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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Unpublished manuscripts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
Was I (or you) at
Stonewall?
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
Pleasure
as a Spiritual Path
Enlightenment
"It's
Always About You"
The myth of the Bodhisattva
Avalokitesvara
Joseph
Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
Joseph 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
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
Sex with God
Merging Religion and Sex
Revolution Through
Consciousness Change: GSV 2019
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
Joseph
Campbell, the Hero's Journey, and the modern Gay Hero-- a five part
presentation on YouTube
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
Be Done on Earth by Howard
E. Cook
Pay Me What I'm Worth by
Souldancer
The Way Out by Christopher
L Nutter
The Gay Disciple by John Henson
Art That Dares by Kittredge Cherry
Coming Out, Coming Home by Kennth
A. Burr
Extinguishing
the Light by B. Alan Bourgeois
Over Coffee: A conversation
For Gay
Partnership & Conservative Faith by D.a. Thompson
Dark Knowledge
by
Kenneth Low
Janet Planet by
Eleanor
Lerman
The
Kairos by Paul E. Hartman
Wrestling
with Jesus by D.K.Maylor
Kali Rising by Rudolph
Ballentine
The
Missing Myth by Gilles Herrada
The
Secret of the Second Coming by Howard E. Cook
The Scar Letters: A
Novel
by Richard Alther
The
Future is Queer by Labonte & Schimel
Missing Mary
by Charlene Spretnak
Gay
Spirituality 101 by Joe Perez
Cut Hand: A
Nineteeth Century Love Story on the American Frontier by Mark Wildyr
Radiomen
by Eleanor Lerman
Nights
at
Rizzoli by Felice Picano
The Key
to Unlocking the Closet Door by Chelsea Griffo
The Door
of the Heart by Diana Finfrock Farrar
Occam’s
Razor by David Duncan
Grace
and
Demion by Mel White
Gay Men and The New Way Forward by Raymond L.
Rigoglioso
The
Dimensional Stucture of Consciousness by Samuel Avery
The
Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love by Perry Brass
Love
Together: Longtime Male Couples on Healthy Intimacy and Communication
by Tim Clausen
War
Between Materialism and Spiritual by Jean-Michel Bitar
The
Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion by
Jeffrey J. Kripal
Esalen:
America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal
The
Invitation to Love by
Darren Pierre
Brain,
Consciousness, and God: A Lonerganian Integration by Daniel A
Helminiak
A
Walk with Four Spiritual Guides by Andrew Harvey
Can Christians Be Saved? by Stephenson & Rhodes
The
Lost Secrets of the Ancient Mystery Schools by Stephenson &
Rhodes
Keys to
Spiritual
Being: Energy Meditation and Synchronization Exercises by Adrian
Ravarour
In
Walt We
Trust by John Marsh
Solomon's
Tantric Song by Rollan McCleary
A Special Illumination by Rollan McCleary
Aelred's
Sin
by Lawrence Scott
Fruit
Basket
by Payam Ghassemlou
Internal
Landscapes by John Ollom
Princes
& Pumpkins by David Hatfield Sparks
Yes by Brad
Boney
Blood of the Goddess by William Schindler
Roads of Excess,
Palaces of
Wisdom by Jeffrey Kripal
Evolving
Dharma by Jay Michaelson
Jesus
in Salome's Lot by Brett W. Gillette
The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson
The
Vatican Murders by Lucien Gregoire
"Sex Camp"
by
Brian McNaught
Out
& About with Brewer & Berg
Episode One: Searching for a New Mythology
The
Soul Beneath the Skin by David Nimmons
Out
on
Holy Ground by Donald Boisvert
The
Revotutionary Psychology of Gay-Centeredness by Mitch Walker
Out There
by Perry Brass
The Crucifixion of Hyacinth by Geoff Puterbaugh
The
Silence of Sodom by Mark D Jordan
It's
Never About What It's About by Krandall Kraus and Paul Borja
ReCreations,
edited by Catherine Lake
Gospel: A
Novel
by WIlton Barnhard
Keeping
Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey by Fenton Johnson
Dating the Greek Gods by Brad Gooch
Telling
Truths in Church by Mark D. Jordan
The
Substance of God by Perry Brass
The
Tomcat Chronicles by Jack Nichols
10
Smart
Things Gay Men Can Do to Improve Their Lives by Joe Kort
Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same Sex Love
by Will Roscoe
The
Third Appearance by Walter Starcke
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann
Surviving
and Thriving After a Life-Threatening Diagnosis by Bev Hall
Men,
Homosexuality, and the Gods by Ronald Long
An Interview
with Ron Long
Queering Creole Spiritual Traditons by Randy
Conner & David Sparks
An Interview with
Randy Conner
Pain,
Sex
and Time by Gerald Heard
Sex
and the Sacred by Daniel Helminiak
Blessing Same-Sex Unions by Mark Jordan
Rising Up
by
Joe Perez
Soulfully
Gay
by Joe Perez
That
Undeniable Longing by Mark Tedesco
Vintage: A
Ghost
Story by
Steve Berman
Wisdom
for the Soul by Larry Chang
MM4M a DVD
by Bruce Grether
Double
Cross
by David Ranan
The
Transcended Christian by Daniel Helminiak
Jesus
in Love by Kittredge Cherry
In
the Eye of the Storm by Gene Robinson
The
Starry Dynamo by Sven Davisson
Life
in
Paradox by Fr Paul Murray
Spirituality for Our Global Community by Daniel
Helminiak
Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society by Robert A.
