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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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 The following essay was prepared for "The Ways of the Spirit: A Course in Spirituality for LGBT People" created by Harry Faddis and Patrick Cheng for broadcast (and podcast) on WRPI radio, March 2006 The Word:Historicity is a Myth of Creativity
Speech changed everything. How human beings are special in planetary ecology is that we are able to communicate complex experience to one another. We are able to share experience. And so our learning can "stand on the shoulders of giants"; we can remember the past and learn from the experience of our forebears and communicate the lessons to our descendants. We can transcend individuality. Writing allowed speech to be concretized. Speech that was written endured through time and resisted change. Writing--in a very literal way--created history. So by the Word, human consciousness creates and shapes its experience. Other people tell us of their experience, and we factor that report into our own concept of what reality is. We tell other people of our experience, and so our experience influences the world beyond us. We tell ourselves about our experience, using words in our minds, and so are able to understand and shape--and change--that experience. We write things down and so create stability and preserve evidence of past decisions and agreements. Lawyers tell us to get things in writing, because writing them down guarantees persistence of memory and endurance of agreement. The "Word," then, has sacred power. It is literally true--and there's even a pun in that comment--that the word creates the universe. This is a recognizable theme in the Sacred Scriptures of the West. God creates the universe by His Word, and His Word becomes incarnate in a person who interprets and explains the lessons. Those lessons function as self-fulfilling prophecies and so change the world. Indeed by speaking the "good news" the world is saved. This is "literally" true about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, though what "incarnates in a person" is different in each. In Judaism it's a genetic heritage, a tribe. In Christianity, it's the person of Jesus. In Islam, it's the instruction/Law of the Koran revealed ("literally") to the Prophet. The Bible is true because it's been written down. "True" means the wisdom and meaning intended has been preserved relatively unchanged from the original revelation to the individual writer who put the words on paper (or parchment or papyrus or whatever). The point of the writer preserving his (or in very rare cases, it has unfortunately turned out, her) experience of mystical consciousness and fulfilling sense of meaning was to share it with others. Sages and oracles and prophets and priests wrote down their most sublime experiences and realizations, using symbols and metaphors and even what we'd now understand to be pop slang, to elicit that same experience and vision in others. The power of the "Word" is that it allows mystical vision and realization about the meaning of life to transcend individual seers and to endure the passage of time. It is then "literally" true to say that writing down the Sacred Scriptures of religion creates the God and the cosmic worldview of the various religions. The "God" we understand and experience today is a heritage of visionaries and seers before us. What those visionaries and seers wanted to communicate is the meaning and significance of their lives. At the time the Bible was written, it was effectively the only book. So when it was said the Bible was the word of God, what was really meant is that what's written down becomes everlasting, i.e. achieves eternal truth. The original emphasis was on the meaning of the words, the experience they conveyed, not on the words themselves. Modern-day Christian (and Islamic) Fundamentalist Scriptural literalism has, unfortunately, confused the "literal" truth of the Scriptures with the facticity of science and intentional observation of phenomena. Thus we see such things as "Scientific Creationism" pitted against "The Theory of Evolution." What compounds this problem is that the religions of the West claim historicity as their proof of veracity. Jesus really lived, died, and rose again. Mohammed really received the Koran from God. John Smith really dug up the gold tablets at the instruction of the angel Moroni. Historicity is itself a mythic symbol. The message of historicity--at least as it was originally applied by people who had only "one book" and for whom writing was itself mystical--is the excellence of the message. The "historical truth" of the Resurrection of Jesus, for instance, is the meaning of the symbol, not the event. Whether Jesus rose from dead is a different kind of question than whether Napoleon died on Elba or St. Helena. Napoleon's death (on St. Helena) didn't mean anything. It was just a fact. Jesus's Resurrection (probably, not a fact) means something: that life endures individual death and, even more important, that Jesus's teaching that love transcends and trumps the Law is the ultimate commandment. All the stories about Jesus are not about Jesus the man, but about the excellence of the teachings of Jesus the visionary. What "rose from the dead" was the truth of Jesus's message about the nature of law and love. The way to read "The Word" is to understand what the original writer was trying to convey, and then to put oneself in a state of consciousness in which one can share the writer's mystical vision. The Resurrection of Jesus is only indirectly connected with the death and survival of the man who lived 2000 years ago on the other side of the planet in a culture so alien to ours we can barely imagine it. That's all too far away and too long ago to matter anymore. What rises from the grave and transcends death is that part of you that is symbolized in the story of Jesus, i.e., that part of you that has the same mystical realization that Jesus had--and that the Apostles had and tried to convey by repeating (and poetically elaborating) their experience of knowing Jesus. And that mystical realization is that you are one with "God the Father" and one with all who believe in love and compassion as the pillars of religion (not sexual purity and obedience to the law). What Jesus realized, we can all realize. We are all Sons (and Daughters) of God. Our experience as gay people in modern society helps us to understand this phenomenon. In our very fleshly experience, we have evidence that the Scriptural literalists are patently wrong about homosexuality and the nature of our lives. Our homosexuality itself provides us with a lesson about the nature of truth. Our writing down our gay wisdom--and sharing it on the Internet and radio--quite "literally" creates the gay-positive environment we long for. And our longing for such a loving, peaceful and harmonious state of being is an experience of God's evolving itself through human consciousness. Understanding the excellence of this message, as part of the contribution of gay consciousness to the transformation of human nature, creates the future. The "Word" creates the universe. |
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. 