Author: Marc Ostrovsky

The Philosopher stared into the sky and said, “If every woman were as she,” meaning the Evening, “We’d all rotate like tops.”

His entourage, all of his sisters, and many there were, scratched the earth with their toes and wondered aloud, “Does he mean me?”

The Philosopher hated words. They’re for sissies, he was fond of saying.

The women grouped around him and hissed, “But we’re your sissies!”

“So sing me a song. I can’t quite remember the words.”

The got into a bunch and sang clapping their hands:

If Humpty-Dumpty was small

He’d pull out his head and give vent

To the steam he keeps locked in his chest.

But alas, he’s grown so big,

We wish he’d invite us to tea,

He’s so masculine when he’s erect.

They giggled and ran around him in circles and wouldn’t stop. They made him dizzy so he fell down dead on the ground in a heap, and was seen asleep. 

“What can we do now, O sisters?” they asked. A Philosopher dreams golden dreams, says a proverb. “Should we wake him? We’ll take him to the pond and see if he swims.”

And so they did.

They dragged him to the edge of the water, but only put his head in the water. “Let him drink!”

And so he did.

He drank and drank until the sun fell and the Evening came wrapped in a dark cloth. “My, my,” she said, “He’s drunk everything. What a little pig.”

The Evening had wanted to go for a swim with the Moon, but all the water was inside the Philosopher.

“See into a man and you’ll discover what he’s made of,” uttered the Philosopher.

The Evening took the hint. She opened the Philosopher’s mouth and climbed in. “He’s as big as a house.”

The sisters followed suit and went in after. “There’s room for all of us.”

“Is this how life was spawned?” asked the Philosopher.

The Evening led them all deeper. “We’ll find things of interest, maybe even Philosopher’s gold.”

The sisters whispered among themselves in excitement.

Soon they encountered a fish swimming around.

“Who are you?” the sisters asked.

“I’m the Fish of Creation. I’ve endured forever.”

The Evening wasn’t impressed. 

The sisters wondered what sort of fish he was.

“I’m the fish of this man’s soul”. And swam off.

The Philosopher pondered the riddle: Is a smile everything in life?

I chanced upon a caryatid

Who inquired as to what I did 

To land a fate far worse.

I wondered at my chosen course 

To wander the welkin

To wear out my welcome

At the plinth of kith and kin.

I chanced again to look within

And hollow was I to the distal winds.

She bade me hasten 

To the world’s rim.

To curse men free afoot;

With puny effort 

Achieve little wit 

Of merit or worth.

On the Mabinogion. Very Slight

I

One day he said he could fly

Who pondered what’s what at Delphi,

His fuss for this fancy? Cuchulain. Cuchulain.

It chid’m, to an inch of his life. But why?

II

His rhymes grotesque

Without hope of defense.

A miserable stink, afloat in the sink,

Being mindless, would endlessly digress.

III

In the sink with the dishes

He felt deep for the fishes,

No lower the Styx can he sink.

Find a shrink! to care for his contrition!

The Green Knight is one of many figures from story who defy death. He holds his lopped off head in his arms and challenges any member of King Arthur’s round table to meet him a year hence. The Torah tells us of the immortal Elijah the Prophet for whom Jews still to this day leave a cup of wine during the Passover seder. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is itself testament to the rightful place of man to be with the immortal gods.

Most of humanity doesn’t make it. Stories have characters who are immortal or exceptionally long-lived, speaking, I think, of the terrible longing for health, life and love in us all. These stories, however, give only the barest of hints on how to achieve this. Are they only stories?

An examination of the self as presently alive leads one to acknowledge that certain strong habits of body, emotion, mind and spirit are as the chains locked tightly about the ankles of a miscreant imprisoning him. We carry the seeds of our own dissolution in our selves. Tripling merrily down the path blissfully unaware of the self is not escape from death.

Blavatsky writing in the late 19th century was one of the first to reveal to the general public the way to great wisdom and exceptionally long life. She claims that Morya, Kuthumi, et. al, now Masters, once were men subject to the fluctuations of hope and despair that characterize men, but that through prolonged self study and meditation broke through the mortal net and achieved a higher state of evolution. Indeed just as a man once was a boy so are there higher levels of development available to him who keeps growing. Unfortunately as Wilhelm Reich in the first half of this century documents, most men become crystallized at a rather immature age, that is, outwardly aging but not even gaining in even wisdom as they drop off into senescence. The key, Blavatsky and others after her say, lies in the development of the true self.

Sitting in Zen meditation brings the practitioner to a still pond where he might glimpse his original face. Theoretically control of the mind and permanence in the present moment ought to bring one to the other side of the pond, that is, away from and different than regular men subject to the vicissitudes of fortune. This path can be treacherous and full of self deception. Who is to know if he is only duped into believing that he is free when truly he is not?

The yogis of India assert a dorman knot of kundalini lies sleeping at the base of the spine, and that is only for him who awakens it to have unending bliss of consciousness and body. The attraction of this philosophy is that it addresses the physicality of the body. The body itself has within it a dynamic force that can completely change the body, emotions, mind and spirit. To sit in meditation with an awakened kundalini master makes clear that further development of the self is a possibility. When in the presence one feels an ecstatic pulsing energy. In Indian literature one can read of men who have surmounted the usual span of years, for score and ten, and who have either retained youth or have regained it through various practices. Paramahamsa Yogananda in his spiritual autobiography reports of meeting and becoming a disciple of Babaji, an immortal yogi living in the Himalayas. Modern day Kriya Yoga teachers following in the reported tradition of Babaji teach a method of self cultivation that they say will heal the practitioner of his inner and outer ills, strengthen the will of body and spirit, and bring one into contact with advanced masters of this method for further teaching. The ultimate goal, says Leonard Orr, author of Physical Immortality, is unending life.

In India we have not only stories of supermen but tracts and methodologies of practice to become such a man. The drawback, perhaps, is that the soil of India is a necessary fundament of the practice. Without it, the meditation masters who have come to America have floundered in the multifaceted everyday life of the west. Though they are men of undoubted charisma, power, and sometimes wealth. What separates them from rock stars or millionaire businessmen? Aldous Huxley in After Many Summers Dies the Swan tells the story of a very rich individual who hires scientists to find an elixir of immortality. He dies before the research can be completed. In a manner of speaking the yogis who have come to the west have also died too soon before their work can gain root.

Judaism offers a few examples of men who gained immortality. Curiously the greatest figures in the Torah, Moses and David, are not among such beings. King David, the author of the Psalms, lived only seventy years, his lifetime taken from Adam’s long life. Moses did not cross into Israel. Elijah merited immortality because he reached the state of Shalom, translated as ‘peace’, but meaning in this sense the invisible point of balance between tension and non-tension. Who in Judaism is greater than Moses? None is held so high. One might glean from this that the gaining of immortality is not the most important goal of Judaism.

The Shemoneh Esrei, perhaps the most significant prayer in the Jewish liturgy, mentions prominently several times the idea of bringing to life the dead.  The general understanding of this holds that in the time of the messiah the dead will be brought back to life in Jerusalem. At the time of the messiah’s arrival a third Temple, the first two of which were destroyed, one by the Babylonians and one by the Romans, will be rebuilt. The world will be turned upside down, perhaps literally, in that the dead will come to life. Is this only a far off story?

The Shemoneh Esrei might be a prescription for attaining immortality, the state of Shalom. If this prayer is a call to the self’s inner world to bring back the Shechinah, the feminine aspect of God, from her exile away and apart from the self, and if by following the prayer’s eighteen benedictions, one can thereby join the Shechinah to the original face of the self, then perhaps such a whole entire being would become deathless. One who prays and meditates on this prayer is like one who is dead. The challenge is to bring that dead being to life. Such a path is hard beyond imagining. If the great figures of Judaism could not attain this marriage with the Shechinah, what hope has the normal Jew? The vague methodology and lack of belief of most in such a radical proposal as this is in itself a sufficient hindrance and would drag down the most diligent and sincere aspirant. Still, to gain immortality would appear to be the most important goal.

One could go full circle through the world’s esoteric traditions and find various levels of acceptance that physical immortality is possible. Some philosophies, Gnosticism, for example, tend to dismiss the body as a tomb gladly left behind at death. Alchemy hints darkly at a practicum for the disciple to follow in order to gain immortality, but the hints are so obscure, some say purposely, so that one could spend one’s entire allotment of years in a vain search for the yearned for elixir of youth. Vedanta, a school of Yoga, also relegates the body to a lesser status than the soul. The sincere seeker might see fit to dash his hopes against the rocky beachhead and like other shipwrecks sink into the vast uncaring sea.

I once saw in the driveways of Northern Philadelphia

In back of the row houses, on the concrete, a crowd

Of women and children, and a woman with a broom

In her dress and apron, the wind blew from the schoolyard

A strand of fear itself more harrowing than the spectacle

That broke the afternoon calm, like the ocean and the shore,

Water spread far past the vision,

Two dogs stuck together at the anus, barking, running about

In circles, their teeth bare and hungry, and the woman

Battered their flanks, she wanted them apart, begone,

But we all didn’t move, it was the afternoon,

And some of the other women roared, the children clapped,

The dogs danced clumsily, they weren’t used to being so close together

In the midst of so many eyes.

The dogs stood in awe of no one, not even the face

Of death worn women hugging around them, rather they laughed

As one in their lips, all grey coitus played out in the street.

We were their grave, we cradled them against the wind

That charged upon their fur, the row houses looked down,

It had all been seen before, a woman lounging naked in a room

Lightly touching the neck of her lover who will soon depart,

Clothed in the vestments of the living, but death had hours

Before visited, coming far over the ocean, faint imprints

Left upon the sand, it broke the vessel of the man’s soul

And lifted it away, gone was the life, the warmth of the lover’s arms

Now only flesh draped on the bed. She held his cheeks

And rubbed them and prayed that the mouth would only speak,

Let the fates do what they will, but for only a matter of minutes

Forget the hardship and the long suffering and bloody wars of men,

Let the spirit of this man return to its house of sinew and bone,

That the touch that I give this man may be truly received. The lover

Guided by the hand of death breathed again the fragrance of this woman,

They fell in and out of one another, their skin brushed the sheets

And their legs strove for the touch of the other, short time

Lived the while, no place is there time enough, for he died,

Death blew his soul to the wind, but she held an image of him,

One so beautiful that her sleep was made smooth by its presence.

The earth does not wholly swallow a man

Whose image is nourished with remembrance,

Though the ground is wide and far and deep, but a tomb,

Stone, the ash buried within, each are in time forgotten,

The lives of those who know the embers and bone perish

Themselves, for death bids them follow,

And they come, and the grave crushes.

Let the earth give the dogs the ground for their love, it is far

They will have to go to meet, for death shatters lovers’ arms,

Never do they find the other again. Savage was the parting

Of the dogs, the woman swung her broom and yelled shrilly,

The blow threw the dog’s bosom to the road, the tumult

Of women swayed to the wind pass, their skirts hitched up,

The children grabbed hold of the end of the wind,

The hair stood on end, fright hovered over the dogs,

They were apart, their pleasure was overcome, they had loved

A moment ago, merely an image remained of what they had done,

The women stood round. They hinder the works of destiny,

They bind the rhythms with old age and grow tired,

They are voiceless and without strength, women washed with the dust

Of their dead husbands, perished in the strife that goes on all around,

Given up as comely shapes to the warlike men

Of the moment, but for no longer, for desire soon dies

For a woman and death anyway arrives resplendent, its wondrous eyes

Look for a man in his prime of age, how forgetful

Are the women! The dogs move away, the image they carried falls

To the ground and filth is heaped upon it, a funeral mound,

Glad are the processions of the mourning women,

Fire comes forth the earth, may the earth allow it, they pray,

The image burns, the ashes fly away into the wind, but the bones

Lie quiet, the dogs are gone and forgotten, the women

Have new loves to weary, and still the bones.