Minor
Coming Out: Irish Gay Experiences by Glen O'Brien
Queering
Christ
by Robert Goss
Skipping
Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage
The
Flesh of the Word by Richard A Rosato
Catland by
David Garrett Izzo
Tantra
for Gay Men by Bruce Anderson
Yoga
&
the Path of the Urban Mystic by Darren Main
Simple
Grace
by Malcolm Boyd
Seventy
Times Seven by Salvatore Sapienza
What
Does "Queer" Mean Anyway? by Chris Bartlett
Critique of Patriarchal Reasoning by Arthur Evans
Gift
of
the Soul by Dale Colclasure & David Jensen
Legend of the Raibow Warriors by Steven McFadden
The
Liar's
Prayer by Gregory Flood
Lovely
are the Messengers by Daniel Plasman
The Human Core of Spirituality by Daniel Helminiak
3001:
The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Religion and the Human Sciences by Daniel Helminiak
Only
the
Good Parts by Daniel Curzon
Four
Short
Reviews of Books with a Message
Life
Interrupted by Michael Parise
Confessions of a Murdered Pope by Lucien Gregoire
The
Stargazer's Embassy by Eleanor Lerman
Conscious
Living, Conscious Aging by Ron Pevny
Footprints Through the Desert by Joshua Kauffman
True
Religion by J.L. Weinberg
The Mediterranean Universe by John Newmeyer
Everything
is God by Jay Michaelson
Reflection
by Dennis Merritt
Everywhere
Home by Fenton Johnson
Hard Lesson by James
Gaston
God
vs Gay?
by Jay Michaelson
The
Gate
of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path by Jay Michaelson
Roxie
&
Fred by Richard Alther
Not
the Son He Expected by Tim Clausen
The
9 Realities of Stardust by Bruce P. Grether
The
Afterlife Revolution by Anne & Whitley Strieber
AIDS
Shaman:
Queer Spirit Awakening by Shokti Lovestar
Facing the Truth of Your Life by Merle Yost
The
Super Natural by Whitley Strieber & Jeffrey J Kripal
Secret
Body by
Jeffrey J Kripal
In
Hitler's
House by Jonathan Lane
Walking on Glory by Edward Swift
The
Paradox
of Porn by Don Shewey
Is Heaven for Real? by Lucien Gregoire
In Search of Lost Lives by Michael Goddart
Queer
Magic by Tomas Prower
God
in Your Body by Jay Michaelson
Science Whispering Spirit by Gary Preuss
Friends
of Dorothy by Dee Michel
New by
Whitley Strieber
Developing Supersensible Perception by Shelli
Renee Joye
Sage
Sapien by Johnson Chong
Tarot
of the Future by Arthur Rosengarten
Brothers
Across Time by Brad Boney
Impresario of Castro Street by Marc Huestis
Deathless
by Andrew Ramer
The Pagan Heart of the West, Vol 1by
Randy P. Conner
Practical
Tantra by William Schindler
Scissors,
Paper, Rock by Fenton Johnson
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
Perspective is available as an audiobook narrated
by Matthew Whitfield. Click
here
Gay Spirituality
Gay Identity and
the Transformation of
Human Consciousness
Gay
Spirituality is now
available as an audiobook, beautifully narrated by John Sipple. Click here
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
Getting
Life in Perspective is available as an
audiobook narrated by Alex Beckham. Click
here
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: What I Learned from Joseph
Campbell
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.
Toby Johnson's
titles are
available in other ebook formats from Smashwords.
|
Toby Johnson assisted Bruce Grether with the publication of
his remarkable book The Secret of the Golden Phallus and
contributed an Afterword/Commentary.
Here's a link to order the book from Amazon.com:
The
Secret of the Golden Phallus: Male Erotic Alchemy for the 21st Century
Commentary on Bruce Grether's
The Secret of the Golden Phallus
by Toby Johnson
The Secret of Pleasure as a
Spiritual Path
The Great Secret of human life is how the interaction of the inner and
outer worlds works and how, perhaps, this interaction can be
influenced.
The list is long. By beseeching God, by prayer, sacrament, ritual,
faith, magic, sacrifice, taboos; by compulsive behaviors, renunciation,
yoga, self-denial, guilt, remorse and compunction; by meditation,
intention, enterprise, desire, discipline, hope; by action, technology,
etc., etc.—all so that we can achieve some control over our futures and
bad things won’t happen to us and, ideally, that we accomplish the
spiritual quest of experiencing “being in heaven.” The search for this
secret is the story of human history.
According to the exoteric religions (i.e., the face of the religions
for the public, not to be confused with “exotic,” for the exoteric
religions are anything but exotic), pleasure is an obstacle to
religiousness and sexual feelings must be carefully reined in. Because
sexual intercourse is so tied to reproduction, heredity and property
rights, sex is an issue of public order and morality, and desire for
pleasure, because it can lead to disorder, is dissed as debauchery,
dissipation and selfishness. But according to many of the esoteric
traditions (i.e., the underground, secret religions of trained
initiates to whom has been given special knowledge, gnosis), sexual
pleasure can be transformed into mystical experience and creative
power. Erotic pleasure can become a spiritual path.
The Golden Flower
The title of Bruce P. Grether’s book alludes to the Chinese Taoist
text, The Secret of the Golden Flower. This obscure document from the
12th Century, C.E. was translated in the 1920s by German sinologist
Richard Wilhelm and published with a Commentary by Swiss
proto-psychoanalyst and mythologist C. G. Jung; Wilhelm also translated
and published, also with a Commentary by Jung, the Chinese Book of
Changes, the I Ching. Jung’s involvement brought these books to
the attention of Western readers, and in the 1960s they became
important elements in the “New Age” interest in psychological and
personal growth, Eastern religions and world spirituality.
Jung was read by the same people who read the Bardo Thodol,
known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead (translated by W. Y.
Evans-Wentz, and for which Jung also wrote a Commentary for the 1938
edition) along with its 1964 logical companion The Psychedelic
Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by
Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. These were readers
interested in the interior life, the spiritual life, the Twilight
Zone-like strange and unusual life of the mind that could be explored
through meditation and spiritual practice and/or expanded
psychedelically.
Exposure to Eastern religions and the esoteric strains of Western
religions (like Jewish Kabbalah and Christian medieval mysticism)
showed a generation that religion wasn’t merely about going to church
on Sunday, professing beliefs in certain dogmas and supporting the
institutions of faith; that there were deeper meanings to all these
religious ideas—now being understood as “myths” that conveyed wisdom
and insight through metaphor and poetry rather than historical fact;
and that the deeper meanings were more important and, often, in
conflict with the priorities of the institutions; that spiritual and
mystical experience was the proper goal of religion, not obedience to
rules and taboos.
A revolution in human thought was underway. Put simply and
aphoristically: human consciousness was becoming conscious of being
conscious, and realizing that that was what the esoteric and mystical
religions had always really been about. This discovery was a true
evolution in human nature. Along with the interest in the deeper
meaning of myth and fascination with drugs and meditation practices
that “expanded consciousness” came the “Sexual Revolution.” The
recognition of sexual pleasure as a positive element in human life—not
just as an instinctual goad to reproduction—went hand in hand with the
new understanding of evolving consciousness.
