Two classics of literature separated in time by nearly 90 years. Very different in their style of writing, yet similar in size, and in the full on aim of attempting to consider everything imaginable in life and in death. Both works come chock full of philosophy, metaphysics, alchemy, magic, and bardo information but differ drastically in presentation. The narrative seems clear and evident in Moby Dick, we always know where we are in the story. It's just the opposite, extremely opaque, in Finnegans Wake. The new reader often has no idea what's going on in terms of any storyline and is advised to consult a reader's guide such as the excellent one by Tindall or Campbell & Robinson's Skeleton Key. The surface plot of Finnegans Wake seems either inconsequential or non existent. It all takes place over one night with the protagonists asleep until the end. Moby Dick's plot is more substantial, but you could probably cut out two thirds of it or more and not affect the basic elements of the story.
These two magnum opuses offer masterpieces of metaphor over multiple levels of sense. W.H. Auden called Moby Dick an 'elaborate synecdoche' in which whale fishing becomes an image of all our lives, teeming with parable and multiple symbolic correspondences. The same description could easily apply to Finnegans Wake sans the whale fishing. A snapshot of the microcosm - the local environment, representing the macrocosm – all and everything, seems the ultimate synecdoche. One example of this in Finnegans Wake: the initials HCE, that of the main protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, also stand for "Here Comes Everybody."
Melville writes of uniting the microcosm with the macrocosm at the end of chapter 70, "The Sphynx:"
"O Nature and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." In this chapter, they behead a Sperm Whale and "in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert." Captain Ahab proceeds to address the dismembered head as if its spirit lived on and could communicate what it has seen in its travels. This seems on par with a magician grilling a non-human entity that's been invoked:
"speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in there. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved among this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold, this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home."
This quote alludes to the land of the dead at the end; that subject is another point in common between MD and FW as we shall see. Death runs throughout Moby Dick. The first words in the book come from a person who is dead. Chapter 49, "The Hyena," laughs at death. The cycle of death and rebirth/renewal appears throughout Finnegans Wake. Obviously, the title itself immediately suggests Finnegan's death. The reader confronts death on the front cover.
The use of Cabala provides another commonality between Joyce and Melville. Cabala appears evident in the above quote. The Hebrew letter Resh means "head" and corresponds with The Sun in the Tarot. Melville demonstrates this correspondence with the phrase: "That head upon which the upper sun now gleams."
No direct evidence exists that Joyce read Moby Dick except, possibly, for the apparent appearance of it in the Wake. The occurs in FW page 13 in the penultimate paragraph. Before we examine that, let's look at what immediate precedes the great white whale's entrance. Top of page 13:
"So. This Is Dyoublong?
Hush! Caution! Echoland!"
Dyoublong alludes both to Dublin and to the phrase "do you belong?"
The second line suggests the Bardo of HCE, with the suggestion reinforced in the subsequent paragraph which has multiple references to death. For instance:
"gravemure" = grave + mure (wall). This gets reinforced a couple sentences later with: "Hear? By the mausolum wall." Then: "With a grand funferall" (funeral, combined with the suggestion of laughing at death). In this paragraph we find multiple references to music and listening or hearing, and a couple to magic. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, aka the Bardo Thodol, translates as the power of liberation by sound. At the end of the paragraph for example: "They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves."
"They" and "theirs" in the last four sentences could easily refer to disembodied souls traveling in the land of the dead; "foriver" alludes to both "forever" and "for river." The river, in Finnegans Wake represents the flowing of LIFE. Next sentence: "lichening" = listening; "for allof" – all of time or all of life? Then "pretumbling forover" seems a unique way to represent the Bardo, the territory a soul enters after life ("forover") and before rebirth ("pretumbling"). The last sentence: "harpsdischord" – many events feel discordant in the Bardo, but some things feel harmonious like a harpsichord might sound; "ollaves" reflects "allof" again, but also suggests "all loves" (all our dearly departed) by switching the "o" with the "a"; "ollaves" also reminds me of those small balls of fruit that go in martinis though I honestly don't know what that has to do with anything.
The paragraph just examined also contains another reference to Dublin, "Dbln." Dublin plays prominently into the Bardo or subconscious mind of both HCE and Joyce. Believe it or not, all this appears relevant to Moby Dick.
In the essay "Moby Dick's Hyphen" by David Collard, which appears in his book, Multiple Joyce, he writes that what Melville does for whales and the whaling industry, i.e. going into it at considerable length and detail, Joyce does for Dublin in Ulysses. If you're thinking of picking up a copy of Multiple Joyce to read how Moby Dick may have influenced him, don't. I just communicated everything he has to say on the subject. It's not a bad essay on Moby Dick, yet with little connection to Joyce. If you, like me, wondered why the original title of Moby-Dick has a hyphen in it that never appears in the text, there's nothing mysterious about it. According to Collard, a typesetter inadvertently put a hyphen in the title and it stayed, basically a typo. The rest of Multiple Joyce looks good, but I haven't read enough to recommend it.
Skipping the next paragraph in FW p. 13 after the one just analyzed brings us closer to our whale friend:
"So, how idlers' wind turning pages on pages, as innocens with anaclete play popeye antipop, the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds, annals of themselves timing the cycles of events grand and national, bring fassilwise to pass how."
The first phrase: how idlers' wind turning pages on pages could suggest reading a book. I know Joyce scholars give a different interpretation of "idlers'" so this may seem purely coincidental, but in Moby Dick chapter 102, "A Bower in the Ardacides" Melville calls the skeleton of a dead Sperm Whale washed up on the beach "a gigantic idler!" The next sentence has: "the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver." Weaver is used metaphorically – when you read the whole passage it appears akin to the Sufi metaphor of weaving together the fabric of existence.
"the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds" = the leaves of the living in the book of the dead. Joyce uses "leaves" multiple times in FW as a pun for leaving the body – told to me by Robert Anton Wilson in his Tales of the Tribe class.
In the same chapter, slightly before Melville calls the whale skeleton a gigantic idler, he writes: "Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure." The weaving metaphor plays throughout this section. "Leaves", as a metaphor for the soul leaving the body, right beside "the great sun" recalls the Egyptian Book of the Dead where the primary goal of the soul is to unite with Osiris after bodily death. Osiris qabalistically corresponds with the sun.
In his mid 19th Century ornate language Melville sums up this section with: "Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories."
Books of the dead deliver instructions and navigational tips for passing through the Bardo hopefully liberating the soul or programming a favorable rebirth (curly-headed glories). This information appears practically useful whether going through a physical, biological death or a psychological one with a temporary death of the ego. Both Finnegans Wake and Moby Dick qualify as books of the dead.
"bring fassilwise to pass how." I don't have a good read on this line and would only be speculating. In an earlier missive on FW, I postulated that the question "how?" appears central to the opus.
At last we get to our whale:
1132 A.D. Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a Runnel. Blubby wares upat Ublanium.
1132 A.D. looks like a date, but seems more cabalistic, to me.
11 = magic, or energy tending to change; 11 also = a circularity of form or motion. Joyce had a strong interest in cycles of time. Finnegans Wake has a circular form.
32 = the ten Sephiroth (spheres) on the Tree of Life + the twenty-two paths that run between them. The Tree of Life provides the form for the filing cabinet of correspondences. Qabala can be considered one kind of coding or mapping of consciousness. It also maps the Bardo. These particular correspondences appeared in Sepher Sephiroth first published in 1909 by Aleister Crowley and derived from the work of MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett of the Golden Dawn. Joyce knew people from those circles such as William Butler Yeats and others. It seems probable those correspondences were known to him.
A.D. = after death therefore indicating the Bardo.
"groot hwide Whallfisk" sounds like great white whale-fish. "groot" = Danish and Dutch for "big;" "hwide" = Danish for "white;" "Whalfisch" = German for whale; "fisk" = Danish for fish. Melville mostly (incorrectly) considers whales to be fish in Moby Dick. The exception being when he considers how they have to breath air in chapter 85, "The Fountain."
