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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Unpublished manuscripts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

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

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

The Monastic Schedule: a whimsy

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

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 Flip:

Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge

A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip is Kripal's ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of the history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world.

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and is the associate director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He has previously taught at Harvard Divinity School and Westminster College and is the author of eight books, including The Flip. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Near the end of the book, Jeffrey Kripal writes: "What we already are is truly fantastic: 5-D or 'X-beings' endowed with spectral superpowers that give witness to the future human being, a massive transdimensional hyperobject awakening to its own actual condition, connected to everything there is, and literally and truly cosmic." Kripal references Timothy Morton (author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence) for this description. To understand what that description means —and to be part of the awakening— takes the flip.

What Kripal calls "the flip" is the conversion in epistemological view of what the world and consciousness really are. Kripal is especially interested in scientists who have been devoted to everyday scientific realism who suddenly experience an insight that there is a level of reality that isn't explainable within present-day scientific material realism. There's more.

Of course, one of the main things that doesn't fit into scientific realism is the consciousness itself that is having the insight and that, from everybody's everywhere individuated and particularized perspective, seems to constitute the world. What the world is, after all, from yours and my perspective is what we experience. For all that the world seems to be made out of "matter" out there, it is really "made out of" experience inside yours and my mind.

Kripal gives examples of events that precipitate a flip or a mystical insight: Mark Twain's experience of "dreaming" of his brother  Henry's funeral just two weeks before Henry's accidental and totally unexpected death, with the experience of the funeral itself happening just as it was dreamed; the wife who had a vision of her husband telling her to call the police—to recover his dead body from the ravine into which his car had fallen—just moments after the accident; the "clairvoyant" Emanuel Swendenborg in 1756 describing in detail the advance of a fire through his hometown of Stockholm, while he was 50 miles away "seeing" it psychically. How do such things happen? How does the impossible happen? How do "miracles" and "supernatural events" happen?

In some ways the world exists more in our minds than in the space around us, more in our interaction with other conscious beings than just with the solid objects of the material universe. Indeed, the material universe represents the hard rules of common experience. In some way the material universe can be understood as just as abstract as the rules of mathematics. Math is absolutely true. 2 + 2 never equals anything but 4. But nowhere can you ever find those 2's in the material world. Twoness is in the mind looking at two objects and seeing "quantity." Quantity is an idea, not a thing.

Kripal's book is full of wonderful and inspiring insights that there is more to us than we ordinarily understand. It is often only in traumatizing situations, like a brother's, a husband's death or a fire encroaching upon one's home (Swendenborg's fire got to within 3 doors of his own house) that these wonders can happen. Maybe it's like the fabled case of the mother who is able to lift an automobile to free her child trapped under the wheel. Extreme intensity changes how we relate to everday reality.

Another of Kripal's notions is that what we used to call "supernatural" is really "super natural." That strange phenomena occur to break us out of our shells is perfectly natural. It's just that to understand such "nature," one has to rise up a level, move to a higher perspective. Consciousness is always giving itself clues to its true nature. "God" is always trying to tell us something.

I love the idea that we are really 5-D transdimensional hyperobjects formed out of consciousness, interacting with one another in ways that generate the world of common experience with its rules of math and matter. This was an idea in the marvelous little book from the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love: Thaddeus Golas' The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment. Golas begins: "We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other."

My own "flip" experience came from studying the theories of mythology of Joseph Campbell. In a moment of insight, I understood that everything is myth and that while understanding that is higher level, it too is still myth. And all of it is "God," but that God is very different from the God the Catholic catechism that I grew up with told of. But that too was a clue. Myths are clues. In fact, everything's a clue. And then—by happy "coincidence"—I got to meet and befriend Campbell, and became one of the crew who worked his appearances in Northern California in the 70s. So that he became for me the "wise old man" of my spiritual journey. Who better for your Wise Old Man?

I have been inspired and elevated and my thinking stimulated and uplifted by everything I've read of Jeffrey Kripal's. The Flip was another such great read. Jeff Kripal would make an excellent wise old man for a new generation of seekers.