Central to this newly developing understanding is the concept of
“altered states.” Mystical and quasi-mystical experience induced by
drugs like LSD or ancient shamanic plants like magic mushrooms and
peyote cactus are clearly “altered states,” but so is a reflective
introspective state generated by music or by meditation practice, so is
intense concentrated focus on a work or art project, so is religious
rapture and the endorphin high of long-distance running and the
adrenaline rush of dangerous sports, and so is sexual arousal—all of
these change our awareness and, in so doing, move awareness to a higher
perspective and make it potentially self-reflexively aware of itself.
And this self-awareness and experience of altered reality has
traditionally been believed to be healing; trance and ecstasy were the
states in which miraculous healing occurred. The experience of “God” is
an altered state.
The Secret of the Golden Flower was an instruction in
Taoist meditation practice. It promised to teach a method for
circulating Light within the meditator’s body in order to give birth to
the spirit body. The method is straightforward, Zen-like, breathing
practice. The meditator sits with straight spine and focuses on the
breath as a dynamic flow of life-energy (chi). The energy path of the
breath is likened to a wheel vertically aligned with the spine near its
base; the wheel turns forward with the energy rising in back and
descending in front, so that the breath moves in a smooth rotation. The
meditator focuses on an inner image of bright light in the mid-point
between his or her eyes. This bright light is the “Golden Flower.”
In fact, in Chinese characters there is a kind of pun, explains
Wilhelm. If one writes the characters for the two words one above the
other so that they touch, the lower part of the upper character and the
upper part of the lower form the character for the word “light.” And
this light is the awakened eye of the meditator which is able to see
the world transformed into Heaven.
The “secret” in the The Secret of the Golden Flower is found in
poetic symbols and images that describe stages of the meditation
practice. The rotation of the wheel of chi is said to cause the breath
to blow on the fires of the gates of life. The energy warms the sexual
organs and they, in turn, release their “fire” to flow upwards through
the spine to the top of the head, to the Creative Principle where it
then rotates downward back into the body to be incorporated into the
Receptive. Thus the flow parallels the rotation of the yin and
yang—Receptive/Passive and Creative/Active, female and male—that is
symbolized iconographically as the black and white entwined commas of
the Tao symbol.
This image also, of course, diagrams the sexual positions known as
sixty-nine—and probably, not surprisingly, for the meditation practice
includes a sexual yoga. And the birth of the spirit body is caused by
the union of male and female energies within the meditator.
The meditation technique is described as “backward flowing.” (Notice
it’s in the opposite direction of rotation from the Tao symbol.) For
ordinarily the life energy in human beings flows down and out. That is,
most people live their lives for continuing the race; their sexual
energy is used for procreation and their lives become about being
parents and raising children. The seeker of the secret of eternal life
however reverses the flow of energy so that he or she lives for
evolving the being by sublimating the procreative urge and reversing
the flow so that the energy goes up the spine. The energies are not
allowed to go their natural downward flowing course, but are dammed up
causing the energy to rise to the higher centers and be transformed
into spirit. What is dammed up, of course, is the Golden Elixir of
Life, imagined as purified and distilled sexual fluids that are
directed up the spine rather than out through the penis. The “secret”
of The Secret of the Golden Flower then is prolonged arousal as
a yogic practice with delayed or, preferably, indefinitely postponed
ejaculation with semen retained as chi.
This Chinese Taoist meditation practice closely parallels the practice
of “raising the kundalini” in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. Kundalini yoga
also teaches practices of extended sexual arousal, perhaps in actual
coitus with a fellow practitioner or “uxor spiritualis,” a female
consort who also performs the transformation of sexuality into
spirituality. In practice, this meant staying aroused, “on the edge,”
without ever ejaculating or having an orgasm. (In its highest yogic
form in Indian Tantra—though this sounds fanciful, in fact—the male
ejaculates into the female, but then withdraws the semen, now
spiritually fructified, back into himself. Some yogis train themselves
to be able to sit in a pool and draw water back through the urethra
into their bladders as preparation for such a feat. Such yoga certainly
provides a visualization for male fructification, even if only in the
mind’s fancy.)
Bruce Grether’s fellow erotic activist Joseph Kramer offers a
contemporary analogy for ways of experiencing and visualizing arousal.
He says that most men experience sexual arousal like blowing up a
balloon, huffing and puffing, straining and squeezing, till finally the
balloon pops. In his Body Electric training, Kramer encouraged a
different model, one from high school science class. Instead of blowing
up the balloon, imagine stroking a glass rod (or the balloon) with fur
to build up a static electric charge. No huffing and puffing. Indeed,
this is accompanied by a conscious breathing practice, called “circular
breathing” (shallow without pause between exhale and inhale); this
causes mild hyperventilation and change in the pH of the blood so that
smooth muscle tissue can’t contract and the practitioner won’t mount an
orgasm. Instead of popping the balloon, the erotic charge builds and
builds to what Kramer calls “high erotic states.”
The Body Electric practice concludes its prolonged genital massage with
“the Big Draw.” As Grether described above, the practitioner contracts
into a full body crunch, holds the breath as long as possible, then
instantly relaxes and exhales. This produces a kind of non-ejaculatory
“orgasm in the soul” that is intensely pleasurable and also intensely
mystical and transcendent. Opposite from popping the balloon, the
pleasure comes in the relaxing, not in the peak of straining. Sex
doesn’t have to be effort; it can be going with the flow. Since women
generally experience orgasm less as balloon-popping than as rolling
with waves of energy charge anyway, part of this alchemy is training
men to experience sex more like women, blending genders. Kramer shows
men how to experience multiple orgasms.
The effort to pop the balloon, of course, is the style of sexual
intercourse that most efficiently facilitates impregnation and
reproduction with men’s pleasure yoked to productivity and women’s
pleasure ignored as unnecessary for fertilization. This is what
religion has traditionally championed as the proper way to have sex.
The practice of generating erotic charge, on the other hand, one of the
“secrets” of the esoteric traditions, shifts the experience into the
interior realm of self-awareness, pleasure and, potentially, mystical
vision having nothing to do with reproduction. The science class image
also suggests another consequence of building and retaining charge. For
if the charged glass rod is touched to other people the charge will
conduct into them—likely making their hair stand on end—in a wonderful
image of how accumulation of chi can radiate out and affect other
people.
