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Contact Us Table of Contents Search Site Google listing of all pages on this website Site Map Toby Johnson's Facebook page Toby Johnson's YouTube channel Toby Johnson on Wikipedia Toby Johnson Amazon Author Page  Secure site at https://tobyjohnson.com  Also on this website: As an Amazon Associate
I earn from qualifying purchases. Toby Johnson's books: Toby's books are available as ebooks from smashwords.com, the Apple iBookstore, etc. 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
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
Gay ConsciousnessQ&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness What Jesus said about Gay Rights Common Experiences Unique to Gay Men Is there a "uniquely gay perspective"? Interview on the Nature of Homosexuality What the Bible Says about Homosexuality Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men Waves of Gay Liberation Activity 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
Enlightenment
Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara You're Not A WaveJoseph Campbell Talks about Aging What is Enlightenment? What is reincarnation? How many lifetimes in an ego? Emptiness & Religious Ideas Experiencing experiencing experiencing Going into the Light Meditations for a Funeral Meditation Practice The way to get to heaven Buddha's father was right What Anatman means Advice to Travelers to India & Nepal The Danda Nata & goddess Kalika Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva John Boswell was Immanuel Kant Cutting edge realization The Myth of the Wanderer Change: Source of Suffering & of Bliss World Navel What the Vows Really Mean Manifesting from the Subtle Realms The Three-layer Cake & the Multiverse The est Training and Personal Intention Effective Dreaming in Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven Gay
Spirituality
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Perelandra is a parable about the nature
of
"original sin"
and mystical consciousness; it tells of a British college professor who
is whisked off by angelic-like beings to act as "God"'s spokesman when
the Adam and Eve of Venus, "Perelandra" in their language, are being
tempted by the devil--who appears in the form of an Earth scientist and
technocrat. It is a beautiful tale of the conquest of goodness. Most
interestingly, Lewis devises a mythic cosmology of light beings and
guardians spirits; Earth's mythologies, he proposes, are erroneous
attempts to grasp this cosmology. A deeply religious man in later life, he
interpreted
the
Christianity of the Great Britain of the mid-20th century in which he
lived into what he thought would be a living religion. He had some
dismissive things to say about homosexual bonding in his book THE FOUR
LOVES: That's hardly a valid argument against homosexual activity in the ancient world. Indeed, those comments only go to show how stereotyped was Lewis's understanding of homosexuality throughout history and, even more importantly, how closeted--perhaps even from himself--he really was. At any rate, he lived long before gay liberation and before homosexuality was understood in a modern, enlightened psychological context."... all those hairy old toughs of centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one another and begging for last kisses when the legion was broken up...all pansies? If you can believe it you can believe anything.” 
While I want to claim Jack Lewis, as he was called, as "one of us"
-- in the sense of being a visionary spurred on by aberrant sexuality
and freedom from conventional gender and familial roles -- I doubt he
was particularly sexually active in any meaningful way, either
homosexually or heterosexually. Though it is true that his longest
lifetime friend, Arthur Greeves, was homosexual. He
wasn't ignorant of sexual diversity; and he apparently wasn't
judgmental of homosexuality in his personal affairs. (Though a very
public "Christian," C.S. Lewis was NOT an example of the current day
"Family Values" Fundamentalist Christian.)His marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham was mostly a scam of the British immigration system and then later of that nation's socialized medicine. After World War I, he'd come home at age 18  and moved the 45 year-old
Mrs. Maureen Moore and her 11 year-old daughter into his home, having
made a pact with his army buddy Paddy Moore that he'd care for his
friend's family in case Paddy died. Biographers assuming his
heterosexuality hypothesize he was in love with Mrs. Moore the 30 years
they lived together. The presumption of a repressed homosexuality might
better explain that he was bound to the Moore family by his
intense--and certainly never to be reciprocated--affection for his
friend Paddy. Who knows? Until the current transformation of
understanding about homosexuality, such details were routinely
concealed and misrepresented.Jack Lewis was certainly a visionary. In his mystical fiction, he spoke raptuously
about a
transcendent
vision of the whole cosmos as a living being textured of light and
energy, far beyond the naive personal God of popular Christianity. From
him comes the sentence: "We live in an environment of mind as well as
of space."