May the women hold their loves above the dim graves,

May the dogs find one another again in the vast earth,

And may the men in the strength of their arms vanquish death.

A Zen Master: Fool, Fraud or Genuine?

From 1977 until 1990 I was intensely involved in a purported zen martial art, Shim Gum Do (SGD), or the Mind Sword Path, under the leadership of its founding master, Chang Sik Kim (CSK).  His teacher, Zen Master Seung Sahn (SSN), fostered the discovery through meditation of this martial art, Shim Gum Do. Both emigrated to Providence, Rhode Island from S. Korea and I met them in Boston. After I left the practice in mid 1990, I wrote a long essay about my reasons for abandoning this martial art. I have taken that essay and enlarged it to read as a history and a cautionary tale. 

This month marks a year since I left Shim Gum Do. For thirteen years with an absence of two years as an orthodox Jew in Far Rockaway I trained as a martial artist and practitioner of zen under the direction of Chang Sik Kim.  He was a self professed zen master and founding master of Shim Gum Do. He told everyone he had spent one hundred days on top of a mountain in S. Korea in deep meditation during which Buddha taught him the arts of sword, karate, long stick, short stick, two sword and street defense. These encompass approximately one thousand forms. He claimed to be a student of Seung Sahn, a famous zen master in Korea and America of the Chogya Sa Order of Zen Buddhism. 

During my time as a student, Seung Sahn did visit SGD and did give dharma talks and interviews. That he came to Shim Gum Do augured the belief that Chang Sik Kim was one of his chief students and possibly the only enlightened one. In 1985 SSN stopped visiting Shim Gum Do due to some bitter disagreement between them. Seung Sahn Nim had  established several zen centers, the first one in Providence, R.I., and relations between those centers and Shim Gum Do were severed. Michael Elta, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, an advanced student of both Shim Gum Do and of Seung Sahn’s zen centers simultaneously, was thrown out of Shim Gum Do though he wished to remain a student. Elta had criticised the way Chang Sik Kim administered Shim Gum Do in letters he wrote to him. He was a professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Michigan, and he ran a zen center. On November 25, 1985, he wrote a letter to Chang Sik Kim and the directors of Shim Gum Do, of which I was one. 

He explains that he held a retreat in the beginning of November which involved fifteen people, five of whom were not members of the center. The retreat consisted of meditation and free fighting. He alludes to a ‘minor political skirmish’ that occurred in the summer, which has caused some concern in the Head Temple in Boston.   That is, some of the people didn’t know the forms correctly, and free fighting was not a core part of the practice. It appears he is talking about a rearrangement in how the affiliate centers will be administered.  He wants them to be primarily independent from and only associated with Boston. 

This caused Chang Sik Kim to break up with Elta. He wanted to propose some commonsensical changes, and that was too much for Chang Sik Kim to bear, for it would lead to a dilution of his authority. 

This letter was the subject of a meeting to which all of the directors of Shim Gum Do were called to discuss. Chang Sik Kim said this letter proved Elta was a traitor, that it demeaned Shim Gum Do and Chang Sik Kim. He made threats to go after and hurt Elta if he continued to teach Shim Gum Do to his students in Ann Arbor. He cut him off from any association.  Seung Sahn Nim, on the contrary, advised Elta to continue teaching despite what Chang Sik Kim had said. This angered Chang Sik Kim,  and he offered it to us as the motivation for cutting him off.

Chang Sik Kim further complained, in support of his grievance against Elta, that the other students of Seung Sahn who had been awarded inka (a degree of enlightenment and permission to teach) did not show sufficient honor to him when he visited the Providence Zen Center. They treated him as a lower student since he had not earned inka yet. He made a big point of showing us that he too was a great master of koans. Koans are the classic way of interviewing a student of zen and measuring the level of his understanding. They are always puzzling to the rational mind and often self contradictory. Seung Sahn conducted his interviews with koans. Chang Sik Kim said he had originated many koans  and that his understanding of them was supreme and amazingly subtle. 

He turned from writing koans to poems in Korean that he swore were works of genius. Sang Won Park, who has some affiliation with Harvard, and who often visited Chang Sik Kim, offered faint praise of these works, “The poems are very fine considering the level of his education, the third grade.” 

Chang Sik Kim did read me a few of his poems in 1989 when he was in the furor of creation. He haltingly translated them and I thought them confusing. I gave him the benefit of the doubt since he had already created the beautiful art of Shim Gum Do. Appreciating poems written in a different language is always difficult. 

I forgave many things about him and the art since I had invested years of training. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. I began by separating the art from its inventor, as if the art, like Pinnochio, once created had a life of its own. In hindsight, I admit that I had cast my lot with this man Chang Sik Kim, and come hell or high water, I would stay with him. I believed that I could walk the high road and reap the rewards of correct practice. The precepts he gave were simple, “Only go straight, don’t look left or right, and believe in yourself one-hundred percent.” This practice was straightforward in both its meditational form and its active form. They acted in harmony. I had found as predicted by him that the clearer the meditation on the forms, the better the physical manifestation of them. He gave the example of showing the 35th form in magnificent style, exceedingly quick and with precision. He arrived there by the pristine quality of his meditation. He needn’t say it as it was obvious to the practitioner. That others descended into the pit of attachment to pleasure through drink, drugs and sex had little to do with me, or so I thought. Eventually the stink of his behavior especially toward his wife, Maria Rowe, pushed me out. The width of the separation between him and his art grew too large to swallow.

Over the preceding few years he had grown more and more unattractive. He began to drink, at first only on weekends to relieve the tension, and then all week. His drinking buddies were several of the senior students including Bob Britton, a house builder in Newburyport, MA,  David Mercinyak, a resident at the dojo, Mary Stackhouse who later married Chang Sik Kim,  Anthony Sanchez who with Stackhouse had been students of mine in Northampton, MA, Mark Fortin, one of the original students, and more, who sat around the large kitchen table downing vodka, whiskey, wine, beer and whatever else.  One time I joined them at the far corner of the table. At their request, I poured a tall glass of vodka. They dared me to drink it. I did. After a few minutes I went back to my room. I was still living there.  And collapsed on my bed. A distorted vision of myself as a fly swirling down a funnel into a hole overwhelmed me. 

Several of these students also smoked marijauna and used cocaine regularly. Once Sanchez, who liked to challenge me, fought me with bamboo swords we used for that purpose. As he moved incredibly fast I thought something was unusual. It was cocaine. Chang Sik Kim did nothing to stop it. He encouraged it by his own habit. I believe he had already become an alcoholic but like many refused to admit it. 

Zen masters follow the path of crazy wisdom. Chang Sik Kim possessed precious little merciful wisdom. I do not believe that all teachers have to be as pure as snow.  It is not even wisdom they require in order to teach.  A teacher and student can form a polarity. In this case, he set up an opposition that his students had to cross without guidance. He provided the first steps: the meditation, the martial art forms, the morning practice of chanting and bowing, the heart sutra, and his precepts. It was up to the student. The teacher’s job was done. If he, as he did, goes astray, his students don’t need to follow. It is not his fault that they are so weak.

Let us consider his wife, Maria Rowe, his highest ranking student whom he said was enlightened. She drank and used drugs with the rest of them.  Catherine Simmons, an erstwhile student, and though I only vaguely remember her, was evidently charming to Chang Sik Kim. He said he loved her, even while Maria was just giving birth to their second son. If my theory of teachers is correct, then here he was setting up an opposition that his wife had to cross to reach the higher stages of enlightenment. He crazily brought another woman into their relationship to test her stamina, strength and perseverance. He took one of the most primal relationships, that between husband and wife, and used it as a teaching tool. This is certainly immoral. But the received wisdom from the dominant western religions is more for the run-of-the-mill sort of being, who could’t find the middle path if his life was at stake, and it is. We who chose Shim Gum Do as our path had already departed from what was broadly thought of as respectable. One must commit oneself, if one is to break through the walls of conventionality and find the middle path.

Chang Sik Kim explained his divided love for both women. In a past life both women had been rivals for his affection. Accordingly, in this life he had a strong feeling for Catherine. This drove Maria wild with anger. The entire household of which I was a part, as my divorce had just happened, was in turmoil. To lend us moorings he revealed to us our past lives. On its face, what he was doing was both immoral and foolish. He told Mercinyak  he had been Tamourlane in a past life and was a worthy lover of Maria, and he urged him to bed her. He divulged to me that Maria and I had been sister and brother. This explained my enduring attachment to Shim Gum Do. He added that in my latest life I had been a poet in Europe who had drunk so much and dabbled with drugs to excess that I had died of it. This explained my writing and my unwillingness to drink with them. 

His comment that Maria and I had been sister and brother had some resonance. Our relationship was close. We both loved Shim Gum Do and I had risen near to her black belt levels. I taught almost all the classes at one point, and later, during Chang Sik Kim’s second one-hundred day retreat, we took over running of the school. One night we both gave a dharma talk to a group of students who came every month to hear Chang Sik Kim speak. My topic was ‘At The Drop Of A Hat’, having something to do with moment to moment consciousness and non-attachment. So his comment did not come out of left field. That he was talking about past lives does not hit me as strange. I know of no one who knows definitely about the reality of past lives, or even if anything exists after one’s death. In Hinduism, the belief in reincarnation and past lives is quite real. Even Judaism, normally thought to have no truck with reincarnation, has the belief of gilgul, or waves, in Hebrew. Each wave is another life, sometimes thought to be placed somewhere in the anatomy of Adam Kadmon, the first Adam, as tall as the sky.

His other comment about me being a writer who had died of excess alcoholism and drug use also rang true. For my entire life people have thought I took drugs, even though I have never tried even one. That happened especially in college. Later others thought I was naive. I certainly did not treat life in the normal fashion. Plus I did write, though I did not try to publish and wouldn’t join any writing groups. In some way, my disgust with their drinking stemmed from a repugnance I couldn’t place. Maybe it did come from a memory of a past life.

Then Chang Sik Kim announced he was giving up his dalliance with Catherine. He vowed he would go into another one- hundred day meditation retreat to cleanse himself  and to further develop the art of Shim Gum Do.  One outcome of this retreat he said would enable him to directly influence world events, such as weapon systems, money flow, and the weather, with his mere thoughts. In fact, he already did have two of these powers. He had only to add the power to affect the weather. He took our money that we paid for membership and dan levels. He taught martial arts with a sword, a weapon, and how to use it. The weather could mean how we, his students, moved through life, in fair weather because we succeeded in crossing the plain of opposition or foul if we went astray and got lost.

This emphasis on previous lives was a ploy to redirect our focus away from the breakdown of his moral and spiritual authority. His net of lies about us knotted us with him. That we were again gathered around him as we had been countless other times in other lives justified whatever he did to and for us. For what other reason were we with him now in this crazy ship heaving to and fro? He foretold that when he died he would fly through outer space to a better planet and that we were beholden to follow him. In a sense, indeed, we had departed from regular life already, and were flying through space to another planet, or another way of being in the world. It wasn’t a total fabrication, merely a hint for those who could hear.

These thoughts are outrageous, yet they were lodged in our subconsciousness like many of his comments and promises. He was the founding master of an art  we all studied so intensely. Some of us made this more important than familial relationships or career opportunities. This was our spiritual path, and if one was to succeed, it demanded supreme sacrifice. Sadhana of any type requires sacrifice of everything.

He spent the one hundred day retreat in one of the rooms of the dojo that was in the front hall under the stairs. He did not come out except to use the bathrooms on the second floor.  Then he draped a towel over his head so that he could not be seen. He was meditating all day, and so we who were still in the building had to be quiet.

