There was once a very notorious master from Russia called Gurdjieff who I recommend you study if you want to look at his books.  He said that 99% of humanity is unconscious, is unaware, and is asleep.  And the same thing has been said by almost every single Eastern master right from Buddha, right through the Taoist and Zen masters, the Tantric masters, which is why in the East from where I originate there are so many disciplines designed to awake humanity up from its unconsciousness.  In the West where I came early on as a child to live there is no concept of unconsciousness as the given human state.  We are taught here, or you are taught here, that all you need to do is pray to a sky god and everything will be taken care of.  But in the East, we tend very much to do it for ourselves. We work on our consciousness ourselves.  Zen, Taoism, Tantrism very much looks at that, ways of waking up.  If one school doesn't work for you, there are hundreds of schools.  But unfortunately I found when training in these disciplines in the East very few gay men are drawn to them because it requires hard work, dedication, perseverance, adherence, continuance. These are lifetimes of studies.  And you can't do them if you aren't committed to waking up. The other term for it is enlightenment.  It's about getting enlightened about who you are.  Any gay man who's committed to enlightenment, to waking himself up will automatically take a thing called the Bodhisattva Vow which is waking everything up. So if you're committed to waking up as a gay man, you are responsible for everyone in your, in the gay community also waking up with you.  You don't do it for yourself.  These ways of developing consciousness would then allow you to address being HIV positive in a very different way because you would have discovered, it's like coming out of a locked closet suddenly finding you are standing in an enormous open field with the ocean in front of you.  The world opens up once you begin to investigate these teachings and disciplines. If all you live in is a gay ghetto and your world is your club, your pub, your back room, your dark room, your porn videos, going on line, calling in sex over the Internet, you're really living an unconscious life. It's not conscious at all.  And this unconsciousness will kill you.  Either physically or, well spiritually definitely it will.  I've known a lot of gay men who have investigated, HIV positive gay men, who have investigated things such as Tantra, Zen, Taoism, who suddenly wouldn't even describe themselves as being gay anymore because they, it's too limiting a description. They've discovered how to be human.  Their sex is with men but they aren't capital G gay.  Because we don't know what gay means today.  To the world at large the gay identity is the AIDS identity.  It's the hedonistic, narcissistic identity. But once you open up into working to wake yourself up, for instance I'll tell you personally what happened to me. I worked with a Danish Lama, one of the few Lamas trained in Tibetan Buddhism in the school of Karma Kagyu Yoga, Tantric Yoga, and he is a remarkable Danish Lama called Lama Ole Nydahl from the Karma Kagyu School.  We talked about how gay men could fit into the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and he said I'm the first one he's met in all his decades of teaching as a Lama, I'm the first one he's met and he has hundreds of thousands of students in the East and in the West.  So say he has three hundred thousand heterosexual students and I'm the only gay man, where are the others?  Why are they not interested in even looking at what other traditions have to offer?  In the Eastern traditions you do it for yourself.  As Buddha said you work at your own salvation with diligence.  My greatest success working with HIV positive gay men has been in just this, telling gay men who are HIV positive to look East, to investigate the teachings.  I've known many who have actually gone to live in India and Japan to study the disciplines. Some have joined monasteries and become Zen Monks even, become Bhiksus, some have become Sados, some have formed camps where they, in America for instance, where they investigate together, although there's no Zen Roshi there, I don't quite know how to do it. As long as they are investigating it I imagine they worked it out for themselves. They're the ones who have discovered there's a world beyond their closet, there's a world beyond their ghetto, and there's a quality they have where HIV and being gay are not the most important things in their lives.  Waking up is.  And we're only here for a short time. We're all going to die of something.  But HIV and unhappiness and unconscious isn't a good way to live.  If you are unconscious you need to wake up.