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 re
adings. Shortly after tha
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 Lo
s Angeles for specialized
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.

from My Life Among the People of the Book
by Iven Lourie