"When the spirit moves into writing, shaping its direction, that is a moment of pure mystery. It is a visitation of the sacred that I cannot call forth at will."
Writing and publishing my first book was a long drawn out test of faith. It was a process that taught me patience. Knowing the path we want to take does not mean that it will not be an arduous one, but the difficulty of the journey does not mean potential failure. During this process I not only re-affirmed my commitment to spiritual practice; devotion to this path enhanced my commitment to writing and my ability to write.
Not much is written about the connection between writing and spirituality. Even though new age writing describes circumstances where writers receive ideas mysteriously, rarely does anyone talk about the sustained link between spiritual practice and writing. Writers are reluctant to speak about this subject because literary elitism engenders a fear that if we describe "unseen forces" shaping our vision and the structure of our writing we will not be taken seriously. Women writers have been more willing than their male counterparts to speak of visions that serve as a catalyst for the imaginative process. When describing the process of writing The Color Purple, Alice Walker spoke of images appearing in her dreams, of voices, of spirits calling to her.
Oftentimes men have evoked the muse, whether real or fictive, to talk about those forces beyond the realm of human reason that drive the imagination. Since the male muse was so often imagined as an obscure object of desire, usually a beautiful young female being (but sometimes male), this has always been an acceptable way to talk about "spirits" and the creative imagination. Few men attempt to link their muses to spiritual practice. Indeed, the Beat poets in their modern rebellious anti-establishment way were among the first modern writers to mesh unabashedly the spiritual and transgressive creative process.
It was this unlikely pairing that drew me to the Beat poets. In 1959 Kerouac would tell the world that the heartbeat of his transgressive spirit was triggered in the traditional church. Sharing his perspective on the origin of the Beat perspective he declared: "Yet it was as a Catholic, it was not at the insistence of these 'niks' and certainly not with their approval either, that I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood (one of them ), Ste. Jeanne d'Arc in Lowell, Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with `Beat' anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church...the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific..." Kerouac's transition to Buddhism was engendered by grief from lost love. To cope with his suffering he began reading The Life of Buddha by Ashvagosa.
My vision of the writing I would do was informed by a longing to give expression to an inner emotional universe that was mostly self-referential. I began my writing career believing I would be a poet, bohemian, avant-garde, art-for-arts-sake writer. All the writing classes I took focused on poetry. My engagement with Buddhism began with poets and poetry. Yet it was the struggle to find my voice as a poet which led me to feminist thinking and feminist politics. Even though I continued to write poetry, as I prayed and meditated about my writing future I felt called to write a book about black women and feminism. It is difficult to explain the nature of this calling—what it means to be called by that unseen force I call divine grace.
During this period of struggle I heard voices calling to me in my dreams, telling me that it was important for me to speak about the experience of black women. My maternal grandmother and great grandmothers were figures in my dream life urging me to answer this call, telling me that they would help direct my path. Despite my initial resistance I would sit at my desk and find myself, seemingly without will, writing just what the voices were telling me to write about.
Imagine my distress when I answered the call of these voices and committed myself to writing work, only to find that writing mocked, that no one wanted to publish it. I was confused. I had naively thought that answering the call of unseen forces would somehow work like magic to ensure the success of my writing. I confronted the reality that we may discover the rightness of our vision and vocation before others do. I wish I could confess that my faith was so great I did not despair, but indeed, I did.
It was with a heavy heart that I took this first manuscript of mine and stored it away in a closet. I took it out again when I accepted more fully that completing the book was my path to fulfillment. Whether or not it would ever be published was another question all together.
The serendipitous way that my first book found its publishers seemed to confirm the presence of unseen spirits. I had mentioned to a new friend I met when she was waiting on tables at a museum cafe that I was working on this book. When we spent time together I shared what it was about. It was she who called to say that she had seen a small ad in a newspaper calling for manuscripts about race and feminism. That ad was placed by South End Press, who would publish this book of mine and many more.
I follow the path Kerouac helped forge as I work to mesh intense Christian upbringing with Buddhist thought. In the late sixties he continued to work through the convergences between theses two spiritual paths, juxtaposing Christian with Buddhist writing. Starting with the assumption that "words come from the holy ghost" Kerouac reminds readers that "Mozart and Blake often felt they weren't pushing their own pens, 'twas the 'Muse' singing and pushing."
When I sit down to write I do not imagine my pen will be guided by anything other than the strength of my will, imagination and intellect. When the spirit moves into that writing, shaping its direction, that is for me a moment of pure mystery. It is a visitation of the sacred that I cannot call forth at will. I can only hope that it will come. This hope is grounded in my own experience that those moments when I feel my imagination and the words I put together to be touched by the presence of divine spirit, my writing is transformed.
At such moments I feel that I am touched by grace. I am moved both by the writing and by the presence of spirits which make that writing the very best it can be. When I complete this work I feel intense jubilation and ecstasy. Not all the writing I do is divinely inspired. The difference is tangible. Many writers who have felt guided by unseen spirits testify that the writing poured forth with ease. Much of the time we labor over our words.
More than anything my writing is informed by spiritual practice in relation to the subjects I write about. After my first book I have never written another without first spending significant time in prayer and meditation about the content and the direction of work. Since I always have many ideas I count on sacred visualization to guide me to the timeliness of the work. My reliance on spiritual guidance is connected to the desire I have for the writing to touch the hearts of readers-to speak to their innermost being.
Much of my work is written to create a context of healing. Words have the power to heal wounds. Out of the mysterious place where words first come to be "made flesh"—that place which is all holiness—I am given the grace to work with words in a spirit of right livelihood which calls me to peace, reflection, and connectedness with communities of readers whom I may never know or see. Writing becomes then a way to embrace the mysterious, to walk with spirits, and an entry into the realm of the sacred.
bell hooks is Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College in Kentucky. She is the author of Wounds of Passion.
Voices and Visions, bell hooks, Shambhala Sun, May 1998.
"If you ask me what we do with people who come in the door, the people who live with chronic hopelessness and fear, I'll tell you that we try to live comfortably in their darkness. And that's the hardest thing of all."
On January 8, 1945, my birthday, I asked the priest at La Iglesia del Perpetuo Socorro in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, if I could become an altar boy. I had just turned six. I was turned down outright. Too young, I was told: I had to wait until I was eight. The tall, pale, lanky Irish priest with the kind eyes was firm. But I would not take no for an answer and continued to ask even though I continued to be turned down. One day, after one of my entreaties, Father Keegan turned to me and said: "En tu inocencia esta la sabiduria"-in your innocence lies your wisdom. I had worn down Father Keegan and he agreed to make an exception and let me serve. Once I was to assist Father Keegan at mass by myself. The moment came when I had to move the huge prayer book from the Epistle side to the Gospel side behind and around the priest. I went up the three steps to the right side of the altar, picked up the book, descended the steps, turned at the middle of the altar, genuflected and attempted the climb of the three steps to bring the book up to the Gospel side. The waiting priest, who had his back to the congregation, turned upon hearing their laughter to see that the book was so heavy that little Paco could not make it up the three steps. Every persistent attempt at stepping up brought me to the edge of being toppled back by the weight of the big book. The priest rescued me by taking the weight off the book as he lifted it slightly, allowing me to complete my mission with recovered dignity. Six months later, my very close friend, Juan, was killed by Father Keegan as the priest was backing up his car and did not see the small child who was waiting for him. Juan was trying to talk to Father about he, too, becoming an altar boy. From then on, whenever I saw Father Keegan, I was impressed by the fact that his face and neck had become beet red, a permanent mark of his deep grief. All he could do was hug me and cry-no words. Soon after the accident he told me I could not continue my altar boy training. I felt wounded; my heart was broken. But something had happened in the brief days I was allowed to serve. I had learned everything I ever needed to know about being a priest, even though I would forget lots of it and would have to relearn it. I believe it was in that period long ago that the seeds for my life's work were germinated. I have now been living and working in The Bronx, New York for fifty-one years. What I have relearned in these many years working in the second poorest Congressional District of the United States (second only to one in Mississippi) is that in order to serve one must have the openness and innocence of a child. That compassion and love for oneself and others is essential, and that being always mindful of the moment you are breathing is the way to heal yourself and others. My mission is to work with people whom I call "wounded healers" and their organizations in the South Bronx, to build sustainable neighborhoods with a sound, spiritual underpinning. In light of the many years I've spent as a businessman, I teach that doing well should not be seen as evil or an obstacle to spiritual transformation. My bedrock foundation is meditation and prayer. The challenge is that people are very cynical, very scared, very hungry, and very wounded. Most of all, they are feeling very tired and uncared for. A friend once told me that wounded humans do not care what you know; they want to know that you care, and only then they might be interested in what you know. If you ask me what we really do with people who come in the door, the people who live with chronic hopelessness and fear, I'll tell you that we try to live comfortably in their darkness. And that's the hardest thing of all. Somebody comes into the employment program. "Tell me what you can do," I ask her. "I can't do nothing. I got no skills, no diploma, no job. I'm on welfare, my mother's been on welfare, don't fuck with me!" I enter her darkness. The hardest thing is being with people who are hurting, with no agenda of their own, no answers. You need to stay with them in this place and help them find the light within this darkness. So I continue my interview. "Tell me, do your kids get fed?" "Course they get fed." "Who feeds them?" "I feed them." "How do you do that?" "I go to the fucking refrigerator. I look inside, I make a list, I go to the store." "You know what you're telling me? You're telling me that you do inventory, you do planning, and then you get the job done. People go to college and get a BA to do what you did." As Father Keegan had done with me, I intervene only enough to lighten the weight so they can move to the next objective with a whole change of perspective. A wounded mother begins to mend. The Latino Pastoral Action Center (LPAC) is a living experiment testing these premises on a daily basis. LPAC was founded by Reverend Raymond Rivera in 1992, and it is where I established my first Peacemaker Village soon after my ordination in July, 1997. Raymond has struggled with the dichotomy between the sacred and the secular and the personal and the structural, while responding both to those who want to save the soul and those who want to change the system. He founded LPAC because he found it difficult to integrate these two perspectives within the church and the social activist communities. Since I have also found myself in similar struggles, the LPAC Peacemaker Village is his and my heartfelt attempt to respond to this challenge. The work that our village carries out is to bring peace to these wounded healers and their organizations. We also teach alternatives to violence-particularly to parish youth, but also to gang members. We accomplish this by teaching people to sit and just be quiet; we dialogue and even teach Aikido, not necessarily as a defense mechanism but rather as a state of mind. At our weekend workshops for young people, we even use some of Thich Nhat Hanh's mindfulness practices. That's when I can tell them about myself, that I have brailled my way through life. That feeling my way through long periods of darkness, I've learned that the darkness and the light come from the same source, and that for too many of us, getting through the darkness is our only road to getting to the light. For many of the youngsters we work with, La Aldea de Paz del Sur del Bronx (The South Bronx Peace Village at LPAC) is the gateway out of darkness and the back to dreaming, imagining and creating hope under circumstances that appear hopeless to them. Our approach is to meet them where they are.
Meeting in the Darkness, Francisco Lugovina, Shambhala Sun, May 1998.
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Samuel Bercholz: Your work is nominally about creativity, but it seems to be as much about tools for spiritual growth. What is the connection?
Julia Cameron: People often say to me, "Your book is a Buddhist book," or "This is a book about mysticism, really, or this is a Sufi book." That is probably because creativity is a spiritual path, and at the core of the various spiritual paths are the same lessons. For instance, I recently read Thich Nhat Hanh for the first time, and I found myself thinking that he sees the world with an artist's eye. I think that's because he is very heart-centered. Even though we think of creativity as an intellectual pursuit, in my experience creativity is a heart-centered pursuit. We actually create from the heart. I think it's interesting that the word "heart" has the word "art" embedded in it. It also has the word "ear" embedded in it.
So both Buddhism and creativity involve the art of listening to the heart. That's where the creative impulse arises from. That's why I cannot distinguish between creativity and spirituality. When you're practicing creativity you become a grounded individual, and that communicates the universal.
I've been a writer for more than thirty years, and the issues that arise in the creative practice are the same kinds of issues that arise in a spiritual practice. You get to look at your insecurity. You get to look at your inquisitiveness. You get to look at your fantasy that a satisfied desire will lead to satisfaction. As near as I can tell, this is what happens with a grounded meditation technique: you go through all of the shenanigans of the restless nature of the mind and what you are left with is, just be. Out of being, things are made. So creativity is the act of being.
Samuel Bercholz: Your creativity exercises could also be viewed as a form of therapy.
Julia Cameron: Again, I don't make those definitions. My books are taught by myriad therapists. What they have found is that if they can heal their clients' creativity, neurosis disappears. This is why they all love this approach, and why therapists facilitate artists' circles all the time.
My feeling is that an enormous amount of what we think of as neurosis is actually blocked creativity. When people begin living in their creativity, the "neurosis" disappears. I am not certain that we are a neurotic culture; I think we are more a stifled culture, needing to express the self, and you can spell that either small "s" or large "S."
My feeling is that we are exhausted with talk therapy. Because The Artist's Way is experiential, it brings people back into their bodies and their hearts. Therapists are using it to bring people into an embodied practice, and that's why everyone's calming down.
It's one of the world's best kept secrets that art makes people sane and happy. If you think creativity makes you crazy and broke, let's not do it. On the other hand, if it makes you expanded and connected and joyous and vibrant and beautiful, it may make us a little nervous, but maybe we should try it.
The only time I get in trouble is if I'm not making something myself. If I'm too busy teaching to do my own art I get very sad. It's a matter of balance for me. I must keep my artist first and my teacher second. I must be making things and then sharing out of that process. If I am only teaching what I have already learned without doing my practice in order to be learning more, I'm very desperately unhappy. It's dangerous for me.
When we are creative we become happier, more stable, more user-friendly. We have this image of writers as grumpy curmudgeons. Well, when they're blocked they are, but a writer who's writing is usually a very festive, even if it's secretly festive, person. A lot of what I teach is playing. I think that as we become more light, we take our ideas more seriously.
Samuel Bercholz: Do you mean "light" like "more brilliant" or like "light-hearted?"
