The Great Dance by C.S. Lewis

Toby has a new book out: an updated, revised and expanded edition of his classic soft sci fi romance novel
SECRET MATTER -- with its quirky and mystical spin on what it means to be gay. Click on the title for info.
There's a funny coincidence/synchronicity about the release of this novel

Table of Contents Search Site Also on this website: Toby Johnson's books: 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, GETTING LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE PLAGUE: A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.     Articles and Excerpts: The Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate Shame on the American People  The cause of homosexuality What Jesus said about Gay Rights Varieties of Gay Spirituality "It's Always About You" The myth of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara You're Not A Wave Curious Bodies What Toby Johnson Believes The Joseph Campbell Connection,     "The Evolution of Gay Identity" "St. John of the Cross & the Dark Night of the Soul." Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.  Eckhart's Eye   Teenage Prostitution and the Nature of Evil   Adam and Steve Gay retirement and the "freelance monastery" Seeing with Different Eyes  The mystical experience   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 YourTiger Face How Gay Souls Get Reincarnated The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance Toby's friend and nicknamesake Toby Marotta. The Gay Spirituality Summit in May 2004 and the  "Statement of Spirituality"

C.S. Lewis was an influential voice in modern Christianity. He was a classical Oxford don who wrote pedantic studies of medieval literature. He also wrote the Narnia children's stories--for which, curiously, he may be best known. ("The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" has been made into a FX movie blockbuster for Christmas 2005.) Lewis wrote several fantasy, "mystical sci-fi," novels.  Perelandra is a parable about the nature of "original sin" and mystical consciousness; it tells of a British college professor who is whisked off by angelic-like beings to act as "God"'s spokesman when the Adam and Eve of Venus, "Perelandra" in their language, are being tempted by the devil--who appears in the form of an Earth scientist and technocrat. It is a beautiful tale of the conquest of goodness. Most interestingly, Lewis devises a mythic cosmology of light beings and guardians spirits; Earth's mythologies, he proposes, are erroneous attempts to grasp this cosmology. As we know from the play and movie, Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis was a "bachelor," living with his alcoholic brother most of his life, living as a sort of celibate cleric of academe. He certainly wasn't a modern gay man, but he was one of us, I think.  A deeply religious man in later life, he interpreted the Christianity of the Great Britain of the mid-20th century in which he lived into what he thought would be a living religion. He had some dismissive things to say about homosexual bonding in his book THE FOUR LOVES: "... all those hairy old toughs of centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one another and begging for last kisses when the legion was broken up...all pansies? If you can believe it you can believe anything.”   That's hardly a valid argument against homosexual activity in the ancient world. Indeed, those comments only go to show how stereotyped was Lewis's understanding of homosexuality throughout history and, even more importantly, how closeted--perhaps even from himself--he really was. At any rate, he lived long before gay liberation and before homosexuality was understood in a modern, enlightened psychological context. While I want to claim Jack Lewis, as as he was called, as "one of us" -- in the sense of being a visionary spurred on by aberrant sexuality and freedom from conventional gender and familial roles -- I doubt he was particularly sexually active in any meaningful way, either homosexually or heterosexually. Though it is true that his longest lifetime friend, Arthur Greeves, was homosexual. He wasn't ignorant of sexual diversity; and he apparently wasn't judgmental of homosexuality in his personal affairs. (Though a very public "Christian," C.S. Lewis was NOT an example of the current day "Family Values" Fundamentalist Christian.) His marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham was mostly a scam of the British immigration system and then later of that nation's socialized medicine. After World War I, he'd come home at age 18 and moved the 45 year-old Mrs. Maureen Moore and her 11 year-old daughter into his home, having made a pact with his army buddy Paddy Moore that he'd care for his friend's family in case Paddy died. Biographers assuming his heterosexuality hypothesize he was in love with Mrs. Moore the 30 years they lived together. The presumption of a repressed homosexuality might better explain that he was bound to the Moore family by his intense--and certainly never to be reciprocated--affection for his friend Paddy. Who knows? Until the current transformation of understanding about homosexuality, such details were routinely concealed and misrepresented. Jack Lewis was certainly a visionary.  In his mystical fiction, he spoke raptuously about a transcendent vision of the whole cosmos as a living being textured of light and energy, far beyond the naive personal God of popular Christianity. From him comes the sentence: "We live in an environment of mind as well as of space." Here is a wonderful excerpt from Perelandra which describes the mystical experience of seeing directly into "the Great Dance" of the multi-dimensional spacetimeconsciousness contiuum that is the true cosmos: "In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed. Thus each is equally at the centre and none are there by being equals, but some by giving place and some by receiving it, the small things by their smallness and the great by their greatness, and all the patterns linked and looped together by the unions of a kneeling with a sceptred love. Blessed be He!" "All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. In these seas there are islands where the hairs of the turf are so fine and so closely woven together that unless a man looked long at them he would see neither hairs nor weaving at all, but only the same and the flat. So with the Great Dance. Set your eyes on one movement and it will lead you through all patterns and it will seem to you the master movement. But the seeming will be true. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre. Blessed be He!" "Yet this seeming also is the end and final cause for which He spreads out Time so long and Heaven so deep; lest if we never met the dark, and the road that leads nowhither, and the question to which no answer is imaginable, we should have in our minds no likeness of the Abyss of the Father, into which if a creature drop down his thoughts for ever he shall hear no echo return to him. Blessed, blessed, blessed be He!" And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled a1l else and brought it into unity--only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could see also (but the word "seeing" is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells--peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilisations, arts, sciences, and the like--ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities. If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner and more delicate cords were beings that we call short-lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things as we also think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours from beyond our spectrum were the lines of the personal beings, yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals: some were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together as against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams: but afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. And by now the thing must have passed together out of the region of sight as we understand it. For he says that the whole solid figure of these enamoured and inter-inanimated circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped farther and farther behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of the sky, and a  simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness. He went up into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of stripping off encumbrances and awaking from trance, and coming to himself. With a gesture of relaxation he looked about him. . . . (C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, pp. 218-219. Ed. note: I've added a few paragraph breaks for readbility.) Ram Dass's story of the same vision, put very simply: "You're Not a Wave!" Joseph Campbell's cogent explanation of the nature of religion. A nice article about C.S. (Jack) Lewis's life by James Townsend

Toby Johnson, PhD is author of eight 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, three 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. In addition to the novels featured elsewhere in this web site, Johnson is author of IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD and THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET (Revised edition): AN APPRECIATION OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL.

Johnson's Lammy Award winning book GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness was published in 2000.

His newest book is GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe.