MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

Soulfully Gay, Part 1: Joe Perez and Ken Wilber in Dialogue

Now showing on Integral Naked: "Soulfully Gay. Part 1. Out of the Closet, Into an Integral Embrace."

The author of one of the most searing, courageous personal memoirs of our time shares how an Integral Approach helped him reconcile a life of fierce inner struggles with what it means to be a gay man in today’s culture, the difference between genuine spiritual experiences and psychotic episodes, and the thorny intersection of homosexuality and Christianity.

Who: Joe Perez is the author of Soulfully Gay: How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God, and the founder of the Gay Spirituality & Culture Weblog.

Summary: In the foreword to Soulfully Gay, Ken Wilber writes: "Joe Perez’s book is perhaps the most astonishing, brilliant, and courageous look at the interface between individual belief and cultural values that has been written in our time. By a homosexual, or a heterosexual, or any other sexual I am aware of." Ken wrote this foreword without even having met Joe—probably one of the strongest complements one writer can give to another—and Soulfully Gay is the second offering from our Integral Books imprint at Shambhala Publications.

Read the Full Summary and Listen to the Dialogue (10 minute free preview; full dialogue available with paid subscription).

Still and Know

"Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion you are sheep.  You are souls immortal, spirits free, blessed and eternal."  ~Vivekananda

One day, the devil and his friend were walking down the street.  Ahead of them, they saw a man bend down, pick something up off the ground and stuff it eagerly into his pocket.  "What was that?" asked the devil's friend. "Oh, that was a piece of the Truth," said the devil.  "Well, that's bad news for you, isn't it?" said the friend.  "Not at all," the devil said with a smirk. "I'm going to let him organize it."

On our spiritual journeys as Lesbian, Gay, Bi-affectionate and Transgender people, some of the most insidious illusions that arrest our progress are the trappings of organized religion.  For many of us that were expelled from the garden of our faith tradition because of our gender identity or sexual orientation, the struggle to return takes over our thinking about religion and spirituality.  But return to what?  Too often we are content to return to the rituals, the community or the drag of our faith tradition-overcoming those who thought they could hold us back or keep us out-but fail to engage our lives and souls in a transformational relationship with the Divine.  We claim the words, but not the power; we celebrate the customs, but avoid the practice; we bind ourselves to institutions, but drown out the Spirit; we sketch vast architectures, but remain blind to the Truth.

It's not that religious traditions are bad, quite the contrary.  Beautiful buildings, colorful fabrics, smoke, crackers, cadences and harmonies are all nice things to have, but if they do not facilitate the deepening of individuals' consciousnesses, if they do not simplify instead of complicate, transform instead of translate, if they do not, like language, point beyond themselves, if they do not lay bare our true selves, then they are all of them empty, valueless barriers to the evolutionary maturation of the human spirit toward God. 

The simple truth is - and you can stop reading after this is you want since the rest will just say this with more words - the simple truth is that salvation, enlightenment and inner peace can only be found by going inward, and never by rummaging through what's outside. 

"If your leaders tell you, 'the kingdom of God is in the sky,' then the birds will get there before you.  If they say that it is under the sea, the fish will enter and will precede you.  I say unto you that the kingdom of God is inside you and outside you and all around you. Whosoever knows oneself will find the kingdom.  And when you know yourselves, you will know that you are the children of the living God," says Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas. How do we come to know our true selves?  We become still, quiet and fully present.  We close our mouths, block off our senses, blunt our sharpness, untie our knots, soften our glares, and settle our dust. Only then can we know our primal identity.  Only then can we hear the still, small voice of Spirit.  Only then are we open to the action of Spirit.  Only then are we available for the great work of transformation.

There are many techniques that can support this transformation, from centering and contemplative prayer to yoga, Zen meditation and Vedanta.  The goals of a transformative spiritual practice are self-realization and partnership with the Divine. 

