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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 Three-Layer Cake and the MultiverseJoseph Campbell used to joke that the medieval worldview can be likened to a three-layer cake. Ironically, this is the worldview that most of our religions in the West still adhere to despite it’s being outdated by centuries of discovery and observation. The layer cake consisted of the “Divinity” layer on top, where God lived in Heaven with his angels and favored human souls in happiness and light; the Earth in the middle, where we live and struggle to find meaning and truth before we die; and, of course, Hell on the bottom—“Devil’s food”—where the disobedient angels and damned souls were consigned in suffering. Only the middle layer was accessible to human observation. The other layers were understood only through faith and belief in authority. For most of human history, the cake was pretty small. It was bound by the land around the Mediterranean Sea. Some explorers had discovered lands beyond this small disk, but what mattered was what was happening right there in Europe, Asia Minor and Northern Africa. And that’s where the authorities were: popes, kings, caliphs and sultans. From the Age of Exploration in the 15th Century onward, that worldview has been challenged by discoveries that the authorities had no knowledge of. The lands beyond the Mediterranean disk weren’t mentioned in the Bible or the Koran, but they existed. Experience proved it. That threatened authority.
The whole three-layer cake model of the world has now been superceded by the complex multiverse that modern science and theoretical cosmology has developed out of further observation, experimentation and experience. The world we live in now is understood to be a speck on the edge of a run-of-the-mill galaxy located in cosmic space among some 200 billion other galaxies all erupting out in a Big Bang that started some 14 billion years ago. The visible universe is a tiny stratum in the continuum of electromagnetic vibrations; if the full spectrum of vibratory frequencies were laid out along the U.S. West Coast from Alaska to Mexico, the visible spectrum would cover the city of San Francisco. The furthest galaxies we can see—and we CAN see them (amazing!)—are 14 billion light years away. If there are any further away we can’t see them because there hasn’t been enough time for the light to get here. This is no three-layer cake. And popes, kings, caliphs and sultans can’t tell us a thing about it based on their authority. Observation has revealed a universe totally different from what most people “believe in.” Maybe that is not as surprising as it sounds. After all, the universe as we know it today was only discovered within the lifetimes of many of the people reading these words. It’s still just sinking in. This causes a tremendous conflict in people’s experience. None of us can actually comprehend that huge cosmos. I’ve been calling it a multiverse, for theoretical physics tells us that not only is it the universe of galaxies stretching out into space, it also comprises a vast variety of possible and parallel universes that exist in various states of possibility. Maybe our Big Bang is just one of billions of Big Bangs in infinitely vast space that have gone on forever with no beginning. Mind-boggling. What is also mind-boggling—and fascinating—is how modern humans can apparently hold both universes in mind. This is perhaps a symptom of some sort of epistemological schizophrenia or maybe it represents the burgeoning of a new kind of consciousness altogether. Campbell commented that he was perplexed at the time of the first Apollo moon mission when the astronauts read from the book of Genesis as they orbited over the lunar surface. Didn’t anybody get the contradictions? The two accounts of reality just don’t jibe. Or maybe there was a certain “frission” that everybody appreciated without exactly understanding how or why? I propose that what this means is that modern humans are inadvertently realizing that “God” and the elements of religion and myth exist in the mind and not in the kind of space that astronauts fly through and into which the multiverse is expanding. There is no conflict between science and religion; they are about different subjects. It really is possible to “believe” in Adam and the Eve in the Garden AND to know that life has evolved on Earth over millennia much the way Charles Darwin hypothesized. While some conservative religious people don’t yet get it, most of us are developing an epistemological sophistication that transcends the contradictions by envisioning a more complex universe that includes mind as well as spacetime, i.e., a multidimensional spacetimeconsciousness. Something else has developed too. It’s not just which version of history (or psychology) is correct, it’s what kind authority exists to define what’s correct or not. And the criteria for judging beliefs have changed, too. And this is what is really threatening to traditional religion and promises to force it to the higher epistemological sophistication. This idea is very threatening to Church and authority. This is really what the trial of Galileo was about—not what he saw through the telescope but whether a single man’s observation trumped institutionalized authority. For if “God” and the elements of religion and myth exist in the mind, then their validity is the effect they have on the consciousness and behavior of those minds. The truth of religion doesn’t come from authoritative revelation and it can’t be proved—or disproved—by historical factualities. The truth of religion has to be judged by the behavior of the believers and the criteria for truth is the lives of religious people. I think the reality is that each of us is on our own to conceive of God and the gods as we choose and the truth of what we believe is how our concepts affect our lives so that we are more cooperative and happier and make other people happier. Walt Whitman addressed just this attitude in Leaves of Grass: “argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men.” This is a truly “religious” attitude toward life. And, though conservative Bible-believers/ Creationists probably wouldn’t actually accede to this, this is how Jesus said one could judge religious beliefs: “By their fruits, you shall know them.” The truth of Christianity lies in the generosity, loving kindness and compassion for others that Christians exhibit. And curiously in their relations with homosexuals they don’t seem to behave according to the instructions of Jesus—“Do unto others as you would have them do to you”—and their behavior toward us is a major indictment of the value of believing their particular set of beliefs. So here’s the message of the three-layer cake and the multiverse: God doesn’t have much to do with it; what matters is how people treat each other. You can believe anything, so long as you are kind and generous and don’t make other people wrong. “Take off your hat to no man,” but be loving to all. What a revolution in authority this represents. And, I think, it is one of the gay population’s boon to humankind—boon and warning: the way you treat us is the way “God” is going to treat you. Authority has moved from the popes, kings, caliphs and sultans to the individual human heart. This is the essence of modern democracy. And gay consciousness and gay liberation are natural outcomes of democracy: the truth of the heart. This isn’t how our political foes characterize us, and, unfortunately, I think, it’s not how many of our own people understand their sexuality. A major job of the “gay spirituality movement” needs to be changing how homosexuality is viewed and valued, so that we are seen not as a regressive force, as a progressive one—in consciousness and spirit, a manifestation in consciousness of the infinite variety and diversity of the spacetimeconsciousness multiverse. |
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.
FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.
Two
Spirits is available as an
audiobook narrated by Arthur Raymond. 