Julia Cameron: Light-hearted. As we become more light-hearted, we paradoxically take our ideas more seriously. If we're trying to take our ideas seriously without a light heart we do not have the passion to execute them. This is why I say creativity is a matter of the heart: it takes heart to execute. If you can get people back in their heart, you get them into executing their creativity. If you keep them in their head, the heart becomes hobbled and the capacity to make things that connect becomes hobbled.
Samuel Bercholz: A big part of The Artist's Way and Vein of Gold is how passion and creativity relate.
Julia Cameron: I think passion is a marvelous thing. I was recently bawled out by a shaman because he took my use of the word passion to mean emotion and turbulence. I use passion to mean an act of will and commitment. I believe that we are intended to be utterly present, present with a passionate commitment. Then when we are, we create. Conversely, when we create, we become present with passionate commitment.
One of the aspects of certain forms of Buddhism that I have difficulty with is that occasionally I get the feeling that people are using their meditation to avoid experiencing the incarnation we all share. They become detached, they hold the larger view, and it becomes: leaf falls from tree, child dies, same value. I think we can hold that view some of the time, but we are intended as humans to resonate far more deeply than that. I believe that creativity as a spiritual path is very much a felt path.
Samuel Bercholz: "Felt" in the sense of passion, or heartfelt?
Julia Cameron: I don't see those as two different things. Do you?
Samuel Bercholz: No, but...sometimes feeling is just a swirl. Is there a difference between the swirl of emotion and heartfelt feeling?
Julia Cameron: When we're in a swirl of emotion, in a funny way it's intellectual. Confusing and conflicting ideas are wrapped up with the emotions, much the way smoke has particles in it. When we are in our heart, there is a clarity to the feeling, a purity to the feeling. It's less like smoke and more like water. Creativity allows you to purify swirling emotions.
Samuel Bercholz: By grounding them? By liberating them? What happens?
Julia Cameron: You see, for me it's difficult to talk so theoretically. For instance, this morning I was very frustrated. I sat down and wrote four short poems, and then I was fine. The poems both grounded and liberated what I was feeling.
Then I think we should talk just about the practice, because the intellectual part of this doesn't make any sense. You can read everything about creativity, everything about meditation, everything about spirituality, and what difference does it make?
Okay, let's look at the nuts and bolts of The Artist's Way. Get up in the morning and write three pages of long hand writing about anything.
Samuel Bercholz: What inspired you to do that? This is something you created, and people are doing it all over the world.
Julia Cameron: It didn't begin with an idea. One day I got up and started doing it, and I found that it worked.
Samuel Bercholz: What do you mean by "worked"?
Julia Cameron: It made me prioritized for my day; it rendered me present to my life; it gave me a seed bed of ideas that later became creative work; it rendered me profoundly present. So I did it more. (laughs)
Samuel Bercholz: Then you wrote the prescription for everybody else. How did you know that this wasn't just for you?
Julia Cameron: People would call me up who were confused, and I'd say, "Try this," and it would work for them. That's how it became larger: I simply shared the tool. It's a tool that arose out of the fact that I am a writer with a habit of writing; therefore, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to get up one morning and start writing, and then to notice what it did for me.
I also do believe in reincarnation. I think that I'm a teacher, and I suspect I've been a teacher for a very long time. A lot of what I know comes from my thirty years of work as a writer, but I suspect that a lot of what I know is remembered. I think this is true for all of us, that we are often doing in this life a work that we began a long time ago. That's what I think The Artist's Way is; it's a work that I probably began a long time ago. Or that artists began a long time ago.
Samuel Bercholz: So do you think there's an ancestry of artists as well as a family ancestry?
Julia Cameron: Absolutely. When people talk about a spiritual practice, they talk about the lineage of the practice. I think I'm squarely within the lineage of creativity, from the caves forward.
Samuel Bercholz: Is this a natural gift, or something you had to develop?
Julia Cameron: I think we have natural gifts and then we develop them. I think my work is helping people to wake up to their gifts and develop them.
Samuel Bercholz: Do you think everybody has natural gifts?
Julia Cameron: Absolutely!
Samuel Bercholz: So what's with all these frustrated people?
Julia Cameron: I think we've forgotten who we are. I think we've forgotten we're gifted. We've been made to feel we aren't gifted: we have an enormous mythology that creativity belongs to an elite few. They've known it since birth, they suffer no fear, they always wear black...
So what The Artist's Way tools do is reconnect people to their own creative impulses, at which point people become far stronger and begin to move in the direction of those impulses. It's essentially a spiritual process, a listening process: with morning pages you are listening to what's going on within you. You're putting it on the page and communicating it to yourself and, in a sense, to the world.
The second basic tool is something called an "artist's date," which is a once-a-week festive period of solitude. This is like turning on the radio to receive. So with morning pages you're listening to yourself and communicating out, and then you go into solitude, a festive engaged form of solitude - you are out in the world, you are interacting, you begin to feel and hear other impulses. You begin to receive.
Samuel Bercholz: In The Vein of Gold you talk about walking as more than just a physical thing. It's about visual images that come by and all kinds of things.
Julia Cameron: We are ecosystems. Creativity is an ecosystem. If we want to be creative, we fish from the well of the ecosystem. It's as though you have an inner trout run and when you strive for creativity you're fishing out of it. Then you need to replenish it, restock it.
When you walk, a couple of things happen. One is that you have an image-flow moving at you. You see and notice things. You see a tiny little bird skittering under a pine branch. You see a homeless person if you're in the city. You note the image, and the image goes into the well. The well is part of the heart, and that's where your art comes from.
Walking also moves you across the bridge into a larger realm of ideas. It allows you to listen to a different frequency. I experience it as a sort of click in the back of my head. I begin to have insights and inspirations which seem to be of a simpler and higher order. There is something enormously powerful about visualizing and moving at the same time. It may just be because we have more energy to deal with, but it really helps things to clarify, and once something clarifies it begins to be able to manifest.
I call it crossing into the imagination. When we make things they begin as thought forms, as spiritual blueprints, and when we are walking and we visualize something, we're actually drawing it into form. As a writer, if I have a tangled plot line, I go for a walk. I'm not thinking particularly about my plot; I'm thinking about the little wren that I saw, I'm thinking about the mallards, if I'm in New York maybe I'm thinking about the antique velvet rope that I saw in the shop window. And as I'm thinking about these things, "Oh! That's what I can do with my plot" emerges. Creativity is sort of Zen: as you focus north, solutions emerge south. It's not linear.
Samuel Bercholz: Well, that's magic. That's the way spiritual practice is: it works because it works. I mean, you could do whole scientific studies and they don't help anything. You can make up excuses why it works, but they're just excuses.
Julia Cameron: You know, if smart were the solution, very few of us would be screwed up. Smart isn't the solution. The heart is the solution. That's why I don't like the term "mindfulness." I like the term "heartfulness." I think it's more accurate.
Samuel Bercholz: Actually, the term is translated from the Sanskrit, and whoever translated it chose the word "mind" rather than "heart." But mindfulness refers to the Sanskrit citta, which is in fact "heart." So "heartfulness" is more accurate; it's not about our head at all.
Julia Cameron: Well, this is good. I always thought, what a dreadful word, they can't mean it.
