Black Aether
by David Chaim Smith
(Volume 6 of the Lightning Flash of Alef series)
If we hold ourselves as separate observers of reality, we will never understand reality. Contemplative mysticism is like a wild beast that consumes itself upon the fires of its own life force. The labyrinth of impressions that constitute so-called “ordinary” life are incinerated whole as a single sacrificial offering as the mind confronts the endless expanse of its own confusions and pain. This becomes the great tikkun (repair) for a seemingly meaningless random universe based on cognitive error. Reality is then absorbed within the very space that presents it, familiarity passes into oblivion, and an astonishing secret nutrient becomes available to all those who seek it.
This unusual work begins by using the imagery of Biblical animal sacrifice as a metaphor for the visionary transmutation of our own minds. The sacrificial beast is our faulty perception of reality, which smoulders on the fire of our spiritual work in the act of mystical devotion. What arises from this, like the smoke of burning flesh, is the state known as black aether. This is a twilight state that arises in contemplation between the familiarity of our habits and our impending mystical breakthroughs. It is the transition where the mind as we know it passes into freefall, and the klipot (shells of superficiality) can slip into oblivion. Through the black aether the whole of reality as we know it can dissolve, and if successful, reality can be spontaneously reborn as profound truth, beauty, and goodness.
About the Lightning Flash of Alef series
The Lightning Flash of Alef series is the expression of the esoteric work of David Chaim Smith. Although the series is published as a set of numbered volumes, the books are non-sequential and do not have to be read in any particular order. Each volume functions as a unique and viable window into the path, and each is sufficient as a starting point for the study of the work.
____________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
THIRTEEN SHIRIM OF BLACK AETHER
SHIR ONE: Crowning the Headless Beast
SHIR TWO: Only Wholeness Can Know Wholeness
SHIR THREE: Nitzotz Elohi
SHIR FOUR: Door, Sword, Arrow, and Sky
SHIR FIVE: Vision of Tikkun Kadmon
SHIR SIX: Lightning Flash
INTERLUDE: A Mutus Liber
SHIR SEVEN: Copulation of Teli and Galgal
SHIR EIGHT: Relentless Harm of Animating Distortions
SHIR NINE: The Psycho-Aetheric Ocean
SHIR TEN: Twilight of Black Aether
SHIR ELEVEN: Transmuting Klipot Into Pure Vision
SHIR TWELVE: The Headless Serpent Messiah
SHIR THIRTEEN: Black Aether and the Transmutation of the Habit Field
____________________________________________________________
43 illustrations by David Chaim Smith
Hardcover Edition
172 pages. Clothbound hardcover with silver foil blocking to front cover and spine. Smyth-sewn, with French-fold dust jacket. Printed on high-quality paper, with custom endpapers.
ISBN: 978-0-578-30766-4
____________________________________________________________
Press, reviews, endorsements
Interview with David Chaim Smith in The Occult Library - read it here
Interview with David Chaim Smith on the Arcanvm podcast - watch on YouTube here
Interview with David Chaim Smith on the Glitch Bottle podcast - watch on YouTube here
Interview with David Chaim Smith on the This Is Darkness podcast - watch on YouTube here
Interview with David Chaim Smith in Arthur Mag - read it here
Interview with David Chaim Smith on the Thelema Now! podcast - listen here
____________________________________________________________
About the Author
David Chaim Smith is an artist, author, and practitioner of contemplative mysticism. He was born in 1964 in New York and worked as a visual artist throughout the 1980s. In 1990, he became immersed in various esoteric mystical traditions, and over the next seven years he studied the Golden Dawn system and worked within several Lodges. In 1997 he set aside both this structured approach and all activities with his visual art to take residence in a gnostic Hermitage in the American midwest. In his studies there he found new methodologies, most notably those for approaching a non-dual perspective via a Gnostic-tantra praxis.
David returned to New York in 1998 and immersed himself in Chassidic mysticism and traditional Hebrew Kabbalah. This he embraced through the devotional approach of Breslov, and it was here he made a profound inner connection through the meditative praxis of ‘Hitbodedut.’ In 1999 David encountered The Fountain of Wisdom, a text that has survived as a 13th century manuscript in the Vatican Library. He worked with the text for many years, drawing from his experiences as an ecstatic visionary artist. In 2004 he made a breakthrough in interpretation with the development of esoteric cartography (spiritual or occult map-making), and within a few years had reached a degree of fluency that allowed him to transfer their syntax and visual vocabulary to works of art. Since this return to visual art, David has been prolific in his practice and his work as a writer and artist whose creative engine is fuelled by a devotional approach to ecstatic visionary mysticism, a unique dimension of David’s work stems from aspects of ideational contemplation considered as a mystical path.
David currently lives in the suburbs of New York City with his wife, Rachel.
