One of the truest tests of any scientific proposition is whether different experimenters come up with the same results.  Standing outside the realm of formal Buddhadharma, E.J. Gold and his brave little band of spiritual revolutionaries are just such an independent lab in the science of mind.  Buddhism should only have such a lama as he!  Chogyam Trungpa was also famous for his rowdy sense of humor, but in print he comes across much more seriously.  Gold's style recalls Lenny Bruce, Paul Krassner, or Stanislaw Lem. (His community once sold  T-shirts that said such things as "Get off my planet, you fucking hairless ape!", "Sex, for God's Sake!", and "A Growing Impatience With The Tormentor," accompanied by Gold's surreal artwork.)

     His humor is strongest in such hard-to-find classics as Lazy Man's Guide to Death and Dying, and Handbook for the Recently Deceased (allegedly written by Claude Needham, but bearing Gold's unmistakeable stamp):

...the book starts out kind of strange and unusual with definite undertones of yucky, about halfway through one begins to get the gist of it, then just as it is beginning to make sense wham you get hit with stuff that looks like partially translated instructions for obscure Japanese electronic equipment followed by a sudden but not altogether unexpected halt
-- Not unlike life.

     Another work that particularly brings out Gold's humor, but on a somewhat different subject, is The Creation Story Verbatim,  a book which operates on many levels.  When I first read it, I thought it was just  zany  metaphysical humor a la Cosmic Banditos, but on returning to it after a few years and a few changes, I found that it also addresses the  guru-student relationship in a radical but very subtle way.

    "I understand completely what You have been trying to explain to me through the analogy of that story, Lord," I said.  "But it still leaves me in the dark about what happened to Harold."
    "You ignorant twit!" His voice was silky.  "You do not need to know anything about this.  It would simply serve to satisfy your already overwrought imagination and curiosity."
    "But Lord..."
    "But Me no buts!  In the course of human events, it eventually became necessary for me to encapsulate their world into a completely mechanical process.  These beings, on their typically circuitous paths, were already quite destructive...
    "This mechanical format of existence for humans is all that prevents them from destroying the objective pattern of their world, and that of all forms.  The problem for them is that although the Essence is immortal, it is usually stupid, while the body and psyche  are very intelligent but limited in duration to the life of the planetary body, which even though it recurs endlessly, is not always occupied by the same being, for as soon as the body has run down through entropic failure the essence separates from it, leaving it to blend once again with the organic body from which it arose.
    "Unless the being who has up to that time inhabited that planetary body has transformed the Essence into an active and permanent entity in which habits have been formed consciously along certain definite lines...thus helping to create the subtle body required for the placement of a soul, and in that way justifying and completing my hopes for humans on the moon earth...Do you understand what I am trying to tell you, Gabriel?"
    "Yes,Lord, but what happened to Harold?"
    The Lord compassionately drove His right knee smartly into my groin, which is an already agreed-upon signal between us that I had in some way failed to comprehend exactly what he had been saying.
    "This can only mean one thing, Gabriel," He said.  "A basic inability to grasp the subject at hand--and far worse, since a simple intellectual understanding of these ideas is of no value, an example of vivifying force will have to be used."
    The Lord sat back and waited for that bit of information to sink in, and I, sure that I had already received sufficient data at that moment for the attainment of a new gradation of reason one degree above Ankhlad, periodically felt at the top of my head for any sign of the appropriate horns, which I expected imminently, according to some very intricate calculations using the old Gregorian calendar and some litmus paper.  But all I got for my trouble was scalp flakes on the fingertips--and suddenly I realized that after all this time I still had no idea what had happened to Harold.

     I understand that Gold is involved in the Gurdjiefian lineage, although I have never found any references to this in his work--other than the tendency to refer to himself as 'G,' the initial used by Ouspensky to refer to Gurdjief. Anyway, these are just as much books of instruction as  the books written by  "real" lamas that are reviewed elsewhere in this electronic soup.  Gold's method, however, lacks the level of formal invocation (and potential spiritual materialism) that characterizes Tibetan practice, and is more akin to Da Avabhasa's program of self-observation. Gold, like Gurdjief, sees little value in mantra and other devotional-invocatory practices.  The teacher works to drive the student back onto his own resources, to find his inner guidance and listen to it.

    The phrase 'the human biological machine' is a key one in understanding Gold's view.  We think we are possessed of free will, but in truth we are a deluded bundle of conditioned responses, and there is no 'thing' we can do that can change that; the ability to observe our own behavior is the only power we really have.  Gold conveys this with a sense of humor that is not for everyone; but if you can tune in to it, it is the door into the mind of a remarkable teacher.