Jung and Alchemy
In addition to sexual allusions, the Golden Flower utilizes alchemical
imagery, that is, metaphors based in physical matter and early machine
technology, referencing such things as water wheels, bellows and
chemical “elements.” The Chinese elements were wood, fire, earth, metal
and water. The text, as we saw, speaks of the breath turning like a
water wheel, blowing on the fires of the gates of life. Carl Jung
thought the discovery of this ancient text by his friend Richard
Wilhelm helped prove his theory of a collective unconscious of
humankind, so that various spiritual, religious, mythic ideas showed up
in far distant cultures. Jung had become interested in the symbols of
alchemy in medieval Europe and saw resonances in the Chinese.
Jung’s great insight was that underlying the pre-scientific experiments
with chemistry in the sometimes underground and secretive world of the
alchemists was Gnostic spiritual/mystical tradition and the quest for
transformation of soul. Jung theorized that the imagery in alchemy of
the four (or five) elements interacting chemically (in the West, they
were earth, air, fire, water and, sometimes, mind) was, in fact, about
psycho-spiritual processes.
Alchemy provided a physical way to demonstrate and participate in
transformation. The chemical reactions of alchemy paralleled the
sacraments of Christian worship. A sacrament is an outward sign of an
inward action of grace—this was Church teaching. When a priest
performed the actions of a sacrament (like Eucharist, Baptism,
Confession—there are seven), something spiritual really happened in the
soul of the receiver of the sacrament. And as the receiver participated
in the working of the sacrament, he or she experienced interior change.
This was an element of faith. Still, it worked only because you
believed in the priest and his powers (which came from yet another
sacrament, Ordination). What if there were other ways of demonstrating
transformation? Chemical reactions were even better demonstrations than
priestly rituals.
Alchemy was always more or less heretical, because it offered an
alternative to the Church, and so the alchemists often preferred to
keep the spiritual side secret. That’s why alchemy has come down to us
as proto-chemistry, not alternative mystical religion. Alchemy arose
from the metaphysics of Greek Gnosticism which the official Church had
condemned as heresy. A central tenet of Gnostic thought was that the
world around us is a kind of illusion that clouds human vision so we do
not see our true nature as spirit. Indeed, spirit has become trapped in
the material world. And the mystical effort was to release spirit from
the bonds of matter. Paradoxically, love and pleasure for its own sake
escaped those bonds. Major manifestations of Gnosticism in the Middle
Ages were Albigensian Catharism and the mystery cult of the Knights
Templar; it was out of the notion of “courtly love” which these
popularized in Europe that our modern ideas of interpersonal, romantic
love developed.
Gnosticism in one form came down through Western culture as
Hermeticism, that is, the secret traditions of ancient Egypt as
expounded by the semi-mythical character called Hermes Trismegistus
whom Grether has already introduced us to. Hermeticism taught that
there are two realities: one spiritual, one material. In varying and
constantly changing ways these two realities interact with one another
to create human experience. As we’ve learned, the secret of Hermeticism
was expressed in the aphorism: “As above, so below.” What that meant
was that there is synchronization between heaven and earth and, more
importantly, between interior consciousness and the exterior world.
Change in the outside world results in changes in interior states;
change in interior experience results in changes in the outside world.
Most people, most of the time, live at the mercy of change and fortune.
The Wheel of Fortune card of the Tarot Deck (another element of
Hermetic tradition) signifies the relentless cycling of good and bad
luck. “Life is a rollercoaster” went the aphorism of the Human
Potential Movement of the 1970s, like Werner Erhard’s est, a New Age
manifestation of Hermetic/Gnostic tradition in our own times. The goal
and the secret of these traditions is to gain mastery over the cycling
of fortune by awareness of the twofold nature of reality and exercise
of proper intention and expectation for aligning them harmoniously. The
“Secret” of est and its offshoots was to choose things the way they
are, “ride the horse in the direction it’s going”; another est aphorism
says: to get what you want, want what you get. “Go with the flow” was
the hippie expression, with Taoist nuance, of the 60s and 70s. In the
popular culture of the 2000s, the New Age “Secret” has come to be
expressed in the “Law of Attraction.”
In a remarkable passage in his Commentary on The Secret of the
Golden Flower, Jung seems to sum up his whole approach to life,
mental health and happiness and reveals what he apparently thought was
the “Secret,” by quoting a letter from a former patient which he said
“pictured the necessary transformation.”
Out of evil, much good has come to me...
I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in
some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only
by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them. So now
I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to
me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and, in this way,
also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus
everything becomes more alive to me.
What a fool I was! How I tried to
force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to!
Jung called this attitude “religious in the highest sense” and wrote
that “only on the basis of such an attitude will a higher level of
consciousness and culture be possible.”
Therein is a kind of Jungian alchemical principle: accepting both
sides, going with the flow, resisting nothing and achieving a
perspective as a way of finding happiness and, paradoxically, control
over life, thus transforming the experience of “good and evil,”
overcoming duality.
Thus alchemy, today, has moved from chemistry to psychology, but still
with the same aim: to be aware of eternal life—“being in heaven”
now—and so to give off gift waves for the happiness of all around. This
creates positive changes in oneself and in one’s world. This creates
what gay Jungian theorist Robert A. Johnson calls “the Golden
World.” This is the world transformed by inner vision so that
everything is perfect just the way it is (including the ups and downs),
and so becomes so in reality. The rollercoaster is a joy and adventure
when you let go, stop resisting, and enjoy the ride.
The transmutation of base metal into gold was the
primary—exoteric—effort of alchemy. But what that
meant—esoterically—was transformation of physical/biological/mortal man
into true spiritual essence. The strange liquid metal mercury was a
fascination to the alchemists and a symbol for spiritual essence. The
name mercury, of course, comes from the Roman messenger god Mercury,
who in Greek is Hermes. The early alchemists hypothesized that all
metals were formed by combining sulfur and mercury. Because of
impurities the compounds would usually be dark-colored like iron, but
purified enough yellow sulfur and silver mercury should merge to become
gold. Purification was the method to achieve transmutation; such
purification—with all the grinding, straining, refining involved just
on the metallurgist’s level—was an exercise in concentration and
mental focus.
Alchemy used color names to describe chemical—and
psycho-spiritual—processes. The element mercury has compounds showing
all these colors. The four alchemical “stages of transmutation” were
nigredo (blackening for putrefaction), albedo (whitening for
purification), citrinitas (yellowing for dawn) and rubedo (reddening
for blood). The step beyond red was the gold of spirit and the dramatic
alteration of consciousness that sees the Golden World.