So we're really talking about what arises from the heart.
Samuel Bercholz: You don't mean the little flesh thing, right? What do you mean by "heart?
Julia Cameron: The essence. The center. The place that is simultaneously individual and universal that each of us carries. That point of truth. I think heart is a pretty good word for that.
Samuel Bercholz: What's the relationship between time and creativity? You're struggling with a deadline now, working on a book, and all of us who are involved with the world of creativity know there are always deadlines and the panic that comes with them. Do you think it's positive that there are time restrictions or would it be better if things were eased up?
Julia Cameron: It's a central question. We yearn for more time with the illusion that if we had open time we would be creating all the time. The trick is to actually learn to use the time which we have.
What I try to teach is how to be creative within the life you've got. We are a workaholic society. We are addicted to work and often to work for work's sake. But when you are happy, rested and in touch with yourself, you can often work very quickly. That's because when you have some clarity it's easy to do something quickly. The trick is really clarity. People say, I don't have time to do the morning pages, but if they do the morning pages it gives them clarity, and that makes them do all the rest of their life more quickly and more easily.
Now, the whole issue of how to be creative within a business environment is an issue of people being connected and clear, which is contagious. I use the term "creative contagion." Very often if one person in a workplace starts working with creative emergence tools somebody else will say, "What are you doing? You seem really different." Then they'll start doing them and you have this sort of grassroots beneath the hierarchy; out of sight of the superiors you have these people who are becoming more and more grounded while also becoming more visionary, innovative and individual.
These tools render us able to see our choices in any given situation. In the middle of a demanding business day you can close the office door for ten minutes and listen to a piece of music. You can go off and write a half a page just to clear your thinking. The tools are very portable. These little tiny timeouts during a day keep you connected, and just an instant of connection creates space for what I call grace, or what other people might call inspiration or intuition. If we make the smallest opening, there is the possibility of creativity. This is why it is so much like a spiritual practice.
Samuel Bercholz: Do you want to say something about the various kinds of addictions and their relationship to creativity?
Julia Cameron: Our mythology tells us that artists are addicted people - that they are promiscuous, drug addicted, alcoholic. We've come to think that somehow those addictions are part of the creative process.
My experience is exactly the opposite. My experience is that creativity is freedom from addiction. We are frightened when we feel the force of our own creative energy, because we don't know how to ground it. This is why my tools tend to be grounding tools, and when creativity is safely grounded and used, addictions fall to one side. Conversely, if you see someone addicted, what you're seeing is a profoundly creative soul reaching for a substitute to self-expression.
When people get sober they can be profoundly creative. When people get emotionally sober off of a process addiction like workaholism or sex addiction or relationship addiction, they have freed for their use a beautiful amount of new usable energy with which they can make wonderful things. That doesn't just mean writing a poem or making a ceramic vase. It can be a new system for the office. It can be revamping the way they do parent/teacher meetings.
But often what happens is that when we experience our creative energy we don't recognize it as creative energy; we just think it's anxiety. So rather than saying, "How can I direct this energy and what should I make?" we try to block it. We block it by thinking of some titillating sexual adventure. We block it by picking up a drink. We block it with a pint of Hagen Daas. We block it by picking up workaholic work. But it doesn't go away; it's still there. Creativity is always there, because it is as innate to humanity as blood and bone. It is the animating force.
Samuel Bercholz: Although a lot of people talk about creativity and sexuality as not different energies. Do you see them as different?
Julia Cameron: No. I would tend to say that energy itself is pure, and that we can abuse it. You can feel the difference between an
addictive, deadening sexual encounter and a sexual encounter where you stay present and the other person stays present.
Samuel Bercholz: Being in the present is the issue?
Julia Cameron: I think so.
Samuel Bercholz: Is it the same with creativity?
Julia Cameron: Creativity is living in the connected moment.
Samuel Bercholz: What do you mean by connected?
Julia Cameron: Heartful, present, alert, attentive, engaged.
Samuel Bercholz: Thank you.
Julia Cameron on the Path of Creativity, Samuel Bercholz, Shambhala Sun, May 1998.
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"According to Buddhist Tradition"
Shambhala Sun | March 1998
"According to Buddhist Tradition": Gays, Lesbians and the Definition of Sexual Misconduct
By Steve Peskind
Leaving the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco, having just met with the Dalai Lama, the words, "according to Buddhist tradition" reverberated in my head. Stepping out into the June sunlight, I felt tired, calm, enormously grateful-and disappointed.
I was grateful for the Dalai Lama's willingness to meet with gays and lesbians to discuss their concerns about Buddhist teachings on sexual misconduct, and for the press release from the Office of Tibet supporting human rights regardless of sexual orientation. But I was disappointed that he chose not to speak personally and directly, beyond Buddhist tradition, to the real harm of some of these misconduct teachings, and their irrelevance for modern Buddhists and others. I wondered, does the Dalai Lama, whom many consider the embodiment of Avalokiteshvara, who "hears the cries of all sentient beings and responds skillfully," really hear the cries of sexual minority Buddhists?
The story of our meeting with the Dalai Lama begins with an article in the February/March, 1994 issue of OUT magazine, which quoted the Dalai Lama as saying: "If someone comes to me and asks whether it is okay or not, I will first ask if you have some religious vows to uphold. Then my next question is, What is your companion's opinion? If you both agree, then I think I would say, if two males or two females voluntarily agree to have mutual satisfaction without further implication of harming others, then it is okay."
Gay men, lesbians, and others reveled in reading the OUT article. We copied the article, sent it home, sent it...everywhere! We reprinted it in community newsletters that made their way around the world. A major spiritual leader, "the favorite lama of the world" as a friend referred to him, had finally told it like it is. We thought.
But in 1996, North Atlantic Books published Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses, a collection of talks and discussions from the Dalai Lama's 1993 visit to France. On page 46 he responds to the questions, "What are proper sexual attitudes? What do you think of homosexuality, for example?" The Dalai Lama replies: "A sexual act is deemed proper when the couples use the organs intended for sexual intercourse and nothing else....Homosexuality, whether it is between men or between women, is not improper in itself. What is improper is the use of organs already defined as inappropriate for sexual contact. Is this clear?"
My immediate reaction on reading this was: "No. This is not clear!" Was the natural behavior of my sexual orientation a violation of the moral precepts of Tibetan Buddhism and consequently negative karma in itself? As a sexually active gay man, a longtime Buddhist practitioner, and an AIDS services provider for the last 16 years, I asked myself, "What happens when `new' Buddhists, often refugees from harshly judgmental Divine Revelatory religions, read this? What about men and women around the world living and dying with AIDS? How will they feel?"
Although the proscriptions were not discriminatory against "homosexuality" per se, they were clearly discriminatory in their impact on homosexual men and women (and even prohibited most of the AIDS safe sex guidelines). Stating that homosexual orientation is okay, but that homosexual behavior is not, creates a terrible double bind for any gay Buddhist who believes the Dalai Lama's teachings.
