|
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
|
The term "spirituality" has come to be used these days to refer to the concerns and sentiments that previously have been called "religious." People who used to think of themselves as deeply religious now often call themselves spiritual instead. This is certainly true among gay people. Many of us were deeply religious as youth. A disproportionately large number entered the seminary or studied for the ministry. Often it was our budding homosexuality itself which inspired such religiousness. We knew vaguely that we weren't normal, that we were special, that we wanted something different from life from our parents, that we weren't drawn to the usual life of marriage and family. We knew we were "called." For most of us, that youthful religiousness failed us. This happened in two ways, one personal, one social. Personally, as we grew up and became more aware of our interior motivations, we discovered sex. We learned to name our feelings as sexual and to see that what made us special was that those sexual feelings weren't what the other boys and girls were experiencing. Socially, we discovered that the history of religion was filled with cruelty and oppression and persecution of difference. As we studied history and science, we saw that the stories we'd learned in Sunday school or catechism class didn't fit the modern world view. We may have begun to realize that if religion was wrong about such things as structure of the solar system and the development of life on Earth, it was probably wrong about a lot of other things--especially the nature of sexuality. But even as we were seeing through the content of religion, we likely still felt those deep feelings of love of life and sensitivity to other people. We still wanted to find meaning in life and to feel the presence of God in our experience. Especially as we realized our homosexual orientation and saw how the Churches had only bad things to say about those feelings--crazy things that we could tell in ourselves were just as false as the stories about the origin of the Earth--we likely abandoned religion. We may have started to call ourselves spiritual, instead of religious. And we meant that we looked to our own experience to find meaning and the presence of God, not to the teachings of Church authorities.
The images and symbols for these big questions have evolved over time. Primitive peoples worshipped animal deities and plant gods. These were the source of sustenance. As they observed the patterns in nature, they saw correlations between the seasons and the movement of the heavenly bodies. The gods shifted to the skies, and they worshipped the sun and moon. As consciousness became more complex and people began to live in ordered societies, the gods shifted their concerns to morality and personal behavior; God became the bestower of Law and guide of conscience. As science shifted its purview from the heavens to the earth, from astronomy to biology, and in the 20th Century to anthropology and psychology, human consciousness itself became the focus on wonder. Religion is necessarily undergoing a tremendous transformation. It is having to cope with modernization. One very important aspect of that modernization is the recognition of psychology. Just as astronomy and paleontology have changed how we understand the structure of the solar system and the evolution of life, psychology changes how we understand human nature. The rise of gay consciousness in the last fifty years is one of the great challenges to religion. While, of course, people have been behaving homosexually all through history, it is a new thing to claim this as a source of personal identity and to understand it as a source of admirable personality traits. It challenges the old notion that the purpose of human life is to go forth and multiply and subdue the earth. Gay consciousness demands a paradigm shift just as significant--and maybe more so--as the heliocentric universe and the evolution of species. Religion is just managing the heliocentric universe (the Pope has finally forgiven Galileo for being right). The war over evolution is still being fought, though it is inevitable which side will win.
The religious Fundamentalists deny the reality of homosexuality just like they deny the truth of evolution. And for somewhat the same reasons. They are more concerned with maintaining their authority than with recognizing and responding to the real human situation. Ironically, the message of religious reformers, like Jesus, was that love and compassion supersede Law and authority. "Love your neighbor" was the commandment Jesus gave. He never mentioned a thing about homosexuality, or about sex in general for that matter. The Golden Rule would certainly not support the Churches' campaign against gay rights. Indeed, to the extent that the Churches rail against gay people, preaching fear and hatred for fund-raising purposes, they reveal themselves out of sync with the One Commandment of Love. As the old myths make less and less sense, the meaning of religion has to shift away from the archaic symbols and old-fashioned laws and begin to respond to the reality of human life. Homosexuality is a central issue in this transformation. In recent years, a new paradigm has arisen. A new scientific discovery has been achieved. This is the awareness of planetary ecology. We now understand that there are forces that guide the development of life on the planet. At the same time, a whole new issue has developed for the planet: overpopulation. There are now just too many people for the earth to sustain. Even if food production can keep up with population growth, how is the planet going to cope with the waste all these people produce. We are exhausting natural resources and polluting the environment because there are just too many of us. The development of conscious homosexuality may well be an ecological mechanism to call the human race to reduce population. We are the models of contributing, satisfying lives lived without reproducing. We demonstrate that having children is not the exclusive, or even primary, purpose of sexuality or of life. Gay culture may not have entirely caught up with its role as ecological guide. We are still struggling to find our place. But even as we struggle we are helping the human race in the important step of maturing from religion to spirituality. We are helping force the issue. Today, everybody is having to make the shift away from the old, out-dated myths. In the conflict between religion and science, science necessarily will win. The purpose of religion then cannot be to cling to the old symbols. It can't be about maintaining certain myths. These are, after all, just metaphors. As the metaphors lose meaning, the deep sensitivity to other people and to the larger goals of planetary ecology have to supersede them This is the meaning of spirituality. Gay people's struggle models everybody's maturation from religion to spirit. |
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. 
The paradigm shift signified in
part by gay consciousness
is even more challenging because it affects the meaning of sexuality
and the experience of embodiment. Acknowledging that a significant
portion of the human race is not driven to reproduce changes the
meaning of sex. That there are people who are constitutionally
homosexual challenges the notion of a universal natural law. It even
changes the way embodiment in flesh and the experience of physical
pleasure is experienced.