Meditation

The way to connect with the greater reality is through interior meditation. For meditation is about experiencing and understanding the God within.
Meditation practice, as taught by the religions of the East and the contemplative saints of the West and popularized by the New Age as part of the transformation of religion, is a means of changing ourselves and expanding our consciousness. Meditation goes to the heart of the matter.

Perhaps religious traditions are needed to transmit meditation techniques--though the church buildings scattered across the landscape sometimes look like the source of more harm than good, and in most of those churches people aren't learning how to meditate. But meditation and religious practice are not mutually exclusive. By taking up these practices, we follow in the footsteps--and resonate with the vibes--of generations of gay men and lesbians before us who entered contemplative and monastic life and learned to practice interior prayer.

There's a Zen notion that if you want to be enlightened and to succeed at life, you must be able to do at least one thing right. You can start with something simple, like sitting. If you can't manage to sit right, the Zen masters say, how can you expect to do anything else right?

It's not so simple though, because simply sitting means not doing anything else. This means you are not thinking. 'Cause if you are thinking--or remembering, fretting, anticipating, or planning--then that's what you're doing, not sitting. So the physical discipline is really a metaphor for a mental discipline.

How to Meditate

To meditate, sit comfortably in an erect, stable posture, preferably, but not necessarily, with your legs folded under you in the lotus or half-lotus posture and buttocks raised slightly with a pillow so that your spine is straight and elongated. You can close your eyes (Hindu style) or keep them open in soft focus on a spot an arm's distance in front of you (Buddhist style). Keeping your eyes open deters falling asleep. Rest your hands on your knees or cup them in your lap. Place the tip of your tongue lightly against the back of your teeth. Breathe regularly. Attend to your breathing and to the stability of your body. And hold the pose for 20 minutes.

The amount of time you commit is up to you. 20 minutes is about the time it takes for the brain to fatigue and shift brain wave states, something akin to getting your "second wind" in athletics. However long you do it, you should decide the length in advance and stick to it. Set a realistic length and don't quit before the time is up. What you're feeling and thinking should have nothing to do with how long you maintain the practice. The success of the practice comes from doing it, not from your assessment of how well you think you're doing. That is, it has nothing to do with your ego. You can't do it wrong. So long as you sit for the time you predetermine, you're doing it right. You shouldn't daydream, fret about work, or plan your day's schedule, but if you do, then notice that and go back to just sitting. (Actually a lot of creative work and planning gets accomplished just in watching the stuff bubble up into awareness.) If you need to scratch an itch, blow your nose, take a drink of water, or shift because your legs have fallen asleep, do so. Then smoothly return to the pose. The effort to maintain your relaxed but erect posture and to stick to your time limit will keep reminding you you're meditating. And that's what meditation is.

Here's a photo of Toby costumed in his
old Servite habit, sitting before his altar.
In the background is a statue of Kwan Yin.

While you're sitting, time passes, you breathe, and you're aware. Focusing on the breath is the simplest technique for calming what's called "the monkey mind"--the tendency of the human mind to keep thinking and jumping from subject to subject. As you focus on your breath or simply on the passage of time, you'll find that monkey mind fills your consciousness with ideas, thoughts, opinions, and considerations. Just let them go and return to your focus of attention. In fact, by observing these fluctuations in consciousness with equanimity and letting them go, you accomplish the major work of meditation practice.

Transcendental Meditation, the movement that with the help of the Beatles popularized meditation in the 1960s, teaches the technique of mantra meditation: recollecting the sound of a word given you by your teacher. T.M. says that the thoughts, memories, and associations that arise during meditation represent unfinished karma and unresolved business. Letting them come into consciousness without reacting to them discharges the karmic or emotional bond. Noticing them and then returning attention to the mantra gradually washes them away in the sound of the mantra.

This image also captures the healing power of psychotherapy. In the psychoanalytic technique of free association, the patient on the couch brings emotionally charged or repressed material into consciousness and discharges it by talking about it in a state of induced relaxation to his or her disinterested, non-reactive, and non-judgmental analyst.

Other techniques for dealing with the monkey mind include gazing at an icon, holy object, or candle flame; chanting a sacred word or phrase; intentionally relaxing the body, alternating left and right, step by step, from feet to head; focusing awareness on the seven chakras (power centers in the mind/body); remembering a particularly joyful or meaningful experience (a high enlightened moment or even a state of transcendent sexual arousal); or simply reminding yourself "Be here now," that is, reminding yourself you're sitting and not doing anything else but sitting.