One of the common chemical transformations of alchemy was heating the
red-colored ore cinnabar (mercury sulfide), so that it vaporized and
then condensed as elemental liquid mercury, now shining silver. Clearly
such a chemical reaction demonstrated a true transformation.
Conversely, mercury could be heated with oxygen to form red mercuric
oxide or precipitated with an alkali to form yellow mercuric oxide.
Mercury sulfide occurs in both a red and a black form.
The alchemist, perhaps with his uxor spiritualis at his side (or
perhaps his amicus spiritualis with his hand on his penis),
would meditate on releasing his spirit from imprisonment in the body as
the cinnabar began to burn in his glass retort. And, lo and behold, as
if to show—and sacramentalize—their intention, during their
“meditation,” the silver liquid would appear in the condensing flask.
(Since mercury compounds are neurotoxins, it isn’t surprising that some
of the alchemists experienced dramatic alterations of consciousness.)
Alchemy sought to bring spirit and matter into alignment by meditation
on chemical alterations because such reactions demonstrated
transformation.
The imagery of alchemy was frankly sexual. Mercury and Gold, silver and
yellow, Moon and Sun, Queen and King symbolize Female and Male. The
alchemical transformation was sometimes portrayed as the union of Queen
and King into a Cosmic Hermaphrodite.
Sexual arousal is another kind of alteration. Arousal in the body,
demonstrated by erection, parallels an alteration of attitude and
experience in the mind. And it is another demonstration of
transformation “as below, so above,” and it, too, can be practiced as a
training in interior awareness and experience of selfhood “below” as
part of a larger process “above.”
Most of the time, most of us are so caught up in the content of our
lives, we don’t consciously experience the consciousness that is having
the experience. The message of alchemy, of Hermeticism, of spiritual
practice and meditation is that humans exist in both planes: we live in
the external world and we live in an interior world of our own
consciousness. What you do in one influences the other. As above, so
below. As within, so without.
Grether’s Male Erotic Alchemy is training in cultivating that interior
world along the dimension of pleasure, so that the prolonged sexual
arousal and alteration of consciousness transforms the practitioner’s
own consciousness in such a way that positive expectations replace
negative ones and one’s own self-fulfilling prophecies fulfill
themselves as happiness, goodness and lightheartedness. Then one puts
out good vibes in the world and aligns with the external world to show
happiness and cause others to be happy and to grow in consciousness.
The Secret of the Golden Phallus echoes and includes these
themes of transformation of consciousness. Grether offers specific
practices for damming the ordinary flow of psychic energy (through
semen-retention) in order to get the wheel—“circular breathing”—to turn
backward and start the energy flowing to the higher spirit centers and
then back down into the world to transform the human experience of
embodiment. Keeping the vas deferens, the tubes that store semen,
engorged—in a sex-positive way, not a sexually-repressive way—generates
a general sense of free-floating erotic arousal that attaches to
everything. “Stay horny,” like “stay hungry,” is slang reminder that
satiety brings dullness and ennui and proper abstemiousness and
discipline keep awareness sharp and vital.
The world becomes beautiful, full of light, “Golden.” The goal of this
transformation in our modern, post-mythological, scientifically aware,
psychologically sophisticated world is to be a better person, a happier
person, a friendlier, luckier, more blissful person who makes everyone
around them happier, luckier and more blissful.
Our cultivating our sexual pleasure makes us happy and makes the world
around us happier. That is the effect that in the secret language of
alchemy was called transmuting lead into gold.
Modern Alchemy
Can we craft models for experience that use the alchemical-like
imagery, but from modern science? Can we devise new myths for how to
think about interior experience with contemporary worldviews, views
that use the 21st Century “elements” of quantum mechanics,
multidimensional space-time-consciousness, astrophysics, evolution and
human psychology?
Bruce Grether answers in the affirmative. The Secret of the Golden
Phallus offers an “erotic alchemy for the 21st Century,” placing
eros and pleasure in the context of metaphysical ideas from ancient
times right up to present day.
Cosmology and high-energy physics today offer alternative visions of
physical reality. In the world of quantum physics, the things around us
are really mostly empty space; what’s real are unimaginably tiny
particles which are only made of vibrating energy. Matter and energy
are two aspects of the same one thing. In Zen koan fashion, you might
say, the new cosmology holds that “Nothing really exists and it’s
vibrating.” Though physics only deals with the three-dimensional world
of “matter,” it makes sense that this is true of the content of mind as
well. We human beings are not really “bodies,” we are interconnected
fields of vibrating energy responding to the vibrations coming from
others around us in space and before us in time. We “create” the world
as a model in our minds in order to make sense of what we’re
experiencing vibrating around us.
Virtually everything in the man-made world we live in is actually the
continuation through time of an experience some other human being was
having before. The desk I am sitting at as I write this arose from the
experience of a carpenter sometime in the early 20th Century sawing and
sanding and screwing together pieces of wood. His experience has
endured in the vibrational world as this desk.
It isn’t so much that brain complexity somehow gives rise to
consciousness as that consciousness generates a consensual, sensory
world of material things (including the brain and the body) in its
process of sorting and modeling vibratory data coming in through the
five senses. The three dimensional (or actually five dimensional,
including time and mass) experiential world exists within
consciousness, formed from the cogitation of sensory input from the web
of relationships which we’re part of.
Surely there are dimensions of mind just as well. We make sense of
things that exist as ideas in mental space just as we see the
dimensions of physical space as things. Consciousness is structured
along dimensional lines that we do not “see” but experience as states
of consciousness and patterns of thought. The great myths, like dreams
projected out into metaphysical space, reveal structures of Deep
Consciousness analogous to star systems and galaxies in Deep Space. The
Great Mother, the Father Creator, the dying and rising Savior, the Wise
Old Man and Spirit Helpers and all the rest—these archetypes hint at
the dimensions of our interior lives.
There’s a sort of modern alchemy—a “new paradigm”—evolving in the
modern thought—that appears variously as quantum physics, string
theory, the holographic universe, mind-body interaction, “Law of
Attraction,” brain science, even A.I. (artificial intelligence).
