Afterword, Preface, and Book Recommendation



Contact Us


Table of Contents


Search Site


home  Home


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 Comodo Seal

Secure site at

https://tobyjohnson.com



rainbow line

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 - The Myth of the Great Secret III

FINDING YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III


Gay Spirituality

GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness


Gay Perspective


GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe


Secret Matter


SECRET MATTER, a sci-fi novel with wonderful "aliens" with an Afterword by Mark Jordan


Getting Life

GETTING LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE:  A Fantastical Gay Romance set in two different time periods


The Fourth Quill

THE FOURTH QUILL, a novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil




Two Spirits
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams



charmed lives
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into Gold: GaySpirit in Storytelling, a collaboration with Steve Berman and some 30 other writers


Myth of the Great Secret


THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell



In Search of God


IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: A Mystical Journey



Unpublished manuscripts


About ordering


Books on Gay Spirituality:

White Crane Gay Spirituality Series


rainbow line

  Toby has done five podcasts with Harry Faddis for The Quest of Life

rainbow line

  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"


rainbow line


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


rainbow line


Enlightenment


"It's Always About You"



The myth of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara


Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara


You're Not A Wave



Joseph 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


rainbow line

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


rainbow line


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


rainbow line


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



rainbow line


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


rainbow line


The Hero's Journey


The Hero's Journey as archetype -- GSV 2016


The  Gay Hero Journey (shortened)


You're On Your Own


Superheroes


rainbow line


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?


rainbow line


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


rainbow line

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


rainbow line


The Secret of the Clear Light


Understanding the Clear Light


Mobius Strip


Finding Your Tiger Face


How Gay Souls Get Reincarnated


rainbow line


Joseph Campbell, the Hero's Journey, and the modern Gay Hero-- a five part presentation on YouTube


rainbow line


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


rainbow line


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"


rainbow line

Book Reviews



Be Done on Earth by Howard E. Cook


Pay Me What I'm Worth by Souldancer


The Way Out by Christopher L  Nutter


The Gay Disciple by John Henson


Art That Dares by Kittredge Cherry


Coming Out, Coming Home by Kennth A. Burr


Extinguishing the Light by B. Alan Bourgeois


Over Coffee: A conversation For Gay Partnership & Conservative Faith by D.a. Thompson


Dark Knowledge by Kenneth Low


Janet Planet by Eleanor Lerman


The Kairos by Paul E. Hartman


Wrestling with Jesus by D.K.Maylor


Kali Rising by Rudolph Ballentine


The Missing Myth by Gilles Herrada


The Secret of the Second Coming by Howard E. Cook


The Scar Letters: A Novel by Richard Alther


The Future is Queer by Labonte & Schimel


Missing Mary by Charlene Spretnak


Gay Spirituality 101 by Joe Perez


Cut Hand: A Nineteeth Century Love Story on the American Frontier by Mark Wildyr


Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman


Nights at Rizzoli by Felice Picano


The Key to Unlocking the Closet Door by Chelsea Griffo


The Door of the Heart by Diana Finfrock Farrar


Occam’s Razor by David Duncan


Grace and Demion by Mel White


Gay Men and The New Way Forward by Raymond L. Rigoglioso


The Dimensional Stucture of Consciousness by Samuel Avery


The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love by Perry Brass


Love Together: Longtime Male Couples on Healthy Intimacy and Communication by Tim Clausen


War Between Materialism and Spiritual by Jean-Michel Bitar


The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal


Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal


The Invitation to Love by Darren Pierre


Brain, Consciousness, and God: A Lonerganian Integration by Daniel A Helminiak


A Walk with Four Spiritual Guides by Andrew Harvey


Can Christians Be Saved? by Stephenson & Rhodes


The Lost Secrets of the Ancient Mystery Schools by Stephenson & Rhodes


Keys to Spiritual Being: Energy Meditation and Synchronization Exercises by Adrian Ravarour