Joyce's word for whale, "Whallfisk" contains both "all" and "whall" (sounds like "wall") – connecting with the multiple mentions of "wall" and "all" earlier on this page. Two earlier instances of "wall" occur beside images of death – by the grave and by the mausoleum. The Hebrew letter "nun" translates as "fish" in English and corresponds with the Tarot card Death. Whallfisk shows another wall beside death with the fish correspondence. Could this wall indicate the separation or boundary between life and death?
Men would look like ants when doing their business with a great white whale; "emmets" appears an archaic British word for ants. Extensive whale hunting would seem archaic even in Joyce's time; "wondern" sounds like wandering, but also "wonder" = a cabalistic pun for "all" when considering the mystical tautology, "all is one," (found at the very end of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, and elsewhere); "wondern" = wonder + n; nun = n = Death; ergo wondern cabalistically puts "all" besides "death." When you die, either biologically or egotistically, mystics say you have an opportunity to connect with "all."
"Blubby wares" = the oil obtained from whale blubber used as fuel in lamps at one time.
"upat" = "up at," but also translates as "four" in the Cebuano language, a language spoken in the Phillipines near where a lot of the action in Moby Dick takes place. Of course, for Joyce and his unbridled use of homonyms, four = for. Joyce uses the word "for" multiple times on this page (see above). Joyce starts the paragraph on p. 13 that I didn't examine: "Four things therefore..." as kind of a humorous pun on "four" with "therefore."
"Ublanium" appears close to an archaic name for Dublin (Eblana) and also sounds like Dublin.
Blubby wares upat Ublanium translates as"Whale oil for Dublin." Perhaps Joyce alludes to the archaic name for Dublin because of the archaic nature of this illumination. Whale oil stopped being used to light up lamps somewhere around 1860.
"Blubby wares" could easily indicate a shorthand term for Moby Dick (full original title Moby-Dick or, The Whale) as Melville provides encyclopedic information (wares) on just about every aspect of whales one can think of. Since Joyce identifies so strongly with Dublin, could blubby wares for Dublin, or blubby wares up at Dublin be a sly acknowledgement by Joyce of the influence of Moby Dick?
It's true that these passages analyzed don't provide an explicit connection to Melville or Moby Dick, but it comes pretty close with "great white whale," Moby Dick indisputably being the most famous one in literature. Let's call this circumstantial evidence.
More circumstantial evidence: Moby Dick begins by looking at the etymology of "whale." The first quote comes from Richard Hakluyt (Melville incorrectly spells it Hackluyt) and refers to a "whale-fish," very close to Joyce's "Whallfisk." Hakluyt goes on to stress the importance of "the letter H, "which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word..." Joyce's word for white, "hwide" begins with h.
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This seems the extent of Moby Dick appearing in Finnegans Wake if indeed it does at all. There are a couple of other parallels, but they don't seem convincing to me as anything more than coincidence. The closest comes on FW page 210 with: ". . . a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick" followed a couple of lines later by"two appletweed stools for Eva Mobbely." Someone else might have more luck connecting this, or anything else in this section to Moby Dick, I don't buy it, or maybe I don't see it. FW p. 492 has the name, Afamado Hairductor Achmed Borumborad whose initials make AHAB, and does show Arabic overtones, but the rest of the section appears to connect with One Thousand and One Nights more commonly known as Arabian Nights. It seems to have nothing to do with Captain Ahab.
Some general parallels between the two novels:
both appear very influenced by The Bible and by the works of Shakespeare.
the writing in both novels sounds musical, at times; moreso with Joyce. Both books incorporate songs; I only recall one in Moby Dick in chapter 9, "The Sermon," but the "Extracts" section at the beginning quotes from songs.
Joyce got known for putting lists and catalogs in. Melville has a little of that as does Rabelais who influenced them both. Melville quotes Rabelais in the opening section and directly mentions him later in the text.
Moby Dick originally was published in England as The Whale before assuming its final title, Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Wake and Whale sound alike and rhyme at the beginning. In the latter, taking out the "h" and replacing "l" with "k" turns Whale into Wake. The word Joyce uses for whale, "Whallfisk" removes the "h" in fish and replaces it with a "k." Would Joyce make such a subtle nod to Melville, by switching two letters? In my opinion, absolutely yes.
Water runs in the background (often the foreground), throughout both novels. Finnegans Wake famously starts with riverrun, sometimes called the "river of life." Most of the action in Moby Dick occurs in the ocean. It starts in the rain with Ishmael deciding to go to sea. The second paragraph begins a lyrical ode to water continuing for a few pages before landing on the same metaphor Joyce uses: "But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." Joyce ends FW with "The keys to. Given!" before returning to the river that started it all.
This is the best video I've seen in a long time. The trippy visuals guarantee that you can watch it multiple times and see something new and different each time. The music presents a deep dive into the symbiotic relationship, the connections and reconnections through the blood that flows between mother and child beginning in the the womb. A spiritual voyage of discovery through a dreamscape bardo sequence leading to a return to the source.
David Pellicciaro landed the vision, wrote and arranged the music and performed it with a little help from his friends: Dale Fanning - drums, Wally Ingram - percussion, Scott Padden - bass, Scott Law - guitars, Beverly Modell - backing vocals, David Pellicciaro – piano, keys, sound design, vocal. Recorded by Dave at Lucky Devil Sound and by Danielle Goldsmith at Tiny Telephone, both in Oakland. Mixed and mastered by Yours Truly at High Velocity, Nevada City, CA. The video was directed and edited by Dylan Cortez-Modell based on Dave's concept.
William Blake would have enjoyed seeing his influence here. Timothy Leary may have reckoned it as a total immersion into the genetic code, a tour through the futique circuits of DNA. Enjoy!
This is the third article in a series on contemporary and ancient Books of the Dead. The first piece is here and the second one is there.
spiriti questi? personae?
tangibility by no means atasal
but the crystal can be weighed in the hand
formal and passing within the sphere: Thetis,
Maya, Ἀφροδίτη,
- Ezra Pound, Canto LXXVI
Note: "atasal" = union with God; from Avicenna.
Thetis = mother of Achilles who made him immortal, except for his heel, by dipping him in the River Styx, the river that runs through the Underworld.
Maya, also spelled Maia = the daughter of Atlas and mother of Hermes via a liaison with Zeus. The Greek word = Aphrodite, the goddess of love
The 23 Enigma – encountering a network of synchronicities and coincidences related to the number 23 – seems quite familiar to many readers of Robert Anton Wilson. He laid out his experience with this phenomenon in Cosmic Trigger – the Final Secret of the Illuminati. Multiple listings to Twenty-three appear in the Index beginning with William Burroughs telling him about it and recurring frequently until nearly the end of the book. The importance of this engima to Wilson's Hermetic development cannot be overstated. He compared it to the flash of insight Dr. James Watson received walking down a spiral staircase leading him to consider DNA as spiral-shaped, an intuitive hunch that led to cracking the DNA code. This opened up the world of Science and applied Technology to all kinds of new beneficial healing advances for humanity. "23 was my spiral staircase, my intuitive signal." ( CT I p. 46, Hilaritas). The 23 Enigma served as an entry point for Wilson to crack, actually more like construct, the code of numerology and correspondence found in the science of Cabala. I contend that this also brought beneficial healing advances for some parts of humanity through his writing and teaching.
