The Myth of the Wanderer

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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

Unpublished manuscripts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

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

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

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.

We are all wanderers here

The Myth of the Wanderer has always had personal meaning for me. In my Catholic religious life experience, when I was with the Servites, I took the religous name Peregrine. St Peregrine was a Servite in the 14th century. The word "peregrine" means wanderer or pilgrim. Peregrine falcons are called such because it used to be thought they made no nest and so were always moving from place to place (that's only partly true).

Here's a link to a page about St. Peregrine and peregrination.





The story in my novel Getting Life in Perspective appeals to the Wanderer Myth. It's got a novel-within-the-novel that is set in the late 1800s at the time of the Tramp Movement. The characters hop freight trains and stay in tramp campgrounds on their way to discovering a "gay utopian colony" out west in the Rockies.

Here's a Code of Ethics agreed to by a convention of "hobos" in 1889. Hobo was the next generation of wanderers after the tramps.

The Hobo Code of Ethics

1. YOU DO YOU.
"Decide your own life, don't let another person run or rule you."


2. SHOW SOME RESPECT.
"When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times."

3. DON'T BE AN OPPORTUNIST.
"Don't take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos."

4. GET A JOB.
"Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again."

5. BE A SELF-STARTER.
"When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts."

6. SET A GOOD EXAMPLE.
"Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals' treatment of other hobos."

7. BE MINDFUL OF OTHERS.
"When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you."

8. DON'T LITTER.
"Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling."

9. LEND A HAND.
"If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help."

10. PRACTICE GOOD HYGIENE.
"Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible."

11. BE COURTEOUS WHEN YOU'RE RIDING THE RAILS ...
"When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member."

12. ... AND WHEN YOU'RE NOT.
"Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard."

13. HELP OUT THE KIDS.
"Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home."

14. SAME GOES FOR HOBOS.
"Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday."

15. LEND YOUR VOICE.
"If present at a hobo court and you have testimony, give it. Whether for or against the accused, your voice counts!"

“Obedient to no man, dependent only on weather and season, without a goal before them or a roof above them, owning nothing, open to every whim of fate, the homeless wanderers lead their childlike, brave, shabby existence. They are the sons of Adam, who was driven out of Paradise; the brothers of the animals, of innocence. Out of heaven's hand they accept what is given them from moment to moment: sun, rain, fog, snow, warmth, cold, comfort, and hardship; time does not exist for them and neither does history, or ambition, or that bizarre idol called progress and evolution, in which houseowners believe so desperately. A wayfarer may be delicate or crude, artful or awkward, brave or cowardly—he is always a child at heart, living in the first day of creation, before the beginning of the history of the world, his life always guided by a few simple instincts and needs. He may be intelligent or stupid; he may be deeply aware of the fleeting fragility of all living things, of how pettily and fearfully each living creature carries its bit of warm blood through the glaciers of cosmic space, or he may merely follow the commands of his poor stomach with childlike greed—he is always the opponent, the deadly enemy of the established proprietor, who hates him, despises him, or fears him, because he does not wish to be reminded that all existence is transitory, that life is constantly wilting, that merciless icy death fills the cosmos all around.”

"And Jesus was a sailor, when he walked upon the water, And he spent a long time watching, From his lonely wooden tower and when he knew for certain, only drowning men could see him, he said 'All men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them'."

CHAPTER 7

THE PATH OF THE WANDERER

Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.
   There’s a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is enlightenment (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it.”

(Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth video, II)

We are each a self—and the Self—searching through our store of experiences, past and present (which is the world), to find a path and to create a future. Each of us is constructing a life story. We are all wanderers, seeking the face of God. It is our heritage. Adam was a wanderer, walking with God in the cool of the evening, beholding God face to face, living open to every new experience as a further revelation of the divine presence. That weary afternoon at the castle, I experienced an enlightened moment and beheld the face behind the veil of my time-and-space reality. I have beheld God face to face. (See Intimations)

Indeed, in each face into which I have looked I have beheld God. That was the revelation of that day. Likewise, early twentieth-century English mystic Caryll Houselander described a period of a few days in her life during which she saw the face of Christ behind that of every person on the street. I have come to understand this Truth, but most of the time my sense of it is only very intellectual and distant. But now and then, behind certain faces the divine presence becomes especially real, and a person who might otherwise have been just another person on the street becomes a manifestation of transcendent mythical reality.