According to this new paradigm, what we human beings really are is
fields of consciousness conjuring up a world we create of consensual
agreement. Too often this world seems a nightmare because we all put
out conflicting intentions and we shirk our responsibility to wake up
and take charge of our lives. Instead—partly because our paradigm of
reality is too small and outdated—too many of us live in the past or
the future in regrets and dreams rather than in the present moment.
Body and soul, matter and consciousness, are not two separate things,
but simply different manifestations of the same thing. Soul and body
are one. “As above, so below.” When we understand ourselves as
spiritual beings—energy fields—interacting with one another, we are
able to transform our lives and become happier and better people.
One dimension of mind appears to us as “meaning.” That dimension seems
to include such qualities as irony, karma and humor. “Karma” is the
notion that every action has consequences, so what you sow, so shall
you reap. We are always living out the consequences of the lives of
those who have lived before. This is what is mythologized in the ideas
of reincarnation and past lives: we resonate with vibrations coming
from the past and we put out vibrations that will have consequences in
the future. Occasionally this appears as “instant karma” when the
consequences result in direct kickback and ironic fulfillment of
self-conflicting intentions.
Another of those dimensions is that of pleasure; energy moving in the
dimension of pleasure manifests as eros, joy, interconnection with
others, affirmation of flesh and human beauty as the mode of
consciousness experiencing itself.
Pleasure as Wonder-full
Pleasure in self-aware human consciousness seems to be an experience of
what in animals is instinct. Following an “instinct” is pleasurable.
The biological mechanism is experienced, both in animals and in humans,
as a good feeling. Pleasure is an experience in the flesh of what in
the spirit is wonder and joy. Pleasure is about expansion of
consciousness. The experience of pleasure, after all, seems often to be
a feeling of expansion; at the most rudimentary, that expansion is the
engorgement of the genitals; at the highest, it is a feeling of rising
within oneself and beyond self into oneness with God. In that sense, in
some ways it is a direct experience of the expanding cosmos evolving
into consciousness. It makes sense to say that the purpose of the
universe seems to be to convert energy into consciousness, the Big Bang
into “God.”
Perhaps, indeed, in a very real way—and if not, then certainly in a
very apt metaphorical way—we can hypothesize that the evolution of
arousal and orgasm in human beings was an integral part of the
evolution of intelligence. It is because humans learned to be in-heat
all the time and always interested in pleasure and interpersonal
interactions that we evolved consciousness in the first place. Human
beings have much more complex foreplay and, with a few exceptions, much
longer coitus than other animals. What began as an instinctive
biomechanism became an experience of love, pleasure and joy. The
instinct to reproduce involved entering into complex relationships with
others; this required speech and communication which in turn gave rise
to culture. Dealing with the drive for love and pleasure forced the
primitive human mind to expand. And, by the way, the presence of
homosexuals in society who sought pleasure not reproduction meant there
would be extra adults in the family as surrogate parents and teachers
to enrich and expand the minds of the next generation. The desire for
pleasure sculpted human evolution.
Perhaps pleasure is, in fact, a dimension of the cosmos, a kind of
vibration that the individual can resonate with and so experience
participating in expansion and evolution. In heterosexual union, after
all, the pleasure potentially gives rise to new life. In homosexual
union, the pleasure motivates participation in culture through
interpersonal interaction, art, poetry and even religion. It is our
pleasure at being alive that motivates us to be more alive. The
experience of pleasure is the experience of evolution itself.
Gnosticism says most of the time this pleasure gets wasted by causing
spirit to be imprisoned in matter by procreation. The pleasure of sex
can be merely the pleasure of instinct obeyed. What the sexual
alchemists reveal is that pleasure can be trained and understood from
higher dimensions of consciousness so that it becomes an expansion of
awareness into alignment with the cosmic evolution.
The Secret of Golden Phallus, in alignment with the
ancient Secret of the Golden Flower and the Hermetic/Gnostic
traditions and spiritual alchemy, tells us how to train our sexuality
so that the pleasure arises not merely from obeying instinct for
procreation, but by becoming the conscious intention to expand into
bliss and put out intentions for the alignment of all beings in the
dimensions of Love, Harmony and Beauty. What Bruce Grether calls Male
Erotic Alchemy, with its sexual yoga and practice of prolonged arousal
with retention of semen, trains one to experience pleasure at the level
of spirit. This is the aligning of “Above” and “Below,” of yin and
yang, of spirit and matter; and this is the intention for the happiness
of all beings. Pleasure becomes transformed from autonomic urge to
conscious intention for evolution of consciousness.
Gravity, Electromagnetism and
the Law of Attraction
Darwin tells us that sexual attraction or repulsion are not nearly so
much feelings of personal taste and preference, as urgings of
evolutionary dynamics. “Attractiveness” means having good inheritable
traits. We experience it as sexual beauty. Even in the physical world
there is really no such thing as “attraction” and “repulsion.” These
phenomena are not what they appear.
One of Einstein’s great ideas was that gravity is not a force but
rather just the motion of objects aligned across the warped surface of
spacetime. Planets appear to circle their suns because the star has
warped space in the gravity dimension. Projected into three-dimensional
space, this “fifth dimension” is experienced as mass and, from our
perspective, the alignment of motion of the star and planets moving in
multi-dimensional spacetime looks like the planets move in circles
around the star as though attracted to it. Actually they are all just
moving in the shortest straight line available. There is no such thing
as gravity, there is only multi-dimensional movement of energy patterns
across the surface of the spacetime continuum (and maybe we should say,
with Hermetic intuition, the spacetimeconsciousness continuum). Gravity
is an effect of geometry.
While physics has not generalized Einstein’s model of gravity to the
other three “forces” (electromagnetism and the weak and the strong
nuclear forces) in what he had envisioned as a “unified field theory,”
these forces too can be conceptualized as motion in warped space along
dimensional lines which we experience only as the appearance of their
projections into our three-dimensional world. Looked at this way,
magnetism is not really the attraction of opposite poles. It also is an
effect of geometry.
Actually opposites don’t attract. In a magnet, iron atoms are lined up
electrically so they all spin the same direction. That’s because they
are all moving the same direction in the “dimension” of
electromagnetism. North (top) poles appear to be attracted to south
(bottom) poles because putting the top of one magnet in line with the
bottom of another aligns the motion of the electrical spins of the
atoms. (Remember the pun in Chinese in which “Golden Flower” becomes
“Light”!)