Life went on, however. On the weekends my daughters stayed with me as part of the custody agreement with my former wife.  Aviva was five and Ilana three. One day we were leaving by the main exit which was near the room where he was meditating. Aviva was speaking loudly to me when he hysterically opened the door and yelled at Aviva to shut up. This so terrorized her that she refused to travel in my car for the next three weeks when I went to pick her up for the weekend. Clearly, Chang Sik Kim was mindless of the harm he had done to her. The harm was evident to me, yet I did not quit. I rationalized that he was lonely and in the middle of a hard quest. I now believe that he was unguarded at that moment and revealed his cruelty and meanness. This was a window into his true self.

At the end of the 100 days he emerged thinner. He had been overweight and out of shape before the retreat. If nothing else, he had eaten and drunk less. His emergence was cause for celebration and he gave a talk. He promised that the way he taught Shim Gum Do would change and that he would start showing us special breathing techniques. He said he had created thirty more forms of Shim Gum Do.

As it turned out he only showed us one simple breathing exercise and then nothing more. We never saw the new forms. We never saw any of the forms of sword beyond form 100, the place where Maria Rowe, his wife, had attained, and she was his most advanced student. There were supposedly 330 forms. Every so often he would demonstrate a form. He invariably would demonstrate form 35. He was able to move through that form in a matter of seconds and with perfect balance and extension. That is much faster than anyone else could manage. Even his students in Korea only learned to form 36, in this system the equivalent of a 3rd degree blackbelt. None of these students ever visited us in Boston. He went back to S. Korea only twice while I was involved. Evidently there weren’t his close adherents. 

Probably the forms higher than 100 didn’t exist. It is very possible he made them up as he went along. There were slight changes for those of us learning them in the first or second wave. He boasted he was the world’s greatest swordsman on posters or to anyone who would listen. Occasionally he gave public exhibitions. He did show an uncanny ability to move quickly and with great showmanship with a sword. His best trick was cutting while blindfolded a watermelon placed on a student’s stomach. He did have a great talent for this and it was most impressive. Trickery does not make one the world’s greatest swordsman.

He was an isolated man who refused to meet with other martial arts teachers or to teach any student of another martial art. He did not appear in the martial art magazines though these magazines knew about him and came by to see for themselves. Chang Sik Kim said the magazines didn’t print a story about him because he would not give them money. This is probably false. Yang Jwing Ming, a kung fu teacher in another part of Boston, was featured on more than one cover of Inside Kung Fu, a well distributed periodical.  After Shim Gum Do I joined the classes there on his version of kung fu. Yang Jwing Ming had already published several books on kung fu and its philosophy. 

The magazine writers saw Chang Sik KIm for what he was, an egomaniac of the first order and a possible fraud. His most advanced student was his wife, and she was not a strong martial artist, more a dancer. She was distracted from developing herself as a martial artist by the marital turmoil, the drinking and the drug taking, and the giving birth to three children among several abortions. He refused to teach anyone faster than his wife could learn. Until I made a large amount of money I could not begin to afford to challenge her position as most advanced student since he charged $2000 per dan level or what encompassed ten forms, plus other significant expenses. Over the years students more advanced than I left Shim Gum Do once they obtained the level of sixth dan. Or they just stopped participating for other reasons. No one could challenge her. She wasn’t  that good, but Chang Sik Kim protected her.

I thought I was a good martial artist. To my chagrin, after joining Yang Jwing Ming Martial Arts I saw that I was not that good and that I need a lot of retraining. Many of the principles of Shim Gum Do according to Kung Fu are incorrect, even in something as basic as kicking and punching. The kicks of Shim Gum Do are simple and not even first level kung fu kicks. The strict attention to form and generation of power are more sophisticated as well. It makes me wonder what in the world I was learning from Chang Sik Kim. Dance?

Perhaps it was martial arts unlike other martial arts, in that, it was in the form of a martial art, but its purpose was to teach its practitioners the roots of zen. The Proclamation of Korean Buddhist Shim Gum Do is printed in the book Maria Rowe wrote and published in 1985, The Art of Zen Sword, The History of Shim Gum Do, Part One, which says:

What is Shim (mind)? Avatamsaka Sutra says, ‘If you want to understand that all three worlds are Buddha, you must perceive world substance. All things are created by mind alone. This means that if you want to understand the true way, you must perceive where name and form come from, and you must understand that name and form come from you. And you must understand that name and form are created by mind. In this world, one by one, each thing is complete, one by one, each thing has substance, and universal substance. We call this primary point. If you keep this mind, you and everything, you and the universe become one. Clear like space, with name and form, without opposites, that is the Absolute. We call it Mind or Buddha or God or Truth or Energy. This is Shim.

What Gum (sword)? An eminent teacher said, ‘There are two kinds of Gum, the killing Gum and the life-giving Gum.’ Breaking all demons, it helps us find the truth. Whether killing or bestowing life, without hindrance, it has complete freedom. Therefore, our Gum chases away evil, helps goodness, makes the correct way, manifests Great Love, Great Compassion, the Great Bodhisattva Way, and fights for the cause of justice. Sometimes this Gum appears as a steel sword, sometimes as a wooden sword, a fist sword, a mind sword, or a name-no-form-energy sword. On the outside it repulses enemies of peace, internally it cuts off our ignorance, makes our bad karma disappear, and enables us to get complete freedom and to find the True Light.

What is Do (path)? Zen Master Nam Cheon said, ‘Everyday mind is the path.’ This means the true way. Without hindrance anywhere, the Great Way has no gate. If you make your opinion, your condition, and your situation disappear, then your true self appears and finding the correct opinion, correct situation and correct condition is possible. Then all that you can see, hear, smell is the truth. All is ‘Do’. Do not make ‘I, my, me.’ Then everyday life is the truth and the path. Then you will get the Great Bodhisattva Way and it will be possible to call all beings from suffering. The name for this is ‘Do’.

Shim is Buddha, which is clear like space.

Gum is Dharma, which is the correct function of energy.

Do is Sangha, which is great love and great compassion.

This is only part of the Proclamation written by Seung Sahn and Chang Sik Kim in 1971.

From the above, one would think Shim Gum Do is a valid practice. I chose that path and chose to believe it was following the way shown in the Proclamation. It was obvious to me and it didn’t matter that others did not agree.

He told lies. He said he stopped hurricanes from coming to Boston. He claimed he was enlightened. He said his wife was enlightened. He said he saw other people’s past lives, and that a person’s prosperity depended on how well he listened to him. He warned that going to bars and drinking was not a good use of time, while he drank too much and actively encouraged others to follow. He said he was a zen master. He said he could see how a student was living and could correct that person’s path to a better way. For him vows and oaths were only a distant goal to be tried, even regarding the abuse of drugs and alcohol. Stretching before class was unnecessary. Only he who was tight needed to stretch. He promised to continue the pursuit for deeper powers through meditation. He gossipped about people’s relationships in Shim Gum Do, charging, for instance, that Michael Elta had sex in the dharma room with Lisa Cinchetti, and that he enjoyed having many women. One of the biggest lies was the ranking system. A student advanced by paying money. Ability had nothing to do with it. One had only to remember the forms and how to perform them. Money was everything. Maria Rowe told me that she also has had to pay $2000 for the forms like everyone else, and I believed her since Chang Sik Kim is avaricious.

A student could be called a master and not be a master of anything, not himself nor the martial art. Because we spent so much time in training we half believed we knew something. We paid dearly for this belief. Mary Stackhouse is another example of a person who did not pay her way. In lieu of money she performed services for him. Maria Rowe charged that Mary Stackhouse and he had sex long before her marriage broke up with him. 

Now that Maria was gone, Mary moved in and took her place. Chang Sik Kim denied all of this.  He charged that John Aldridge, another student, and Maria and he formed a triangle of tangled sexual relationships. 

It is a fact that Chang Sik Kim liked women. He often went to the Combat Zone to watch strippers and probably have sex with the whores. One time he drank so much he passed out at a red light right in front of the Brighton Police Station after a rollicking time in the Zone. Bill Jarcho, an artist, and another student, told me that at one of the Shim Gum Do picnics Chang Sik Kim came on strong to two women who were with him, making lewd comments and touching their breasts. He had had too much to drink. Other women have similar complaints, Maria Rowe has told me.

In 1983 I visited Chang Sik Kim on Christmas Day and he was in the kitchen with a young woman, probably underage. The table was littered with glasses and bottles of liquor. The two of them had the feverish look of those who have drunk beyond the capacity to think clearly and who have had sex together. Her name was Crystal. She was the type of tortured soul who would have sex with anybody, and he was the type of man who felt no compunction about obliging. Soon after this he threatened his marriage by pursuing Catherine Crimmins without abashment.

The crown of it all was the menage a trois of John Aldridge, Maria Rowe and Chang Sik Kim. Aldrige was a pathetic martial artist  since his leg muscles were so tight he could not adequately kick. Chang Sik Kim reported that his wife is a nymphomaniac who desired above all to have sex with Aldrige. He added that after continual pining from Maria, he relented and allowed her to go to Aldrige. She flew into his arms and they fucked their brains out. 

He confided in me when I was divorcing my wife that because he knew the secret of fulfilling every desire of a woman with his wonderful penis he would never suffer the same experience. While Aldridge and Maria went at it, he turned to alcohol for solace in his loneliness. That, he said, was the cause of his drinking.

Aldridge would the next morning eat breakfast with Chang Sik Kim after a night of licking his wife. Chang Sik Kim said he showed the compassion and moral strength of Jesus by not becoming angry with him. This triangle of lust went on for three years. Maria said she visited Alridge because she was lonely and in need of affection. Perhaps she was reliving her experience when as a child her older brother raped her. Whatever the reason he did not banish Aldridge from Shim Gum Do, but brought  him closer to his bosom while he was cuckolding him proves that he was abnormal and perverse. He had no regard for women, not even his wife.

He maintained that she was insane.

Maria was a romantic and a tart. She was by no measure a nymphomaniac. She defended her drinking as a way of pleasure and openness. She teased me saying I was too closed and ought to follow her way of pleasure. I was not interested in her taunts. She might have justified her relationship with Aldridge as a way of artistically enjoying life. However, she also told me she was hypnotised by Chang Sik Kim and forced to act against her better judgment. He did have a powerful control over her. Once she awoke from this slavery, she did so with a vengence. She went to Italy and began an amorous relationship with Jerry Carson who was an old student of Chang Sik Kim’s and an old dear friend of hers. He used the discovery of this relationship as a pretext to accuse her of being a whore. But the menage a trois had been a fact for three years and Chang Sik Kim said nothing about it. If he was not upset with Aldridge sharing his marriage bed, there should have been no problem with Carson. The difference is that Jerry Carson was thousands of miles away and out of Chang Sik Kim’s control. That is what irritated him. Aldridge lived upstairs. Maybe Chang Sik Kim became impotent with Maria and wanted to enjoy sex vicariously. 

Chang Sik Kim used to comment about little penises. Maria says that during his one hundred day retreat and after the affair with Catherine Crimmins he would nightly leave his strict meditation and make love to her in their bedroom. So much for the saintly Chang Sik Kim. They even bore another son.

He was like a mirror. He could be anything: parent, master, fool, enemy, lover, friend, tyrant. I suggest he was like this because there wasn’t a wholly formed individual. He was half grown and the one interacting with him fetches from his memory or his needs the other half of Chang Sik Kim and then proceeds to have intercourse with it. His deprived childhood during the Korean War might have stripped him of the possibility to have a fully evolved being. Or the fact that he was a provincial Korean in the United States might have been too much for him and made him feel inadequate. On the other hand, he had achieved non-self to a degree that he could act as a mirror to whatever would enhance our growth. The task of the teacher is not kindness, but the presentation of the hard truth that is even harder to swallow.