Of course, self-realization and partnering with the Divine mean exploring parts of ourselves and parts of God that we wish weren't there.  Only when we become fully conscious of the web of assumptions and beliefs that we have constructed about the world and about ourselves-a web in which we now are caught-are we forced to dismantle our illusions.  Then we learn to see what lies within us and what lies outside us as they really are; only then are we able to interact with the world as it is and not as we imagine it to be.  "Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease," cautions Lao-tzu in Tao Te Ching. "Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power."

Unfortunately, queer people are as skilled at avoiding this kind of conflict with our own minds' constructions as we are adept at confronting the discriminatory traditions and values of our society and many religions.  This conflict is so primal, so radical-to change not only the public translation of spiritual values but to transform our very understanding of reality-that part of us wants to escape it.  The loud, pushy voice of ego keeps our focus outside of ourselves-driving us to change things on the surface of the phenomenal world.  Any kind of fundamental questioning, any opportunity for deep, inner quiet, threatens to shatter the concepts of what the self is and how the universe operates upon which we base every thought and decision!  Many of us think, subconsciously or not, that we just don't want to know that much.

I've certainly seen this hesitance in myself; it took me years to pick up a Ken Wilber book because I knew I just couldn't handle having my worldview challenged that much.  The last time I confronted my Dad about the religious reasons for his disapproval of my marriage, he emotionally responded to my informed exegesis of scripture with, "I don't want to hear it.  I need to believe what I believe."  It's true of most of us. Our entire lives are constructed around certain assumptions about how things work and why.  We want our understanding of Spirit and our experience of the world to be static things that after you get them once, they never change.  Unfortunately, as time goes on and human beings learn more and more about the universe and human nature and how they operate, our personal understanding has to change or we become fossils of an outmoded worldview.  Our development becomes arrested: full stop.  Just because a way of being has become comfortable doesn't mean it's correct.

In fact, we usually become more and more uncomfortable as we become closer and closer to Spirit through meditation and prayer.  First, "We see that God is not a drug or an instantaneous bliss maker," explains Julia Mossbridge, gifted author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul's Work. "We discover that our lives are not the sole item on God's agenda. Partnering with God is not about developing an ethereal, airy-fairy relationship with some force of Love.  It is about developing an intimate, everyday, every-moment-of-every-day friendship in which you are with God all the time: while doing volunteer work, making a speech, singing in a choir, dancing at your wedding, getting in a fist-fight, eating the third plate of nachos, cursing at pedestrians.  All the time."

"It is a call to follow Jesus out of all the structures, security blankets, and even spiritual practices that serve as props. They are all left behind insofar as they are part of the false self system…The false self is an illusion," says prominent Christian contemplative, Father Thomas Keating in Open Mind, Open Heart. In short, when we become fully, deeply present-as we begin to recognize our true selves and look God in the eye-we get the rug pulled out from under us. 

It's not a bad thing, although we have a low tolerance for discomfort.  Getting shaken up is just evidence of our rising up.  If our feet stayed firmly planted on the rug of our conventional understanding, our feet would never leave the ground. Groundlessness is inherent in the process.  Just as there must be silence for Spirit to be audible, there has to be space in our thoughts and beliefs for Truth to manifest.  Groundlessness wipes away our preconceptions. Pema Chodron explains in The Places That Scare You that as we become used to this insecurity, "To the extent that we stop struggling against uncertainty and ambiguity, to that extent we dissolve our fear."

There is no fear in love.  When groundlessness cultivates our fearlessness, we encounter our own genuinely loving nature, and we become available for open-minded, whole-hearted interaction with the universe.  As gay Christian mystic Jim Marion puts it in Putting on the Mind of Christ, "All we need to do to be 'saved' is to consciously realize who we have been all along.  We need to realize our own divinity, own it, take up the responsibility of it, and live it." 

If Transgender, Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay women, men and young people do not awaken to our full responsibility, to our fulfillment, our empowerment, then our natural function as human beings in society will continue to be frustrated, obstructed and disjoint.  The possibility for our final emancipation, legitimation and liberation will wither if LGBT people do not unmask and become more present to others, in service to others, and bring the gentle qualities of Spirit to the details of living. 

These universal qualities of Spirit-love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, contentment, responsibility and harmony-will help us transform straight communities into just and sustainable environments that nurture whole, mindful and evolving individuals.  Our awakening of spiritual and emotional intelligence will be the thunder that cracks their slumber.  Our care and service will rain down and wash away the dark stains of hate and prejudice.  Our radical realization will be the Shirt of Flame that burns bushels and allows our inner lights to shine. 

Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us 'til we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity's sake?
~Christopher Fry, A Sleep of Prisoners

Immortality relevant to religion, not to Spirit

Religion not The Answer, says Andrew Sullivan On The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan writes:

Maybe religion is best understood not as The Answer to The Question, but as the only human response to the most pressing human fact - our own death. Oakeshott places religious life in the mode of practice, not in the mode of philosophy. I have struggled with this argument for a long time, but the older I get, the wiser it seems.

You and I will both die. To the question of what becomes of us then, science has a simple answer. We decompose and rot and eventually become dust. But the human mind, because it is human, resists that as the final answer to the question of our destiny. We find it very hard to think of ourselves as not being. That resistance is always there. There is no escaping it. I predict you will feel it at the hour of your death, if you have any time to contemplate it. This resistance to our own extinction is part of science and part of our genetic impulse to survive - but also why we feel ourselves connected to something eternal.

Is this sense of an after-life an illusion? We cannot know for sure. But death isn't an illusion. And when death is nearest, faith emerges most strongly. You can either see this as a reason to pity people of faith - they're too weak to look mortality in the face and deal with it. Or you can see this as part of the wisdom of people of faith: we know what we are, and we have reached a way of dealing with it as humans, full humans, not just arguments without minds and bodies. Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.

I agree that religion is not The Answer (to whatever question). But that all-embracing existence that goes by the name of Spirit, Brahman, Emptiness, or God--that is The Answer (to many questions, among them: Who am I? what is the nature of Life?) By failing to state this clearly and instead offering up faith as a reasonable belief in the survival of the human being outside of a body, Sullivan misses the point of The Answer entirely.

The materialistic denial of Spirit to which Sullivan responds is worthy of response, and Sullivan's impulse towards a reasoned, post-mythic understanding of faith is more correct than not. Sullivan doesn't err in his understanding of religion. But Sullivan doesn't go far enough in his thinking about God (not religion). Belief that religion is essentially about denial of death is probably correct, but faith in Spirit has nothing to do with any consequence or impact on human affairs of such belief. In plain English, the matter of the immortality of the soul matters to religion, but doesn't matter to Spirit. Spirit accepts and embraces all; Spirit is alive and existent, filled with the abundance of life, regardless of what you or I or Andrew might believe about the immortality of the soul.

Spirit is The Answer. Faith is a gift from Spirit to support human beings along the course of our development towards greater and fuller and wiser understandings of the nature of existence. Faith supports our feeble bodies and minds and souls as they grope from one less-than-perfect understanding of Life to another, sustaining us through the periods of darkness and nurturing us in periods of life. No answer to the question of religion is complete without acknowledging these truths.

Uni-tegrity (a devotion)

By Paul Purcell

I remember coming up with this word when exploring/dialoguing with others embracing universal spirituality. As we open our hearts and minds to the Universal dimensions of our intrinsic Oneness with divinity and all other beings, our hearts and minds are opened to a spaciousness where Love can arise and blossom, opening new doorways and opportunities for understanding, wisdom and practical living in community.

This call to realize the Oneness of all Life is for all conscious beings to consider as we work to honor and allow for integrated living and mutual respect for all members of society. This integrity of Being pervades the essence of Life Itself...and embraces all universally. It transcends all culture, race, sexual orientation and any and every form of sectarianism that might divide or spoil the essential priveleges of Life for all.