In Walt We Trust by John Marsh


Solomon's Tantric Song by Rollan McCleary


A Special Illumination by Rollan McCleary


Aelred's Sin by Lawrence Scott


Fruit Basket by Payam Ghassemlou


Internal Landscapes by John Ollom


Princes & Pumpkins by David Hatfield Sparks


Yes by Brad Boney


Blood of the Goddess by William Schindler


Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom by Jeffrey Kripal


Evolving Dharma by Jay Michaelson


Jesus in Salome's Lot by Brett W. Gillette


The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson


The Vatican Murders by Lucien Gregoire


"Sex Camp" by Brian McNaught


Out & About with Brewer & Berg
Episode One: Searching for a New Mythology



The Soul Beneath the Skin by David Nimmons


Out on Holy Ground by Donald Boisvert


The Revotutionary Psychology of Gay-Centeredness by Mitch Walker


Out There by Perry Brass


The Crucifixion of Hyacinth by Geoff Puterbaugh


The Silence of Sodom by Mark D Jordan


It's Never About What It's About by Krandall Kraus and Paul Borja


ReCreations, edited by Catherine Lake


Gospel: A Novel by WIlton Barnhard


Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey by Fenton Johnson


Dating the Greek Gods
by Brad Gooch


Telling Truths in Church by Mark D. Jordan


The Substance of God by Perry Brass


The Tomcat Chronicles by Jack Nichols


10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do to Improve Their Lives by Joe Kort


Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same Sex Love by Will Roscoe