On the basis of the discrepancy between the OUT article and Beyond Dogma, I wrote an open, public letter to the Dalai Lama in January of 1997, noting that many of us who so admired him were confused and distressed by the inconsistency of his statements and their worldwide ramifications. I respectfully requested that he "in whatever manner and venue he chooses, speak to the Buddhadharma, the truth of homosexuality and homosexual behavior." That letter resulted, through the agency of the Office of Tibet, in the June 11 private meeting between the Dalai Lama and seven gay and lesbian leaders in San Francisco.
At the meeting I asked the Dalai Lama about a statement he had made at a press conference the day before. A reporter had asked him to comment on the morality of homosexual behavior, and he replied: "We have to make a distinction between believers and unbelievers. From a Buddhist point of view, men-to-men and women-to-women is generally considered sexual misconduct. From society's point of view, mutually agreeable homosexual relations can be of mutual benefit, enjoyable and harmless."
The Dalai Lama went on to say that the same Buddhist scripture that advises against gay and lesbian sex urges the same for heterosexuals. "Even with your wife, using one's mouth or the other hole is sexual misconduct. Using one's hand, that is sexual misconduct." He added, "The Buddha is our Teacher," the historical reference for all Buddhists.
The next morning in his diplomatic suite in the Fairmount, I asked him, "If the Buddha is our teacher, where and when did he teach that homosexual partners are inappropriate, that homosexual behavior is sexual misconduct?" The Dalai Lama candidly responded, "I don't know." During the meeting the Dalai Lama confirmed for us another sexual proscription according to Buddhist tradition: heterosexuals are prohibited from having sex more than five consecutive times with a partner. Jose Cabezon, a gay Buddhist scholar, promptly asked him, "If the purpose of the proscriptions is to reduce sexual activity, how does it make sense to allow a man to have sex with his wife up to five times a night, while saying that it is sexual misconduct for a man to have sex with another man even once in his life?"
The Dalai Lama roared with laughter, saying,"You have a point there!" Earlier he had asked all of us, "Sex is for procreation, right?" Our collective silence was our response. When I asked, "Which of the proscribed behaviors regarding partner, organ, or excessive frequency do you personally consider most important?" he responded with a thoughtful look, not saying anything.
In preparation for the meeting the Dalai Lama had traced the sexual misconduct teachings back to the Indian Buddhist scholar Ashvaghosha, and said they may reflect the moral codes of India at the time, "which stress moral purity." He was open to the possibility of Buddhist tradition changing eventually in response to science, modern social history, and discussion within the various Buddhist sanghas. He urged all of us to go forth and advocate our interests, basing our action on Buddhist principles of "rigorous investigation and non-violence." He noted that he is not unilaterally empowered to change tradition: "Change can only come on the collective level," he said.
Religious teachings on sex-make that "wrong sex"-are well known to be a principal cause of violence and discrimination against sexual minorities and a primary cause of self-destructive behavior among them. This is true in the West and it is true in the East. Clearly, some of the traditional Buddhist teachings are violent to the truth and lives of Buddhist sexual minorities. It's still questionable whether the Dalai Lama, whose words carry much weight in the court of world opinion, really "gets" the impact of Buddhist tradition labeling the way we make love as "sexual misconduct." My partner of twenty-one years and I don't appreciate it. And the Buddha didn't say it at all, according to the evidence.
According to the oldest Buddhist teachings, the Buddha cautioned against "misconduct of sensual desire." He warned of mental stains from "drowning in sensual pleasure-harmful and disturbing intentions and actions arising from wrong perception and the dualistic fixation on self and other. He did not mention sex, inappropriate organs and partners. During the June 11 meeting the Dalai Lama clearly stated that "the goal for all Buddhists is Nirvana"-complete freedom of mind free of wrong perception, dualistic fixation, defilements and hindrances. He did not clarify, however, how sex as an expression of emotional intimacy, or moderate and respectful recreational sex, or gay tantric sex for that matter, in any way impedes full awakening, freedom and peace of heart. The meeting was warm, serious and much too hurried. The 45 minutes was a 15 minute extension to the 30 minutes which the Office of Tibet originally allotted for "this historic meeting." The Dalai Lama encouraged the seven of us and others to hold conferences on Buddhism and sexuality and other pressing concerns, including Tibetan Buddhist full-ordination of women as nuns. Although the Dalai Lama opposed violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation, he did not commit himself to helping correct harmful Buddhist teachings still on the books-including the conduct codes which can fuel homophobic behavior among Buddhist teachers and students. Famous for saying, "When science points to or proves a truth contrary to Buddhist teaching, then Buddhist teaching must change," he said as we were leaving his suite, "Changing Buddhist traditions will be much harder than advocating for your human rights."
So it's up to us to affect change, with lots of help from Buddhist teachers who are quite awake on the subject of sexual right action, teachers such as Khandro Rinpoche, Drukchen Rinpoche, the late Dudjom Rinpoche, Lama Tarchin Rinpoche, Robert Aitken Roshi and others. We must continue to insist that the tradition change. Three years ago I asked Khandro Rinpoche, the gifted young Tibetan teacher, about her views on homosexual behavior and the dharma. This eldest daughter of Mindroling Rinpoche, and Kagyu and Nyingma lineage holder, offered the following response as part of her public teaching in San Francisco on "AIDS: Compassion and Skillful Means":
"One can grow spiritually by being a monk, through getting married, through homosexual relations. If you really love another man as a man, no problem. Within the Buddha's doctrine itself homosexuality is nothing special, nothing new. Such a thing as realization means being free from attachment to whomever it may be-a man to a man, a man to a woman, a woman to a woman, or whomever it may be. Each person is responsible for his or her own mind, own thoughts, emotions, understanding, awakening, realization. It's possible for a homosexual person. It's possible for all sentient beings."
We cannot control tradition and politics. We cannot control psychological and physical violence born of delusion. But Buddha's way is not about the "control" of suffering; it's about responding with open awareness to the whole display of our experience, including suffering. The Dalai Lama accurately observed that he is not unilaterally empowered to change Buddhist tradition. But he is empowered to speak for himself. His speaking to the irrelevant, false aspects of sexual misconduct teachings will certainly help the cause.
A Buddhist's responsibility is to insist that Buddhist oppression of sexual minorities, women and others, including heterosexual couples, end. The San Francisco-based Buddhist AIDS Project is formulating "A Respectful Request to the Dalai Lama," in the form of a petition asking him to speak directly to the irrelevance and harm of some traditional misconduct codes found in all lineages of Tibetan Buddhism.
Steve Peskind is coordinator of the Buddhist AIDS Project in San Francisco. He is the editor of the anthology, Heart Lessons From an Epidemic: Buddhist Practice and Living with HIV, to be published by Parallax Press. He can be contacted at
"According to Buddhist Tradition", Steve Peskind, Shambhala Sun, March 1998.
