A long quote from Timothy Morton:
“The viscous coffee plops out of the cup in the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks. These zones are not really “between worlds,” since there is nothing between which they exist. All of reality is a bardo, a “between” as Tibetan Buddhism puts it, or rather a series of bardos. Karma, namely the collected tendencies and habits that things run into, is what fuels the bardos. These bardos are simply the relationships between entities... In some sense, modernity is the story of how oil got into everything. From oil’s point of view, my car is a shallow doll’s house thimble. Yet from my point of view, oil makes America look the way it does: it covers the plains with highways while weeds grow through the rotting wood on a railway track. From evolution’s point of view, I’m just an ephemeral expression of DNA. Yet from my point of view, I inhabit an extended phenotype that consists of computers, desks, lights, streets, children, and dinner plates."
It's a very compelling idea that Dougie is passing through the bardos. Does anyone know any more about this Tibetan mythology?
Not enough to link sensibly, TCIL, but Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964/1992) provides an excellent introduction and instructions. Someone should write The Twin Peaks Experience: A Psilocybin Enhanced Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Then everyone will be able to "get Lynch."
Audio versions of some of the basic Leary/bardo ideas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li9xiY3TsRU - should be taken before every part but esp. before part 8.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H1Cg6aEha4 - should be taken after every part but esp. after part 8 & the finale.
A possible reading of Dougie:
In Dougie, Cooper has reached pure mind (pranidhana), the fourth stage of mind. In this stage "everything that is needed will simply happen in the best possible way". Cooper has become without memory (manas). He only has the memory of his body, the memory that knows how to breath. In this state, the best possible outcome will happen as easily as breathing.
This understanding would work by seeing Cooper as both 'good' and 'evil' Coop together, or in their right places. The 'trick' has caused an imbalance in Cooper. He is not human, he is purely mind and completely corrupted. In a sense, Cooper returning to his normal persona will be a fall from enlightenment as well as an escape from base corruption.
Fire walk with