The Third Appearance by Walter Starcke


The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann


Surviving and Thriving After a Life-Threatening Diagnosis by Bev Hall


Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods by Ronald Long

An Interview with Ron Long


Queering Creole Spiritual Traditons by Randy Conner & David Sparks

An Interview with Randy Conner


Pain, Sex and Time by Gerald Heard


Sex and the Sacred by Daniel Helminiak


Blessing Same-Sex Unions by Mark Jordan


Rising Up by Joe Perez


Soulfully Gay by Joe Perez


That Undeniable Longing by Mark Tedesco


Vintage: A Ghost Story by Steve Berman


Wisdom for the Soul by Larry Chang


MM4M a DVD by Bruce Grether


Double Cross by David Ranan


The Transcended Christian by Daniel Helminiak


Jesus in Love by Kittredge Cherry


In the Eye of the Storm by Gene Robinson


The Starry Dynamo by Sven Davisson


Life in Paradox by Fr Paul Murray


Spirituality for Our Global Community by Daniel Helminiak


Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society by Robert A. Minor


Coming Out: Irish Gay Experiences by Glen O'Brien


Queering Christ by Robert Goss


Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage


The Flesh of the Word by Richard A Rosato


Catland by David Garrett Izzo


Tantra for Gay Men by Bruce Anderson


Yoga & the Path of the Urban Mystic by Darren Main


Simple Grace by Malcolm Boyd


Seventy Times Seven by Salvatore Sapienza


What Does "Queer" Mean Anyway? by Chris Bartlett


Critique of Patriarchal Reasoning by Arthur Evans


Gift of the Soul by Dale Colclasure & David Jensen


Legend of the Raibow Warriors by Steven McFadden


The Liar's Prayer by Gregory Flood


Lovely are the Messengers by Daniel Plasman


The Human Core of Spirituality by Daniel Helminiak


3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke


Religion and the Human Sciences by Daniel Helminiak


Only the Good Parts by Daniel Curzon


Four Short Reviews of Books with a Message


Life Interrupted by Michael Parise


Confessions of a Murdered Pope by Lucien Gregoire


The Stargazer's Embassy by Eleanor Lerman


Conscious Living, Conscious Aging by Ron Pevny


Footprints Through the Desert by Joshua Kauffman


True Religion by J.L. Weinberg


The Mediterranean Universe by John Newmeyer


Everything is God by Jay Michaelson


Reflection by Dennis Merritt


Everywhere Home by Fenton Johnson


Hard Lesson by James Gaston


God vs Gay? by Jay Michaelson


The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path by Jay Michaelson


Roxie & Fred by Richard Alther


Not the Son He Expected by Tim Clausen


The 9 Realities of Stardust by Bruce P. Grether


The Afterlife Revolution by Anne & Whitley Strieber


AIDS Shaman: Queer Spirit Awakening by Shokti Lovestar


Facing the Truth of Your Life by Merle Yost


The Super Natural by Whitley Strieber & Jeffrey J Kripal


Secret Body by Jeffrey J Kripal


In Hitler's House by Jonathan Lane


Walking on Glory by Edward Swift


The Paradox of Porn by Don Shewey


Is Heaven for Real? by Lucien Gregoire


Enigma by Lloyd Meeker


Scissors, Paper, Rock by Fenton Johnson




Toby Johnson's Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:




Gay
Perspective cover
Gay Perspective

Things Our [Homo]sexuality
Tells Us about the
Nature of God and
the Universe


Gay Perspective audiobook
Gay Perspective is available as an audiobook narrated by Matthew Whitfield. Click here







Gay
Spirituality cover
Gay Spirituality

Gay Identity and 
the Transformation of
Human Consciousness



gay-spirituality-audiobook
Gay Spirituality   is now available as an audiobook, beautifully narrated by John Sipple. Click here








charmed lives
Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling

edited by
Toby Johnson
& Steve Berman







secret matter
Secret Matter

Lammy Award Winner for Gay Science Fiction

updated







Getting Life
Getting Life in Perspective

A Fantastical Romance





Getting
Life in Perspective audiobook
Getting Life in Perspective is available as an audiobook narrated by Alex Beckham. Click here 






The Fourth Quill

The Fourth Quill

originally published as PLAGUE




johnson-the-fourth-quill-audiobook
The Fourth Quill is available as an audiobook, narrated by Jimmie Moreland. Click here






Two
Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo

with Walter L. Williams




Two Spirits
audiobookTwo Spirits  is available as an audiobook  narrated by Arthur Raymond. Click here






Finding Your Own True Myth - The Myth of the Great Secret III
Finding Your Own True Myth:
What I Learned from Joseph Campbell

The Myth of the Great Secret III








In
Search of God in the Sexual Underworld
In Search of God  in the Sexual Underworld










The Myth of the Great Secret II

The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell.

This was the second edition of this book.




rainbow line



Toby Johnson's titles are available in other ebook formats from Smashwords.

What Are You Looking for in a Gay Science Fiction Novel?

from Secret Matter



Afterword
Mark D. Jordan


Picking up this new edition of Secret Matter, I recall how many thanks we owe to science fiction. For keeping our imaginations queer, I mean.

As a boy, I found in sci-fi novels (SF, s-f, fantasy...) a whole gallery of queer lives. I wouldn’t have known to call them that, at least not at first, but I studied the portrayals as intently as if they held my secret. They did. During bleached Texas summers, sprawled on a thin rug in the coolest room of my grandmother’s house, I read my way onto exotic worlds where people were allowed to be... unusual. Their lives had more colors and shapes than got mentioned around her formica dinette. Under wispy red suns or moons of ice, beside murmuring ruins of alien cities, men and women got to become what they could never have been earthside. Or in south Dallas. They unriddled strange religions. They endured demonic visions that transfigured them into gods. And often they ended by preferring life out there, beyond terrestrial certainties.

Then came the allure of sci-fi authors. I still remember the strange thrill I felt, over the thrum of the window unit, when I read that "Andre Norton" was the pen name of a woman. I knew from French class that "Andre" was "Andrew." How could a woman be an Andrew? And why had some of her novels been published originally under the cross-sex name "Andrew North"? Somewhat later, I was stopped at the local branch library when I tried to check out Brian Aldiss's Starship. The librarian looked at me sourly and explained that the book, now firmly in her hands, "talks about things that aren't for boys." My amused mother returned the next day to sign a form giving me permission to check out whatever I fancied. But the embarrassing episode taught me that some sci-fi writers, like dirty words and pictures of naked bodies, were restricted to adults. So I sought them out.

. . .

