This is a somewhat convoluted observation that I had the other day that, to me at least, makes some sense of my (largely erstwhile but still slightly lurking) Twin Peaks obsession. I’ve been reading quite a lot of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky and have been struck frequently by their characterisation of humankind as largely asleep. They constantly write that such sleep is not easy to understand but equally that it is in fact possible to do so. With the help of another writer (one E J Gold), I think I may understand some of this now.

Understanding here is a curious thing, it’s not a cognitive understanding, it’s an entirely practical or at least an experiential one. The first understanding I had of sleep was the obvious way in which one cannot really be aware of everything that is happening as it happens, one can try to keep a track of events in a more aware (awake) state, but it is, as Gurdjieff admits, nearly impossible to do (unless apparently one has had some level of esoteric training). This is ‘sleep’; it’s a fair characterisation of it, however it is not all of it. Furthermore thinking of sleep in this way encourages one to think of it as something almost simple, that if one simply could keep track of events, one would be ‘awake’.

In fact sleep is far more entrenched than this. Sleep is also your patterns and emotional responses. If you observe yourself accurately you will come to see that your organism almost entirely runs itself. This brings into play a curious kind of separation. One can kind of see that there is part of us that can observe that your organism including its thoughts and feelings is indeed quite machinic. Certain jokes arise in you, to make certain people laugh, certain situations irritate you without any action on your part. You, this other part of whatever we are, are entirely unnecessary to this process, it will run entirely without you.

So what is awakeness? Awakeness is also a natural occurence that we do have some limited access to. Strange moments of clarity that may just occur or be induced by drugs, stress, or meditation etc, are actual experiences of awakeness. Awakeness is often characterised by the absence of any sense of irritation or indeed enthusiasm towards anything. But these are just the foothills of awakeness. Esoteric systems generally are about trying to cultivate this sense. Pretty much all of the activities of these systems are designed to try to put you in some form of awake state and try to do something whilst you are in it, to work with it.

Awakeness/sleep is also very clearly not a binary on/off system. Furthermore it is simply a grammar that helps explain something. To be partially awake can be, as mentioned, a normal but fleeting thing. However, being more like a sliding scale than an on/off switch one can be more awake still (or less awake still). Indeed many of the normal more awake states are in fact still highly automatic but simply have an increased awareness of the automation.

The sliding scale in some sense though is confusing, for it can conflate the awakeness with the weird reality interference. The two are related, though not necessarily correlated. The weirdness will probably activate waking and being awake will also bring about weirdness but its not a precise relationship. We can (sort of) think of these as two axes. That is, we might find our selves somewhat entangled with events that emanate from the higher dimensions/other world/pneuminous realm whatever you want to call it and/or we may find ourselves with an increased sense of presence, awareness ability to perceive and override our automatic actions and words. Extensive ability to do the latter will likely increase the former but an increase in the former may only negligibly increase the latter, as we will often marvel and forget or obsess over the weirdness in unproductive ways e.g. by reifying and attempting to place weirdness within the scope of regular reality (which it will totally resist). Ghost hunters and UFO obsessives may fall into this category.

Gurdjieff famously disavowed his magickal abilities in favour of a pure focus on something like will and attention. This was his sacrifice. We could place our axes precisely on his decision, saying that he restricted his access (and control) over weirdness (axis 1) in favour his concentration and will (axis 2) believing this to be the important part of his spirituality. This makes sense since, as discussed, it is perfectly possible to continue to have sleep like responses and be interested in weird phenomena.

The other world is a strange thing. From sleep you can kind of intuit its presence. This intuition is going to be supplied by clues like manifestations of phenomena that either are or resemble synchronicity, telepathy, entity interaction, precognition etc. Personally I was prone to one of those number synchroncities and can still remember the moment when one of my friends finally had access to the internet so we could look it up. It is an understatement to say I was suprised that my very number (47) was right there on the net as ‘the mysterious number that connects all things’ or some such. Indeed the state the phenomenon put me in something close to a waking state. This was one of the ‘shocks’ that Gurdjieff says we need to experience. Occult phenomena are good at this because they either scare the bejeesus out of us or they imbue us with a sense that reality is actually bigger that the spatio-temporal kind of layer we seem to live in.

What has Twin Peaks got to do with this? I would contend that Twin Peaks was extremely good at putting me into some kind of waking state (albeit it temporarily and certainly not for all of the show whilst it was on). I might extend this claim to say that a lot of Twin Peaks cult popularity was because it was quite good at doing this generally. This is also responsible for the sensation that some watchers get that the show is somehow more than just a TV show.