In the latter years of my association with Shim Gum Do he spent most of the day watching television and napping. He suffered from diabetes and the drinking only exacerbated the condition. I asked him to stop drinking for reasons of his health. He answered that he would live longer than I would and that I had nothing to worry about. Another time when he and Maria were having a fight over this issue among others, he told me that he would stop drinking if I moved back into the dojo. Somehow I would be a shoulder to lean on. I refused. The idea that I was important to him gratified me and made all the effort I had put into Shim Gum Do worthwhile. Another time he was sitting on the sofa in the front hallway. He told me that in a dream he had seen me as the tree that upheld Shim Gum Do. All well and good. I was at that time the second highest ranked student, under Maria and higher than Mary Stackhouse. I had been a large financial donor by paying for dan levels and for two swords, and I had been teaching most of the classes in sword and karate. Chang Sik Kim’s role in the day to day teaching had dropped precipitously since he did not have the necessary physical energy due to his illness. 

My relationship with the residents of the dojo was not good. Disrespect toward me was very real.  He told stories about me that lowered me in their eyes. I had certain privileges such as staying later to train when everyone else had gone, and going there to train on weekends. Sometimes I went early in the morning to join in the meditation. On Sundays I occasionally joined them in their chores. The place was like a home. I believed in and tried to live the maxim ‘only go straight’ and I didn’t care what the others thought of me. I cherished the ideal of a martial artist that I deluded myself I was following.   

The meditation involved reviewing in the mind’s eye the forms of sword, karate, long stick or two-sword. Each form had up to approximately one hundred separate movements, depending on what constitutes a movement. The idea was that mind and body are one and that by meditating on the movements one could improve dexterity, speed and skill. Also this discipline was a system to train the mind to remember with clarity. There was a saying: Clear mind, clear body. According to him this was the true zen path.

He never revealed to me how this would enable one to move as quickly as he did through form 35 of sword, or how remembering so many forms would lead one to enlightenment. Just do it, and see for yourself. In general, this is good advice.

Only I can see for myself. However, after many years of training I was nowhere nearer to attaining great energy or enlightenment. He did not teach a system like the microcosmic orbit in Chinese martial arts or any system like that found in yoga. He had deteriorated over the years and he was the founding master of this art. In 1977 when I first encountered him he seemed a different man altogether: bright, tremendous energy, generally in high spirits, and ambitious. At his first dojo at Boylston St there were many students more advanced than I. Over the next thirteen years they all left or were driven out by Chang Sik Kim. Perhaps they all sensed that his inner light was dimming. 

On the other hand, he told me at least twice that I was a pillar for the maintenance of Shim Gum Do, and that I had a fundamentally important relationship with him. The others fell away because they were unworthy and the current sexual tumult in the dojo was part of the crazy wisdom with no end in sight. I kept myself apart from all the madness and honed as closely as possible to his precepts, ‘only go straight, believe in yourself one hundred percent, and don’t look left or right’. He had really created out of thin air the art of Shim Gum Do, and it was a vehicle toward enlightenment. That he the founder was slipping was no measure of the gift he had brought to the world. The true measuring stick was its effect on those who walked on the high road as defined by the art. Now being 66 years old and looking back, I look with fondness toward him even though his particular brand of personal behavior and his mistreatment of his students including his wife are despicable. I think the art of Shim Gum Do is, despite all of that static, a beautiful creation worthy of lifelong practice. That at 66 I am as fit in mind and body as I am is a testament to it.

I have experienced other men who have attained greatness in meditation other than Chang Sik Kim. They are different. The meditation these men prescribe has an uplifting effect and fills the body and psyche with energy. Also these men lead moral lives and they strive to continually improve themselves. This is true, but I don’t really know these men like I knew Chang Sik Kim. All men have flaws, some more flagrant than others, but no mortal is perfected. One man stands out from the others I have come across, and that is Shivabalayogi. He meditated alone and like Chang Sik Kim his teacher was unearthly. Shivabalayogi spent twelve years meditating in a strict practice taught him by Shiva. CSK says Buddha showed him Shim Gum Do and that he brought it to earth during a one hundred day meditation. For a few years I practiced Shivabalayogi’s meditation practice of lifting the eyes toward the third eye and repeating the Om Namaha Shivaya mantra. He gave me a supply of vibhuti or a kind of chalk to aid me by making a spot on my forehead. The years I spent sitting in Shim Gum Do meditation did teach me how to sit and to focus my mind energy. It  is a self enclosed system of attachment to Shim Gum Do. For others it was a system of hypnotic attachment to Chang Sik Kim. I have heard of no mistakes of attachment by Shivabalayogi to women or drink or seeking money that have plagued other men who came to America to spread their particular brand of meditation. The list of these men is legion, and is spread to figures in government and entertainment. But I only visited with Shivabalayogi during his short sojourns in Boston. After his death, some pretenders emerged in India who say they are him reincarnated.

The authenticity of Chang Sik Kim is problematic and an important issue. He claimed to have learned martial arts and that he is the master of all of them without the guidance of a teacher. If Buddha was his teacher, as he claims, then why the antics? Do the students who failed by immersing themselves in drugs and alcohol under his eye make him a bad teacher? By their fruits you shall know them. He was a man who cheated on his wife and then accused her of adultery, who taught that alcohol is a bad use of energy and then drowned his loneliness in drink leading his students down the drain with him. Let us grant that Maria was a difficult woman, but even so, how could a master have married such a woman and then brought into this world three children and then to be in the midst of a bitterly fought divorce? It is odd that he could see the shortcomings of others, but he couldn’t see his own. He should never have made her pregnant. He says he had control over his ejaculation, so he could have rocked back and forth with her in a tantric embrace forever. As his most special student he ought to have given her great teaching, not misery and many abortions. Who is the sexual maniac? Why drink so much? He excused this by saying that great past zen masters and poets used alcohol as a means to inspiration. Some of them might have been nasty men. CSK showed a malicious heart sometimes. But so what? As long as he guided his students to true self knowledge, the way might be harsh and medicine strong, but the end will justify the means. 

He was the shepherd to cowardly little boys who couldn’t see who he really was. They lacked the courage to ask questions. The masters meetings were a joke, primarily because  the masters themselves were weak, directionless men and women. They couldn’t maintain disciplined training or a teaching schedule. None of them were credible martial artists. Bob Britton, one of CSK’s favorites, left SGD because he preferred golf. Mark Fortin, another favorite, spent a year in a detoxification facility. When in one meeting I charged that Mercinyak taught a karate class stoned, the masters had nothing to say. “A person has the right to do as he pleases,”  they told me. For many years Maria defended her own drinking and smoking marijuana by saying she was pursuing pleasure. 

Here I will show a letter from Zen Master Seung Sahn taken from an online source containing all his teaching letters. Maria Rowe wrote a letter to him and he answered back.

March 4, 1978

Dear Sang Gwang Rowe Sa Bom, (Maria Rowe)

Next, I will talk a little to you about the Shim Gum Do Zen Center. The Shim Gum Do Zen Center is a strong Providence Zen Center branch Zen Center. So I think everyday service, correct Zen Center style, is necessary. And the Shim Gum Do School is bigger than many other Zen Centers, so organization is very important, which means having a Directors’ Meeting, house meeting, working together, which means if everything is not organized, in the future, many problems will appear. If you are only dependent on Gwang Jang Nim, this is not so good. For example, now at Providence Zen Center, all the directors are very strong. Also, everything is organized. Once a week is a Directors’ Meeting, and once a week is a house meeting for the whole house. If you have a problem, or if you have something happening or plans for the future, decide all this at your Directors’ Meeting.

Then, next, announce it at a house meeting. Then everyone will understand the Zen Center’s situation, Zen Center’s business, and the Zen Center’s future. Then everybody’s Zen Center, everybody’s business, and everybody’s future will be clear. So some day, Gwang Jang Nim will go to Korea and come and go to other places, and this will be no problem. Also, the Zen Center will be no problem. If you only depend on Gwang Jang Nim, then when he goes to Korea, there will be no head, so how will you control the Zen Center and Shim Gum Do School? I’m only worried about this. I think you are a good director, a good Sa Bom, and a good Zen student. You must fix your Zen Center’s present situation.

Next, I want to talk about Zen interviews with you. At any Zen Center, together action is very important. Why is it only the Shim Gum Do Zen Center has no interviews? If you are attached to “I”, “my , “me”, attached to my condition, my situation, you cannot attain the True Way, cannot attain correct Shim Gum Do. Gwang Jang Nim is a Shim Gum Do Master. Learn Shim Gum Do from him. Learn Zen from me. Very clear. When Shim Gum Do and Zen come together, then this is a complete Shim Gum Do Zen Center. Somebody said, “Shim Gum Do School is different.” Then, only a Shim Gum Do school is good, and a Shim Gum Do Zen Center is not possible. If you have a Shim Gum Do Zen Center, then you must do the same action as any other Zen Center. This is very necessary. Also, I am the Shim Gum Do School president. Then, all Shim Gum Do students must listen to the president’s idea. That is the correct way. Master Dharma Teacher George is not only Providence’s Master Dharma Teacher; he is all our school’s Zen Centers’ Master Dharma Teacher. Instead of me. So his and my teaching are not different.

So I often say if you keep your opinion, your condition, your situation, then you have a problem. Already, the problem appeared. Not only Zen, not only Shim Gum Do School, any person, any people, any country, any politicians, if they keep their opinion, their condition, their situation, they will have a problem. If those things disappear, then the correct opinion, correct condition, and correct situation appear. This is called the True Way and Great Bodhisattva, Great Compassion, and Great Love. I know your mind. You already understand this way. Also, I know your difficult situation. But you try, try, try. Then you will get it. I already told these things to Gwang Jang Nim. Gwang Jang Nim said everything is O.K., and he said, “I will follow Soen Sa Nim.” Maybe this is good. Sometime, have a good talk with Gwang Jang Nim (Chang Sik Kim).

This letter is very early in Shim Gum Do’s evolution. Zen Master Seung Sahn perceived the flaws in Chang Sik Kim from the very beginning. By this time in June, 1978 I had been a student there for about a year. Many of the original members were active: Michael Elta, Mark Fortin, Jacob Perl, Jeff Stephenson, Bob Coyle. I don’t remember Elta so much as a presence. Mark Fortin was an energetic man who was very strong and enthusiastic about SGD. Jacob Perl was noticeably European from Poland and was a serious student at the Providence Zen Center who at least once attempted a one hundred day retreat. Jeff Stephenson resides at the edges of my memory as a very good student and always laughing and smiling. Bob Coyle was a big man from southeastern Massachusetts near the Rhode Island border and was in the building trades. 

Seung Sahn states unequivocally that Shim Gum Do is a subsidiary part of the Providence Zen Center.  He explicitly spells out the relationship between him and Chang Sik Kim. Chang Sik Kim is a Shim Gum Do master. Learn that art from him. To learn zen, go to Seung Sahn, a zen master. Shim Gum Do and zen go together, so that the organization becomes the Shim Gum Do Zen Center. Otherwise, if Shim Gum Do is separate, it is not a zen center, nor is it a place to learn zen.

Furthermore, Seung Sahn states that Master Dharma Teacher George is the Master Teacher over Chang Sik Kim.  Seung Sahn charges Maria Rowe with fixing this situation. Chang Sik Kim does not accept that anyone is a Master Teacher over him. 