Secret Matter stands in a line of speculative novels that try to picture healthy queer lives beyond heterosexist institutions. Like lesbian-feminist dreams of utopia, or the myths told around Radical Faerie campfires, this novel proposes queer consciousness as an alternative to familiar prejudices and conventions. They tell us, "Sex can only be between one man and one woman bound in a monogamous marriage ordered to child-rearing and social stability." No. "Jealousy is an important safeguard on sexual purity." Not really. "Love needs lies." Imagine it otherwise.

In Toby's novel, the function of literary imagination is presented as a play within the play: people give meaning to their encounter with the visitors by appealing to sci-fi stories like Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. The stories--Toby's too--help them to resist the bondage of familiar lies. In other places and times, the imagination of radically better and truer possibilities for human living has been a sacred task. Priests construe patterns for other lives in sacred texts. Prophets call them down. Oracles dream them in trance. Bards, seized by another sort of divine madness, sing them. I discovered Secret Matter while I was looking for queer religion, and I was not disappointed. It not only imagines queer lives, it proposes that they be religious through a combination of text, prophecy, trance, and song.

(to continue, please buy the book . . .



Preface to the Updated Edition

Secret Matter was first published in 1990. It was set in "the near future." Fifteen years later, the little soft sci-fi romance has become a genre classic, but the near future it was set in has come and gone. And so for this rerelease by Lethe Press a little updating was needed.

With a few changes to the plot and some tweaking of politics and high-tech devices, I think I've made the story accessible to contemporary readers. I've introduced a new explanation of the Visitors' reality (based on--and extrapolated and fictionalized from--the mind-transforming concepts in the remarkable book The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness by Samuel Avery). And I've honed the message and, I think, made the revised and updated Secret Matter a better novel.

 As a frontispiece and in memoriam for the first edition, I'd used  a calligraphy exercise done back in the late '70s by my first lover Guy Mannheimer (1943-1989). It was a quote from the novelist E.M. Forster, friend of proto gay spiritual philosopher Edward Carpenter and best known in gay culture for the novel Maurice. Guy's sampler used the provocative word "queer" in the most charming way. It seemed perfectly to capture the innocent message of Secret Matter and the meeting with the Visitors.

a text version of the quote appears below



queer victory


I've used the wonderful words "queer victory" in many things I've written. I loved how the adjective "queer,"with its meaning of strange yet also slightly alluring, implied homosexuality without appealing to the word as the mean-spirited epithet. This quotation exemplifies just the right use of this contentious word of self-identification. So now for this updated edition of Secret Matter, I went searching for its source.

E.M. Forster's  words come from an essay "What I Believe" in a book called Two Cheers For Democracy. But they turn out to be slightly different from the words Guy used in his calligraphy sampler.

Forster actually wrote: "They represent the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos." Not as neat, and not as gay-specific. It now seems to be about the contrariness of human nature, not about the "aristocracy of the sensitive, considerate and plucky." Too bad!

Did Guy Mannheimer change the wording? Was it to give special meaning? Or was it simply to fit space constraints? And then where did he get the quote from? Guy had been in attendance at the First Radical Faerie Gathering in Arizona in 1979 only shortly before. Did he learn the quote there? Maybe from Harry Hay, titular Father of Gay Liberation? Did Harry change the words? (Hay's first exposure to what--in great part thanks to him--would later become "gay consciousness" was a book about the spiritual nature of "homogenic love" by Forster's friend and influence Edward Carpenter which Harry discovered in a public library when he was 11.) He'd have certainly preferred the gay-specific implication.

That I've used these words in so many essays about our queer gay consciousness--and then discovered the words were different from those I knew--has made me question whether the past might change around behind us. What an audacious idea!
Time is a quirky thing.

Well, "the near future" has certainly changed from what we thought it was going to be in 1990. The queer lives of lesbians and gay men have been vilified and devalued--because of AIDS, because of the priest pedophile scandal and the fight over same-sex marriage, because of the cultural coup of Fundamentalism worldwide--even while we achieved amazing, but maybe self-defeating, visibility in TV, movies, and the news media. Could the negative spin on what it means to be gay and queer have changed the Forster quote out from behind me?

