND of how a new transformation of the idea of "God" is happening in modern times.

In America in the 1950s, before the sea change in human life referred to as "The Sixties," the Blessed Trinity--invoked each time a Catholic made the Sign of the Cross in the ritualistic/superstitious act of calling upon God for grace and help--was "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."

The Father was clearly the white-bearded Old Man who reached out to instill life in Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The Son was the historical personage of Jesus of Nazareth, called the Christ, i.e., the "annointed One," the "World Savior," whose life and death is the central Christian motif told about in the Gospels. And the Holy Ghost was an invisible presence, symbolized by a Dove.










This Dove descended on a lightbeam to enter the womb of the Virgin Mary to conceive the child Jesus.





The Dove rained down tongues of flame onto the heads of the Apostles to inspire them to preach the Good News Jesus brought that human beings should love one another--and that love, not obedience to Law and taboo, is the key to experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven. And this on Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus's Resurrection from the dead and conquest of crucifixion, one of the most heinous forms of execution ever devised by man. The Dove, in stained glass, hovers over the high altar in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, portending Divine Providence.








The Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, as explained by Sts Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, is that in the Beginning, before time, God the First Person knew Himself and spoke the Word, which generated the Son, the Second Person. The First and Second Persons loved one another, and that love proceeded from them together,* as the Third Person. It is like the human family (albeit all queerly male) in which the father loves the mother and their love--and passion--gives birth to a son or daughter. The heterosexual family is the model for the dynamics of the Three Persons in One God.

* So-called Orthodox Christians (Coptic, Greek, Russian, etc.) who have a different political structure for the Church, i.e., without a central and infallible head (Pope), but rather  consisting of Bishops who pass their ordination and consecration directly from one generation to another in a line from Jesus known as Apostolic succession, officially disagree with the notion that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. They prefer a more linear procession, with the Father generating the Son and the Son loving the Father and generating the Spirit — like their Bishops in a nicely orderly procession that doesn't require involving the original begetter again. This disagreement was the official cause of The Great Schism of 1054 which divided Christianity into Eastern and Western Churches.

With the liturgical reform of the late 1950s and the "defenestration" of the Church after the Second Vatican Council of Pope John XXIII, the odd Old English word "ghost" for spiritual being, was changed to the Latin and more serious-sounding word "spirit," so that the Dove became the Holy Spirit.

Unlike the Father and the Son who are anthropormorphized into persons with likes and dislikes, even jealousies, and with, in the case of Jesus, a physical human body and a Mystical Body consisting of all human beings who have the presence of sanctifying grace in their souls, the Holy Spirit is totally non-physical and non-personal.

The Holy Spirit is that sanctifying grace--the "amazing grace" that transforms human lives. The Holy Spirit is Love, the feeling and interior sentiment of care and nurturing and deep desire for union.

Unlike the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit is symbolical.

In the Old Testament, pre-Christian Hebrew/Jewish mythos, the Creator God--YHWH--gave forth a radiance called the Shekinah. That was the first appearance of the image of the Third Person of the Trinity. In Kaballah tradition, the Shekinah is the Spouse of Yahweh, God's wife. In later Hebrew writings that form the Old Testament's prophetic and poetic period, God's partner in creation is called Sophia, wisdom. That's the second appearance of the Third Person, as the idea and plan God had in His mind when He spoke the Word of creation.

In the heavily Gnostic-influenced, Gospel of St John, the Word coexists from the Beginning with God and is God. And that Word becomes flesh, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the man Jesus who came to walk among men in Palestine at (and as) the beginning of the Common Era.

The "Word" is Wisdom expressed. It's an idea, a meme, a myth.

That we can write about the doctrine of the Trinity and observe the changes--from radiance to wisdom to ghost to spirit--is a sign of the modern ability to understand religious doctrine and mytholgical tradition from over and above.

It is this ability and higher perspective that constitutes what, I think, Joseph Campbell would call "the new myth."

Our modern idea of "God" is changing from a personal being with beard and flowing robes to the Universal, Cosmic process that "began" with the Big Bang and proceeds to evolve into stars and planets, and then into Life and then into Intelligence and reflexive self-awareness that can observe the process.

With the modern discoveries of deep time, the billions of galaxies of the universe outside the solar system, the evolution of life and the complexity of the human mind--symbolized, by the way, in the human persons and personalities of Einstein, Hubbell, Darwin and Freud (and Jung, of course), our idea of God has to change.

He can't be seen as an old man sitting atop Mt Sinai or Mt Olympus or Jesus reigning from Heaven Above. What fascinates and inspires human beings today is not imaginary personalities hovering over us (we consider such "delusions" as mental illness), but rather our awareness of ourselves as conscious beings.

Consciousness itself is the new image for that mystery about which life and meaning revolves.

This shift in the meaning of God from "person" to symbol is beautifully expressed in the transformations of the Third Person of the Trinity.

Using the age-old image of the Dove, we might say that the Holy Ghost is moulting, putting on a new coat of feathers, a new manifestation.

The Doctrine--which, of course, I am making up right here--of the Moulting of the Holy Ghost is the "new myth" that religion and myth have been clues to the Deeper Consciousness of which human, individual, life is an experience of.

Joseph Campbell called this "a prodgious transfer of the focal point of human wonder."

(I think Campbell belongs in that list with Einstein, Hubbell, Darwin, Freud and Jung.)



Read more about The New Myth