One night, I was with friends in front of a theater in the San Francisco’s North Beach area. A friend and fellow former Servite was acting in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A young man engaged me in conversation. I was at first a little put off. He was disheveled, his clothes crumpled and worn, his face and hands dirty. But his eyes were bright and alive and his smile captivating. I ended up standing there in the street for an hour or more while he told me about himself.

He said his name was Monty. He was in his early thirties. He’d been an executive in an advertising firm, he said, successful according to American standards. He had, however, come to feel that the security and success of his career were an impediment to his spiritual growth. He felt that there was no challenge left to his soul. And so one day—I imagine in the fervor of conviction—he quit his job, sold or gave away his belongings, gave up his apartment, and went to live on the streets. He was surviving by living simply and frugally, foraging food, occasionally accepting an invitation to stay at someone’s house (in those days before the explosion of homelessness in America, it wasn’t hard to get an invitation to crash some place in San Francisco), depending on Providence, and overcoming desire. Overcoming desire, he said, was the most necessary thing if the spiritual life were to prosper.

He never asked me for money, but I did give him my address and invited him to visit. A couple of days later, just after supper, Monty came to the house. He had been at the beach to watch the sunset. I was living then with four others in a house near the ocean. I invited him in and fixed some food for him. He was grateful.

I spent a long time talking with him. I was deeply affected by his decision to be a wanderer. He seemed to be living the mendicant life in a way that put to shame my safe, protected, and institutionalized attempts. I wondered if I should try to follow his example. I was frightened by that thought.

It got late. I invited him to sleep over. He accepted. But when I offered to prepare a bed for him, he declined. Fighting the temptation to need comfort, he said, was the hardest part of his life choice. The luxury of the bed would only make that temptation worse. He preferred to sleep on the floor in the living room. The next morning he left and I have never seen him again.

Late that night, as I wrestled with the example of mendicancy he presented me, he took on a magical aura. He held me loosely in his arms to comfort me and told me that my life—like the lives of all of us, I suppose—would be full of suffering and that, even so, I would make it through. He said I’d been right to choose the bodhisattva’s path. He said it was not the suffering I had to fear, but the fear of it. Most any suffering we can survive; few hardships are so terrible that they destroy the soul. But what will destroy the soul, cause it to wither up and die unnoticed, he said, is the fear of suffering that builds up walls around the heart and keeps out the life. The sources of that fear are anger that things are the way they are and not as we’d like them to be and desire that they be different from the way they are.

The message of Monty’s appearance in my life was, perhaps, that what mendicancy really means is not so much destitution—though it probably does demand basic simplicity—or lack of security, but the willingness to accept life as it comes. There’s nothing in itself wrong with making plans for the future or keeping a savings account. But there probably is something damaging to the spiritual life in trying to make sure that every possible future is foreseen and every exigency accounted for. Such an attitude restricts the life and limits experience. Fear and desire must be overcome, because until they are one can never enjoy what is actual.

The cynicism that my training in psychiatry has taught me argues that Monty was schizophrenic, compensated enough to survive on his own, but living in a dreamworld. I wonder if his dreamworld wasn’t a better place than the collective dreamworld the rest of us live in.

Despite the madness that might have characterized Monty’s psychology, he was for me an “incarnation” of the Buddha. In my interpretation of my life, I can see how he had passed beyond the polarities and awakened from the dream of the world. I can understand how he presented me with a clue to the meaning of my own life-dream. The day Monty came to visit, he brought me a present. It was a small glass bottle, encrusted inside with sea sand and smelling faintly of spearmint. He’d found it on the beach. Perhaps it came from far away. I still have it, a souvenir of my wandering, my present from the Buddha.