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Queer Spirit: On Sexual Identity as Help and Hindrance
Shambhala Sun | March 1998
Queer Spirit: On Sexual Identity as Help and Hindrance
Peter Sweasey
Homosexuality and spirituality do not seem, at first sight, particularly compatible. Gay people are still routinely condemned by prominent religious figures. Many Jewish and Christian organizations see homophobia as proof of orthodoxy, while fundamentalists generally believe that the more you love Jesus, the more you should hate faggots. Some religious groups have gradually adopted more liberal views-but their acceptance of queers is often hedged with qualifications, such as refusing to acknowledge gay marriages. The majority of western Buddhist groups take a more positive line, although, as the Dalai Lama controversially pointed out recently, they are going against some Buddhist cultural traditions in doing so. Just as religion rejects queers, so queers reject religion. Angry people, wanting to fight back after suffering years of oppression, find an obvious enemy in religion, which so brazenly proclaims its prejudice. For many queers, religion is seen as "a straight thing"-you may have had it when you were younger, but after coming out it should be left behind. Now you're out and proud, and the only pilgrimage you should make is to Ikea. To come out is to join people with well-established beliefs and traditions, spaces and rituals, culture and community. Being lesbian, gay or bisexual becomes a way of life in itself, fulfilling many of the roles traditionally played by religion. Who needs "spirituality" when you've got lifestyle, fashionable celebrity icons, the best nightclubs, and lots of beautiful people to have sex with? Or, for the more earnestly inclined, when there's equality to win, a health crisis to survive, and homoculture to consume? And yet, in spite of this mutual hostility, and in spite of the virtual taboo around spirituality in most queer contexts, there are many lesbian, gay and bisexual people for whom both spirituality and sexuality are sources of strength and joy. There are queer Buddhists, Jews, Quakers, Episcopalians, Catholics, Neo-Pagans, Sikhs, Hindus, Taoists, and New-Agers of every complexion. Some of these people practice in predominantly heterosexual organizations; others join lesbian and gay synagogues and churches, or groups dedicated to gay spirituality, like the Radical Faeries. There are people who draw on a number of these and other spiritual traditions without fully belonging to any of them; and there are still more who identify themselves as "spiritual" but would have reservations about anything resembling organized religion. Some turn elsewhere for their spiritual sustenance, perhaps to nature, art, drugs or sex. How do these people manage to integrate their sexual and spiritual identities when there is so much pressure from both sides to choose one over the other? Why do they bother to do so? How does their sexuality affect their understanding of spirituality -and vice versa? I put these questions to a large number of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, from a variety of different spiritual traditions, while I was researching my book From Queer to Eternity (Cassell, 1997). In their answers, there was a lot of agreement about some key ways in which being queer can affect your spiritual journey. Some people told me that their sexuality, far from disqualifying them from spiritual involvement or causing them to reject it, was actually what caused them to set out on their journey, and that it has been helpful for their spiritual growth. Queerness may be a spiritual advantage even if it is a religious handicap, even though some religious groups will close their doors to you. Queer people are very quick to make a distinction between spirituality and religion. Elizabeth Sarah, a lesbian rabbi, explains that "when people think of religion they think of institutions, hierarchies, things that are fixed and try to control them. The word spirituality seems more autonomous, about where people are coming from in their own lives. It's about what it is to be human, what it is to be alive, what it is to be part of creation." Chris Ferguson, a gay man and Buddhist, makes a similar distinction: "Religion is trying to make you what you're not. Spirituality is trying to make you who you are." Chris, Elizabeth and many other gay people emphasize the inner life over external dogma. This is partly a distinction that queers are forced to make, because the public aspects of religion have so often been hostile to us. Turning inwards is more than a defensive response, however; it is an inevitable part of realizing you are lesbian, gay or bisexual. Spirituality arises from the ultimate questions: why am I here, how do I live? To realize that you are other-than-heterosexual in this society is to initiate a process of self-analysis that can include, or eventually lead to, those same Big Questions. To be queer is an existential condition; at least for that time when people are in the closet and thus locked inside themselves, they are forced to ask: if I am not like others that I see around me, what am I about? What do I want out of life? Who am I? "Because we're told that we're not meant to be here," says Jason Oliver, a Pagan, "gay people go out of their way to find out what they are really here for." Once you've started asking those big questions, it's difficult to stop. As a result of this process, we fall out of innocence; queers come across the big existential questions much sooner than many other people may have to. As Diana, a Christian priest, said to me, "When you're confronting your own sexuality, you're confronting yourself at the very deepest level of your being-and it's in that deepest level of your being that your spirituality dwells as well. A lot of straight people think they're `normal'; they never actually look at who they are because they don't think they need to, they just get on with life. So because they don't go through that process of delving deep inside themselves, they may never get to that level of looking at their spirituality either, or even realize that they have a spirituality." The catalyst for this crucial process of questioning and turning within is the feeling of not being able to identify fully with the surrounding world, the experience of not fitting in: "queerness." David Philbedge, now a Buddhist, told me of how, from an early age, he'd felt like an outsider. "If you have a sense that you're different from what's around you, you're not going to get sucked in without thinking, you're not going to accept received wisdom. All worthwhile spiritual paths involve asking questions: it's that sense of being an outsider that begins that process." Another Buddhist, Fernando Guasch, agrees: "This radical form of dislocation is fundamentally the core of the gay experience. Jung says consciousness comes out of friction: where you clash with the rest of things. It makes you very aware. Being gay allows you to `read the world differently,' as the native American say. Gay people can see through many of the `god-given truths' that so many straight people seem to believe are moral/ethical facts about the world-they're good myth busters. Gay people have always been able to point at the emperor and say he has no clothes." When people realize that they are not heterosexual, they may also realize the illusory nature of so much of what they are told life is about. They begin to awaken. Most humans get a wake-up call sooner or later-when someone they love dies, perhaps, or when achieving material goals fails to bring the happiness they expected-but queer people, if they are to have the chance of living honest and fulfilling lives, are forced to act on this call earlier in life than most. Coming out involves rejecting social programming and expectations, and asserting that they will live by the truth of their experience instead. And in refusing to keep up any sort of pretense (about this aspect of their lives, at least), they are laying the groundwork for a healthy, open spirituality. They are learning something about who they really are instead of who they are told they should be, and as a consequence, the act of coming out can be a source of spiritual insight. "When I allowed in the `truth' that I am gay," says Philip Joyce, a father of three, "it was an overwhelming insight, enabling me to make sense of so many of my previous feelings and experiences. It released an enormous amount of energy. I experienced a powerful sense of self, and a human warmth towards other people, which were new to me. I was illuminated and exhilarated, and it changed the course of my life. It was a new truth by which I had to live. It was so inspirational that I would say this was a major stage in my spiritual growth." A lesbian called Kate told me that when she came out, "I felt `born again,' or rather that I had finally found who I really was. From being monochrome, life had become glorious Technicolor." Kate is not the only person to use religious terminology in describing coming out. Realizing you are gay can cause a kind of death-of the former, ill-fitting heterosexual identity and expectations-but it leads to the experience of new life. Spiritual growth similarly involves a shedding of old assumptions and illusions, ideas about who you are and what your life will be like, in order to make space for a greater truth or liberation. Perhaps it is no coincidence that when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he uses the words "come out" (John 11:43). Lazarus is often depicted as being reluctant to come out, since the tomb, like the closet, has the