Let us honor Uni-tegrity (the aspiration or condition wherein all parts of a whole are maintained for the well-being of all; a state of integrated unity). Let us uphold the unity at the Heart of all Being(all beings) when in purity they behold the harmony of Life which alone sustains true peace.

To the peace, love and harmony of all beings we dedicate this meditation.

Gay Buddhists: on a distinctive spiritual path?

By Mark S. Ritzenhein

Many gay people feel alienated from their heritage faith because of the institutionalized homophobia which they find themselves faced with once they realize that they are gay. Thus, when they first approach Buddhism in a more committed manner, they initially and foremost want to know if they are walking through a revolving door to yet another situation where their wish to find fulfillment of their spiritual needs is poisoned by the same homophobic attitudes.

This fear may also rest in part upon unresolved matters of internal self-acceptance, brought about by a lifetime of negativity imposed by others. Barely-healed psychological wounds can be easily re-opened by finding the same cold water in one's hoped-for new harbor of refuge. Refuge is what prospective as well as practicing Buddhists are offered: "I go for Refuge in the Buddha; I go for refuge in the Dharma; I go for refuge in the Sangha."

New at Zaadz: gay and queer pods to join

Watch for more on this site in the weeks ahead on Zaadz, the groundbreaking new social networking tool for the spiritual set. Still in Beta, this venture by CEO and Philosopher Brian Johnson (in partnership with Integral Institute among others) is aiming to change the ways that conscious folks meet each other, socialize online, find business and cultural connections, and ultimately change the world.

Andrew Sullivan, conservative religionists, and development

"From moderate religion comes pragmatic politics," writes Andrew Sullivan in "When Not Seeing Is Believing," an excerpt in Time from his forthcoming book The Conservative Soul. The heart of Sullivan's message--urging conservative religionists (Sullivan calls them "fundamentalists," obviously not wanting to taint the word "conservative" with their ilk) to moderate their religion by embracing a humbler variety of faith--might just hit its mark.

The first problem: humility (as in lack of confidence that your worldview isn't a myth) is only one of several key issues for those he is trying to reach. A second problem (I will suggest): humility (in its formulation as an acknowledgment of the limits of reason) is precisely the opposite of the message religious conservatives most need to hear. Sullivan sometimes conflates these senses of humility, and consequently sometimes urges doubt when confidence is better prescribed. However this article is, I believe, on the money in identifying and articulating the key issues in spiritual development for those of a more moderate faith--those folks more like Sullivan than Jerry Falwell or Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Will God destroy America over gay rights? The mythic-literal view, a liberal response, and an integral take

Paradoxy, the anonymous Christian blogger from Eugene, Oregon, recently identified a neglected theological issue in the gay debates. He observes that many conservative Christians based their opposition to gay rights on "the belief that God will destroy any society that becomes even moderately tolerant of homosexuality."

Beyond yin and yang: the role of gayness in human nature

By Joe Perez

Types refer to the persistent deep universal structures of existence. As I've argued in Soulfully Gay, the four prime types of existence are the masculine principle, the feminine principle, Eros (or heterophilia), and Agape (homophilia). In an evolutionary perspective, love flows in two directions. Love flows from creation to Source (the direction of heterophilia), and from Source to creation (the direction of homophilia). Gayness is not merely a concern of homosexuals; it is a universal attribute of human existence on the deepest or highest levels of reality.

What do the symbols mean?

Recent articles on Gay Spirituality & Culture are marked with symbols to indicate the author's (or the subject of the post's) general perspective on things. For example, a post providing a first-person look at spirituality is coming from the first-person, subjective angle (Upper-Left quadrant). Or a post on discrimination against gays in the military may be marked with a symbol denoting that it's concern is with the objective social and political order (Lower-Right Quadrant).