Indianologist and gay mystic Andrew Harvey describes a wide range of meditation techniques in The Direct Path: Creating a Journey to the Divine Through the World's Mystical Traditions.

Psychologist and former priest, Daniel Helminiak presents a wonderful discussion of meditation in the book Meditation Without Myth: What I Wish They'd Taught Me in Church about Prayer, Meditation, and the Quest for Peace.

Toby's altar with Tibetan bell and vajra.
The vajra is estimated to be 350+ years old.
Toby's personal myth is that it was "his" in
a previous incarnation. Notice how worn down
the metal is; that's from being held in the hands
of generations of meditators (and bodhisattvas).

Most of the time our awareness tends to stay focused outside us. We live in our eyes and see the contents of our consciousness displayed as the outside world. When we sit in meditation we turn off the usual demands of the senses and allow our consciousness to rise above the particulars that drive our lives. By turning inward, we start to see subtle aspects of our lives and our selves that are lost in the bright light of the outside world. The stars are still above us during the day, but the brightness of the sun makes them invisible. We don't see who we really are because most of the time we're blinded by our minds churning away.

A simple technique to redirect this churning is to use, like a mantra, the question: "Who am I?" Such questions naturally arise as you sit. When you wonder "Who is meditating?" or "Who watches the thoughts come and go?," you discover "you" are not who you thought you were.

The brain is always involved in a process of identifying, sorting, evaluating, and filing current sense experience by associating it with events in the past and anticipating events in the future. This processing is the content of our lives. It is the activity of our egos. Your perspective on experience determines how you think of yourself. It's what "you" are. But there's another you that observes the processing. Because the ego is usually obsessed with the process rather than with present experience, you often don't even know who you are.
When it's not processed, experience is free of problems, suffering, fear, and desire. It's just what is, here and now. Meditation is training in letting go of the obsession with the processing, thus letting go of past and future. Meditation teaches you to be aware of the present moment without the intervention of the mind by attending to the silence between thoughts. The silence is the moment of now.

A simple way to notice that silence and to drop the processing is to ask yourself: "What is my next thought going to be?" The you that waits for the answer is not your mind. Your mind is the processing function that produces the thought. But it's not the watcher.

To extend this exercise one step further, ask yourself: "What totally new thought am I going to have?" As the next thought comes up, observe it and see whether it flowed from what you'd been thinking previously. If it does, drop it; it isn't a new thought. Then wait for the next. When a truly new thought comes up, notice it and let it go, and watch to see whether the next thought is related to it. This practice keeps you mindful of the great silence from which thoughts emerge without letting you cling to any particular thought.

The "usual you" is the thoughts. Consciousness forgets itself every time it gets caught up in the flow of thoughts, ideas, experiences, and desires that you think of as yourself. When you allow thoughts to come and go, you can become aware of the space between the thoughts--the silence, consciousness itself. This emptiness between thoughts is the emptiness of space and the field of infinite potentiality. Being aware of the emptiness is being one with God. It is God--the One Mind--that is conscious in you.

Through meditation you begin to experience yourself as something deeper than the aggregate of your day-to-day sensory experience. You begin to discover the difference between experiencer and experience, between the dreamer and the dream, or--in W.B. Yeats's famous expression--between the dancer and the dance. Or, conversely, you discover there is no difference: There is no experiencer, only experience; no dreamer, only dream; no dancer, only dance. That is, there is no you separate from your experience, separate from the universe, or separate from God. The you that seems separate--your ego--is just the processing in your mind. It's not you. You are the universe--God--looking at yourself from the perspective of your history and placement in time and space.

The Physical Body, Vital Body, and Mental Body

Another set of meditation techniques involve becoming mindful of the space of your body and of the various layers or "bodies" that surround and comprise your consciousness. Buddhist psychology calls these "sheathes."
In meditation, when you deliberately narrow your focus and concentrate on simply sitting and breathing, you can feel the different layers of your own being. Most fundamental, of course, is your physical body, made up of matter which is, in turn, composed of biochemicals, molecules and elemental particles. Atomic physics has discovered that these elemental particles are, in fact, mostly empty space--not things at all but energy fields that whirl across the surface of multi-dimensional space-time. From the perspective of the atoms that constitute our physical bodies, we are vast beings, huger than galaxies.

