Erasing the Name
The Devotional Fire of En Sof
by David Chaim Smith
“Perception can be offered as a prayer, and the sense of transcendent perceptibility can be received as its sacrament. In this exchange En Sof is the main consideration, as its potency is expressed through you and as you. The named identity is what is erased. This portal to nowhere is love-in-itself. Loving as an action dissolves there. What remains is free.”
Erasing the Name introduces the reader to a mode of devotional contemplation that invites the mind into immersive surrender within an all-consuming love of the divine mystery. The work builds esoteric knowledge (daat) through a maze of diagrams and poetic passages so what is gathered can be released within what Kabbalists call En Sof (the infinite). This opens a doorway that allows discursive consciousness to dissolve into the sublime expanse that fills and surrounds all phenomena.
____________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
About the Cover
The Devotional Fire
Erasing The Name
The Practice
____________________________________________________________
26 illustrations by David Chaim Smith
Hardcover Edition
108 pages. Linen hardcover with dust jacket, perfect-bound.
ISBN: 979-8-9920121-5-6
____________________________________________________________
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.