As Grether told us, the phenomenon on the spirit level is that “Like
attracts Like.” This is called the Law of Attraction. The secret of
this so-called Law describes a dynamic in consciousness for influencing
how life and destiny unfold. The “Law” says that what you think about
and hold in consciousness comes to you: if you want to be successful,
think of success; thoughts of success attract successful people and
successful outcomes and so holding thoughts of success makes one
successful. Thoughts and fears of failure, similarly, attract failing
outcomes and problem people, and bad luck follows. This is describing a
dimension in consciousness. But, like gravitation and magnetism, it
actually describes its phenomenon backwards. There is no “attraction,”
there is alignment.
What, perhaps, is really happening is self-fulfilling prophecy aligning
in the dimensions of consciousness. What you expect and intend is what
you get. The direction you move in the “happiness” dimension determines
how your life unfolds. It’s not what you think about that determines
what happens to you, it’s your attitude toward whatever happens.
Another expression for this dynamic is “Follow your bliss,” for if you
move in alignment with what brings you happiness and fulfillment,
that’s what you’ll get. It isn’t wanting success or prosperity that
makes it happen—the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth is that wanting is the
cause of suffering—it’s living a meaningful and blissful life. If
you’re happy with things the way they are, resonating with the vibes
that move through your life with grace and understanding, you’ll get
happier and doors will open for you without your having to want to
“attract” anything to yourself. As above, there’s no attraction,
there’s alignment.
The way to find your bliss is to go within—in spontaneous reverie,
disciplined meditation, erotic yoga—and just be in the present, letting
go of past and future, of judgment and wanting, with no resistance,
seeing that being alive is being in heaven now. “The Kingdom of Heaven
is spread across the face of the earth,” said Jesus, “and men do not
see it.” So see it!
An even better way to say this, perhaps, would be “Expand into your
bliss,” for the motion of the universe to which we must all align is
expansion. With positive intention and expanding good feelings,
pleasure is expanding into your bliss.
The Next Step in Evolution
These ideas about dimensionality and the forces in
“spacetimeconsciousness” will no doubt someday prove to be just as
inaccurate and primitive as we now think of the medieval alchemists’
ideas about the nature of metals. They still function for us now as
models for thinking about the dynamics of consciousness. And that’s the
deep issue here. All we ever have is models. The way to understand the
myths of religion is as models of such dynamics. This is our “new
myth,” that consciousness is ever revealing itself to itself and, in so
doing, is expanding and developing greater powers and abilities.
Change and evolution will continue beyond us just as surely as it has
brought us to this point. And just as human beings, as the self-aware
intelligent consciousness of the planet, have evolved more and more
sensitive physical senses in order to perceive and cope with the
vibrational information coming from all around us, so now that
evolution is proceeding at the level of consciousness, the next step in
evolution is going to show up as development of new mental “senses.”
Perhaps this next step will be a common experience of irrepressible
compassion and autonomic empathy. When we see other people struggling
with their experience, we will automatically sense their experience and
identify with them and feel the struggle as our own. We will literally
“feel” the sufferings and joys of others. We will sense their interior
awareness just as we now sense their external appearance. This is what
psychics, mystics and intuitives experience; this is what’s called
“seeing auras.”
This is the future of evolution predicted by Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin, S.J. in his mystical vision of “The Phenomenon of Man.”
Carl Jung had said there is a “collective unconscious”; Teilhard
proposed there will develop a “collective consciousness” (the Omega
Point) in which all individual human beings will actively and directly
experience themselves as parts of each other in a planetary mind,
sharing one another’s “I”’s. Gay prophet and futurist Arthur C. Clarke
described a similar collective mind in his science-fiction novel Childhood’s
End as the outcome of Earth’s evolution as it moves into the
Overmind/“God.” In pop “New Age” and parapsychology thinking, this next
step is presaged by the current appearance of so-called indigo children.
We experience this phenomenon 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.
Mahayana Buddhism identifies the virtue of mudita—joy in the joy of
others, vicarious joy, the pleasure that comes from delighting in other
people’s joy and happiness. This is a virtue that isn’t particularly
recognized in Christianity, but it certainly sounds like what Jesus
would do. In a very real way, isn’t joy in the joy of others the basis
of the Sexual Revolution?
The Rastafarian myth that’s entered modern consciousness through the
reggae music of Jamaica says that the personal name of God is “I,” so
every time every one of us calls ourselves I, we’re recognizing all our
Is’ oneness with God. Hindu myth says atman is brahman, Tat Tvam Asi;
the mantra means “Thou art That,” that is, your being is the being of
God: “You’re It,” or even more impersonally, “This is It.” The
Christian myth tells us to see one another as “other Christs”;
“Whatsoever you do to the least, that you do to me,” said Jesus. The
Mahayana Buddhist myth tells us that Avalokiteshvara has taken on all
the reincarnations of all sentient beings to free them from suffering,
and so we all are “other Avalokiteshvaras.” Avalokiteshvara’s mantra,
naturally, is “May all beings be happy. May all beings be free.”
Television and the Internet—the technological “nervous system” of the
planet—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 their plight. Seeing their happiness makes us happy.
We currently tend to defend ourselves against this kind of experience
of compassion. It’s derided as being a “bleeding heart.” (Curiously,
religious conservatives diss “bleeding heart liberals” even though a
major icon of Christian religion is the Sacred Heart—bleeding heart—of
Jesus, saving the world through forgiveness and compassion for
suffering sinners.)
Sexual identity has been 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 feminine and subservient to men by repressing them out of
embarrassment. Men and women bond together generously to produce new
life, but then bond with their offspring against the rest of the
world—“us against them” in the name of family values.
That is, the duality that being male and female creates in human
consciousness also creates a barrier to being truly compassionate and
kind. Indeed, this duality then shows up as the polarity of “us and
them,” “good and evil” and the justification for not being
compassionate of others as the judgment that they are “wrong”—or that
it’s their own fault they are suffering.
Men and women have different life priorities and put out conflicting
intentions and expectations. The resulting conflicting self-fulfilling
prophecies stir the universe and generate the future, but also create
strife and suffering. This phenomenon is jocularly called “the battle
of the sexes.” This is why the goal of alchemical transmutation was
sometimes imaged as the Cosmic Hermaphrodite or Divine Androgyne, for
overcoming the inevitable duality of the sexes is a necessary step in
personal and spiritual—and planetary—growth.