Habits are so completely automatic that our nonphenomenal attention is blind to them.  We are not able to study the habits of the machine directly, because when we exert our attention upon the machine, the machine wakes up a little and the habits disappear momentarily. The most difficult manifestations to observe are those tiny little unconscious habitual expressions of the motor centrum.  The smaller they are, the harder they fall.  To be able to gather data about the very smallest negative manifestations, those most automatic, we must receive help from outside because the machine cannot be trusted to give us correct information about itself. A work-circle is useful for this, because in the beginning we really cannot see the manifestations of our own machines with enough impartiality to categorize them. The habits of the motor centrum are so trivial that we may not be able to see them without special help, and for this we must use a group of people engaged in similar work, who can see our machine with much more objectivity than we can ourselves.  Naturally they may miss one or two particularly revolting manifestations, but leave that for later. Sometimes an outside obsever can catch us in an uncustomary posture and delineate it clearly to us, even considering our clouded vision.

(Practical Work on Self)

 
    If we want to discover our chronic, all we have to do is go into horizontal sleep and have somebody shake us awake in the wee hours of the night  or sometime in the pre-dawn  and observe our first reaction.  That will be our chronic. The machine doesn't want to enter the waking state; it resists it right up to the last moment.  But once it's in the waking state, it can't imagine  what it was ever doing in the sleeping state, why it preferred the sleeping state, why it developed a defense mechanism against this wonderful waking state, and may even wish never to return to the sleeping state again.
    But when it has returned once again to the sleeping state, it can't imagine what it ever saw in the waking state, and it wants to stay where it is now just as powerfully as it wanted to remain in the waking state a few moments or hours ago.

  

(The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus)

 

    Gold's teaching frequently deals with the apparent duality between the ego-personality (the "I" that, as Da says, is the body) and the trans-life essence.  It is important to remember that the trans-life essence is not a 'personality' but a set of karmic preferences--the seed from which a personality sprouts in the course of a lifetime.  Your personality is not going to survive your death.  Speaking of which....

Gold's most widely known opus is The American Book of the Dead.  In it he transforms the basic instructions of the Tibetan Book of the Dead into American cultural terms--quite successfully.

    At a particularly difficult time in my own life, I was reciting the book for a friend's father.  One morning the reading was
 

Alas, what a bummer that after all this time floundering around in the stinking swamp of planetary existence, after countless ages of creation and destruction, without beginning and without end, while so many others were able to liberate themselves, I haven't been able to liberate myself or even ask for help.  Now I'm going to get on with it, even here in the place of rebirth.  It's not too late even now.  From this moment on I feel sickened by the six lower dimensions.  There's nothing there for me.  I don't want any part of them.  There's nothing to learn there, nowhere to hide, nothing but suffering and filth.  I'm tired of them.  Now it's time for me to give up living in the six lower dimensions, so I'm going to bring avout my spontaneous rebirth in a lotus flower at the feet of the beloved in the pure realm of the Clear Shining Light.  I'm going to bathe in the pure light and wash off all this foul reeking crap that's been accumulating on me.  I feel filthy and disgusted by all worldly accumulations.  I have to be cleansed of them.  Now I'm going.  I'm going.  I'm being born in the realm of luminous Clear Light and the beloved will cleanse me.  I can feel the purity.  I can feel it.  I can feel it.  I'm going.

     This instruction was so appropriate to my own situation at the time that a friend who had overheard me giving the reading thought I was speaking spontaneously about myself.  Indeed, the whole course of the readngs was so in synch with the unravelling of my own life that I began to suspect that I was actually the one who had died, and that I was hearing the readings that were being done for me as  if they were readings that I was doing for someone else. Later ,the Khenpos would tell us that  most people who die don't realize that they've died and are in the bardo, because the mind tends to blank out the event of death.  For this reason it is prudent to always assume that you are in fact dead, and that 'what is happening to you' is always your own consciousness unwinding.

So if I was dead then, what/where am I now?

    Gold reminds us that not all births take place into infant human bodies.  How would you know if you had been reborn into an adult human body and picked up on its ambient memories? The books begins with an introduction that is distinct from what is found in more traditional Tibetan versions  of The Book  on Liberation Through Hearing, but is extremely valuable in its own right.  The following passages in particular have served me very well.
 

One of the first problems in dealing with the between-lives area is realizing that it's not really between lives or re-incarnation, but the same life lived through Creation, skipping -like a flat stone on water into the voidness of non-Creation--but the change in state doesn't change the life you're living, and ought not to affect your consciousness unless your consciousness is dependent on your actions in Samsara, the world of illusionary influences and centralized ego-reality. When you first came into the cosmos, your idea principally was--or at any rate your hope is now--to maintain the thread of consciousness throughout your experience in the universe,  Usually it works out that what with all the fascination and sudden experiences and emotional-sensory shocks, and sympathy with the focus of attention of the biological machine, and constant demands on your attention, before you realize that you're being quietly dragged into a tar-baby little by  little (you rarely get caught all at once), there you are, nodding ironically, muttering something in the general direction of 'Sonofabitch!  Got me again!'
...