apparent comfort of a certain security. It's a risk that has to be taken, however; in the words of Harvey Fierstein's anthem to gay pride, "Life's not worth a damn till you can say, I am what I am." That song provides another interesting cross-over with religious terminology. "I am what I am" is a classic statement of spiritual truth as well as gay identity. In the Old Testament, these words are how God is identified: when Moses asks the voice in the burning bush to name itself, it replies "I am what I am." To be oneself, to be aware, to be conscious, to be; awareness, consciousness, being: these things have been the concerns of spiritual traditions throughout history, and they are signified by "I am what I am." Having admitted and asserted this much truth, queer people are unlikely to surrender their hard-won insight into the way things are. If the existential questions provoked by being queer cause them to look to religion for answers, they have a yardstick with which to judge what they are told. If they're told that they should not exist, or that their sexuality is wrong, they have reason to doubt the veracity of anything else that religion may say. Queer people are skeptical of anything that will not acknowledge or allow the truth of their experience. They have a built-in-some might say God-given-bullshit detector. This is valuable, since there's a lot of bullshit in religion, as well as a lot of good. Any spirituality worth its salt survives skepticism; a lot of conventional religion does not. Being queer may force them to throw out the bathwater, but that doesn't mean they can't keep hold of the baby. This confidence in the authority of personal experience is a marked trait of spiritual queers, and is important whether the individual concerned is following an orthodox tradition or a looser, more individualistic path. To people with a paternalistic concept of religion (God commands, we obey), it may sound heretical to value personal experience over the supposed authority of religious institutions and scriptures. I would argue that, as well as being the only rational course, it is crucial for psychological survival and spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity requires growing from childish dependence to adult independence (or interdependence), from external religion (with all the fear, conformism and habit that may involve) to the freedom of internal spirituality. As part of this process of spiritual growth, queer people who had some sort of faith before they came out often find themselves renegotiating their relationship with religious authority. Rabbi Mark Solomon told me of how, when he was Orthodox and in the closet, he saw religion as a matter of "fitting in to patterns that had already been established." When he came out, he realized that "there are no answers that are identically suitable for everybody...each person has a personal relationship with God which is different, because no two people are precisely the same. God is beyond all the narrow concepts and systems to which we confine God and confine religion." Another gay man, Peter Ashby-Saracen, was formerly involved with fundamentalist Christians. "Christianity was something I wanted to protect me from the hurts of life and to take away certain things I couldn't handle at the time, like my sexuality." After coming out, he began to practice the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin. "Nowadays I look on life as a voyage of discovery. I've always thought of Buddhism as a tool-rather than a prop, which is something one leans on for support, something I see as static. I like the emphasis on the practice serving the individual, rather than the individual serving the religion. It is a liberating experience to know that there is a non-restrictive practice aimed primarily at encouraging you to be what you are. Being able to become the real me is of immense importance. If I ever felt that Buddhism wasn't serving my purposes any longer I would reject it without hesitation." He believes because he chooses to; because it is beneficial for him to do so. He is not disempowered by his faith. In this, he is typical of queer believers. One of the more common objections to any notion of spirituality or religion is that it's a crutch, a sign of weakness, something for feeble people who can't accept life as it really is. The lesbian, gay and bisexual people I spoke with would reject this claim. Since queers are not encouraged to acknowledge their spirituality, those who nonetheless persist, and overcome all the hurdles put in their way (by their own community as well as certain religions), must do so out of genuine desire. Queer people who follow spiritual traditions are not doing so because of social convention; nor do they surrender their intelligence. They are well aware of the routine and obvious objections; their spirituality has been fiercely tested-by themselves as well as others-and survived. As Rabbi Lionel Blue has said, spirituality in the lives of lesbian and gay people tends to be "honest, not rhetoric. It does not avoid or evade. In a packaged society, such plain and simple truth is rare and valuable." Religion is frequently guilty of sentimentality and escapism, but I saw very little of either quality among the queer people I came into contact with. Jonathon Andrew, a Christian who has lived with HIV for over a decade, said to me: "I don't think by having a spiritual practice you can exclude yourself from the hard reality. If your spirituality doesn't work on the ward at the AIDS hospice, it's not worth it. What the spiritual practice is about is coming to terms with the reality. And transforming it, somehow." Another gay man, Steve Hope, is a Quaker; he finds "the freedom lies in being as open as possible to ever more realities and experiences, and to share and be enriched by other people's experience. Being open to God is being open to more and more reality."If your spirituality doesn't work on the ward at the AIDS hospice, it's not worth it. What the spiritual practice is about is coming to terms with the reality. And transforming it, somehow." Another gay man, Steve Hope, is a Quaker; he finds "the freedom lies in being as open as possible to ever more realities and experiences, and to share and be enriched by other people's experience. Being open to God is being open to more and more reality." Being truly open to reality means letting go of certain ideas about ourselves and the world. So far I've suggested that the potential advantage of being queer is that it can encourage people to do precisely this-to feel less restricted by what society decrees to be "normal," and to be freed to follow their own truth instead of obeying social or religious orthodoxies. However, there is always a strong temptation to substitute the discarded orthodoxies with new illusions of your own invention-more appealing and subtle than the ones they replace, perhaps, but illusions nonetheless. Queers, for all the potential spiritual insight of their experience, are as susceptible to this temptation as anybody else. One way in which gay people have responded to so many years of being marginalized by mainstream society is to create a very strong cultural identity of their own. If you read any of the lesbian or gay magazines or books now available, or watch some of the numerous lesbian and gay movies that have been released in the last few years, or go to the pride marches and festivals which take place in most major Western cities, you'll quickly pick up how gay men and lesbians dress, what music they listen to, what they do with their leisure time, and much else besides. This process is strongly consumerist-there are few items which you can't buy emblazoned with the colors of the rainbow "freedom flag," symbol of lesbian and gay pride. These are just the superficial trappings of two very deep-rooted beliefs: that sexual orientation is centrally important to your life, and that there are defining characteristics of gay men and of lesbians beyond their sexual preferences. It's not just what they do and how they look, it's what they're like inside. Gay men, for instance, are assumed to be sensitive, witty, creative, caring, have good taste (in clothes, interior design, etc.), and get on famously with straight women. Crucial to their definition is that they are the opposite of straight men-who are emotionally inarticulate, obsessed with sport, money and cars, and intrinsically violent. Similar logic can be found underlying a lot of lesbian discourse (although there it is tempered by the feminist imperative to identify with all women). I am over-simplifying and generalizing here, but one way queer people have reacted to being told for so long that they are worse than everyone else, is to end up thinking that they are fundamentally, innately different-and sometimes, even, that they are better. The world can be divided into two camps of people, Us and Them, and the gulf between these groups is caused by sexual orientation. Modern lesbian and gay people are happy to divide themselves off like this because they understand their differences from heterosexuals as being positively to their advantage-and because queers are the ones making this distinction, not the victims of it. Some queer explorations of spirituality reflect this us-and-them division. Mark Thompson, author of Gay Spirit and Gay Soul, sees the role of queer people as "carriers of soul to a world that prefers to dwell on surfaces." Along with gay anthropologists like Will Roscoe and Randy P. Conner, he argues that queers have played this role throughout history. The "Gay Spirituality" movement that they are involved in takes as its role models people from earlier