As mentioned, being awake is a smooth curve, the lower reaches of which we are familiar with (sleep) and the rising of the curve is also accessible for free sometimes. Twin Peaks and other cultural experiences sometimes move us up the curve by their ability to powerfully demonstrate a kind of recognisable world that simultaneously blends with esoteric manifestations. Whilst this is true of it, it is also true of many other kinds of supernatural shows. However, straightforward fear in this sense is not so productive of waking states (at least from cultural products) so shows that produce this kind of response only put the organism in a state in which it is afraid and not in which it is jarred by ontological dissonance.

How does Twin Peaks achieve the ontological dissonance that I ascribe to it? I would say it is i) by its seamless fusion of the competence and rational clarity of its hero (Agent Cooper) combined with his rapidly disclosed belief in divination/synchronicity as valuable guideposts to his enquiry and ii) by the way show unambiguously contains the existence of other than human powers and places that have some sense of existence external to human reality iii) the way in which the other world is depicted in a manner never before thought of (at least in anything mainstream that I have seen). By this I mean the famous red room. With its red velvet curtains, art deco decor and black and white zig zag floor (all set to various jazz like themes), the black lodge is/was one of the most amazing/strange characterizations of the other world that has ever been.

The show makes it clear that some of the spirits work to help Cooper whereas others do not, others still are unclear in their alliances (e.g. the man from the other place). As such the favourable synchronicities can be interpreted as clues from these beings. Whilst there are direct manifestations of entities, the communication of clues through reality (synchronicity) suggests the curious sideways on interaction with the normal real that so often characterizes the phenomenology of such events. That is, the paranormality does not occur from powers that act on the level of regular reality (like a poltergeist might move a plate) rather the interaction alters the elements of reality themselves (or potentially our perception of them) to produce the clue. This of course is a little too ontologically simplistic and needs (in my opinion) the help of something like pneuminous accretive theory to complete it. That is, we cannot talk about things of the world as ontological simples themselves, for they are each informational/conceptual structures and thus capable of being different vectors of meaning.

Twin Perfect’s famous explanation of Twin Peaks as expressing TV itself or maybe rather TV’s slide from authenticity into impoverished entertainment is extremely convincing. I’ve no need to disagree with it and I don’t particularly want to. However, correct as it may be, the phenomenology of Twin Peaks does not show this level of it. Twin Peaks is generally watched as if it were a TV show and not a meta-indictment on TV itself. As such it is interpreted through these rules. The Red Room may well be code for TV signals and stage curtains but without this realisation it hits a level of perfect surrealism that disarms all regular expectations of paranormal interaction. This, I would say is a key factor that colours all the other weirdness that goes on in the show. That is, if this other dimension of ‘evil in the woods’ were given a more conventional representation of evil spirits with their realm looking suitably gothic (or some other cliche) then the power of the show to disturb/shock would be considerably diminished.

By shock, I don’t mean the ordinary kind of shock of fear necessarily (though this can do it), but rather the Gurdjieffian shock which can suddenly place us in a heightened/weirdified state to some degree. Twin Peaks by its very ongoing presence (whilst watching it) can give this shock. This is because the ontology is necessarily embedded in the world. Of course many elements of the show do not deal with the weird, however as long as the thread to Laura remains, we can know a priori that the rest of the madness is entailed.

Another layer to the shock/awakeness inducing phenomena is the resonance people feel to the weird realism. Whilst one end of Twin Peaks is totally off the deep end, the other end exists at the totally relatable level of synchronicity. Soft esoteric experience like synchronicity are something that make even hardened materialists pause, even if only for a second or two. This is because (as I have spent more words than is necessary elsewhere explaining) the interpretation of the synchronicity as the weird reality intruding phenomenon is epistemically equivalent to its interpretation as coincidence of pure chance.

The point is, whether they give it much thought or not, almost everybody knows this kind of potentially paranormal experience. Twin Peaks takes that experience and shows you that a highly intelligent agent of the state uses and believes in this as a method and furthermore is not wrong to do so. This means the show unambiguously comes down on the weird reality intrusion version of synchronicity. Subliminally or otherwise, the display of this capable, highly likeable protagonist using this intuitive method (and it being ‘true’) facilitates a certain feedback with the viewer that lifts them into a space where they too (given probably a certain psychological disposition) engage/believe deeper in this weltanschauung.

