David Chaim Smith was born in 1964 in Queens, New York. His early career was as a visual artist throughout the 1980s. In 1990 he began an immersion into the root sources of Alchemy and the Hermetic and Hebrew traditions of the Kabbalah. In 1996 he abandoned visual art for a total dedication to spiritual practice, from which came a unique blend of practical mysticism and creative innovation. This blend coalesced while working with an obscure thirteenth-century text called The Fountain of Wisdom, which he mapped out diagrammatically in notebooks during his ten-year hiatus from visual art. The resulting symbol vocabulary served as the basis for his 2006 return to art, generating the content for several books. He currently lives in the suburbs of New York City with his wife, Rachel.
INTRODUCTION A Guide to Contemplative Mysticism
CHAPTER 1 The Mixing Field: An Introduction to the Six Gates
CHAPTER 2 Flight of the Merkavah
CHAPTER 3 The Pregnant Sacrificial Beast
CHAPTER 4 Gate of the Wedding Chamber
CHAPTER 5 The Fire of Nondimensionality
CHAPTER 6 The Skins of No-thing-ness (a Summary)
EPILOGUE Continuing the Work
About the Author