Wilson presented the 23 Enigma so well that it entered the underground cultural lexicon. Some examples of this off the top of my head include an excellent, but short-lived (1987-1988) science fiction TV show called Max Headroom. The main character works as an investigative reporter for Network 23. Around the same time, a great film packed with esoteric information, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, came out. It opens with a Warner Bros. style cartoon, Somethin's Cookin'. In it, Roger gets tasked with babysitting Baby Herman after Mother says she's off to the beauty parlor. The baby innocently gets into all kinds of dangerous situations that Roger frantically tries to protect him from resulting in various daredevil slapstick antics. A refrigerator falls on Roger's head at the end of it, but he blows his part by seeing tweety birds instead of stars and gets fired. He pleads with the director, "please drop the refrigerator on my head again," the director replies, "we've dropped the refrigerator on your head 23 times already!" When you see this, especially after viewing it more than once and knowing the context of the rest of the film, it feels more like a deliberate inclusion rather than a random coincidence
In 2007 this enigma entered the mainstream with the film The Number 23 starring Jim Carrey – I have not seen this. The description of it says the protagonist finds an obscure book about 23 that leads to a descent into darkness. As recently as a few weeks ago on the TV show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Oliver played a clip of a jury foreperson reading the guilty verdict on 34 charges brought against a political candidate. To great comedic effect, Oliver showed each charge of guilty being read one by one in sequence only stopping at the 23rd.
According to Wilson odd coincidences and synchronicities tend to multiply as one gets more involved with the occult. I can verify this through my experience and would add that not only do synchronicities increase upon the spiritual path they can also help to guide. I've heard reports from several people that coincidences involving 23 become spookily more frequent after reading Wilson on the enigma. Part of the reason may certainly be attributed to selective attention. We see more 23s because we're looking for them or we gain increased maze brightness to that number simply from having read about the enigma; they jump out to us because we've tuned in to the phenomena. Anyone working along the lines of Scientific Illuminism is encouraged to be skeptical of assigning significance whenever seeing a 23. Yet, there seem occurrences of 23 (or any number important to us) not so easily explained.
Anyone who has come across and assimilated some kind of self-observation practice, whether from the disciplines of Buddhism, Yoga, Gurdjieffian 4th Way practices or something else can gradually become cognizant of the source of their attention. Meaning that a process of discernment can get applied to numerological encounters – did I make it up or is there some sort of occult communication going on? Perhaps a communication from one of the higher brain circuits? For the most part, these higher circuits seem occult (hidden) to our ordinary awareness. Can the more unknown parts of our DNA and nervous system arrange for synchronicities to communicate to our consciousness via unknown forces and interactions that can be modeled in quantum physics? What is the difference or relationship between a turned on C6 (using Leary's model) and the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (using the Thelemic model)? As RAW said, and I concur, 23 can act as an intuitive signal. A signal for an educational process that starts to alchemically construct and turn on C6 – it seems never ending, yet always growing in beauty like a well tended garden full of joy to produce, and in a vegetable garden if I may extend the metaphor, tasty and joyful to eat the produce.
The discernment process reflexively exercises Intuition. Numerological consideration can be a workout for Intuition. Intuition does get stronger when exercised. Numerology can also be complete self-delusion without a healthy sense of skepticism. Intuition enters the picture when attempting to discern whether you're deluding yourself or if something real is going on.
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PROOF OF CONCEPT (maybe)
Regarding encountering synchronicities in this line of work, the day after I wrote the last few paragraphs a post came up in my Facebook feed from Dan Clore asking about: Musicians of interest to sombunall RAW fans?" I opened up the comments and one of the first ones I saw from Robert Rabinowitz included a quote from Cosmic Trigger about the 23 Enigma. The quote includes Wilson saying: "This, of course, illustrates Jano Watts' concept "The Net" – the lines of coincidence-synchronicity that connect everything-with everything. It is also an analogy with what phsyicists call QUIP – the Quantum Inseparability Principle" Rabinowitz goes on to write that he composed a classical sounding piece of music called QuIP. He plays the flute,with Jai Jeffryes on piano. You can hear the live performance of it here. Right below was a comment from Jessebob Baughman who gave a shout out to this blog and to my discography that I greatly appreciated.
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One of my favorite anecdotes concerns someone who posted a skeptical diatribe on Twitter about the 23 Enigma then went out to eat and was directed to table 23. It both blew and changed his mind. I've often been asked, what does it mean to encounter weird 23 synchronicities? So I've developed a take on it: 23 signals you're in the Bardo now. Let's look at how I got there:
By Gematria 23 = Parted, removed, separated. This easily suggests death - physically when parted, removed and separated from the body, and psychologically when parted, removed and separated from ego and personality.
23 = Joy
23 = A thread. Maintain the thread of consciousness while traversing the labyrinth of the Bardo appears a prime instruction in Tibetan Buddhism.
23 = Life
23 corresponds with death, the Bardo and Life and, for added measure, Joy. It recalls the line: "This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing and the joy of dissolution all." (Liber Legis I:30)
In the "List of Primes" from 777, Aleister Crowley's Qabalistic dictionary,
23 = The glyph of life – nascent life
This nascent life could easily symbolize newborn life in the higher domains of consciousness.
Key 23 in 777's "Table of Correspondences" represents the Hebrew letter Mem, the element Water, and The Hanged Man in the Tarot. In The Game of Life, Leary connects Mem and The Hanged Man (and thus 23) with Caste 13, the first stage of what he calls "Post-Terrestrial Evolution" which include Circuits 5 - 8 in his model.
This Tarot card is an unmistakeable, dramatic signal from DNA that your nervous system contains post-terrestrial circuits which free the body from the gravitational and terrestrial limits of the womb planet. The Birth of the Self. The Self! The Self! - Leary, The Game of Life.
Hexagram 23 in the I Ching = Po/Splitting Apart. This splitting apart can suggest entering the Bardo when the spirit leaves the body or entering a psychological Bardo, even a Chapel Perilous when the higher, post-terrestrial consciousness breaks free from identification with terrestrial consciousness. Sufis call that "waking up."
The six lines of an I Ching hexagram carry a meaning when the line indicates that it changes. The first four changing lines in Hexagram 23 sound rather dire and appear to refer to complete identification with Circuits 1 - 4, what Sufis call "sleep." The fifth changing line could refer to the post-terrestrial side:
A shoal of fishes
Favor comes through the court ladies
Everything acts to further
A "shoal of fishes" could serve as a metaphor for the alignment of our wishes, aims and desires to formulate a Will to wake up. In Thelema, Nuit and Babalon are two of the court ladies. In the opening quote, Ezra Pound utilizes Greek mythology to present the court ladies Thetis, Maya and Aphrodite.
The top changing line in Hexagram 23 means:
There is a large fruit still uneaten.
The superior man receives a carriage.
The house of the inferior man is split apart.
A carriage = a vehicle which could be a kind of "body" for navigating the territory of the post-terrestrial circuits. "Man", of course, represents the ancient generic term Leary rebranded as "WoMan."
And finally . . . in Crowley 101, the online course Robert Anton Wilson gave under the auspices of The Maybe Logic Academy in 2005, we studied Chapter 23 from The Book of Lies. In that chapter, Crowley takes off on the then contemporary expression, "23 Skidoo" which means "get out!" He proceeds to express the word OUT as a Magick formula with sophisticated Qabalah, but more simply I think he also literally means "Get out" judging from the repetition of it five times. Get out of your comfort zone, get out (at least temporarily) of your habitual belief systems, the ordinary way of seeing things. Get out of your sleep. Get out of your enlightenment. It reminds me of entering the Bardo because whatever you get out of seems like a small death. It also recalls the Burroughs/ Gysin formula, "Here to Go" and Crowley's fifth power of the Sphinx, "to go."