The physical body is inert matter, like a rock or a pile of soil. One day this body will die and return to dust. Even so, right now, it is your body and it is clearly something more than material elements. It's alive. A complex array of biochemical reactions enlivens the physical body, including the digestion of food into fuel and the processing of that fuel with oxygen into energy. The aggregate of these processes is called the breath body. It's what you focus on in meditation practice; it's the "being alive" itself.

The breath body is porous and interconnected with other beings. In every breath you inhale particles that have been part of other beings' bodies and respirations. In every inhalation there are molecules that have been breathed by all the people who've ever lived. Indeed, in every breath you take are oxygen atoms that Jesus exhaled preaching the Beatitudes and Hitler rallying his troops to war. Because we are living beings, we are constantly exchanging the matter we are made of.

The exchange of biochemicals within this living matter directs the flow of vital energy. This is the hormonal body. It is also affected by biochemicals from the outside environment, like pheromones, the smells and biochemical emissions from other people that are inhaled by the breath body. Your nervous system organizes and orients the activity of the body. The sensations and brain activity that ride on the life energy of the body constitute the neuronal body. This is what makes you sentient, aware of what's going on.
The breath body, hormonal/pheromonal body and neuronal bodies are referred to collectively as the vital body. The vital body enlivens the physical body and gives rise to mind and spirit. The mental body is your awareness, the "stuff" going on inside your head. Not only are you receiving sensory input from your neurons, you are also making sense of it, cognizing it. Spirit or soul is the part of you that responds to experience and makes decisions, assessments, and judgments. In human beings, sentience, mentation, cognition, and understanding produce yet another layer of experience.

In this context, religion refers to the activities of the physical, vital, and mental bodies; sacraments, rituals, and beliefs operate on these levels. One step up, spirituality refers to the meaning behind the sacraments, rituals and beliefs. Thus spirituality refers to the process by which human beings understand individual experience and the relationship between individuals and the cosmos. Spirituality refers to the operation of the radiant body.

The Radiant Body

Not only are you aware, you are aware that you're aware. You can observe yourself. This is consciousness, the part of you that grasps your understanding. It's the observer that registers sensations and assembles a universe of meaning. It's what "you" are. But it's also more than just you. This observing consciousness is the true mystery that inspires spirituality today. This is what our myths of God are about. This is what the practice of meditation is about. This is the meaning of those curious Oriental statues of gods with multiple heads, one upon another: consciousness observing consciousness observing consciousness. By stilling sensory and mental activity, consciousness becomes aware of itself.

There is yet another layer or body that surrounds us. This is the part of us that gives off vibes. Modern radio and TV devices that resonate with invisible waves in the electromagnetic spectrum offer a metaphor for the "waves" or "vibes" that are radiated by sentience and vitality. Just as the flow of electricity through a microphone or camera can be modulated to produce waves that can be transmitted into the environment and subsequently picked up by radio and TV receivers, so the flow of electric charge and neurotransmitters in our bodies can be thought to generate waves that can be picked up by other people. We generate them and we receive them. We receive them from the people around us and from the countless people who've lived before us. We may even pick them up from people who'll live after us, since these vibrations may transcend the sequence of time as we know it. Metaphorizing them as waves offers a scientific way of modeling such phenomena as telepathy, clairvoyance, prophecy, and past lives.

This sounds a little magical (and, in a way, it is). It's also very basic and very familiar: Happy people make the people around them happy. And the reverse is also true: Angry and unhappy people make the people around them angry and unhappy.

This outermost layer is comprised of mentation, awareness, understanding and intention. It can also be called the light body or the radiant body.

Human beings are only just beginning to understand how these mechanisms operate. We are influenced by our own intentions and by the intentions of all people as they interact with our interior process of world creation. Our karma--the causes and effects that result in observable patterns in our lives--comprises the resonances we pick up from all the lives around us and ahead of us. It is at this level that all the self-fulfilling prophecies and intentions, conscious and unconscious, of all people actually bring the world of experience into existence.

Sex as Meditation

Meditation allows us to perceive experience in a larger context, by freeing us from the particulars. Sacred masturbation and Tantric intercourse are forms of meditation that employs the powers of sex to focus the mind and to transcend the particulars.