His relationship with Seung Sahn was already deteriorating so that sometime in mid 1980’s he split from the Providence Zen Center and from Seung Sahn directorship of Shim Gum Do. Zen Master Seung Sahn correctly perceived the problem in believing in Chang Sik Kim. When he is not there, in any capacity, by physically leaving and going to Korea, for instance, or by drinking inordinately and acting like a drunken fool, or be indulging in sex and sexual bondage of others and absenting himself from the correct way, or by encouraging others to sexual and drug and drink deviency he betrays his responsibility to his teacher and his art. Maria Rowe was in no position to fix Chang Sik Kim. He used his position as head of Shim Gum Do and as her husband to control her. 

I just watched the history of the Providence Zen Center in slides showing all the places where Zen Master Seung Sahn established centers throughout the world. Shim Gum Do is not mentioned at all. Chang Sik Kim is not mentioned at all.  My disenchantment with Shim Gum Do soured my regard for zen. 

Let us grant that Chang Sik Kim spent 100 days in meditation under the direction of his teacher Zen Master Seung Sahn. Seung Sahn acknowledged him as a Shim Gum Do master. Curiously he says ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ as if there could be many SGD masters. Perhaps this is a matter of the writer, Seung Sahn, not being a native English speaker. I do not think so, as it fits logically in his precise perception of Chang Sik Kim. Chang Sik Kim left Korea because Seung Sahn asked him to come over to the United States. He could not establish Shim Gum Do as a practice in the Providence Zen Center. Apparently they were unappreciative, and thought it better to follow Seung Sahn and not dilute their practice. Later they learned tai chi and yoga. Jacob Perl, who according to the Providence Zen Center history received inka, or the authority to teach zen, and one of Seung Sahn’s and Chang Sik Kim’s first students, no longer has any association with Shim Gum Do. 

Chang Sik Kim gave many indications that Shim Gum Do was a zen path. First he called himself Gwan Ja Nim which means ‘instructor’ then after his second 100 day retreat he named himself Sa Bu Nim, which means ‘master’. Then he told us that Maria was to be called Gwan Ja Nim and that we were to bow down to her as we had bowed down to CSK. He asserted that Maria was enlightened. We bowed down to him as a matter of respect . We also bowed down to the statue of the Buddha as a matter of ritual and reverence. It equated him with the Buddha, a realized being, who knew the difference between cabbage and cucumbers, a metaphor used in his dharma talks. After a while, Maria told me to stop bowing down to her. Perhaps she was awakening from her nightmare. Bowing is a way to empty the self of thinking and naming and attachment. 

I think the bowing began in Boylston, the first dojo. A group of students including me were sitting on the carpeted portion of the floor near the altar after working out in the late afternoon. John Avault spoke. He was one of the most senior students. He announced that Chang Sik Kim was a keen eyed zen master, and that we were graced to know him, and that to show our appreciation we should bow to him.  We all did. He told us keen eyed zen masters were rare. I don’t remember if that is when the practice of bowing became standard. Avault’s statement struck me as strange, and that is why it stands out in my memory. I hadn’t considered CSK in that light. Rather he was just a martial artist. 

Later I considered myself lucky to have met a keen eyed zen master. I bowed to him not for him as he was, but for what I thought he should be. I ignored the reality of his condition and replaced it with my own picture of a true zen master. My sight was dazzling. 

Seung Sahn’s picture hung on the walls of the dojo.  Chang Sik Kim valued him as his teacher even though he did not learn Shim Gum Do from him. According to the story of his initial 100 day retreat Seung Sahn appeared to Chang Sik Kim during that meditation and helped him conquer inner demons. He had chosen him as a young man to foretold that he would one day be a great martial artist. He was a lowly floor and clothes washer in the temple. Fact or fiction? We never had this authenticated by Seung Sahn. Perhaps all of us thought it improper to challenge Chang Sik Kim by asking Seung Sahn such a silly question. Seung Sahn was then the president of the ABSGDA, the American Boston Shim Gum Do Association. He did write the long statement called The Proclamation of Korean Shim Gum Do in 1971. He did visit the Shim Gum Do dojo with regularity in the late 1970’s through early 80’s. In the 80’s, however, his schedule became busier with the founding of temples and administering his growing empire. It was heard that he broke his vows as a monk and enjoyed sexual play with his close women disciples. His sperm was the strong foundation for his zen centers. Seung Sahn visited SGD less often, and then there was a break.

CSK removed Seung Sahn’s pictures from the dojo and put up his own pictures. Seung Sahn never said that Chang Sik Kim was his chief disciple. However, in our hazy perception of their relationship we just assumed this was the situation. The importance of this relationship is that it validated Shm Gum Do as a zen practice, an action meditation beside the still meditation.  I can recall talking of the succession of principal zen masters of each era beginning with Bodhidharma and fitting Seung Sahn and Chang Sik Kim into that stream. What Shim Gum Do was in the world history of martial arts was puzzling. After the first 100 day retreat Chang Sik Kim displayed the newly found martial art to a conclave of Korean zen masters, and they awarded him a 15th dan blackbelt. It was said that he was the reincarnation of the ancient Korean martial artist Hwarang Do. This gave it an antecedent it otherwise sorely lacked. 

How could we ever establish that Chang Sik Kim was Hwarang Do? It was a matter of faith. Little concerning him could be validated. He was Korean, had an aged mother who did spend a month with him at the dojo with his unmarried sister who did not speak any English. He knew some Buddhist sutras and possessed a rather large estimation of his own worth. 

I began Shim Gum Do after college. In my senior year at Brandeis I used to wander the stacks of books in the library during my respites from translating Latin and Greek texts. I visited the stacks concerning the history of ideas over and over again. The books on zen particularly interested me. Suzuki’s book on Japanese zen made mention of the combination of sword and meditation. I found that fascinating. I saw some Kurosawa films about samurai  warriors in Central Square, Cambridge, and at other cinemas that are no longer existent due to gentrification. Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshio Mifune strongly affected me. Mifune’s way of walking in Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy impressed me and I thought it would be an achievement if I too learned to walk with such command of space.  These movie heroes were the opposite of my father who dying of ALS and who was totally incapacitated. They captivated my dreams.

One day walking in Back Bay looking for a job after my graduation I noticed a flyer taped against a mailbox advertising zen sword. The address was only a few blocks away. I walked over there. At that time the dojo was at 1112 Boylston St on the 3rd floor over a pizza shop. Mark Fortin gave me the introductory welcome. He was then fit and strong and he impressed me. I joined and began to practice hard every day. Even during the blizzard of 1978 I walked to the dojo from Central Square, Cambridge, and worked out in the freezing room.  There was so much snow the authorities closed down the highways. 

I was dedicated. I did not research Shim Gum Do’s reputation nor did I visit other styles. I was naive. I urged my wife, Nancy, to join and she passed the first degree blackbelt and did show some enthusiasm.  While she was pregnant with Aviva, our first born, we lived at the dojo for the first six months of her pregnancy. We slept on a mat in the karate room. From there we moved to the Odd Fellows Hall building in downtown Waltham, MA, near the train station to Cambridge and Boston. We had a loft in which Nancy drew and painted, and I began a short lived SGD school. 

One day CSK took me aside and told me I should open a larger school. I found a place in Northampton, MA, the upstairs of the Polish Bar and Club. It was a fabulous ballroom, with wood floors, a stage, a kitchen, high ceilings and a balcony with rooms for living.  We lived on the financial edge. The rent was $1000 per month and I took on any employment I could find and Nancy sold some paintings. Eventually we had about 25 students, and a few who lived with us, and that helped. About five of my students came every morning for meditation and chanting the heart sutra. One day I asked if any of them were Jews and if he knew about his heritage. The disconnect between my Buddhist practice and myself as a Jew who knew little about the essence of Judaism grew heavier. As Nancy and I were about 25 years old and with one beautiful child, Aviva, and we were not encumbered with any debt or obligations, it was a good time to try another lifestyle in order to satisfy my ever widening urge to learn about being a Jew. I forced Nancy to move with me to a Hasidic community in Far Rockaway. Chang Sik Kim told me to do whatever I liked with my school in Northampton. I handed it over to Winston Weatherall, another blackbelt, who agreed to carry on. He ran it into the ground and it closed down.

I spent thirteen years in Shim Gum Do including an interlude in Far Rockaway. While there I used to go at night to practice my forms in the kitchen of the shul. Rabbi Freifeld permitted it. I pushed the chairs to the sides of the room and continued practicing my sword and karate forms. I loved the practice. One of my principal joys is pressing my body to its limits. Even today I am happiest when I am faced with a bar over my head for pull ups. In southern California I am always outside when I am exercising and it is paradise. 

It is obvious now that the demon I faced was my father’s death from ALS. It was particularly difficult for me to peel myself off the image of him lying on his bed a vegetable and then dead in his coffin. I self medicated by exercise. Every rep signaled to that part of my mind where fear dominates that I was whole and not diseased.  As I have grown older exercising has become habitual and thoroughly enjoyable. I can see no reason to stop it as long as I live.

The other thirst was for knowledge. It appeared to me early that words were a key to knowledge, and as a boy of ten I would copy the words from the dictionary with which I was unfamiliar and tape those lists on the wall over my desk. That love of words changed into a love of reading and studying. I approached the knowledge, the possession of which, I saw was lacking in the adults who surrounded me to be about religion and spirituality. Twice I entered to study at higher levels at Jewish Orthodox schools to begin to apprehend and appreciate the hidden jewels of the Torah, other exegetical books like Job, and the Gemara in their original languages, as in college I chose my major to be Classics or the study of the great ancient works such as Homer in Homeric Greek. I extended that to an investigation into the nature and practice of different styles of meditation, active and still, from many directions. It became clear that at the core of Judaism is meditation in the daily davening of the shemona esrei. I wouldn’t have recognized that if I hadn’t spent a decade meditating on the forms of Shim Gum Do. One practice informs another. 

I also wanted to be a writer. In sixth grade I began to write poems and I still can quote the first quatrain. My Bubby typed my poems, such as they were, literally treacle. To wit:

John Abram’s turd

Was a merry old bird.

He lived in a bowl

And tried many souls.

Over the years I have attempted to write something of value. For one of my assignments in college I wrote a long poem for Latin in which I recalled a vivid scene of two dogs mating. I tried to write it in the style of the author we were reading, and the professor did not like my offering as it was not what he assigned. Then I sat in the closet of the apartment where I lived with Nancy and Aviva and Ilana and started my warrior stories. I do these things, like jump headfirst into Shim Gum Do, because I realize that I can use these experiences for my writing. In all fairness, even though Chang Sik Kim had flaws as all mortals do, I learned from him.

Some Interpretations of Creation as Told in Genesis 

Readers of the Torah might come to question why the elements of the story, especially in the chapters devoted to Creation and the first men and women, came to be written in the way it was. These events took place before history, even as history is understood in the Torah.  Though God alone created everything, the question begs of itself, who created God? History did not begin with God’s creation, nor with the appearance of Adam and Eve and their first two children, Cain and Abel. The Creation stands apart both in kind and placement. History, such as it is in the Torah, begins with the genealogies of Cain and Seth provided in the 5th chapter of Genesis, and not with Creation. Furthermore, the description of Creation wasn’t created out of whole cloth. The Editor rearranged the elements of earlier Creation stories in order to weave the particular story he wanted to tell.   

Either production of the universe starts from nothing as the Torah describes or procreation that involves a female and a male. The Torah proposes the first version and the other sources from Sumeria and Babylonia, for instance, recount the second. It is not the purpose of this essay to choose one version over the other. The literature and the people, the Jews, that arose because of the Torah, is proof that what the Editor wrought was right and good. Rather to show that  the Editor of the Torah, so-called in imitation of the Homer who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, edited the creation story of Genesis in order to assert that the One God created everything ex-nihilo. 

Below are the first two days of creation in Hebrew with the vowels. 