So the next step in evolution of getting over “us and them” includes
getting over the apparent duality of the world into “good and evil” and
“male and female.”
The Contribution of Sexual
Liberation
to the Mystical Traditions
Sexual liberation and conscious cultivation of sexuality and good will
for others’ sexual pleasure move sex from the physical to the
psycho-spiritual. No longer is sex just a biological instinctive
imperative for racial/species survival, it becomes participation in
expanding and evolving consciousness at the spiritual level.
Breaking the link between sex and procreation that modern contraception
forced has ushered in new freedoms and new identities. Contraception
allowed procreation to be conscious and intentional. No longer is sex
and reproduction restricted to “nuclear families”; experiments are
happening with polyamory, bisexuality, metrosexuality (or better,
mesosexuality), solosexuality, fluid sexual and gender orientation.
The Women’s Movement championed the equality of the sexes and began a
realignment and balancing of gender and gender roles and perhaps a move
throughout all modern culture beyond the dualities (including those
conventional notions of “good and evil”).
Gay liberation has relaxed gender roles throughout society. Men don’t
have to be afraid to be soft and sensitive or women to be strong.
Homosexuality is a clue to the complex dimensions of sex since
homosexuals necessarily discover that their sexual feelings are not
about procreation. The same sex marriage debate has transformed how
people understand the nature of marriage as founded in affection, love
and sexual attraction—in a sort of reprise of courtly love tradition;
this debate has changed what young homosexuals expect their futures to
be.
Psychological awareness shows that love and relationship are
therapeutic and growth-enhancing. In the terms of that romantic love
tradition, falling in love is a message from the soul about lessons one
needs to learn in this life, a signpost of personal, “karmic,” destiny.
The purpose of relationship goes far beyond giving birth to offspring,
it’s about giving birth to one’s own spirit body—in interconnected
relationship with every person one has ever loved.
Modern queer identity is a clue to even more complex dimensions of
consciousness in which gender identity can be understood separate from
the bodily organs and physical destiny. The rise of gay consciousness
and self-awareness of sexual orientation is an evolutionary step in
moving human consciousness beyond the dualities. And the sense of other
people’s minds from inside is prefigured in the phenomenon of “gaydar.”
Sexual liberation and modern technology have created a new medium in
which we are able to watch other people in various kinds of states of
arousal, styles of interaction and forms of intercourse and lovemaking.
Though the availability and suitableness of this medium is highly
contested, the way to understand modern erotica is as a precursor to
collective mind. Pornography is a way for human beings to share our
experience of being our bodies; we are able to join in sexual
experiences other people have had, to resonate with their vibes. We can
get inside other people’s minds; with good intention and insight, we
can see that the models and porn stars are other Christs, other I’s. We
can understand erotica as an act of generosity on the part of the
performers sharing their prowess and physical beauty and of homage and
empathy on that of the viewers—a direct experience of joy in the joy of
others redounding back on itself as physical pleasure.
Masturbation—soloving—has been acknowledged and devilified, indeed
recognized as physically and psychologically healthful by modern
medicine; the condemnations of self-pleasuring of the old religions are
fading into the past with other superstitions.
Valuing sexual pleasure as a good in its own right moves sexuality out
of biology and into mind and therefore beyond the duality of efficient
heterosexuality.
These three elements of evolution—understanding myth, feeling
compassion and transcending conventional heterosexual dualistic
roles—are all different appearances of the same thing: the emerging
self-awareness of the cosmos. And this is what, in the metaphor of
religion, is God’s love of creation.
The Secret of the Golden Phallus
Bruce Grether’s Male Erotic Alchemy affirms a modern, psycho-spiritual
discovery—and heresy—that pleasure is good for people and that eros can
be a power of positive transformation and is THE driving force of
planetary and human evolution, both at the level of biology and at the
level of consciousness and culture. And, as always, the “Great Secret”
is that this is heaven now. The time for you to experience being in
heaven is now, when you’re alive. Don’t wait till you’re dead, because
then the “you” that experiences things as you won’t be experiencing
anything. This is It. Tat Tvam Asi. We have only to learn how to see.
The “Secret” that this book reveals is that pleasure is healing and
brings a person into synchronization with “karmic destiny” and/or
universal consciousness. Male Erotic Alchemy is a practice for learning
how to allow pleasure to be healing and transformative. It is a
meditation practice with the “transformation” in the body (of erection
and alteration of consciousness) as an outward sign, like a
sacrament—or a chemical reaction—that shows transformation in
consciousness.
The alchemy of the Golden Phallus is about “saving the world,”
transforming personal experience through the yoga of erotically aroused
psychic energy. Sigmund Freud called this energy libido; his associate
Wilhelm Reich (initiator of modern “body-work” as a psychotherapeutic
tool) called it orgone. For physicists, it’s energy. And within the
individual, it is the joy of having a body that produces such wonderful
feelings of pleasure.
When we are in sexual arousal and confident that sexual experience is
going to happen, we begin to feel joy and focus in the present, relief
of worries, liberation from anxieties about worthiness, attractiveness
and lovableness—crucial issues in human life. When we’re in the altered
state of sexual pleasure, we are happy, and we’d want others to be
happy. This is true with a partner, and is true when we are alone with
ourselves. Love is the feeling of drawing close and holding the beloved
and of, thereby, exulting and shining bright. It is contraction that
creates expansion.
Because sexual pleasure is something we want and remember as something
we value and were happy about, we should want all people to feel sexual
pleasure and experience it joyfully as expanding into their bliss and
loving life just as it is.
Sexual pleasure feels good because it is the immediate experience of
lining up with the movement of evolution from Big Bang to God in the
dimension of consciousness. You are moving with the expansion of the
cosmos. As you approach orgasm, think (with conscious double entendre)
“Here comes God” and, as you prolong and exult in pleasure, think “May
all beings be happy. May all beings be free.”
It’s as though in humans—conscious entities—the experience of being in
alignment with this incredibly significant force in our lives is
joyful, in the same way that a magnet would feel “joy” as it lines up
with a magnetic field or a planet as it swings around its sun.
The Great Secret is to go with flow, because there is really no
alternative; the flow is flowing. The Secret of Bruce Grether’s alchemy
is how to become the flow.
Toby Johnson is author of some ten books, including Finding
Your Own True Myth: What I Learned from
Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the
Great Secret III.
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