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A large number, but not all of 23 synchronicities appear connected to either death or birth. In Cosmic Trigger, Wilson tells the story of William Burroughs introducing him to the 23 Enigma. According to Burroughs, it first came to his attention when an acquaintance by the name of Captain Clark mentioned that he'd been operating a ferry from Tangier, Morocco to Spain for 23 years without an accident. Later that very same day the ferry sunk killing everyone on board including Clark. Burroughs apparently turned on the radio that night and heard of an Eastern Airlines, Flight 23 plane crash also piloted by a Captain Clark. The flight was going from New York to Miami. It doesn't say if anyone died so I searched online for a record of it and couldn't find anything that matched those details. There was a mysterious plane crash of a United Airlines flight 23 in 1933 near Chicago killing everyone onboard that was later suspected to have been caused by a bomb and thus the first instance of terrorism of that kind. Although it was flight 23, it was not Eastern Airlines, wasn't going to Miami and the pilot wasn't Captain Clark. There was a crash near San Francisco in 1964 of a plane flown by a Captain Clark that killed 44 people. Clark had been shot by another passenger. Right time and the same Capitain's name, but it was Pacific Air Lines flight 773 – nothing to do with 23 or Eastern Airlines. Who knows what Burroughs heard on the radio that night, if he misheard it or if the newscaster supplied misinformation. Whatever happened, it caused Burroughs, and later Wilson to begin notating odd occurrences of 23. It's interesting to me that garbled communication brought recognition to the 23 Enigma. What agency was at work to bring this about? It's almost as bizarre, though not as far-reaching, as Albert Hoffman "accidentally" discovering the consciousness altering properties of LSD, another well-known, albeit much stronger Bardo enabler.
Wilson writes of taking a skeptical friend to see the film Charly about a mentally challenged character transformed into a genius by neuro-surgery in Operating Room 23 – a dramatic metaphorical death and rebirth. He lists a number of gangster deaths connected with 23. For instance, "Mad Dog" Coll shot on 23rd street at age 23. There's the story of Laura Huxley attempting to communicate with her husband Aldous after his death. A psychic told her Aldous wanted to communicate "classic evidence of survival" after death. The disembodied Aldous allegedly directed her to read line 23 on a particular page in a particular book on modern writers. The line praised Aldous Huxley "in this admirable communication." What strikes me as odd is how anyone living, even Aldous Huxley before he passed, would know exactly where the book was (fifth book on a certain self'), exactly which page and which line to read. Then, of course, we have the famous incident on July 23rd, 1973 when RAW received his first communication on the importance of Sirius following a prolonged excursion into the Bardo the night before courtesy of Crowley's Holy Guardian Angel ritual, John Lilly's Beliefs Unlimited and sex Magick.
In Cosmic Trigger RAW considers that the 23s might result from selective perception yet identifies this selective perception as the metaprogrammer, one of the higher neurological circuits. In other words, my words, the metaprogrammer selects perceptions to guide the mundane awareness to the expanded awareness of the post-terrestrial territory. Working with Aleister Crowley's terminology, as RAW did at the time, one could say the Holy Guardian Angel selects perceptions for the Initiate to enable its Knowledge and Conversation to function as a Guide. He writes that most of his communication from the HGA came from synchronicities.
Related to selective perception, RAW incorporates 23s into the Discordian Law of Fives "which holds that all incidents and events are directly connected to the number five, or to some multiple of five, or to some number related to five in one way or another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter" (CT I p. 57). His reasoning holds that 23 can break down as 2 + 3 = 5 so whenever you see a 5 or a multiple of 5 you're also implicitly getting a 23. Of course, by the same logic, 5s and their multiples also implicitly contain the numbers 14, 32, and 41. Ingenuity seems the key word for interpreting the Law of Fives. It means "the ability to solve difficult problems in original, clever and inventive ways." It also seems related to "genius" and, for me, connects with a work by Plutarch, De genio Socratis. It refers to the daimon of Socrates, which, according to Plutarch, means that Socrates has a guardian spirit who leads him in the best way. This also perfectly describes the Guide aspect of the Holy Guardian Angel. Paradoxically, the Law of Fives can come across as a rationalization for making shit up to see whatever it is you want to see, or conversely, intuitively connect with the HGA to receive guidance. Crowley connects 5 with The Hierophant from the Tarot, the one who communicates the secrets of the temple. Incidentally, RAW writes that he put all the research and data he found concerning 23s in Illuminatus!
As I see it, strange sightings of 23s can serve as a reminder of being in the Bardo, the space of in betweenness, in between waking sleep and enlightened awareness. Coincidences can serve as a reminder to make the attempt to wake up. Waking up can seem as simple as being fully present in the moment, disengaged from daydreams and mental chatter. According to the Sufis, we naturally wake up several times a day. These instances are called "moments of freedom", but we usually don't recognize them due to the momentum of the sleeping state carrying over through them. They involuntarily slip by. It's not always necessary to take a psychedelic, perform prolonged rituals or meditations, fast, do yoga or otherwise engage in esoteric practices to enter the Bardo, though these don't hurt and can help if done with discipline. You don't have to physically or mentally contort yourself, find a guru or join a cult to construct a path toward higher consciousness.
Traveling through the Bardo, attempting to metaprogram new realities, expanded perceptions, new ways of thinking and doing is not a picnic or a walk in the park despite Illuminatus! literally starting with a walk in New York's Central Park. The Bardo can be terrifying with shocking ambushes, intense radiations, piercing sounds among other gnarly sensations. Chapel Perilous, the Dark Night of the Soul, the ordeal of Crossing the Abyss all occur in this territory. Hence the usefulness of a guide whether it be one's daimon, Holy Guardian Angel or a Book of the Dead of one kind or another – the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams appears one fun and light-hearted example.
Nowadays, we have Films of the Dead. Three of those that immediately come to mind include The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman, Beeteljuice by Tim Burton, and All That Jazz by Bob Fosse. Note that Beeteljuice borrows part of the classic "It's showtime, folks" line from All That Jazz. This three minute and thirty-three second clip gives a taste of the Bardo . . . where all your dreams and nightmares can come true.
The 23 Enigma offers more than a symbol as a bardo indicator. Not every coincidence appears meaningful. 23 can serve as an identifier in a code. Toward the end of chapter 23 in Thomas Pynchon's last novel, Bleeding Edge, there appears what I suspect is an allusion to Robert Anton Wilson's inveterate agnosticism and principle of Maybe Logic interspersed with a few 93s (Thelema adds to 93 making it aka the 93 Current). The CS glyph that I've mentioned once or twice ("slowly cooking", "soon compelling", "cozy schmozy", etc.) runs throughout chapter 23. Pynchon is an acknowledged and brilliant Qabalist. More on the Qabalah in Bleeding Edgehere.
Another instance of 23 as a code identifier appears in Neuromancer by William Gibson. Chapter 23 in that iconic novel opens with: "Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon." Recall that RAW considered 23 a key number; "out" recalls the "get out" formula from The Book of Lies chapter 23; "fish" indicates the Hebrew letter Nun which corresponds with the Tarot trump Death. Thus, 23 (the Bardo) = a key for Death; "nylon" adds to 210 an important Qabalistic number RAW explicates somewhere in the Historical Illuminatus trilogy, if memory serves: two becomes unified as one then becomes none – a progression that appears a form of death and rebirth. A loop in music describes a passage, usually a drum or percussion phrase, that repeats over and over until stopped. A "loop of nylon" thus symbolizes the repetitive, mystical practice of 210. Entrance into a Bardo space appears obvious in that chapter to those who recognize it. It concludes with a death and rebirth. I wrote more on the 23 Enigma and death in Neuromancer, parallels with Leary's S.M.I.2L.E. formula, and its influence on Pynchon's Bleeding Edge in a post here.
* * * * * *
"ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS DEMONSTRATES
THAT LIFE AFTER DEATH IS WITHIN THE REACH OF EVERYMAN . . .
However, soon the Papyrus starts unrolling very precise instructions
for reaching the Land of the Dead. . .
Just as the Old World mariners suddenly glimpsed a round Earth to be circumnavigated and mapped, so awakened pilgrims catch hungry flashes of vast areas beyond Death to be created and discovered and charted, open to anybody ready to take a step into the unknown, a step as drastic and irretrievable as the transition from water to land. That step is from word into silence. From Time into Space.