"In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed. Thus each is equally at the centre and none are there by being equals, but some by giving place and some by receiving it, the small things by their smallness and the great by their greatness, and all the patterns linked and looped together by the unions of a kneeling with a sceptred love. Blessed be He!"Ram Dass's story of the same vision, put very simply: "You're Not a Wave!" Joseph Campbell's cogent explanation of the nature of religion. A nice article about C.S. (Jack) Lewis's life by James Townsend Here's the same idea from a very different voice: Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion, when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become the victor and the vanquished. I become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower and the known. I keep on dancing and then, it is the eternal dance of creation. The creator and the creation merge into one wholeness of joy. I keep on dancing -- until there is only… the dance. --Michael Jackson 1992  Perelandra
is set on Venus as it was imagined in the mid-1900s, an ocean world.
There is only one bit of solid land, an island with a mountain, which
is referred to as the Fixed Lands. Otherwise all the "terrain" of the
planet is floating islands, formed of mats of seaweed and plant life.
These islands provide a place to live; they are abundant with fruit.(Illustration by Andromedaroach, Deviant Art; there are other images of Perelandra on the site.) The story is about the "Adam and Eve," the first parents of Venus/Perelandra being tested, like Eve with the apple. In Lewis's novel, the character of God, named Maleldil, has given one commandment -- not to sleep on the Fixed Lands. The Eve character, called The Green Lady, is tempted by Satan, in the form of an Earthling scientist, Edward Weston. He tries to convince the first parents on this new planet that they needn't obey Maleldil's instruction. The protagonist is a stand-in for C.S. Lewis himself (or for Lewis's good friend and fellow "fantasy novelist" J.R.R. Tolkien), a British college professor of Classics named Elwin Ranson. In the previous novel in the series, Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom was introduced to the real entitites in the Solar System which are —poorly— mythologized on Earth as the various Gods and supernatural beings. Ransom is friends with "angels," called eldila, who come to him with a mission. Since the Devil got to assume a human body for his tempting, they ask Ransom to stand up against him. When he agrees, the eldila transport Ransom to Perelandra to argue for the good. And Ransom is successful and "original sin" is avoided on the new planet. But it is by a much different contest than arguing points of philosophy. He has to kill the opponent. More importantly in the plot, Professor Ransom gets to see the gods of this cosmology and to experience the Great Dance (as cited above). Towards the end of the story, "Eve" says: “The reason for not yet living on the Fixed Land is now so plain. How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure — to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the wave – to draw my hands out of Maledil’s…to put in our own power what times should roll towards us…as if you gathered fruits together to-day for to-morrow’s eating instead of taking what came. That would have been cold love and feeble trust. And out of it how could we ever have climbed back into love and trust again?”What a challenge to live with that love and trust. Says Teilhard de Chardin: "We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately must we believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms (The Divine Milieu, p 137). "Have faith," say God and the gods. This is what my imagined/mythologized Avalokiteshvara said to me at the 21st Street Baths. Floating IslandsHere's a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_island "Sometimes referred to as tussocks, floatons, or suds, natural floating islands are composed of vegetation growing on a buoyant mat of plant roots or other organic detritus. In aquatic regions of Northwestern Europe several thousand acres of floating meadows (German Schwingrasen, Dutch trilveen) have been preserved, which are partly used as agricultural land, partly as nature reserves." Not quite like the large sea-worthy, ocean-going islands in Lewis's novel, but real floating islands:  Doing the ImpossibleAnother section in Perelandra which has been particularly meaningful for me has to do with "doing the impossible." Sometimes I have realized that for my own happiness and/or that of another, I had to say something, I had to do something, I had to change things--even though it seemed impossible. Not that anything I ever did in my life was that "impossible," but that I have sometimes been afraid of acting on something I wanted or needed to do. Lewis's character Elwin Ransom—who has been offering philosophical reasons to the Green Lady/Eve and to the demonic-possessed scientist Weston/"The Unman"—realizes that he actually has to fight his opponent in hand-to-hand combat, but he is a middle-aged college professor. How can he even consider such a task? He has a deep interior experience of speaking with "God"/ Maleldil/ "the voluble