My Life Among the People of the Book
by Iven Lourie
When a colleague of mine asked for an essay on working with The American Book of the Dead (now in its 25th anniversary edition), with death and dying, I thought immediately of an article I published years ago in a small newspaper. This was The Crestline Courier, in a Southern California mountain community where I first studied with E.J. Gold and read his Book of the Dead. The article is here for you to read, my exhibit “A,” but my colleague asked for something more meaty, more current. What I decided to recount, to be honest, is my sketchy version of how the book got written and published in 1974, before any but the most academic translations of the Bardo Thodol were in circulation and before the concept of guiding the Being after death had penetrated our culture (in spite of Dr. Leary’s effort with his hallucinogenic version, The Psychedelic Experience).
I believe E.J. Gold had been working on writing his own bardo text for years. At Kung Fu Health Food Restaurant, where I was waiting tables one day in the late summer of ‘74, E.J. Gold was sitting at a table conversing with several students. The topic turned to the Tibetan Bardo Thodol, the psychedelic experience, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Medieval Books of Hours. This conversation was evidently a continuation of an ongoing discussion from Gold’s days in Hollywood. He had been cooking this idea for years, talking about it with the likes of musicians Jim Morrison and others at the sound studios of Capitol Records; with Burgess Meredith or William Shatner on the TV set of Name of the Game or Lost in Space at Universal Studios; or after hours in those dark, polished wood booths at Musso and Frank’s Grille.
Which brings me back to the very white and sunlit room of the Kung Fu Restaurant, where I just happened (ha!) to be lucky enough to be waiting on tables the day that the other shoe dropped. The upshot of this conversation was that every culture, every religion, had its Book of the Dead. This map of the labyrinthine territory of the Real World, beyond the human corner of reality, was omnipresent in human history. Only post-industrialized Western society had ignored this ancient teaching. And what was currently available to the avid seeker? Translations by Evans-Wentz and the like, filled with unpronounceable Sanskrit terms, footnotes filling half the page to explain and interpret the literal translation, scholarly commentaries and speculations. What happened to the “liberation by sound,” the mantram for the Being, the sacred text intoned at the bedside of the terminal man or woman? What was needed was an American book of the dead.
Very shortly after that conversation, perhaps that night, E.J. Gold sat down at the composer and began wailing away at his version of the bardo instructions. He worked at a typesetter, as was his preference—not a typewriter, certainly not a computer terminal—with no chance to correct or retype, without re-doing entire pages. He just wrote the text straight out, creating a typeset manuscript in lieu of a first draft…. What that means is, letter for letter, word for word, sentence for sentence, whatever the author typed—that was what went to the printer. Within a few days—presto! the American Book of the Dead was in our hands, being read aloud by twenty or thirty of us in the meeting room at the training center, Maison Rouge. We got a crash course in how to set up a reading altar, the appropriate ritual for encapsulating our reading space, giving readings, and the best approach to articulation. Above all, we learned attentiveness to the Being “in transit” and concentration on the readings. Shortly after that, we became clerics and priests of Thanatology, developed the first version of the Transit Practitioner’s Course (now the Labyrinth Reader’s Course), founded an International Society of Terminal Midwifery, and the rest is history.
That original text went through several edits and modifications, copies were printed on a small offset press and velo-bound for the Practitioners. One of the students, on his own initiative, took a copy down to the Bay Area and showed it to Sebastian Orfali at And/Or Press, and presto! American Book of the Dead was issued in 1975 as a trade paperback with its signature red cover, gold and black trim, the colors of a Tibetan sanctuary. Somehow the dates seem compressed in my memory, not quite right. How could E.J. Gold have composed the book, revised it several times, published it in-house, then gotten a literary publisher and gotten it in print, all in a matter of several months? Something seems wrong with the chronology, as I reconstruct that period. How could all that, not to mention the revolution in my own life, have occured between June and November of 1974? Nonetheless, that was the time I spent there, and it was like that, a time of high compression. The summer of 1974 in Los Angeles for specialized training, then Kung Fu Restaurant and Maison Rouge in the Fall, then home to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving, when I learned that my mother had cancer. Incurable, wasting, terminal cancer. I stayed home, got a job, and lived in my parents’ home, with my wife-to-be, helping however I could, until my mother died March 1, 1975. We got married in late May, flew back to Tucson, bought a car, and packed up and drove to Crestline to rejoin the Theological Seminary, the Restaurant, the community of students.
For me, it was a Way of Life. It was a dying to life, to my life, but also a new life, rising from the dead. A resurrection, a vita nuova. I did know, from early on, that I was part of this community, till death do us part, so to speak. I figure that because it is our great privilege and gift to know even this much of the Real True Story of Life—it is only right that we function as bardo guides for others in this world. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man shows the way.” The Voyager is all of us, and the Voyage is the Destination.