There are important parallels between meditation and sex--and, of course, important differences. Not all sex should be meditative. Sex with another person, especially a new potential lover, is almost entirely about the particulars. It's all about the senses, the experience of infatuation, and romantic love. But sexual arousal, either alone or with a regular partner, can be much more interior-focused. It can be about achieving states of transcendent consciousness. The replaying of karmic events and important memories can act like the techniques for discharging unfinished business. In masturbation--or perhaps in anonymous play at a sex club--that question "Who am I?" sometimes naturally arises. Sexual arousal can be an invitation to be mindful of consciousness--and to offer the greater consciousness pleasure and joy in creation.

While sex doesn't have to be meditation or prayer, it can still be more than most of us make it. Sex--and especially masturbation ("soloving")--can be experienced as a practice of consciousness of God. Instead of thinking of sex as wicked and ungodly--as the religions often enjoin their flocks--we can experience sexual arousal as a journey of the soul into sacred mythic space where the deep forces of life and embodiment and autonomic, hormonal instinct for pleasure take over and allow ego to dim. In this underworld--in the Greek mythological sense of a subconscious, transpersonal substrate--sexual arousal is truly worship. Indeed in gay personal ad jargon, body worship is a style of sex. It is adoration, reverence, and love for the evolutionary forces that have created the world we live in and shaped us into human beings--incarnate consciousness.

It is easier to be aware of the presence of God during sex than at almost any other time (except, of course, during meditation and ritual when that's the point). Most things in our daily experience--driving a car or baking a cake--require attention to the particulars of what we‘re doing. Sex isn't about particulars. When we understand sexual arousal as participation in the joy of life celebrating incarnation, then it is always an experience of God, of the élan vital loving life.

Mirror-gazing

Gazing into a mirror--especially deeply into one's own eyes--is a common meditation practice around the world. It dramatizes that question "Who am I?" by placing the questioner right in front of the embodiment of the question. Because the physical body that's reflected in the mirror is sexual, there's a sexual dimension to the question. This practice transforms self-image and expands consciousness.

Observe your own body in a full-length mirror, determining what you like and don't like about your looks. Honor your own body with the steady, consuming gaze you'd bestow on the body of any other attractive man standing naked before you.

As you gaze at your body--perhaps bringing yourself to sexual arousal--understand that what you're seeing is what other people see (though you never see yourself the way others do). This is how other people form their ideas of who you are and what you're like. This is how they find you desirable. This is also how you manifest yourself to yourself. This is how the spark of consciousness that is you imagines, visualizes, and projects itself into three-dimensional reality.

Then let your perspective rise as you settle your gaze on your eyes. This reflection is the universe. Inside the body you observe, in its brain, behind its eyes, is the entirety of the world you experience. And you're outside observing it.

See that you're not your body. You're the observer who experiences what's going on in that body, and who thinks in terms of the experiences that body has had. But you're something more. Your ego and self-image--all that stuff you think is so important--is just a reflection in the mirror of a consciousness that far transcends who "you" think you are.

Tibetan Buddhists say the practice of mirror-gazing allows one to see one's past incarnations. As you look at yourself in the mirror and peer deep into your eyes, let other faces rise to awareness. Imagine that what you're visualizing is the karmic patterns that intersect to shape your particular perspective. "You" are all the people who lived before you and whose karmic resonances create the context of your life. All the other beings are putting out vibes, just as you're putting out vibes. That's what the universe is. Allow that exalted vision to reside in and warm your chest and belly. Allow yourself to be sexually aroused by your vision and to see how the vast interplay of vibes comes into being in you as your flesh. Raise your perspective above time and realize it's all happening simultaneously. Be aware of your radiant body. In your mind's eye, see the radiance surrounding you.

If you bring yourself to orgasm, allow yourself to see it's "God" you're experiencing as pleasure. Feel the orgasm in your radiant body and let your pleasure radiate good, loving vibes.

The Birth of God

A couple of decades ago, radical theologians revived and popularized Frederick Nietzsche's intentionally provocative declaration "God is dead" as a way of arguing that human beings are maturing psychologically beyond literal belief in the old myths. Even then the issue wasn't so much the death of God as the birth of God.

Beginning with the Big Bang, energy has flowed into being, forcing space to expand and creating the context in which the universe exists. Space, carrying activity across its surface, evolves from chaotic energy into hydrogen atoms, then helium atoms, then on up the ladder of being to stars and planets. From there, the process spawns living, reproducing molecules, then plants, sentient beings, intelligent life, consciousness, and finally God.

