E.J. Gold has been a controversial figure in the Californian Human Potential Movement for over twenty-five years. Notorious as a 'shamanic rabbi' who keeps changing the trip, Gold is best known for the American Book of the Dead (Nevada, CA: Gateways Books, 1975), a Western version of the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), which has sold over 100,000 copies.

Gold was born in New York City in 1941, and as son of H.L. Gold, the famous editor of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, he grew up surrounded by science fiction writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Forest J. Ackerman, Orson Welles, and John Cage.

After working in the Los Angeles entertainment industry in the late 1960s, Gold rose to prominence as a member of the California Nine, a guerilla art group.

Around the same time, Gold began working with spiritual material by Fourth Way-oriented writers, particularly Robert S. De Ropp's The Master Game (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), one of the first trans-personal psychology studies to examine non-drug shamanic practices, and the legacy of George Gurdjieff and Aleister Crowley.

As well as being a prolific sculptor and artist, Gold has written dozens of books on subjects ranging from inter-dimensional voyaging and higher bodies to artefact reading and natural childbirth. His specialty has been several volumes on bardo states, death and dying, including The Book of Sacraments (Nevada, CA: Gateways Books, 1996) and Angels Healing Journey (Nevada, CA: Gateways Books, 1997).

His publishing company Gateways Books and Tapes produces material by John Cunningham Lilly and Enneagram authority Claudio Naranjo amongst others. He has experimented with many tools, including floatation tanks and space migration scenarios.

Gold has been associated with many of the leading spiritual teachers and luminaries, including Rabbi Zalman Schachter, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Swami Vishnu Devananda, Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa, and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

His latest passion is online gaming, in particular the battle-game Quake.

1. How do you use Quake as a spiritual teaching tool?

It's not just Quake that we use as a cybernautical teaching tool; actually, Quake was first online, which began an upward swing into popularity during the summer of 1997 . . . and had Quake not included CTF --Capture The Flag-- which is a team game, the same game you used to play at summer camp or on the streets or down by the bayou . . . except that, in Quake, you don't tag someone and send them to jail . . . you shoot them and they die, returning to some random spawning point. Basically, it works the same as the old Lose One Turn.

Since then, a team-oriented version known as "Team Fortress" came out. Originally it was built on the Quake rendering engine, but is soon to be rebuilt on another architecture, presumably one which allows much more complex activities.

Our own G.O.D.D. (tm) rendering engine and its associated function subroutines has actually been used for online gaming since 1996, but since we had no intention of releasing anything publicly at that time, we didn't mention it in print.

The G.O.D.D. (tm) engine was developed specifically to my specifications for a 3-D engine that would allow me to produce highly complex and accurate representations of Bardo spaces and situations, as well as other spaces which have the effect of stimulating past life memories, an important step in understanding the function of karma and the importance of accepting one's spiritual obligation.

Additionally, in Quake CTF, you tend to die an awful lot, and it's intentionally rather bloody and horrible sounding when it happens . . .nobody likes it, and then you are expected to remember your aim --the flag, not the frag, meaning not taking revenge on the guy defending his base and flag-- through many deaths and rebirths.

Oh, there are many more interesting relationships between these online games and the Bardos, most of which are examined in detail on our free gaming Web site, which all this stuff is posted, about how it's used, and what it all means in spiritual terms, and so forth. Been there for over a year now, under the training pages - mostly it's a matter of fairness, though.

Think about it; how much of our miseries as a world emerging out of technology into spiritual mastery can be directly traced to the loss of fair play, honesty, sense of humour? Online gaming can --in the right hands-- lead to some understanding of how meaningless, how insignificant, life is without a view of the Big Picture . . . .what we in the trade call "The First Rude Awakening."

There's much, much more to it, and our G.O.D.D. (tm) games are a far cry from the killing fields of Quake--most of them are educational and early-learning spelling/reading activity games and exciting mazes with all sorts of hilarious tricks, traps, and humorous taunts and teases. There are also walking tours of ancient sites such as Stonehenge, Amarna, and Ur . . .You'll find a Shareware download of our 3-D chatrooms on our Web site.

We've even made films in the G.O.D.D. (tm) --see? That darn (tm) . . .I'm required by law to put it in every time that I use the term, like Coca Cola (tm) and Joy of Cooking (tm). That's what I mean. What a world, when an artist must include a copyright notice somewhere on the painted field, on the front of the canvas in order to protect some elusive "conceptual rights" from which he or she must derive an income just like anyone else at any other job . . .and when we must triple-lock our doors, take stereos out of our automobiles when we park them, and leave our genitals at home when we venture out into the streets.

Speaking of streets, I spent a lot of time in the streets as a kid, and one aim of mine has been to introduce the idea of using Quake or some online team-combat system to work out those gang disputes which can be settled this way. Gangs typically take great pride in a sense of honour, and could be expected to keep their word if bound by this code. Sure, I have no illusions; some disputes are just bound and determined to end up in the street, where some four-year old kid is going to end his or her life for no reason whatever, but not all gang disputes need to be resolved in the streets. Most of my fellow online Quakers regularly admit to being drug-dealers, gang members, crack addicts (hard to miss when they use names like "CrackFiend" and "dRuGAdIcT"). We also recorded some Quaking songs which almost made it onto the Quake II CD ROM, except they cut back to one disk instead of the original two.

Those songs, released on In Your Face by Gorebag and the Grunts (I'm the aforementioned "Gorebag" referred to on the cover) give a very full idea of the ideas behind online gaming as a form of spiritual realisation.