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Following is my 1977 article. Wait. A few more introductory lines. I find in reading it that the main issue of this article, grief at terminus versus guiding the Being, is still germane 23 years later. Grief and loss is still the focus of the self-help literature, while there are far fewer books that are actually about preparing for terminus or guiding the being through terminus and beyond. Moreover, I realize in 2000, sitting here in Northern California at Gateways Books & Tapes, the publishing house that has kept American Book of the Dead in print for 25 years, that this article represents for me—I am after all a writer and editor—the step that comes after the fireworks and romance of one’s first initiation. I had to do a great deal, and it took me some years, to integrate the insights of those six months in 1974 into my life. I had to develop ways to communicate and share the teaching, a ministry that would work for me, and publishing that article was one step in that direction. Here’s how I sounded in 1977.
What dying means to me
by Iven Lourie
February 18, 1977 – The Crestline Courier
I can’t recall wondering about death when I was young. It hardly seems possible but I don’t think I worried about it or found it mysterious or anything of that nature. I remember burying dead animals we’d found in the backyard. It was an occasion for tears when a pet died, and we gave all our deceased pets elaborate burial rituals. The grave of a boxer dog that was run over by a car has been a landmark at my family’s country place for years. The decayed remainder of the dog’s collar still marks the spot. The passing of these various animals was upsetting, but never for long. It never led me to speculate on what happened to them. I reacted strongly to the Korean War newsreels. That frightened me enough to leave a vivid impression. I wanted to forget about it as soon as possible, not speculate.
The first time death meant anything to me personally was when my grandfather died. I was 5 years old. Even though I had been ambivalent about him, I cried because he was dead.
I lost a friend my senior year at college and this did have a strong impact on me. This young man was shot on the street for no apparent reason, while he was returning from the library. This tragedy created shock waves in my group of friends. Seemingly senseless and even ironic in many ways, it was sudden and unprecedented for all of us. We were in what I would describe as a state of shock for 3 or 4 days. There was a great deal of grief and pain among us. Most of us were not led to confront the fact of dying. We were mainly caught up in lamenting or speculating over destiny and its twists, because that is what we were willing to consider. I was dazed and locked up inside myself throughout the preliminaries and the funeral ceremony, but when my friend’s younger brother shoveled the first dirt onto his coffin at the cemetery, I felt my chest break open with grief. For the first time, at this point, I accepted that my friend’s body was dead and cold. And I suddenly also felt all the grief of his family’s loss. There was a tendency, after the shock wore off, for us to bury any emotional reactions we had to this death in a growing cynicism. All that survived for me was the very positive memory of my friend when alive.
Loss; that was the primary association I had with dying and death. The great loss and grief experienced by the living was very real. I feared death, and so I didn’t want to think about it. There were other ideas about life and death I was assimilating, from reading philosophy and literature. But these did not connect at all with my experience and emotions regarding death. It took many years and a whole train of experiences to bring my philosophical and spiritual ideas together with my life experience. By the time I read The American Book of the Dead, I was open to the possibility that the life of my material body was not the only life I had, not only after dying but also during this human life. I read The American Book of the Dead with great interest; it had a strong attraction for me, for in it I recognized experiences and states of mind I had experienced, but without having understood or assigned any significance to them.
I had felt very strongly at times there was a Divine meaning in everyday events, that at times of crisis a message was being sent if only we could receive it. I could recall dreaming about things that afterwards happened, and also feeling that a guide was giving me advice in a dream.
The ideas on transit experience not only matched information I had found elsewhere, they also seemed logical and sound according to my “common sense.” I immediately began study and Transit Training with I.D.H.H.B., Inc., in Los Angeles, and at the Crestline Theological Seminary, which offers the Transit Practitioners Course.
As it happens I was called away from my studies to join my family in a time of crisis. My mother was dying of cancer and I went through the very painful process of death and mourning with my family. Although my own perspective was strongly influenced by my training, I was unable to offer consolation to my father or mother because they chose to hold onto the hope of a medical cure until near the end. For the first time, I found that I had a profoundly different outlook on death, even my mother’s death, than those around me. My concern was always for my mother and how she was handling the experience of dying, how she was preparing herself to give up the physical body and the business of her life here. From time to time, I was still subject to fits of grief and upset in identification with other family members or feeling sorry for myself. But, I did not shift all my concern from my mother, as she neared death, to the living and their experience of loss. The loss remained, but my attention was focused on how my mother was doing. As a result, I noted the changes that she went through during the last week of her life; the deliberate way in which she completed the business of her life, the dignified and firm way in which she handled the grief of those around her. I felt I had learned a great deal from her actions, which had been exemplary and impeccable. I read The American Book of the Dead for my mother after her death, in private, using a favorite chair and a picture of her. Again while the family was immersed in grief and consolations, I still felt that I had a responsibility toward my mother. My readings went well, and I had strong feelings of contact with my mother.
I now know a great deal more than I did about the process of dying. I feel differently. This change has come about through my acceptance of the teaching concerning death and transit. The crux of the change is a shift from concern for the living who are bereaved to a continuing concern for the dying. How an individual experiences death, how well prepared he is, how confident and calm, these are the key factors in ending the whole life-time well. Our efforts should be on behalf of the dying and not preoccupied in feeling sorry for ourselves.