self" in which he realizes he has no choice because the act is going to be done. The thing still seemed impossible. But gradually something happened to him which had happened to him only twice before in his life. It had happened once while he was trying to make up his mind to do a very dangerous job in the last war. It had happened again while he was screwing his resolution to go and see a certain man in London and make to him an excessively embarrassing confession which justice demanded. In both cases the thing had seemed a sheer impossibility: he had not thought but known that, being what he was, he was psychologically incapable of doing it; and then, without any apparent movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge ‘about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible’. No such thing as chance or fortunePart of this inner dialogue includes the following discussion of Ransom's name--in relation to the name of the World Savior (which on Earth Christians know as Jesus Christ). There is deep wisdom here about destiny/karma.Readers of Toby Johnson's novel Secret Matter might recognize this mention of the Moon as an outer limit: in order to transport between the Visitors' dimension and our own, the Visitors' spaceships had to go beyond the orbit of the Moon. And readers of The Fourth Quill might recognize the Voice in Perelandra as the Voice John Stiers dialogues with in the "Closet of Horrors." Perhaps for all of us, there's a Voice—of "God" or of the Self—that keeps saying the same thing: "It is not for nothing that you are called [to be a] Ransom." We all are called to "save the world" because we are all incarnations of that "God"/Self which creates the Universe in order to know itself and saves the world by saying Yes. This is the Self that in Mahayana Buddhism is mythologized to have saved the world as Avalokiteshvara choosing to be all of everybody's future incarnations. The image below shows Avalokiteshvara sitting in a relaxed meditation pose with one leg cocked and the other down over a wall or tucked under him. "Peace is at the heart of all," wrote Joseph Campbell, "because Avalokiteshvara, Kuan Yin, mighty bodhisattva, Boundless Love includes, regards and dwell within (without exception) every sentiant being." (The quote continues on https://tobyjohnson.com/jesus.html#bodhisattva)  |
Toby Johnson, PhD is author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of his teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.
Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.
His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.
Two
Spirits is available as an
audiobook narrated by Arthur Raymond. 
As we know from the play and movie, Shadowlands, C.S.
Lewis was
a "bachelor," living with his alcoholic brother most of his life,
living as a
sort of celibate cleric of academe. He certainly wasn't a modern gay
man, but he was one of us, I think. 
Each figure
as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole
spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled a1l else and brought
it into unity--only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he
had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the
same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former
pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a
significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could see
also (but the word "seeing" is now plainly inadequate) wherever the
ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute corpuscles of
momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the
secular generalities of which history tells--peoples, institutions,
climates of opinion, civilisations, arts, sciences, and the
like--ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished.
The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived
and died, were things of some different kind. At first he could not say
what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual
entities. If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very
unlike time as we know it. 
region of sight as we understand it. For he says that the whole
solid figure of these enamoured and inter-inanimated circlings was
suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in
four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other
worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the
interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more
intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which
could reason and remember was dropped farther and farther behind that
part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity,
complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the
hard blue burning of the sky, and a simplicity beyond all
comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew
him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness. He went up
into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very
moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had
the sense of stripping off encumbrances and awaking from trance, and
coming to himself. With a gesture of relaxation he looked about him. .
. . (C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, pp. 218-219. Ed. note: I've added
a few paragraph breaks for readbility.)