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GSV Timeline Fall 2004 Toby Johnson Keynote It's Always About You: Joseph Campbell and How to Read a Myth Toby Johnson Gay Spirit Visions Fall Conference, 2004 Well, so I am going to explain what "Inner Fabulosity" means!!! Three ideas come up immediately for me. One's a loose association. One's a political slogan. The other's a "secret meaning." First, the loose association. "Oh Fab, I'm glad, they put real borax in you." I tried to figure out how to make that into a mantra, but no matter what, it doesn't work very well. Borax just isn't a good example of something gay! Mark Weaver When Kip and I were running the gay bookstore in Austin, there was a local anti-gay Christian preacher named Mark Weaver who was offended by the very thought of homosexuality. He was famous for carrying a sign with him wherever he went that said "Gay is not OK" He had a little following, mostly of guilty homosexuals it looked like, who'd carry these signs along with him and they'd picket gay events (and AIDS education seminars -- for which he got sued and driven out of Austin). They used to bring their signs out to Hippie Hollow, the gay nude beach at Lake Travis, about 15 miles outside town. There was a saying that "there is no distance too far for Mark Weaver to go to be offended." We sold a T-shirt at Liberty Books based on Mark Weaver's signs. In black block letters, like his signs, it read: "Gay is Not OK," then in bright pink script below that, it continued "It's fabulous!" So "fabulous" is on the other side of just OK. It's being wonderful, incredible, marvelous, and spectacular. And your "inner fabulosity" is your own interior self-concept of yourself as marvelous and full of wonder . even when other people like the Republicans don't get it. Etymological Meaning Well, the etymological meaning of "fabulous" is "told in or based on a fable," i.e. a story with a moral or a meaning. "Fable" is another word for "myth." So "fabulosity" must mean being of mythic proportions and having a "secret meaning." Song: It's in All of Us. I learned this form Rob Eichberg, David Goodstein's partner in The Advocate Experience. It's about finding the "secret meaning." It's in everyone of us to be wise Find our hearts, open up both our eyes We can all have everything without ever knowing why It's in every one of us by and by. Show & Tell: Pass around The Magic Eye books of "holographic" images. Explain briefly how to view the "3-D" image by changing your focus: hold the book up to your nose and focus on it, then pull it away--without changing your focus--till it jumps into 3-D. That's example of how you can "transform consciousness" or "see the world in a different way" without anything in the content of the world actually changing. Teilhard de Chardin, the French mystical palentologist, spoke about seeing --through the eye of the mind -- a "fire" burning up behind everything living in the world, seeing how it's all alive, evolving, changing, growing, seeing how this life is the life of "God" and so this world is "the divine milieu." "Throughout my life, through my life, the world has little by little caught fire in my sight until, aflame all around me, it has become almost completely luminous from within . Such has been my experience in contact with the earth--the diaphany of the divine at the heart of the universe on fire." "Diaphany" is a combination of epiphany, meaning manifestation or apparition, and "diaphanous," meaning gauzy and almost transparent Seeing the divine milieu is a little like seeing the 3-D images of The Magic Eye. What changes isn't the content of the outside world, but rather the way you're looking at it. That's what we sang about in the song -- "find your heart, open up both your eyes" -- "both eyes" meaning the eyes of the body, but also the eye of the spirit, the "third eye." As those who were in attendance know, part of the GSV Fall 2004 Conference was dealing with Hurricane Ivan. Inthe closing Heart Circle GSV artist Mike Goettee told us all about his experience of capturing a big pink cloud which he'd understood as a symbol for our good gay energy. What a great example of finding the diaphany in God in nature. Here's Mike's image -- it's a clickable link to his website http://maxglitz.home.mindspring.com/ WHAT I LEARNED FROM JOSEPH CAMPBELL I want to share with you the main lesson I learned from Joseph Campbell. It's really about seeing with that spiritual eye. You know, I only half-jokingly call myself "Joe Campbell's apostle to the gay community." What I learned from him transformed my understanding of religion -- just like The Magic Eye. And it offered a way of understanding religion that makes sense for gay people. It explains why we need -- and should have -- particular, "special," spiritual practices and beliefs for us. I want to first tell you very briefly how I came to be a disciple of Campbell's. And then I want to explain two religious terms that are generally misunderstood: "myth" and "faith." Then I want to explain Campbell's idea of "how to read a myth" and then apply that to a couple of important mythic themes: "God the Creator," "redemption/salvation," "Christ," and "afterlife." That will get us to the real secret of myth, the message behind it all. And that can be summed up in a simple sentence: "The point of all spirituality is to experience heaven now." MEETING JOSEPH CAMPBELL I first got exposed to Campbell when I was assigned The Hero With A Thousand Faces, his first and main book, as summer reading in advance for a course on Jungian interpretation of myth and symbol in literature. I was a student at a Catholic college--Saint Louis University in St. Louis--and only a year out of my first round of seminary. I was, well, in the language of the day, "blown away" by Campbell's explanation of myth which was all presented by recounting the great mythic stories of the world's religious traditions. I was particularly affected by the story of the bisexual/androgynous Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara who "saved the world" by taking on himself the incarnation of all sentient beings, so that he is the One Being who is reincarnating in all of us. A marvelous story, with lots of layers of gay meaning that I will talk about in one of the small group workshops this afternoon. In 1970, I was a graduate student in comparative religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, a gay hippie having moved to "Mecca" and pursuing one of the great themes of hippiehood and the counterculture: Oriental myths/meditation and the real meaning of religion. It was Campbell who'd gotten me interested in comparative religion, especially Buddhism, and Alan Watts who been a previous president of the school who'd gotten me to C.I.I.S. (then called California Institute of Asian Studies). One day I noticed a poster on the bulletin board for a seminar Campbell was giving at a conference center in Ukiah, about 100 miles north of the city, called The Mann Ranch Seminars. I discovered I'd just missed a seminar there by Alan Watts, but was in time to sign up for Campbell's weekend. I was a poor hippie flower child at the time and so applied for a "work scholarship." I was asked to come up a day early to help clean the rambling old ranch house where the seminar would be held. I hitchhiked up Hwy 101 to Ukiah. Well, Campbell also arrived early. And so I had the opportunity to meet him in a more personal and casual manner. I was delighted with his friendliness. "Oh, call me Joe," was the first thing I remember him saying, in reply to one of us addressing him as "Professor Campbell." That started a correspondence with him that lasted some ten years; I got invited to join the Mann Ranch Seminar staff and to be part of the team that would host Campbell on the West Coast till his retirement and move to Hawaii in 1980. In a way, Campbell lived like a gay man. He and his wife, dancer/choreographer Jean Erdman, did not have children, preferring "spirit children" to real children in the form of their books and performances. And Joe taught at Sarah Lawrence, a girls school, So he was always pleased to have young men interested in his ideas. And there were several of us who got to be known as "Joe's bright eyed boys" the sons he hadn't had, the "disciples" who'd transmit his ideas beyond him. By the way, an interesting factoid about Campbell is that most of his life he and Jean lived in a two and a half room apartment in a high-rise building on Waverly St and Avenue of the Americas, overlooking Sheridan Square and the intersection of Christopher and Gay Streets. I've imagined he must have been watching out the window the nights of the Stonewall Riots. CAMPBELL AND MYTH Central to Campbell's ideas was a shift in the meaning of the word "myth." So often in casual speech we use this word to mean a falsehood or an error.
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