A Course in Miracles

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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Unpublished manuscripts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.

TECHNIQUES OF THE WORLD SAVIORS

 A Course in Miracles

from The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell (Celestial Arts, 1990) by Toby Johnson

This article has 4 parts. This is the last part

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  

One of many current attempts to articulate this wisdom is the amazingly popular A Course in Miracles. The Course is a three-volume set of books that was "dictated" to an anonymous, and previously agnostic, psychology professor at Columbia University. Her name was Helen Schucman. The "speaker" in the books, most of the time, seems to be Jesus. The message, however, is only occasionally like orthodox Christianity.

I came by the Course in a curious (miraculous?) way. I had been in New York City with my friend and one-time collaborator Toby Marotta, talking with people in the publishing business. We had been given the name of an editor at a Christian Fundamentalist press. Since one of the manuscripts we were marketing was Toby's Harvard dissertation analyzing the history of the homosexual rights movement in America, we didn't think he would be of much assistance to us, but as a courtesy to the person who had given us his name we called him. Yes, he said, he'd like to meet us, if only socially. We made a date to meet in Central Park.

He turned out to be a delightful man, not at all what I had been expecting from a Christian Fundamentalist. He talked with us superficially about New York, about the publishing business, about our lives. I talked a little about Buddhism and comparative religion. He said something that caught me off guard. He made an offhand remark about "those of us who have made the vow." What had he meant by that? "Bodhisattva?" I said quizzically and cryptically. If he didn't pick up on it, I'd know he had not meant what I'd thought.

"Well, yes," he said. I hadn't expected to meet a bodhisattva that day or to have him recognize that I too was drawn to that spirituality. Later, over drinks in one of the fancy hotels that face the park on Fifty-ninth Street, he asked me if I had heard of A Course in Miracles. I hadn't.

One day a month or two later, back home in San Francisco, I was feeling a bit glum, uncertain of the direction my life was moving. All day I'd been singing under my breath a song by The Moody Blues. Though I really couldn't understand all the lyrics, the refrain seemed to catch what I was feeling: "I'm looking for someone to change my life. I'm looking for a miracle in my life."

I came home in the afternoon to find a package waiting for me. Inside it were three books titled A Course in Miracles. My bodhisattva friend had gotten them to me right on time. (That was Richard Baltzell; here's link to a page about him.)

The next day I began studying the Course, which the book--assuming a pattern of reincarnations--tells "is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean you can establish the curriculum. It only means that you can elect what you want to take at a given time."

The Course consists, in part, of practicing a 365-day series of short meditations. The starting meditations center on the experience of emptiness: "Nothing I see means anything"; "I have given everything all the meaning that it has for me." A mythology is gradually introduced which says that God, of whom each of us is a "Son" like Jesus, wills happiness and health for each of us. But because we "see only the past," living in memories that are fraught with anxiety and dissatisfaction, we tend to create around ourselves an illusion full of disease and ignorance. The Course promises to teach us to work "miracles," which are natural consequences of grace in our lives. "When they do not occur something has gone wrong." And the Course warns that "miracles are habits, and should be involuntary. They should not be under conscious control. Consciously selected miracles can be misguided."

The secret to working miracles is forgiveness. And forgiveness consists in seeing that disease and suffering are illusions that only seem to exist because of memories of the past. The method of the Course is to forgive all that seems to have wronged us, to rise above fear and desire, and to see that life is indeed giving us all that we need, since clearly, God wills our good fortune and what we have is exactly what we need and everything is working out just the way it should.

That same wisdom, expressed without the Christian mythology, appears in a concise and wise little book that grew out of the psychedelic Age-of-Aquarius, Summer-of-Love mysticism of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury culture. This is Thaddeus Golas's The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment. The metaphysics is simple and as vague as the emptiness it alludes to would require: "We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other." We cannot know what kind of beings we are; we can only know that we are in relationship with one another.

The spirituality is simple and phrased in short mantra-like epigrams: "No resistance." "Love it the way it is." "Love as much as you can from wherever you are." "I wouldn't deny this experience to the One Mind." The spiritual method of The Lazy Man's Guide is to "raise the level of one's vibrations" by loving and affirming life, remembering the epigrams as aids to lowering resistance and generating love.

Perhaps the most effective spiritual method of all is to believe in life. We cannot fight it. We can only pay attention, resisting as little as possible, investing it with meaning and significance that allow us to say yes to our experience. For in that experience and nowhere else can we find a God that is capable of satisfying and supporting us.

The verification almost every belief system claims for its doctrine is that "it works." For believers in every system--especially as new converts--begin to experience miracles, find meaning and significance in their lives, discover joy and delight. Coincidences abound; the universe seems full of the sweet touch of God. For it is, after all, not the content of belief that matters, but the fact of belief. True believers find that life supports them because their faith, and their contact with the deep stratum of consciousness from which faith arises, activates and vivifies them.

We don't need miracles--though we may get them--nor do we need intentionally to manipulate our destiny. We need simply to accept our lives attentively, to be aware of being alive in a benign universe. Then our lives can be seen to be full of miracles.

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