The Pilgrimage to the Western Lands has started, the voyage through the Land of the Dead. Waves of exhilaration sweep the planet. There is hope and purpose in these faces, and total alertness, for this is the most dangerous of all roads, for every pilgrim must meet and overcome his own death."
– William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands, p. 115
"The Magical Universe, MU, is a universe of many gods, often in conflict. So the paradox of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who permits suffering, evil, and death, does not arise.
"What happened, Osiris? We got a famine here."
"Well, you can't win 'em all. Hustling myself."
"Can't you give us immortality?"
"I can get you an extension, maybe. Take you as far as the Duad. You'll have to make it from there on your own. Most of them don't. Figure about one in a million. And, biologically speaking, that's very good odds." – ibid., 113
Bill Laswell and I both agree that The Western Lands is one of William Burroughs' best works. On one level it's a brilliant, direct and highly informative Book of the Dead. My first encounter came from helping record Burroughs reading from it for the Material album Seven Souls. (constructed and produced by Laswell). Apart from Burroughs and Laswell, this manifestation of Material also includes Rammellzee, Foday Musa Suso, Faheim Dandan, Nicky Skopelitis, Simon Shaheen, L. Shankar, Jeff Bova, Sly Dunbar and Aiyb Dieng. In the title track, Burroughs outlines the fate of the different souls in the afterlife, according to Egyptian mythology.
Material Seven Souls
The Western Lands is a collage-like collection of episodes ranging from fictional and science fictional vignettes to auto-biographical moments, dream fragments, old-cut-up experiments, references to his friends, other books and writers, occult experiments, black magic and more. It includes some of his favorite subjects like giant, killer centipedes taking over remote outposts of civilization and the adventures and modus operandi of the Persian mystic leader Hassan i Sabbah; the latter being another Burroughs influence on Robert Anton Wilson who put Sabbah in Illuminatus!.
The connecting theme running throughout is confronting and conquering death. Unlike Bob Wilson, Burroughs doesn't place any stock in prolonging the life expectancy of the physical body ("it's full of holes, it's full of holes"). Rather, he seems to take the approach of training ourselves to become familiar with the Bardo and the ordeals found there; learning how to tolerate and deal with that territory through gradual exposure. The afterlife technology he presents, though largely Egyptian, can come from anywhere.
"The Hindus teach that the Heaven World is more dangerous for the soul than the Hell World, since it is more deceptive and conduces to the fatal error of overconfidence and assumption of immunity. Like a fighter the soul must be constantly in training lest it grow soft on an ephemeral throne."ibid, p. 137
Much of the bardo training value in The Western Lands doesn't come from any advice or data presented. It comes from the bardo scenes, the moods and feelings of that space evoked by Burroughs' visceral descriptions. He frequently gives a taste of this territory gently letting the reader metaphorically dip their toes into the strange, disorientating, sometimes terrifying Land of the Dead. A couple of brief examples:
"The cave system penetrates the mainland for miles. No one knows how far back the tunnels go. Some narrow into dead ends, others open into huge caverns with underground rivers and lakes. There is a deadly stasis of impregnable grandeur, forming a dense medium, difficult to breathe. One suffocates in fairy lands forlorn, magic casements, ruined palaces."ibid, p. 189
"He sees canals and paths and bridges, a network to the sky with an intricate series of locks and sluices, gardens and houseboats pulled by large turtles with eyes for ropes in their shells. The turtles have webbed feet and move with surprising speed and power, pulling barges of produce and passengers.
In the distance he can see a vast lake in milky light. There is no sun or satellite visible. It must be reflected light that gives such a soft, even distribution. Occasionally he meets people on the path. He can feel their bodies as a precise displacement."ibid. p. 244
The poignancy, profundity, and genuinely masterful quality of the writing comes from Burroughs directly confronting his own death in these pages. The Western Lands begins and ends with a semi-autobiographical character, "the old writer." This character had published a novel once that made quite a stir but was never able to finish another one. Now he was humming the refrain to "Dead Man Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton. On page 3 he gives the writer a name: "So William Seward Hall sets out to write his way out of death."
Not only his own death. His dear friend and closest collaborator, the painter Brion Gysin, died the year before this was published. Gysin, the formulator of a consciousness altering device and doorway into the Bardo called the Dreammachine, was the one who introduced him to the cut-up technique. Gysin does get mentioned by name a few times. As does another friend/collaborator and ex-lover, Ian Sommerville who had an untimely death at the age of 36 in a car accident on Burroughs' birthday in 1976. Sommerville was an electronics technician who also collaborated with Gysin to create the Dreammachine in 1961. The year before, Sommerville found a way to program a random sequence generator that Gysin applied to his cut-up technique. Years later, Robert Anton Wilson tried similar experiments with computer software programmed to create random cut-ups that found their way into his book on synchronicity, Coincidance.
On p. 236 WSB writes a Bardo hotel episode: Le Grand Hôtel des Morts where he glimpses Sommerville several times on an escalator or in the corridors or waiting rooms and references his fatal car accident. He asks the front desk girl if Ian Somerville is there. He is and comes out. They "exchange a few dead sentences. It doesn't matter who says what." He then asks if Brion is there, but he isn't.
The strongest reference to Gysin's death occurs in the last episode in the book where the "old writer . . . had reached the end of words, the end of what could be done with words. And then . . ." A distant memory of the British in Gibraltar evokes a bardo scene that ends with a metaphor for clinging to a dying life. The book ends with:
"In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling upon the Mountain.
'Hurry up, please. It's time.'"
The Parade Bar was a restaurant in Tangier that Brion Gysin bought, set -up and operated primarily for the purpose of having a regular venue where the Moroccan music he loved could be performed live. These were the Master Musicians of Jajouka from a small village a couple of hours away. The "Mountain" seems a reference to Hassan i Sabbah aka, the Old Man of the Mountain. Burroughs mythologizes Sabbah as the one who breaks the monopoly energy vampires have on the gates to Immortality. The last line is what you hear in British pubs announcing the last call for alcohol before closing for the night. T.S. Eliot used the same line in The Wasteland. It's not clear to me if Burroughs intended to reference The Wasteland, but it would be appropriate if so as that poem appears another excursion into the Bardo. A recurring theme in both this book and Burroughs' philosophy is the breaking out of TIME and expanding into SPACE. I don't know if these were officially his last words: when he had his fatal heart attack and was being taken out of his house on a stretcher he said to his companion, "back in no time."
The Western Lands portrays the Bardo of William S. Burroughs, the documentation of the unraveling of his subconscious mind and making it conscious. The deaths of both his parents turns up in an episode on p. 42. The presence of his son, Bill Burroughs Jr. who tragically died young after a difficult life is there too.
* * * * * *
In chapter 4, Kim Carsons, a Western (as in the old west in the U.S. circa late 19th Century/ early 20th Century) character from WSB's previous novel, The Place of Dead Roads – the second novel in a trilogy that concludes with this novel – is given the assignment to find the Western Lands and find out how the Western Lands are created; he wants to find their blueprints. The Western Lands is what the ancient Egyptians equated with Immortality. Burroughs wants to know why the Egyptians needed to preserve the physical body after death with mummification. He considers it a mistake. Carsons is based on the English writer Denton Welch, but also stands in as another alter ego for WSB. The author frequently breaks the so-called fourth wall with direct references to his writing process. In this case, Kim receives a summons from the District Supervisor to get his assignment, but he wants to know why he isn't the District Supervisor since he wrote him. A snippet of the writer's philosophy on writing follows.
Via a fragment of an ancient Mayan codex, Kim's assignment surrealistically morphs into a search for monster centipedes and the Centipede God. The chapter mixes genuine research and data on centipedes embellished greatly by the author's vivid imagination (we hope it's an embellishment!). Carson journeys into the wilds of the South American island of Esmeraldas in search of the centipede cult. The Guide gets introduced as the one taking the expedition down a river into the jungle though Kim has left the narrative and it's now Neferti leading the voyage.