That's certainly a topic for a science fiction novel! That's not what Secret Matter is about, but this novel is about a different way to understand the nature of gay consciousness.

Maybe what determines what we experience in life is our focus and expectation and intention, more than "hard reality." If not able to change the past, how gayness gets spun and how we think about ourselves certainly changes the future. So maybe holding in mind Secret Matter's innocent and hopeful little myth of what gay consciousness is really about is one of the ways we can change how time is changing around us.

It would be a wonderful near future if we can actually achieve that queer victory over cruelty and chaos.


Here's that quote from E.M. Forster as it appeared on Guy Mannheimer's calligraphy sampler.
An aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky are to be found in all nations and classes, and through all the ages. And there is a secret undertanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one queer victory of our race over cruelty and chaos.
 E.M. Forster





The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness:The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness:
A Physical Basis for Immaterialism

By Samuel Avery

Compari Press, pb, $10.00  108 pages

Available from amazon
The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness:



Reviewed by Toby Johnson




    This is not a gay book, but it is such a treat--and a challenge--that I want to share it. I think it would be of very special interest to "spiritually oriented" gay men.

    The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness is a relatively succinct presentation of the proposition that instead of consciousness as an artifact in the material universe, rather the opposite is so: the material universe is a creation of consciousness.

    Beginning with the "experience" of a single-celled microorganism in the primal oceans, Avery shows how sensory experience generates dimensional representations of patterns as consciousness sorts its experience of itself. Those single-celled organisms, for instance, have only one experience and one sort of choice. The sense is taste; when a new chemical enters the cell it will be "experienced" as a good taste, i.e., food, or a bad taste, a chemical the cell can't use (or perhaps that kills it). The choice is whether to let new molecules through the cell wall. The cell executes this by controlling the charge along the wall, keeping the molecules that comprise the wall tight packed together or relaxing and opening up space for outside molecules to come in. That charge, mediated by potassium and sodium ions, is the basis of consciousness. When a new molecule comes inside, it is tasted. The sensation happens inside the cell wall.

    The physical senses correlate with the dimensions of the experienced world. That first dimension is taste; it's opening or closing the cell wall. So a series of patterns of open and closed--which in modern math is the binary pattern of 1s and 0s which can be represented along a line of one dimension.

    The second sense is smell. The cell learns to sniff around looking for good tastes by picking up chemical clues to its environment outside the cell wall. Not only does the cell experience being open or closed, it experiences being here or there in relation to the other molecules around it. It moves around seeking good tastes by sensing good smells. And thereby generates the second dimension.

    Five senses would generate five dimensions. Sound is the third dimension, light the fourth, and touch the fifth.

    Avery observes that our normal model of the material universe actually is of five dimensions: three spatial and two temporal. The second temporal dimension is a novel concept in this book. The clue to the second dimension of time is the squared unit of time in the formula for acceleration: A = d/t2. We say, for instance, that the acceleration of a falling body is 32 ft per second per second.

    The second dimension of time is mass. It is experienced as inertia. The reason you have to push hard on a massive object to get it to move is because it is moving at a slower rate of time than you. What seems like resistance to motion is drag in relation to the second dimension of time.

    What a neat idea! What a challenge to conceive.

    The whole book is a series of arguments, thought experiments, and discussions of how to see that materiality arises from consciousness rather than the other way around. It never gets "spiritual"--in the sense of talking about meaning or of the content of religious myths (like God). Though the argument does hypothesize an "observational realm" by which consciousness is conscious of itself within its dimensional projection of space.

    Along the way, Avery offers explanations for what matter and light are that solves the various paradoxes of quantum mechanics. He explains mass in a way that physics has never been able to, leaving it simply as one of the undefined elements of space, like distance or time. He even explains the speed of light.

You should read this book!  (For more about the nature of reality, look at Michael Talbot and the Holographic Universe and "Experiencing experiencing experiencing.")

rainbow line

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.

 back to top


BACK to Toby's home page


valid html

Visitors
Essential SSL