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר׃

וַיַּ֧רְא אֱלֹהִ֛ים אֶת־הָא֖וֹר כִּי־ט֑וֹב וַיַּבְדֵּ֣ל אֱלֹהִ֔ים בֵּ֥ין הָא֖וֹר וּבֵ֥ין הַחֹֽשֶׁךְ׃

וַיִּקְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ לָאוֹר֙ י֔וֹם וְלַחֹ֖שֶׁךְ קָ֣רָא לָ֑יְלָה וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם אֶחָֽד׃ {פ}

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יְהִ֥י רָקִ֖יעַ בְּת֣וֹךְ הַמָּ֑יִם וִיהִ֣י מַבְדִּ֔יל בֵּ֥ין מַ֖יִם לָמָֽיִם׃

וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִים֮ אֶת־הָרָקִ֒יעַ֒ וַיַּבְדֵּ֗ל בֵּ֤ין הַמַּ֙יִם֙ אֲשֶׁר֙ מִתַּ֣חַת לָרָקִ֔יעַ וּבֵ֣ין הַמַּ֔יִם אֲשֶׁ֖ר מֵעַ֣ל לָרָקִ֑יעַ וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֗ים יִקָּו֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם מִתַּ֤חַת הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ אֶל־מָק֣וֹם אֶחָ֔ד וְתֵרָאֶ֖ה הַיַּבָּשָׁ֑ה וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃

Raphael Patai and Robert Graves, in Hebrew Myths, assert: the monotheistic editor of Genesis, chapters 1 and 2 of the cosmogony could assign no part in Creation to anyone but God, and therefore omitted all pre-existing elements or beings which might be held divine.

Such abstractions as Chaos (tohu and vohu), Darkness (hoshekh), and the Deep (tehom) would, however, tempt no worshippers: so these took the place of the ancient matriarchal deities.

These authors use Ugaritic writings that either predate the Bible or are contemporaneous with its composition to peel back the veneer of the Hebrew text. One of the problems with a project of this sort is that the Torah is the first text from which all others flow, for instance, the Gospels and of other sects and beliefs that sprung up in the years around the 2nd Temple period ending in 70 A.D. It appeared to be a closed book. However, with Raphael Patai’s, a philologist’s, strict gaze into the text, and the eye of the author of The Greek Myths, Robert Graves, secrets long held are revealed. 

The line referred to in the above quote in Hebrew Myths is the second sentence of the Torah, which is printed in Hebrew:             וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃

and it says, in translation: “And the land was Tohu and Vohu תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ  and Darkness חֹ֖שֶׁךְ  was on the Deep תְה֑וֹם and the wind or spirit of God   וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים was hovering over the Water הַמָּֽיִם.”     

(Note that the word  ר֣וּחַ can have two meanings, either: wind or breath, and spirit)

When reading the second line of the Torah, one asks oneself, what are Tohu and Vohu? It is commonly translated as ‘unformed and void.’ Those two words try to describe nothingness, and they provide nothing to further the understanding, and deaden any possibility of looking deeper or at what lurks behind. 

The story underlying Genesis may therefore be, say Patai and Graves:

That the world in its primeval state consisted of a sea monster Tohu and a land monster Bohu. Tohu’s identity with Tehomot, and Bohu’s with Behemoth has been suppressed for doctrinal reasons.

Tohu and Bohu are now read as personified states of emptiness or chaos, and God being made responsible for the subsequent creation of Tehomot (or Leviathan) and Behemoth.   These assertions will be made plain below and the Hebrew texts cited as proofs by Patai and Graves are given with translations.

There are two strands involved. One is the idea that Tohu and Bohu are shortened versions of the names for Tehomot and Behemoth, a sea-monster and a land-monster, and further, the identity of Tehomot as Leviathan.  The second strand is the splitting of the universe in two parts, an upper and a lower, wherein the Leviathan and Behemoth are pressed together in coitus, where from, God breaks them apart. 

There is a third strand, that of the serpent or snake. He appears in the Torah’s second creation story at Eden, where he appears as if from nowhere to encounter Eve. The snake has no introduction and escapes mention in the list of animals that Adam names. He is not a celestial being, for he suffers the loss of his legs and arms and becomes a snake at God’s utternance. The Zohar Chadash recognizes this lacuna and reports that Samael saw God teaching the Torah to Adam and descended to earth from Heaven as a shadow riding on a serpent to confront Eve. In Numbers Moses makes a standard on which he places a serpent that is kept and worshipped in the Temple. In Exodus, on his way to Egypt at the behest of God to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt, Moses is waylaid by God in the form of a serpent that almost swallows him. In Isaiah and Job there are phrases using words for the serpent that directly echo phrases from Uragritic poetry concerning the Creation.  In the earlier Creation stories the Serpent is a primary mover of the machinery of creation. The Editor suppressed that role in the Torah’s Creation story, but it springs up tellingly in other places. 

The Akkadian or Babylonian and Assyrian Creation Epics are parallel texts to the Torah’s Creation account and are crucial for understanding it. They were in the air, so to speak, in the early 2nd millennium B.C.  David Rosenberg in his book, Abraham, The First Historical Biography, places Abraham in the 18th century, B.C. Hammurapi, he of the Code, united Mesopotamia in the 18th century, B.C. This places Abraham in the timeline, something that easily gets buried when one is reading the Torah. Moses stood at Sinai approximately at 1500 B.C. In Greek philology, Gregory Nagy’s and others’ work that connects the Vedas with the Homeric canon has been foundational for opening up and clearing up some of the mysteries of the Iliad and Odyssey. In a similar vein, to explicate what lies behind the Torah requires the use of parallel texts from earlier or coterminous related cultures, for instance, the Enuma Elish.

The Enuma Elish, from Akkadia, meaning ‘When on High’ is the longest of the creation epics other than the Torah’s. It begins: ‘The holy house, the house of the gods, in a holy place had not yet been made…’  And continues: Then Apsu the Begetter and Mother Tiamat mingled chaotically and produced a brood of dragon-like monsters. Later, after eons had passed, a younger generation of gods arose, and one of them, Ea, God of Wisdom, challenged and killed Apsu. Tiamat was angered, and married one of her sons, Kingu. She bore monsters from her union with Kingu, and prepared to take vengeance on Ea

Ea, God of Wisdom, produced a son, Marduk, who alone stood against Tiamat and her eleven monsters. After a terrible battle, Marduk overcame Tiamat. He split Her into halves like a shell-fish.  Marduk used one of these as a firmament, to impede the upper waters from flooding the earth; and the other as a rocky foundation for earth and sea. He took the Tablets of Fate from the breast of Kingu, Tiamat’s mate after Apsu’s death, and after condemning Kingu to death, Marduk created Man from His blood. 

When on High, as the Enuma Elish says, there was as of yet nothing created. The two first principles, Apsu, the male, and Tiamat the female, began the process of creation. After Apsu’s murder came the splitting of Tiamat into two halves, and from the blood of her son and mate, Kinku, Marduk created Mankind. The Torah account, on the other hand, uses earth rather than blood to create Adam. The blood that Markduk used appears in the following chapter about Cain and Abel. Abel’s blood cries out from the earth after his murder. Cain is exiled and Adam and Eve have no other children for a long time, until Seth, at the end of the chapter. The next chapter of the Torah, chapter five, contains extended genealogies of first Cain and then Seth. These chapters serve as a break in the action. The curtain opens at chapter 6 wherein Noah appears.  That there is this stopping of the action while the genealogies are recited, suggests that history starts with Cain and Seth, especially the latter, as he is the link to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The blood of Abel is used here to denote the creation of man. He is murdered. The Editor put this story here in prehistory, as if muder is part and parcel of humanity. Blood and soil is the cry even today of one’s racial claim to land. Abel is dead and gone, Cain is exiled and gone, so the stage is clear until Seth is born. He appears because Abel’s blood poured into the earth, and so Seth and all the generations to follow come from this mixture, as did Marduk with Kingu’s blood. History as it is usually understood is a genealogy, and begins with the lists of who begat whom, and the Torah does no differently. British history is the list of the kings of England. It is a very old way of counting the years and peopling it, in other words, the making of history.

In ancient texts the first line served as the title of the work. This is unlike modern works which have a special title crowning the text and separate from its body. The opening line of the Torah says that God created the heavens and the earth.   In the case of the Torah, its first word actually is the Hebrew title of The Book of Genesis or בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית. The entirety of the opening line: ‘God is the creator of the Heaven and the Earth’ serves as a better title than simply its opening word as it carries the main idea of the entire Torah, i.e., that God alone made everything, and everything is contained in the words, ‘heaven and earth’   הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ. These two words, ‘heaven and earth’, are actually part of the title, and therefore, perform differently than those same words when they appear within the text. Here the two words connote everything in the universe, and are neither specifically the earth nor the heaven. 

How did the ancients conceive the universe or ‘the heavens and the earth’ to be shaped?

As H.J Rose writes: “In order to understand the cosmological myths of the Ancient Greeks, it is necessary to realize what they, in early times, supposed the shape of the world to be… In particular, the Greeks supposed that the boundary of this plain of earth was formed by the stream of Ocean (Okeanos), which is not the sea, but a great river, flowing in a circle. The sky is a substantial dome, it is said to be made of bronze or iron; it is at a considerable height above the earth, but not an immeasurable distance; the residence of the gods is now the sky itself…”  In other words, what man could see as far as he could see was the sky and ground, and in the far horizon, they touched. That encompassed all creation. There was nothing more. So the appropriate epithet of the great Creator is He Who Created the Earth and the Sky. In the Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, a midrash on the work of God in His creation written in 8th or 9th century in Israel, it says: ‘The Firmament covers Earth like a dome-shaped lid; its edges touch the surrounding Ocean. The hooks of Heaven are sunk in these waters.’   Here we can see that the Jewish and the ancient Greek conceptions of the world coincide.

It is suggestive that two of the words in the second sentence of Genesis are almost the same: 

                  תֹ֙הוּ֙                          תְה֑וֹם                                                                                                              

וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃

‘The earth was tohu and bohu (unformed and void)  and darkness was on the face of the deep and the spirit of God was on the waters’.

The second sentence in Hebrew is printed just below the two words. The first word is ‘Tohu’ meaning ‘a void’ and the second  ‘Tehom’ is translated as ‘depth or deep waters or abyss or chasm’. Their vowels are slightly different and the second word has an extra letter, a ‘mem’ or ‘m’. Even their meanings almost coalesce into one. An empty space or void is something like an abyss in meaning, especially when the language is poetic. 

The two words, Tohu and Bohu, from the second sentence of Genesis, as previously stated, are defined in the dictionary as ‘unformed and void.’  These two words are important as they are the very stuff out of which God creates everything. Tohu is a cognate of Tiamat, and both are the Leviathan, a water monster.

If  one adds an ‘m’ to the word Tohu, תֹ֙הוּ֙,  it becomes Tohum and then by changing its vowels, it becomes Tehom,  תְה֑וֹם.  The Torah is written without vowels. The vowels one sees in printed versions of the Torah are an afterthought. In the Torah scrolls, the words are written by a scribe and there are no vowels, not even periods to demarcate the ending of a sentence. At some particular places in the text, the vowels make all the difference in understanding the text. It is understandable that eventually the Torah would have to have an unchanging text including what vowels went where, in order to stave off different or even heretical positions. 

The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 consonants and includes no vowels. Even modern Hebrew is printed with no vowels in most cases.  When vowels are printed in books with the words it is to show how the consonants are to be read. When the Torah reader chants the text by reading directly from the Torah scroll on Shabbos, for instance, it is of the utmost importance that he reads the text exactly as it has been handed down by the Masoretes. The minyan checks the reader’s rendering of the Torah script by following in a Chumash or a book of the Torah that is printed with vowels.