"The Guide consults his map, which opens like an accordian. The map is brightly colored, depicting unusual beings. Some of them are growing upside down into the ground, shoots sprouting from their legs."
At first only referring to him as The Guide, we soon find out the guide's name is Wilson. This could allude to either Robert Anton and/or Peter Lamborn Wilson. I suspect both – they're both quite obviously very experienced Bardo Guides. The latter gets thanked in the acknowledgements section at the beginning for providing research on Hassan i Sabbah.
* * * * * *
Burroughs affirms synchronicity pretty early on (p. 30) calling it a pregnant concept that replaces the "monumental fraud of cause and effect."
Proof of Concept (maybe)
When Burroughs came to Platinum Island to record excerpts from The Western Lands, I knew very little about him and didn't know what to expect. I bought several of his books beforehand to read up on him, but thanks to a busy studio schedule only had time to read one of them, Junky. It was the first book he wrote and doesn't represent his genius.. I did know of his pioneering literary cut-up techniques and had recently read Robert Anton Wilson's new book, Coincidance, which also contained cut-up experiments generated from computer software. I brought my copy in to show Burroughs after we finished recording. He seemed very interested when leafing through the book so I told him he could keep it. This delighted him immensely. After he and his editor James Grauerholz left the studio they went upstairs to visit his friend the famous grafitti artist Keith Haring whose painting studio was a couple of floors above our recording studio. About 6 or so months later a new Burroughs release called Interzone, comprising Naked Lunch outtakes was accidentally delivered to our studio. It was addressed to Haring. Unfortunately (or not, you never know), Keith had confronted and succumbed to his own death from AIDS in the intervening period. I was there when our studio manager received the mail. "You're into Burroughs, aren't you?" He said to me, "here you have this book, Keith Haring won't be needing it." I'd given a book by Robert Anton Wilson to WSB and somehow, through fate, magic or random chance, a book from him was gifted to me.
That one day meeting and recording William Burroughs is one of the highlights of my career as a sound engineer and one of the highlights of my life. Before he arrived, I half expected a somewhat washed-up character from the 60's. When he left, I felt like I'd met one of the most wise individuals I would ever meet and still feel that's true to this day. I wrote up and posted the experience on this blog slightly more than 14 years ago. The follow-up post is here.
I'll leave you with more bardo words of advice from WSB and music from Bill Laswell's Material. This one comes from the album Hallucination Engine.
Words of Advice for Young People – Material featuring William Burroughs.
"Finnegans Wake is similar in structure to the song "Finnegans Wake" and to the four Gospels and to the Egyptian myth of Osiris and to the Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead and 1700 other things at least." – Robert Anton Wilson, Interview on Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell, 1988.
Joyce also regarded himself as an alchemist taking all the gross matter of the world and turning it into sublime eternal art. He also compares his work to what the priest does in the Mass only Joyce felt that he was doing it for real and the priests were faking it which is to turn the mortal into the immortal.
– Robert Anton Wilson, ibid.
My style is heavily influenced by Joyce. Everything I do has a Joycean element in it.
– RAW, ibid.
Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (RIWYCGAW), a film treatment by Robert Anton Wilson, begins with the death of all life on earth via a seemingly relentless montage of atomic explosions – you are dead along with everything else.
The reader-viewer gets thrown immediately into the Bardo. The story begins in the Land of the Dead which turns out to be a dream (or is it?) and recurs until Ignatz (our protagonist witnessing all this) can't tell if it's real or a dream. A TV turns itself on (a definite bardo indicator) with more atomic blasts then the title "Death of Earth." This soon morphs into "Death Of Ego."
Right off the bat this gives us the two primary reasons to learn about the Bardo: 1. Real, physical death and 2. Psychological death when your entire primate identity: ego, personality, intellect, gets blown to smithereens one way or another, and there you are, once again for the first time ever, in the bardo.
Back in the film treatment, the "Announcer" who hipped us to "Death Of Ego" has a photo of a Playboy Bunny behind him. The next time we see him or her, a page later in the book, the photo has changed to the iconic one from 1968 showing the imminent execution of a Vietnamese prisoner on the streets of Saigon. Suddenly, death has gone from the death of all humanity to the death of an individual; from the impersonal to the personal or from the macro to the micro.
The Announcer proceeds to deliver the first direct bardo instruction:
"The process of rebirth can be painful and confusing. Many of the dead do not know they are dead. They think they are just wandering from room to room looking for their car keys – or watching a Cisco Kid movie about urine smugglers. Some even think they are watching educational TV." The opposite page shows Ignatz and his wife Betty Boop watching TV in a scene that appears to be from the 1950s or early '60s. They seem completely oblivious to the dead guy (Frankenstein's Monster) sitting beside them.
Being dead and not knowing your dead seems equivalent to being in the bardo and not knowing you're in the bardo, an obvious interpretation of the photo with Igntaz, Betty and the Monster (a dead guy brought back to life) (RIWYCGAW, p. 21). The last sentence in the quote: "Some even think they are watching educational TV, seems like it could directly hit home with a viewer watching this in a film – "are they talking about me, at this moment?" Might I be in the bardo and not know it? Wilson brilliantly provokes the reader-viewer to such a consideration.
Since we heard it straight from the horse's mouth that everything RAW does has a Joycean element, I'll offer the following connection. The heroic Cisco Kid character originally derives from an O. Henry story, "The Caballero's Way", published in a collection called The Heart of the West (1907). Wilson was certainly well read enough that this reference could be intentional. The weighing of the heart is one of the most well known scenes from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The candidate's heart was placed on the scale to be weighed against the feather of truth placed on the other side of the scale. If the heart proved lighter than the feather then the candidate was allowed to continue on their journey to the land of immortality, known in some instances, as the Western Lands.
Smuggling urine forecasts a joke Wilson introduces later, but looking at a possible Joyce influence here: urine = you're in = you're in the bardo now. The Cisco Kid, via RAW's imaginative movie for dead people, smuggles in (gets it past the conscious censors) the notion that you're in the bardo now.
Incredulity trigger warning for the forthcoming anecdote that relates to the experience of being dead and not knowing it. A shaman I once worked with whom I found credible, told me that after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/2001, he felt a calling to travel there in his body of light to tell the the spirits of the recently deceased what had happened. He claimed that they didn't know they were dead. They had no idea of what happened. He was providing a public service by telling them.
An obvious Joycean-style connection at the beginning of RIWYCGAW occurs with the riffing on "Death Of Ego . . . Death Of Earth", which to an experienced Joycean detective and a Cabalist gives the initials DOE. Wilson cuts to an animation of a small deer dancing then has Ignatz say "A female deer . . . a doe . . ." (the two ellipsis – the three dots – are in the original). If we pursue this pun for further connections, like we might for something in Finnegans Wake, we find an allusion to the common mnemonic for remembering the notes of a diatonic musical scale: do, re, mi, fa so, la, ti, do. It became well known in the musical, The Sound of Music with a song that begins:
"do a deer, a female deer,
re a drop of golden sun . . ."
G. I. Gurdjieff, another Wilson influence, has his Law of Octaves which represents each step in any process with the notes of the diatonic scale. To sound a do (long "o"), in his lingo, means to begin something or to begin a process. RAW sounds a doe with Death of Earth . . . Death Of Ego at the start of RIWYCGAW. Re, a drop of golden sun connects with the Egyptian influence. Re is a common alternate spelling for Ra the sun god. The first step or instruction indicated in many of the spells from the Book of the Dead calls for the soul of the deceased to unite themself with Osiris. Osiris abides in the cabalistic sphere of Tiphareth, the solar territory on the Tree of Life.