This is more of what makes Twin Peaks have the sensation of being more than just a program i.e that it is in some sense a coded message about how things actually are. The aforementioned implication from synchronicity to entities and other dimensions also escapes the screen, travelling along the legitimised synchronicity path. That is, because the show supplies a ‘cause’ of the synchronicities (the sideways interference into reality by the spirits), buying into the show’s ontology comes almost as a whole. Again, this is a sliding scale type effect, however because an answer as to how these phenomena occur is given, the sense of possible coded revelation that the show presents carries through, therefore the more extreme weird end of the show’s ontology is also displayed as possible.

To briefly return to Twin Perfect’s analysis we can again agree but with a slightly different twist. Because Twin Peaks is Television, the reality manipulations in it are identical to what we think of as paranormal in this world. The scriptwriters (spirits) can insert any synchronicity into events that they wish and it will be meaningful because it was exactly written to be so. We can bounce back the paranormality as television back to the real world and feel another angle of the well-known show’s epithet ‘we live inside a dream’. The Twin Peaks characters do live inside a dream, but somewhat trite though it is to say, from the Gurdjieffian perspective so do we. When defined as asleep (and it is not the least fair characterisation of our repetitive automatic characters) we can be seen to be dreaming, only drifting occasionally into anything resembling a cognizance of what is going on.

Twin Peaks, through these various loops, appearances and reflections can partially drag us out of this somnambulance into a slightly heightened state. The problem with this state (through this means) is that the usual path it takes is not the development of the state itself (to be fair, why would you notice this or engage with it, I mean you just thought you were watching a TV show that made you feel a bit strange) but rather a fascination with the other axis of weirdness we described. By plugging into various quasi ‘real’ phenomena (synchronicity (which is real phenomenologically at least), project bluebook etc.) it pulls the Lovecraftian trick of blurring the lines between fiction and reality. This can make us feel the pull of the weird and end up obsessing about these aspects on the wrong ontological level (a kind of taxonomisable or contactable real), which, whilst fascinating, are dead ends of paranoia, madness and disappointment.

This doesn’t mean the weird stuff isn’t real in some sense and it doesn’t mean we can answer the question about whether entities are inside or outside of us or even if it really makes any sense to ask this. What it means is that occult value is not in obsessing about a kind of weird science of this stuff that never gets anywhere, it’s more about the ability to develop a kind of awareness that escapes the regular sleeping state. Engaging only with the weirdness on this level of fascination is a return to sleep. This is kind of the tightrope that Erik Davis talks about (in High Weirdness) or at least similar. Weirdness provides shocks but is also fascinating. Fascination brings sleep. Staying awake though, increases weirdness even if only in the way things sometimes look different (though it can also trigger synchronicity and other things). More weirdness increases the fascination obsession temptation and so on.

There is of course the possibility (I admit slim) that Twin Peaks even overtly refers to all of this. By this I am referring to coffee. Let’s ask ourselves ‘what does coffee do?’ The answer is ‘it wakes you up?’ What does the intelligent, capable, likeable FBI agent do? He drinks coffee. Cooper can easily be identified with someone in the waking state and his love of coffee is part of what identifies this. He doesn’t want to fall asleep and he loves coffee (Gurdjieff is often referred to as drinking coffee). He unambiguously is shown as someone who engages with meditation and who is two steps ahead of everyone else by sheer awareness of what’s going on. This is an at least partially awake human being whose awakeness is partially fuelled by coffee. Furthermore, it is only Cooper who is capable of receiving the messages from the other world (awakeness increases weirdness). As if to reinforce this trope of the ‘awakeness of Cooper’, ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ features largely an entirely asleep Cooper, this time in a state even lower than that of the regular human sleep.

In a way it is nothing to say this, Lynch knows lots about meditation and will definitely be familiar with terms like ‘awakeness’. His usage of coffee as symbolic/connected to Cooper’s awakeness could indeed be entirely deliberate. The interesting possibility would be if Twin Peaks was actually designed to wake people up. Twin Perfect’s argument would sort of agree with this insofar as Twin Peaks exists to symbolically point out the dire state of TV (at least back in the 80s) and act as a wake-up call against it (though this is hardly an esoteric point). Is it designed to wake people up esoterically by identification with a synchronicity legitimator (amongst other things)? Probably not. However, I would say that regardless of intent, even though it may also open up weird fascinations (and hence sleep) it does contain certain shock-keys that can facilitate some access to altered consciousness.