” In the 9th and 10th centuries A.D. the Masoretes in Tiberias, Israel, perfected a system of vowel notation and added it to the received consonantal text…It is simply the best preserved and has received, by universal adoption, the stamp of authority…The standard Masoretic text is also known as the Ben Asher text, after the family name of the Tiberian scholars identified with the final editing. The Biblia Hebraica (3rd edition, Stuttgart, 1937) used by most modern students and scholars is based on the copy of a Ben Asher manuscript now in Leningrad and dating from 1008/9 A.D.” (Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew). The Torah was given to Moses in approximately 1500 B.C. Twenty-five hundred years later the vowel placement for the Torah was standardized, even though there may have been alternate vowel placements and alternate understandings of certain passages that this standardization erased. It is the task of the person who seeks to pry open the text of the creation story to go back to the time when these alternate understandings were open and available by means of the changeable vowel structure.

 A name, in particular, is arbitrary in its spelling and vowel structure. It is a special class of nouns. As the Torah scroll is written without vowels, and the vowels one can see in printed versions are an overlay, then one is justified in changing the selection of vowels for a name. If ‘Tehom’ is a name, then one can change the vowels. So, ‘Tehom’ תְה֑וֹם  can become ‘Tohum’. In this case, the T*h*m remain, and the vowels, denoted by the * are open to variation. The word ‘Tohu’  תֹ֙הוּ֙   can also be changed by simply adding an ‘m’ to it, so it becomes ‘Tohum’. With this, the two words that are very similar as they are preserved in the Torah, can with simple vowel changes and the addition of the ‘m’ that partially denotes the plural in Hebrew, can be rendered in identical spellings. 

‘The definite article in Hebrew corresponds closely to the definite article of English in usage and meaning. The basic form of the article is ha- plus ‘הַ’ the doubling of the following consonant. It is prefixed directly to the noun it determines:

שָּׁמַ֖יִם a sky

הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם the sky 

There is no indefinite article in Hebrew, corresponding to the English ‘a’. שָּׁמַ֖יִם  may be translated as “sky” or “a sky.”  Patai and Graves explain that in Biblical Hebrew as in English, a proper name does not have a definite article in front of it. One does not write, the Marc. One writes, Marc. ‘That Tehom never takes a definite article in Hebrew proves it to have once been a proper name, like Tiamat. Tehomot , then, is the Hebrew equivalent of Mother Tiamat, beloved by the God Apsu, whose name developed from the older Sumerian Abzu; and Abzu was the imaginary sweet-water abyss from which Enki, God of Wisdom, emerged’.

In Hebrew the feminine plural is denoted by adding an ‘ot’ as a suffix, so ‘Tehom’ becomes ‘Tehomot’. Similarly, ‘Bohu’ becomes first ‘Behom’ and then in the plural, ‘Behomot’ or in English, Behemoth, a dry-land counterpart of the sea-monster Tehom. In the dictionary, ‘Tehom’ is ‘Ocean; abyss, chasm.’ 

‘Were it not for the Tehom-Tiamat parallel, we should never guess that Tehom represents the formidable Babylonian Mother-goddess who bore the gods, was rebelled against them, and finally surrendered her own body to serve as the building block for the Universe.’

We can see that Tehomot and Tiamat are very similar. ‘Tiamat’ lacks an ‘h’ sound. The ‘h’ sound can be easily gained or lost by the rules of sound changes from one language to another. ‘The ‘h’ is a voiced consonant, and over time some voiced consonants became voiceless, and vice versa, and consonants were occasionally lost.’ Furthermore, the dictionary meaning for ‘Tehom’ is suggestive in that it is the deepest part of the ocean wherein live monstrous sea dwelling fish. The nearness of the sound of the Tehomot-Tiamat nexus and the similarity of meaning between the two, the first being the place where sea-monsters dwell, and the second being the Mother-goddess (of Water) described above. In this sense, therefore, we can see the parallel between Tehom and Tiamat. 

The Babylonian sea-monster corresponding with the Hebrew Tehomot appears as Tiamat, Tamtu, Tamdu, and Taawatu.’  They further point out that if one considers the various spellings of Tiamat, by philological rules, one can derive taw as the root of Tiamat. And, as taw is to Tiamat, so is Tohu to Tehom and Tehomot. That is, one uses the same rules that one can add a ‘m’ to Tohu so that it becomes Tehom(Tehomot being its plural form). 

Patai and Graves weave together a third account of creation using various Biblical sources: Psalms, Isaiah Kings, Nahum, Proverbs, Jeremiah, Job, and Habakkuk. They call it the ‘third creation story.’ It expands the brief reference to ‘Tohu and Bohu and the Deep’. The Creator must struggle against water, personified by the Prophets as Leviathan, Rahab or the Great Dragon, not only because the Creatirix, whom he displaces, is a goddess of Fertility, and therefore of water.’ (Hebrew Myths, p 30).  Recall that Marduk splits Tiamat into halves, using one half to impede the upper waters from flooding the earth, and the other half to provide a rocky foundation for earth and sea.

In the Midrash Konen, a cosmogonical and cosmological midrash, containing four parts written by four different authors, the contents of which closely parallel such apocryphal books as Enoch, 4 Esdras, etc., it is written: God found the male Upper Waters and the female Lower Waters locked in a passionate embrace. “Let one of you rise,” He ordered, “and the other fall!” But they rose up together, whereupon God asked: “Why did you both rise?” “We are inseparable,” they answered in one voice. “Leave us to our love!” God now stretched out His little finger and tore them apart; the Upper He lifted high, the Lower He cast down. To punish their defiance, God would have singed them with fire, had they not sued for mercy. He pardoned them on two conditions: that, at Exodus, they would allow the Children of Israel to pass through dry-shod; and that they would prevent Jonah from fleeing by ship to Tarshish.`

In this midrash shown above, the Upper and Lower Waters are locked in a passionate embrace and God tears them apart. This is very similar to the story about Marduk splitting Tiamat in two halves. One could protest that this is just a silly tale to explain how the Jews could walk dry across the water when the Pharaoh is in full pursuit, and thus has no relationship to any philological treatment. However, a midrash is a serious part of the Biblical canon. In the view of Patai and Graves, it can include traditions or information from earlier periods that perhaps overlapped with the editing of the Torah’ creation story. 

Midrash was initially a philological method of interpreting the literal meaning of biblical texts. In time it developed into a sophisticated interpretive system that reconciled apparent biblical contradictions, established the scriptural basis of new laws, and enriched biblical content with new meaning. Midrashic creativity reached its peak in the schools of Rabbi Ishmael and Akiba, where two different hermeneutic methods were applied. The first was primarily logically oriented, making inferences based upon similarity of content and analogy. The second rested largely upon textual scrutiny, assuming that words and letters that seem superfluous teach something not openly stated in the text. 

Biblical canon alludes to Leviathan as a many-headed sea-monster רָאשֵׁ֣י לִוְיָתָ֑ן , or as a fleeing serpent   לִוְיָתָן֙ נָחָ֣שׁ בָּרִ֔חַ .  or a crooked serpent       נָחָ֖שׁ עֲקַלָּת֑וֹן                  

In the Ugaritic texts it says: If you smite Lotan…the crooked serpent, the mighty one with the seven heads. The language is the same in Hebrew. In particular, the word for Leviathan לִוְיָתָן֙. In Hebrew it is read with the vowels, and it reads as ‘Levyatan’. In English it is spelled Leviathan. If one removes the vowels from the Hebrew word, לִוְיָתָן֙, one can read only the consonants, and it reads as Loytan.  Loytan and Lotan are practically the same. One is the Hebrew without the vocalization, or the vowels as given in the Masoretic text.  In the texts from Psalm 74:14 and Isaiah 27:1 shown below, it says the God will crush and punish the Leviathan, There are three types of Leviathan; the many headed Leviathan   רָאשֵׁ֣י לִוְיָתָ֑ן,  the fleeing snake Leviathan לִוְיָתָן֙ נָחָ֣שׁ בָּרִ֔חַ, and the crooked snake Leviathan לִוְיָתָ֔ן נָחָ֖שׁ עֲקַלָּת֑וֹן. The Ugaritic text shown above has the exact same description for the ‘crooked serpent Lotan.’ Accordingly, one can say that Leviathan is a serpent of the water, and is even called a dragon or sea-monster תַּנִּ֖ין אֲשֶׁ֥ר בַּיָּֽם׃. 

Just below is the line from Psalms that agrees with the description of the mighty one with seven heads.

אַתָּ֣ה רִ֭צַּצְתָּ רָאשֵׁ֣י לִוְיָתָ֑ן תִּתְּנֶ֥נּוּ מַ֝אֲכָ֗ל לְעָ֣ם לְצִיִּֽים׃ it was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan.

who left him as food for ^cOr “seafaring men”; meaning of Heb. uncertain.the denizens of the desert;

This line reveals the ‘many headed Leviathan’ in Psalm 74:14. This is like the seven headed monster on Hittite cylinder seals, and mentioned in Ugaritic mythology.

Isaiah 27:1

Tanach with Ta’amei Hamikra

בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֡וּא יִפְקֹ֣ד יְהוָה֩ בְּחַרְב֨וֹ הַקָּשָׁ֜ה וְהַגְּדוֹלָ֣ה וְהַֽחֲזָקָ֗ה עַ֤ל לִוְיָתָן֙ נָחָ֣שׁ בָּרִ֔חַ וְעַל֙ לִוְיָתָ֔ן נָחָ֖שׁ עֲקַלָּת֑וֹן וְהָרַ֥ג אֶת־הַתַּנִּ֖ין אֲשֶׁ֥ר בַּיָּֽם׃ (ס)

In that day the LORD will punish,

With His great, cruel, mighty sword

Leviathan the Elusive^aMeaning of Heb. uncertain. Serpent—

Leviathan the Twisting^aMeaning of Heb. uncertain. Serpent;

He will slay the Dragon of the sea.^b

^{The line above has the other two designations of the Leviathan: the crooked one and the fleeing one. It also at the end of the line calls the Leviathan a ‘dragon of the sea.’} 

 ^{As quoted above in the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Creation story, Marduk splits Tiamat in half:}

After a terrible battle, Marduk overcame Tiamat. He split Her into halves like a shell-fish.  Marduk used one of these as a firmament, to impede the upper waters from flooding the earth; and the other as a rocky foundation for earth and sea.

Tiamat is a water-monster, and also Tiamat and the Leviathan are the same. In the Torah God splits the waters into two:

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יְהִ֥י רָקִ֖יעַ בְּת֣וֹךְ הַמָּ֑יִם וִיהִ֣י מַבְדִּ֔יל בֵּ֥ין מַ֖יִם לָמָֽיִם׃ God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it may separate water from water.”

וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִים֮ אֶת־הָרָקִ֒יעַ֒ וַיַּבְדֵּ֗ל בֵּ֤ין הַמַּ֙יִם֙ אֲשֶׁר֙ מִתַּ֣חַת לָרָקִ֔יעַ וּבֵ֣ין הַמַּ֔יִם אֲשֶׁ֖ר מֵעַ֣ל לָרָקִ֑יעַ וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃ God made the expanse, and it separated the water which was below the expanse from the water which was above the expanse. And it was so.

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֗ים יִקָּו֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם מִתַּ֤חַת הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ אֶל־מָק֣וֹם אֶחָ֔ד וְתֵרָאֶ֖ה הַיַּבָּשָׁ֑ה וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃ God said, “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may appear.” And it was so.

וַיִּקְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ לַיַּבָּשָׁה֙ אֶ֔רֶץ וּלְמִקְוֵ֥ה הַמַּ֖יִם קָרָ֣א יַמִּ֑ים וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב׃ God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of waters He called Seas. And God saw that this was good.