Reminders that Reality Is What You Can Get Away With portrays a Bardo trip occur throughout the film treatment. Another one occurs on p. 48 - 50 with the Schrödinger's Cat paradox from quantum physics that concludes with the cat being both dead and alive until someone opens the box to take a measurement. Lest we dismiss this as simply a theoretical exercise from physics, we hear Orson Welles addressing Edward G. Robinson's objection that it's impossible for a cat to be both alive and dead at the same time. "Welles (witty twinkle) Erwin Schrödinger proved it. He's got a Nobel prize in physics. He also proves you're dead and alive at the same time." The Schrodinger's Cat paradox recurs throughout the film.
The concept of a favorable rebirth plays out on p. 28 - 29 starting with a study showing the benefit of an enriched environment upon the cognitive skills of rats. Our beloved Announcer returns on the following page with a death/rebirth procedure that could be likened to the methods of Zen koans or Finnegans Wake to name two.
"Announcer: If enough Alien Signals are thrown into the brain – enough Chaos and Confusion – the third neurological bardo prepares for rebirth on a higher level of networking. A new ego you might say."
The paradoxical bardo cat comes back on p. 158 in the context of a different Orson Welles film leading to a riff on reimprinting (rebirth) against a soundtrack of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." "If you want to change all your imprints at once, sign up now to join the first Space Colony and enter a totally new reality-tunnel." As Beethoven's Ninth Symphony begins rising to its peak, the following visual in the film suggests a glorious rebirth in higher dimensions.
On p. 160 Betty Boop begins discussing the symbolism behind the Sacred Chao. She addresses the reader-viewer a couple of times as; "O nobly born," the same terminology used to address the Voyager who has left their body in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Weirdly enough, a few days ago, I received an invitation to join a Betty Boop Facebook group from a complete stranger. The extent of my exposure to the wiles of Ms Boop prior to reading RIWYCGAW comes from multiple viewings of the highly recommended bardoesque film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
For me, just the title Reality Is What You Can Get Away With suggests the bardo. How long can you hang out in the bardo? How much presence can you bring there? How well are you able to use your attention to choose a favorable rebirth? What can you get away with in the Bardo?
* * * * * *
Contemporary so-called Books of the Dead differ from their traditional counterparts with a less direct, more allegorical or metaphorical presentation. For instance, they don't have "Book of the Dead" in their title. No one might know that James Joyce intended Finnegans Wake as a Book of the Dead (on one level) but for the fact that he requested his friend, Frank Budgen, write an article explicitly saying so. Sometimes an afterlife adventure can be deduced from the title – a wake indicates a reception, often a party of sorts following a funeral. Wilson's play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell seems obvious from the title. Another contemporary Book of the Dead, The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs makes it clear with its dust jacket of stylized ancient Egyptian illustrations and hieroglyphics that he intends to signify the Western Lands of Egyptian mythology.
Traditional Books of the Dead seem meant to provide direct assistance to the voyager after biological death, but also appear quite effective for aiding someone going through the death of ego for one reason or another. Many untrained voyagers in the mid 1960s to mid 70s found themselves flung willy nilly into scary bardo spaces after taking a strong psychedelic dosage. John Lilly asked his friend E.J. Gold to make a modern translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead specifically to help people having difficulties with an overwhelming psychotropic drug experience. This resulted in the American Book of the Dead, an instruction manual equally effective for both ego and physical death. Early in his consciousness-altering research Timothy Leary recognized the value of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for mapping out psychedelic spaces as made evident in the book he wrote with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience – A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964). John Lennon quotes directly from this book in his song Tomorrow Never Knows: "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, it is not dying, it is not dying . . ."
Modern literary Books of the Dead like Finnegans Wake and RIWYCGAW seem geared to ego death, aka raising consciousness. This means they are relevant to us right where we sit now in our current life even if we don't expect to die for years, decades, or millenia (if they figure out how to extend biological life). They provide bardo training both directly and indirectly. The latter through creating the feel or mood of the apres-vie by simulating bardo spaces through dream sequences (Finnegans Wake has its own dream language), surrealistic effects like suddenly shifting environments (sudden transitions), non-sequitur events, drug episodes, etc.; anything that disorients the habitual perception of how we make sense of reality. RAW, at times, employed the cut-up technique popularized by William Burroughs to come up with bardo sequences.
Publicly, RAW appeared more interested in what occurs after the death of the ego than in surviving the demise of his biological form. He seemed more invested in scientific advances to provide biological life extension than what might happen in the afterlife sans corps. His focus writing about bardo exploration concerned itself with mapping out and establishing a domain in territories of higher consciousness while learning how to function and even work there. In other words, bardo awareness and personal functionality after ego death rather than the individual's journey after physical death. Of course, the former also prepares you for the latter.
* * * * * *
Always assume you're in the bardo whether it seems like it or not. This axiom seems akin to advice from the Gurdjieff and Castenada schools to maintain the awareness that one could die at any moment. Castenada's Don Juan said that death is always behind you just over your left shoulder. If you turn around fast enough, you can see it.
All this talk of staying aware of death can sound morbid until you realize that it's really about waking up to life. Anyone who has had a near death experience or even an encounter where the real possibility of imminent death stared you in the face can testify that you become incredibly alive and fully present when you think you're about to die. Bardo training is as much about life, maybe moreso that it is about death. Life outside the well worn grooves of a mechanical existence programmed by primate social and cultural imperatives. Navigating through life in the extraterrestrial brain circuits also seems like running through a maze or labyrinth.
E.J. Gold is an acknowledged researcher and expert in Bardo training. He's the author of multiple books, videos, plays and computer video games on the subject. His most straightforward book on the Unknown realms shamans and other intrepid adventurers explore is Life in the Labyrinth, not death in the labyrinth. With enough experience, one come to the realization that death as an absolute finality does not exist; death becomes an indicator of profound change that always brings about a rebirth or resurrection of some kind, a becoming. RAW writes about the realization of his own immortality in Cosmic Trigger I.
Always assume you're in the bardo. Why? Most of the time it feels like I'm going about my business doing the things of ordinary life. Most of the time I feel identified with my ego. There seem to be gradations of ego death. You can temporarily blow out your self identity for several hours with a psychedelic. If strong enough, you no longer assume you're in the bardo, you have the undeniable perception of being there. More gentle ego deaths result from any kind of meditation or magick ritual. It can happen when listening closely to or when playing music. We find even subtler deaths than those.
Always assume you're in the bardo seems the opposite of what we normally assume, that we are this static, unified persona that has predictable reactions to any given situation. A little self observation reveals the static ego to be a fiction, a construct in our mind that's constantly reinforced by others who have the same assumption. If we pay attention to our inner states and outer behavior it will become noticed that we subtly change identities and manifest ourselves differently as the environment changes. We're different with our parents than when hanging out with our buddies; different when in a church or temple (even if we're not religious) than in a bar or nightclub, etc.
* * * * * *
The bardo is the territory where magick takes place. It's the space where reprogramming or metaprogramming can occur; also known as the choice-point space. Die to our old self, choose a preferred rebirth. For example, suppose I want to eat healthier food. Formulate a ritual where the "self" that loves junk food undergoes a metaphorical death. Introduce a set of instructions encouraging the bardo voyager to take rebirth as a "self" that eats healthier. Repeat as necessary – a complete transformation of one's eating habits seems highly unlikely after one experiment, yet there will usually be incremental progress . . . and the progress accrues. I estimate that it took a good ten years, maybe more, to morph from someone who ate mostly fast food to someone who rarely eats junk food. One of the keys to reprogramming involves forsaking moral self-judgement. I'm not a "better" person because I no longer consume Big Macs, I just feel better. Conversely, I'm not prone to emotionally beating myself up for ingesting empty calories. I enjoy it at the time.