cultures who deviated from the dominant gender and sexual norms, and undertook spiritual work and leadership-most famously, shamans and Native American berdache. Modern queer people, like the berdache, can provide a bridge between men and women because they have characteristics of both. They can also, as shamans did, bridge the profane and sacred. Queer people are inheritors of spiritual skills (healing and divination, for instance) and, although scattered across the world, are all part of one special tribe-if only they would realize it. As a gay man, I have in the past found these ideas deeply appealing. Of course I would love to believe that I am spiritually gifted and have a crucial role to play in saving the souls of the world-and that this comes to me without effort, simply because I was born queer. However, ultimately I must reject this Gay Spirituality for the same reason that I reject homophobic religion-because it does not acknowledge the vastness of reality, nor does it correspond to my experience. You only need to listen to the conversation going on in your average gay bar to realize that queers don't, automatically, represent a higher order of consciousness. Gay men, for instance, can be just-if not more-macho, objectifying, emotionally inarticulate and misogynist as the next (straight) man (and I know many straight men who display none of those characteristics). True, there have been some remarkable homosexual visionaries and artists throughout history, but there have been some remarkable heterosexual visionaries and artists too. If we believe it is up to the queer tribe to save the world, we write off the majority of humanity. If queers are destined to play this spiritual role, what's left for straight men and women to do? The idea that only queer people can have easy access to both "masculine" and "feminine"characteristics traps the majority of human beings in the restrictive gender roles that, following the lead of feminism, we have finally begun to deconstruct. The spiritual gift of queerness is a certain freedom from social and religious norms. But the notion of queers as intrinsically enlightened-or, more basically, the notion that we're fundamentally different-could easily become another "norm" that disguises the full complexity of who any of us is; or another distraction from reality. The dualistic division it creates between queer and straight limits our ability to identify with all others as human creatures like ourselves, and so could hinder that most basic of spiritual virtues, compassion. Of course queer people want and deserve equal rights, but do we have no concern with the world beyond the way it treats us? Will we not act on the (noble) truth that all people are suffering? "You've got to keep away from elitist attitudes," warns Rabbi Lionel Blue, who is much-loved in Britain for his regular radio and television appearances, and came out in his sixties. Although homosexuality was illegal for much of his life, and caused him a great deal of personal conflict, he says "Everything that gays go through a straight person goes through too. The scenery is somewhat different, but the same dramas are played out. It is easy to escape from a ghetto imposed on you, and then to build one of your own because it seems safe and cozy. The aim of gay liberation is to make people whole, not to increase their divisions." Being queer does not automatically make you "special," any more than it automatically makes you evil or sick. It has no inherent, objective meaning. There is nothing about feeling sexually attracted to people of the same gender that predetermines your spirituality; spirituality grows out of our experience. There is some experience that most queer people at this time have in common-some of which I outlined earlier in this article-and that experience can be very valuable to work with. That experience is not innate, however. In a future society that freely acknowledges the whole spectrum of human sexuality, homosexual people will no longer be "queer" outsiders and coming out will no longer be the same catalyst for self-realization that it is currently. Such a society is still some way off. But even here and now, some queer people-in the light of their spiritual beliefs-argue that sexual identity is given undue emphasis. "You limit yourself by over-identification first of all with your own sexuality, and secondly with the group of people that you belong to," says Maitreyabandhu, a Buddhist. "Your sexuality is only a part of you. It doesn't have to be that big a part of your life even. It's not a problem, but neither is it a status-or a career." Someone once told Maitreyabandhu that their sexuality was the foundation of their life, like a chair that they sit on. "I said, well it will break. It's not big enough to contain what life is about. To try to understand life from the basis of being gay drastically restricts human potential." Peter Ashby-Saracen agrees, while clearly valuing the experience his sexual orientation has brought him: "Being gay is one manifestation of being human, and being human is, among other things, to be aware of our place in the wider `scheme of things.' Being gay doesn't satisfy everything in my life, though it's probably the thing that affects it most. I need some expression for my feeling of the infinite and where I fit into it, and my spirituality does this for me." However big a part sexuality may play in our lives, infinity is, obviously, bigger. Spiritual traditions aspire to encompass the whole of reality-the breadth of human experience, the mystery of existence, the immensity and variety of the cosmos-which is not something lesbian and gay identity, however proud, can do. Coming to this realization can be a continuation of the process that starts with coming out. "You've got to bring more than your sexuality out of the closet," advises Nagaraja, a gay Buddhist. Spiritual growth, like coming out, requires you to "know thyself," to keep asking that central question, who am I? "A queer person" is a good answer, because it is honest and shows some self-knowledge-but it is still only part of the answer. There's a temptation to think that "a lesbian" or "a gay man" is "who I really am." But we are mistaken if we think what we have found on coming out is our ultimate identity. Instead it is a signpost that points to the greater truth: the fact that, in many further ways, we are more than the culture around us would have us believe. Coming out is not the final destination; it is just the beginning of the spiritual journey. By starting with what we know -that we are lesbian, gay or bisexual-we may be led to universal human issues of mortality and meaning, of justice and suffering, of our place in the universe. "If we are not careful," warns Maitreyabandhu, "our gay liberation will become gay limitation. We need to rediscover our radical roots and reconnect with the urge to change ourselves and the world." For me, that means queer people should not be putting so much energy into building a permanent, fixed identity, and instead should be questioning why we are categorizing ourselves by our sexuality anyway. We will not change ourselves or the world if we remain content with roles based on who we have sex with, whether we feel good about playing those roles or not. As Maitreyabandhu suggests, being queer in itself is no longer the radical challenge it once was. "Lesbian and gay" has gone mainstream; spiritual traditions, however, remain revolutionary. The Buddha and Jesus invite us to look beyond how the world seems to be organized at the moment, and the place we are assigned within it. In arguing that sexual orientation should not be our ultimate concern, I am not for a moment suggesting that it is not important, or that we should deny who we are. Being open about our sexuality, while seeing it as just one facet of our complex humanity, is very different from staying silent about our sexuality because other people force us to. For political reasons, it is still crucial in many situations to identify publicly as queer. And for queer individuals, without the crucial act of honesty and self-realization that coming out represents, any sort of spiritual growth (or fulfilling life, for that matter) is impossible. Our journey can only start when we know where we are coming from. We can only understand other people when we begin to understand ourselves; we cannot comprehend universals until we acknowledge our own particulars. There will be many things that make us different from other people-sexual identity is one, but national identity is also important, and so are gender, race, class, education, age and many other characteristics. All of these are significant; they are the material we have to work with, the fuel for our spiritual journey, the grist for our mill. And yet we must avoid clinging too tightly to any of them, in case our ideas about who we are get in the way of our spiritual task-which is simply being who we are. The final irony is that this sexual identity some of us have fought so hard for becomes, in the silence of meditation or prayer, just another part of the psychological baggage that we need to leave behind. In the words of Lev, a man I spoke to who belongs to the Jewish havur'a movement and Radical Faeries, as well as drawing on Eastern traditions, "When I've felt most spiritually connected is when I've had the strongest and clearest sense of my core being, rather than being a Jew, being a gay man, being a professional, being white, whatever. It's what's underneath all that."
Queer Spirit: On Sexual Identity as Help and Hindrance, Peter Sweasey, Shambhala Sun, March 1998.
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