God is the perfection of love, harmony, and beauty--the fullness of being, consciousness, and bliss. As we saw Teilhard hypothesized, once God evolves, it--or, mythically, "He"--pops out of time, becomes eternal, and coexists with all the stages of the process by which it developed through the universe. If the universe successfully evolves into God, then the being that is conscious in each of us self-aware sentient beings is God. If this is the case, "He" sees that everything is perfect in its place in the vast evolutionary pattern. There was never any such thing as evil.

If God fails to evolve--perhaps, because we human beings render the Earth lifeless--then God, or at least this planet's part of the cosmic process, cannot pop out of time and observe that everything is good. Then everything isn't good; the process doesn't work out. The suffering and tragedy that generations of human beings and our predecessors have endured will have been for nothing. "Evil" will have won.

We cannot tell where we are in the vast process. We cannot tell whether the being observing the universe through us is God existing co-eternally with the universe or just our individual egos suffering on their way to eventual oblivion.

Faith that God exists is faith that the universe will work as it should, that evolution will create God. We must have faith that it will work because that faith creates the self-fulfilling prophecy that brings it about. To believe in God, then, is to believe that evil isn't real and that it will ultimately be redeemed. To believe in evil is to put out the vibes--to prophesy--that God will not succeed. To overcome the belief in evil, you have to overcome the polarities. You have to see beyond dualism.

Our gay outsider's perspective and our ability to live beyond polarities makes us part of the self-fulfilling prophecy that God does exist. That faith allows us to abandon judgment and concern for laying blame and to see that everything is perfect.

When God pops out of time, "He" sees all time in a single eternal moment. Similarly, when we see our lives from the present moment, we pop out of time and discover that the events of our lives comprise a single eternal moment, we discern how it all fits together. There is nothing to regret, nothing to resent. Thus we can forgive the universe, forgive all the individual assaults against us, and forgive the past. We can let it all go.

We can even forgive those televangelists--even the ugly-acting minister from Oklahoma. For we can see that it's not that they're wicked, but just that their vision of God is too small. And they play an important role. By demonstrating how polarization and wrong-making corrupt religion, they inadvertently assist in its maturation into higher spirituality.

By letting go of judgment and the belief in evil, we participate in God's creation of Himself. Indeed our experience within time is precisely God's experience outside of time--everything is perfect because together we managed to create God out of the cosmos.

Great Just the Way It Is

Thomas Merton ended his book, The Sign of Jonas, with words that echo that idea put into the mouth of God: "What was vile has become precious. What is now precious was never vile. I have always known the vile as precious: for what is vile I know not at all. . . . I have forgiven the universe without end, because I have never known sin."

And wise old man Joseph Campbell used to say: "People ask me, ‘What about all the evil and suffering in the world?' And I say, ‘It's great just the way it is.‘" He'd stutter a little on the "g" and then shake his head as if in bewilderment that anybody could imagine any other response. "What else can you say? This is the way it is."

The purpose of meditation is to quiet the mind so that you can step outside your life for a moment and see what's going on, let go of the past, and transform the way you think about yourself and the universe. So you can forgive the universe. So you can say: "It's great just the way it is." Transforming your thoughts and intentions transforms the universe.
Even so, when we experience God's satisfaction with creation, we also experience God's impatience. All of nature groans with anticipation and restlessness as we human beings struggle to grow up and realize that everything is perfect just the way it is. That realization would end all the competition, hostility, blaming, and warfare that spoil the innate perfection. Nature is understandably impatient for human beings--straight men--to just stop all the dualistic bullshit.

Avalokiteshvara sitting on a tiger throne.
This statue, by Kip Dollar, is
part of Toby's meditation altar.
The story of Avalokiteshvara proclaims
"The Way of Joyful Participation in the Sorrows of the World"

As homosexuals who've been victims of that bullshit, we intuitively feel that Divine Impatience. Indeed, our impatience with "man's inhumanity to man" drives the gay cultural and political movement. That Divine Impatience is a spiritual manifestation of the physical expansion of the cosmos and the evolution of consciousness. Our efforts to achieve liberation and change the status quo--and our impatience with the social and, especially, religious forces that resist these efforts--is our participation in the creation of God.

This is a vision beyond duality and polarization. Though it points toward issues far beyond sexual liberation and the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn, we can see that, precisely because it calls for rising above duality, it's an insight that gay people can readily grasp and that we dramatize with our lives. That's why it's something our homosexuality tells us about the nature of God and the universe. And it's something that tells us how to transform our lives. In religious mythological terms, this is called "saving the world."