Wilson devised a reprogramming formula; it's found in Cosmic Trigger I (p. 120 Hilaritas edition):
"Bn = Bo + Pn + MS
where Bn is new behavior, Bo is old behavior, Pn is a deliberate new program for self-change and MS is a metaprogramming substance such as LSD." He showed his formula to the good Dr. Leary who commented that B could be switched out for C (Consciousness) or I (Intelligence).
The "new program" and "metaprogramming substance" parts of the formula takes place in the Bardo, in the transition between the old and new behavior. Of course, psychedelic substances are not absolutely required. Crowley gives a drug free death/rebirth exercise in section "AAA" of "Liber HHH" found in Appendix VII of Magick Book 4 Liber ABA (p. 589 1st Edition).
Cosmic Trigger I returns to the "pattern of death-rebirth" saying that it still appears symbolically in the Roman Catholic Mass and in the Masonic "raising" ceremony. He continues: "the candidate is often brought to a state of terror similar to the emergency condition of the nervous system in near-death crises. What occurs then, and is experienced as rebirth, is a quantum jump in neurological awareness. In Leary's terminology, new circuits are formed and imprinted."
Everything seems connected in the bardo. John Lennon expressed it perfectly in I Am The Walrus: "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together." RAW identifies it as the non-local circuit in Finnegans Wake.
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The great advantage of encountering the Bardo gently through literature, film, music, theater, or any artistic medium is that you can take it at your own pace or choose to not take it at all. Timothy Leary famously said that reading Ulysses and Finnegans Wake served as preparation for psychedelic spaces. Bardo preparation or training for fully entering it later.
An allusion to both rebirth and to death appears on the first page of Finnegans Wake. The reference of the rainbow ("regginbrow") can be interpreted as God's covenant for Life, as a promise of rebirth on a macrocosmic scale following the death of all animals outside of Noah's Ark after the Great Flood (except for ducks and fish, according to Eddie Izzard).
Eddie Izzard – Ducks & the Flood
Immediately after this sign of hope and rebirth, this covenant for Life, is when we plunge into the Bardo with: "The fall", followed by the hundred letter thunder word. The sound of thunder signals the entrance to the underworld. Thunder is a not uncommon sound in the bardo. When you hear thunder, especially if close by, it can key in a bardo space which means it can wake you up a little. I was once doing sound design, adding sound effects behind spoken word readings from the American Book of the Dead. I was laying in the sound of thunder. E.J. Gold heard what I was doing, came into the studio and said there's lots of thunder in the Bardo.
The next sentence following the thunder word describes the death of Tim Finnegan whose wake gives the book its title.
"The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: . . ."
In a 19th Century Irish-American ballad, also called Finnegans Wake, Tim Finnegan, all liquored up, falls off a a ladder and apparently dies. At his wake, the corpse get splashed with whiskey which revives him – an early allusion to the death and resurrection theme that runs throughout the book. It also refers to Finn McCool, the legendary Irish giant said to lie in trance beneath the Dublin landscape. McCool was beheaded in one version of the legend. Perhaps this helps explain why his head sends someone to the west looking for his toes.
I've not seen an adequate explanation of "pftjschute." It reminds me of a sound a cartoon character might make upon suddenly disappearing and thus appears an appropriate sound for death. Dissecting this word, we see that "chute" in its standard definition of "a sloping channel or slide for conveying something to a lower level" sounds like going into the Bardo or the Land of the Dead. Chute is also the French word for fall; "pftjs" adds to 165. In Sepher Sephiroth, the dictionary of Gematria originally published in 1912 by Aleister Crowley with contributions from Allan Bennett and MacGregor Mathers, 165 = "To make them know;" also "NEMO." Nemo represents a high grade in the Thelemic hierarchy, the Master of the Temple. It means "no man" and connects with death.
It's explained in the "Cry of the "13th Aethyr" from The Vision and the Voice by Crowley, Victor Neuburg, and Mary Desti: "And he saith: No man beheld the face of my Father. Therefore he that hath beheld it is called NEMO. And know thou that every man that is called NEMO hath a garden that he tendeth. And every garden that is and flourisheth hath been prepared from the desert by NEMO, watered from the waters that were called death. We have an allusion to a garden with Eve and Adam in the first sentence of the Wake.
In the commentary to Chapter 65 "Sic Transeat —" from Crowley's The Book of Lies, :
"The chapter title means, 'So may he pass away', the blank obviously referring to NEMO.
I have no idea if Joyce knew the gematria meaning of 165 and intentionally placed it with the otherwise incomprehensible "pftjs ..." or if it's just one of those synchronicities that he loved. It certainly fits.
"Erse", the name of a language, is a synonym for Gaelic. It may also pun with "else;" as in "the pftjschute (no man) of Finnegan – else (otherwise a) solid man. Finnegan then gets conflated with Humpty Dumpty, the living giant egg and master of language in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland tales who had a great fall "offwall". Humpty suggests the alchemical egg where transmutation occurs (see Paracelsus or Carl Jung).
Then we get to the (possibly) Egyptian part: "sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: . . ."; "unquiring" breaks down as the prefix "un" = not and "quiring": a quire is the area in a church or cathedral set aside for the clergy and choir; this suggests a "not Christian" one; "well to the west" recalls the Western Lands, the land of immortality. The journey through the bardo to immortality; "tumptytumtoes" has the Egyptian god of the setting sun, Tum, in the middle of it. The adoration of Tum occurs at dusk in the Thelemic "Liber Resh" ritual. Tum is a derivation of Atum. In very early Egyptian pre-history, Atum was the chief god, the primordial living being who created the cosmos as personified by other gods.
Tum as the sun god at dusk fits in well with a book beginning to dive into the night. Atum as a creator sun god whose toes are creations of a material world (Malkuth on the Tree of Life) also seems appropriate for the emerging "chaosmos" (chaos + cosmos) of Finnegans Wake.
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Bardo episodes appear in all of RAW's fiction in various forms: dreams, drug experiences, magick, meditation visions, etc. The very first sentence of The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles Volume I says it all: Sigismundo Celine was lost in a dark forest with a Red Indian, seeking the supreme wakan. (The Earth Will Shake p. 3 Hilaritas edition). Sigismundo is having a dream or reverie in church on Easter Sunday.
Right off the top, we find parallels with Dante's The Divine Comedy which begins on Good Friday with Dante lost in a dark forest. I have written extensively on the S + C letter semiotic (Sigismundo Celine), most recently toward the end in the first post of this series, Folds and Overlaps Between Aleister Crowley and Finnegans Wake. Before that, in my post on Rabelais. "Red Indian" also appears a deliberate use of initials with R + I = 210, a significant qabalistic calculation for multiple reasons.
Wakan is a Native American term that translates roughly as Great Spirit or life force. Considering a Joycean influence, wakan sounds similar to waking. "Waking up" is a Sufi expression of enlightenment borrowed and used extensively in Gurdjieff's 4th Way movement and other contemporary spiritual guides. In the 4th stanza of The Divine Comedy, Dante describes himself as "so full of sleep just at that point where I abandoned the true path." (Knopf, 1995 translated by Allen Mandelbaum). Death soon becomes direct and explicit in the story with Sigismundo witnessing the murder of his Uncle in the church by 4 assassins.
Illuminatus! (co-written with Robert Shea) also begins in the Bardo and quite clearly connects with the start of The Historical Illuminatus – "The earth quakes . . ." being the most obvious sign,
The Bardo, magickal, non-local circuit aspect of RAW's fiction comprises just one level or layer of complex, multi-leveled presentations. They're also simply great adventure and detective romances. His most direct and sustained journey through the Bardo occurs in his two film treatments, Reality Is What You Can Get Away With and The Walls Came Tumbling Down (the latter links to a post on its bardoesque aspects) and to his play Wilhelm Reich In Hell which will be discussed in the future.
Stay tuned for a discussion on the 23 enigma, the Bardo, and a Book of the Dead by William S. Burroughs.