For every ounce of intention you have of getting yourself liberated, there's a trillion tons of counter-intention stacked up against you.
...

 Well, listen, this jerk has been through the labyrinth more times than a cat howls in heat, and if there's something stupid you can do, either in a higher or a lower dimension in the labyrinth, why, I've done it--sometimes more than twice. There are several fundamental problems in the labyrinth.  One of them is the simplest to spot and the hardest to deal with.  You got so caught up in the pursuits of primate life that you're no longer interested in your prime aim as a voyager--the aim you had when you came into the cosmic theater in the first place, and now you're interested in how it all comes out and in doing something  about it by changing the experience.  You're so interested in all of that that you haven't got the time or interest to waste on all this ethereal and impractical 'spiritual stuff.'  All right, no one can force you to practice the teachings.  Maybe this time all you want to do is to re-familiarize yourself with them--not actually put them to use.  So you read, study,  go to a few lectures, maybe do a little hatha yoga, jogging, racquetball; if you want to go further out with it, you could change your diet, wear looser clothes, non-leather sandals, and take up transcendental tennis. That's the first major problem of the macrodimensional domains--no practical experience during the lifetime.  The middle of a voyage in the macrodimensions is one hell of a time to get your first practical experience with the teaching.

Let's say you have been practicing.  Then what are you doing with a paperback version of this book? Well, first of all, it's absolutely necessary to rid oneself of that pride peculiar to human primates, that conviction that we need none of this stuff because we're already there.  This is just the sort of arrogant nonsense that's going to guarantee that we get knocked off in the first stages of the between-lives section of the labyrinth.  Imagine someone saying to the Clear Light, 'Well, as it happens, I was just a Sufi before I woke up dead!'  That puts a nice neat barrier between you and a gentle blending with the Absolute, doesn't it?
 

    Basically, if you have even the slightest suspicion that you might, at some point in your life, die--you owe it to yourself to read this book.  And not just read it; study it repeatedly and put it into practice in your life--if that's really what this is.  Maybe you are dead, and this is the guide's best or only way of attempting to reach you and insure your liberation.  Naah....

    Gold opens the book with a poem that has become one of my favorites:

It's when you first get up in the morning
And smell your own breath
And sit on the john to let out
the day's first blast
Of methane and sulphur dioxide
That it hits home the hardest...
The whole system
Operates on rot.

It isn't just  the body,
That fabulous human machine,
That tip-to-toe mass of organic decay
in seething fury to survive,
One microorganism over another,
Fighting like fury to stay on top,
Dominating the dung heap for a single moment
And succumbing the next,
That walking, talking
Semi-plastic garbage bag
With the slim semblance
Of Intelligence and Purpose.
And here you are
Sittting smack dab in the middle of it all,
Right in the center of the swamp,
A king or queen riding the wild horse of rot,
And here's another box of cereal about to
Become one with the human host,
Another few hours of fodder
For the great compost heap,
Fuelling it for the day ahead.
Steeling itself for meaningful deeds,
Girding its loins for the far-reaching,
Earth-shaking events,
The sky-piercing thoughts,
All-embracing transdimensional visions,
The subltle shadings of emotional delights,
Lover and beloved
Gazing with rapturous lustful wonder
A swooning, sweeping, swaying dance of love,
An interlude of romance,
A moment's brush with beauty,
Another afternoon of love,
Another sexy bag of rot.

 
    Gold is not interested in becoming the center of a movement.  He operates in a small town in the Sierra foothills, does not tour or advertise,  and has no 'centers' elsewhere.  It seems that he would rather inspire people to do what he does than to follow him, and that is what we as a group are attempting to do.  In many ways we found his teaching more in tune with our cultural tendencies than the Vajrayana; the two are certainly not incompatible.  If you already live near him, or are willing to move, he might be your man; if you're just looking for great reading, hey--all his books are pure Gold.

The American Book of the Dead, by E.J. Gold, Gateways/IDHHB, Inc. 1990
The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus, by E.J. Gold, Gateways/IDHHB, Inc. 1986
Practical Work on Self, by E.J. Gold, Gateways/IDHHB, Inc. 1989
Creation Story Verbatim, by E.J. Gold, Gateways/IDHHB, Inc.1986
The Original Handbook for the Recently Deceased, by Claude Needham, Ph.D., Gateways/IDHHB, Inc. 1992