Splitting the waters into one that is above and the other that is below is the second day of Creation. The account of this splitting the waters is confusing and difficult to understand precisely. What is the ‘expanse’ or רָקִ֖יעַ? It is written in this manner to obfuscate what is actually happening.  On the first day, there is Tohu and Bohu. God splits them apart on the second day. They are the Leviathan and the Behemoth, respectively. If one keeps this in mind, the account of the second day becomes more comprehensible. The Leviathan, a water-monster, is Tiamat or Tehom. The Torah Editor has submerged these details in order to keep intact the assertion that God alone created everything and He did this from Nothing. 

^{Job 26:13}

בְּ֭רוּחוֹ שָׁמַ֣יִם שִׁפְרָ֑ה חֹלְלָ֥ה יָ֝ד֗וֹ נָחָ֥שׁ בָּרִֽחַ׃ By His wind the heavens were calmed;

His hand pierced the ^cCf. Isa. 27.1.Elusive Serpent.^-c

In this line from Job 26:13 in the second clause, ‘His hand pierced the Elusive Serpent’, the adjective נָחָ֥שׁ בָּרִֽחַ describing the serpent has two meanings. The first meaning is the one provided ‘elusive’ in the standard translation shown above. The other meaning is ‘bolted’. Properly, this is a passive participle of the verb to ‘flee’ or to ‘fasten with a bolt’. A passive participle can modify a noun, and therefore act like an adjective.  

The significance of these last two quotes, from Isaiah 27:1 and Job 26:13 is that they connect the Leviathan and the Serpent. It is meaningful that both lines have the phrase נָחָ֥שׁ בָּרִֽחַ (fleeing serpent), and it also connects the word, Leviathan  לִוְיָתָן֙   with this phrase. It also sets up an identity between this Serpent and the Dragon of the sea, הַתַּנִּ֖ין אֲשֶׁ֥ר בַּיָּֽם׃. Therefore, the Serpent is the Leviathan which is the Dragon. Furthermore, the dual meaning of the word בָּרִֽחַ is either ‘elusive’ or ‘bolted’ is also significant. If we use the second meaning, ‘bolted’, then the Serpent is bolted. In the third account of creation compiled by Patai and Graves, it says: ‘He confined Tehom with a bolt and two doors.’ This refers to a double door with a bolt shot across it to prevent Tehom from escaping. The same image occurs in the Enuma Elish, the Akkadian Creation Epic: after Marduk had killed Tiamat and formed the Heavens from one half of her body, he ‘shot a bolt across, and placed watchers over it to prevent Tiamat from letting out her waters.’ So there is an equivalence between God and Marduk, who both fought Tehom or Tiamat, and enclosed them in a prison with doors bolted. 

Creation can be understood as a procreation, and for that a matriarch is necessary for the birth of the universe. Okeanos and Tethys are spoken of in a famous passage in the Iliad 14:201 as the progenitors of the gods. Hesiod names Okeanos the eldest of the Titans and father of 3000 rivers, and Homer calls him a god only inferior to Zeus. He was supposed to girdle the earth like a serpent, and was identified with Leviathan, the Great Dragon and Rahab. Eurynome is the daughter of Okeanos and Tethys, as told by Hesiod.  ‘And he sang how first of all Ophion and Eurynome, daughter of Oceanus, held the sway of snowy Olympus,’ Apollonius of Rhodes  in his Argonautica summarizes the Song of Orpheus.  Ophion is the Serpent.  

Robert Graves reconstructed the Orphic Creation story as: Eurynome, Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, divided sea from sky, danced upon the waves, stirred up the wind, was impregnated by it in the shape of a great serpent named Ophion or Ophioneus, and laid the World Egg.

There was an ancient belief that mares could be impregnated by the wind. (Iliad 16:149 etc..) (Handbook of Greek Mythology p29)  Who knew? Eurynome was impregnated by the wind/serpent. In the second line of the Torah when God is hovering over the Waters, is a retelling of Eurynome being impregnated by the Serpent.  וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃  In this phrase God has the epithet, ר֣וּחַ, which has two meanings, wind or spirit. If one chooses, ‘wind’, then the ‘wind’ is hovering over Tiamat, in other words, impregnating her. In this case, God is equivalent to the Serpent or even Apsu the Begetter who is the mate to Tiamat. The Torah Editor so tightly suppressed the story containing the matriarch, that He takes on different roles depending where He is placed in the enactment of the Creation. 

There are two confusing words in English, Orphism and Ophite. An Ophite is not a follower of Orphism. 

Orphism: The of mystic philosophy embodied in Orphic poems, and taught to the initiated in the Orphic Mysteries. 

Ophite: A member of a 2nd century sect, who worshipped the serpent as an embodiment of divine wisdom. Comes from the Greek word for serpent.

In the Orphic Fragments 60, 61 70 and 89: Night, the Creatrix, lays a silver egg from which Love is hatched to set the Universe in motion. Night lives in a cave displaying herself in triad as Night, Order, Justice. 

In the Near East the creation myths, part of the divine matriarch’s role had been given to a male-warrior escort. In the Enuma Elish the universe is created by the union between Apsu the Begetter and Mother Tiamat. 

Alexander Polyhistor summarized Berossus’ account of creation as: where after El’s victory over Tiamat, the Goddess Aruru formed man from El’s own blood kneaded with clay. 

‘Elohim’ usually translated as ‘God’ as is found in Genesis 1, is a Hebrew variant of an ancient 

Semitic name for ‘the one god of many’. Among the Assyrians and Bablylonians it was ‘Ilu’. It was ‘El’ for the Hittites and in the Ugaritic texts. It was ‘Il’ or ‘Illum’ for the South Arabians. It was ‘El’ who headed the Phoenician pantheon. This is further proof that all that seems whole is not. Some strands of tradition or knowledge must have come along with the name ‘El’ in its various formulations. 

The idea that God is a Serpent is found in the Ophitic tradition. The Ophites in the first century A.D. believed the world had been generated by a serpent. (Hebrew Myths p 32) As shown above, when God is hovering over the Waters, He is impregnating Tiamat. The serpent/snake appears many times in the Tanach, which includes all of the other Biblical writings. In addition to his role in Eden with Adam and Eve, he is involved with Moses:

In Numbers 21:8-9 shown below:

וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְהֹוָ֜ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֗ה עֲשֵׂ֤ה לְךָ֙ שָׂרָ֔ף וְשִׂ֥ים אֹת֖וֹ עַל־נֵ֑ס וְהָיָה֙ כׇּל־הַנָּשׁ֔וּךְ וְרָאָ֥ה אֹת֖וֹ וָחָֽי׃ Then the LORD said to Moses, “Make a seraph figure and mount it on a standard. And if anyone who is bitten looks at it, he shall recover.”

וַיַּ֤עַשׂ מֹשֶׁה֙ נְחַ֣שׁ נְחֹ֔שֶׁת וַיְשִׂמֵ֖הוּ עַל־הַנֵּ֑ס וְהָיָ֗ה אִם־נָשַׁ֤ךְ הַנָּחָשׁ֙ אֶת־אִ֔ישׁ וְהִבִּ֛יט אֶל־נְחַ֥שׁ הַנְּחֹ֖שֶׁת וָחָֽי׃ Moses made a copper serpent and mounted it on a standard; and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, he would look at the copper serpent and recover.

The word שָׂרָ֔ף  seraph means ‘poisonous fiery serpent‘. This serpent of bronze made by Moses at God’s command was kept and revered in the Temple sanctuary until King Hezekiah who according to 2 Kings 18:4 destroyed it in his reforming zeal. 

ה֣וּא ׀ הֵסִ֣יר אֶת־הַבָּמ֗וֹת וְשִׁבַּר֙ אֶת־הַמַּצֵּבֹ֔ת וְכָרַ֖ת אֶת־הָֽאֲשֵׁרָ֑ה וְכִתַּת֩ נְחַ֨שׁ הַנְּחֹ֜שֶׁת אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂ֣ה מֹשֶׁ֗ה כִּ֣י עַד־הַיָּמִ֤ים הָהֵ֙מָּה֙ הָי֤וּ בְנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵל֙ מְקַטְּרִ֣ים ל֔וֹ וַיִּקְרָא־ל֖וֹ נְחֻשְׁתָּֽן׃ He abolished the shrines and smashed the pillars and cut down the sacred post. He also broke into pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it; it was called Nehushta

נְחַ֨שׁ הַנְּחֹ֜שֶׁת             21:9 This  is the word that appears in Numbers

נְחֻשְׁתָּֽן                     .This is what the Jews called the Serpent of Bronze

This suggests that Yaweh had at one time been identified with the Serpent-god. The poisonous fiery serpent has the power to heal someone bitten by a snake. King Hezakiah smashed the pillars of Asherah, a Goddess that used to be on either side of the altar, and cut down the poisonous fiery serpent to which the Israelites had been making offerings, like to a god. 

The idea of the serpent continues in a midrash recounting that Yahweh attacked Moses in the guise of a serpent in Exodus 4:24.

וַיְהִ֥י בַדֶּ֖רֶךְ בַּמָּל֑וֹן וַיִּפְגְּשֵׁ֣הוּ יְהֹוָ֔ה וַיְבַקֵּ֖שׁ הֲמִיתֽוֹ׃ At a night encampment on the way, the LORD encountered him and sought to kill him

The midrash reports that God attacked Moses in a desert lodging place in the dead of night. He assumed the shape of a huge serpent and swallowed Moses as far as his loins. 

Why a serpent? Why to his loins? In Numbers as mentioned above, God orders Moses to make a brazen serpent. Serpents loom largely in the background to the Creation story. Moses’ penis is at his loins, and the serpent is an elongated penis. And the next line in Exodus tells how Zipporah, Moses’ wife, circumcised her son that night and wiped her son’s leg’s with the blood. Then she says and then repeats, ‘You’re a bridegroom of blood to me.’ Perhaps the mention of blood pertains to the blood of Abel. His blood initiated the Jewish people through the patriarchs, and Moses is the prime mover of the rest of Jewish history, its greatest prophet, the leader of the Jews out of Egypt to the Promised Land, Israel. His apotheosis is the true beginning of the Jews. He is the hero of the Torah. His story takes up the last four books of the Torah. In him is the creation. This is the start of his mission. He is at the beginning of the journey with his family to go back to Egypt. It is like the murder of Abel that initiated the history of the Jews in Genesis, and at the beginning of Exodus, the almost swallowing of Moses by the Serpent is another initiation. The circumcision is the sign of the Jews. It is bloody like a murder is bloody. It is the penis which is like a serpent. This episode with Moses and Zipporah is short, encompassing only three lines. Perhaps it was cut short by the Editor. The Serpent impregnates the Goddess in the original creation story. Does the circumcision somehow tame the serpent?  

וַתִּקַּ֨ח צִפֹּרָ֜ה צֹ֗ר וַתִּכְרֹת֙ אֶת־עׇרְלַ֣ת בְּנָ֔הּ וַתַּגַּ֖ע לְרַגְלָ֑יו וַתֹּ֕אמֶר כִּ֧י חֲתַן־דָּמִ֛ים אַתָּ֖ה לִֽי׃ ^fMeaning of vv. 25–26 uncertain. So Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!”

וַיִּ֖רֶף מִמֶּ֑נּוּ אָ֚ז אָֽמְרָ֔ה חֲתַ֥ן דָּמִ֖ים לַמּוּלֹֽת׃ {פ}

And when He let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.

The snake וְהַנָּחָשׁ֙ appears in Genesis in the first line of chapter 3. The last sentence of the previous chapter, chapter 2, is just above that line about the snake, in which Adam and Eve are naked עֲרוּמִּ֔ים. The very next line, the first line of chapter 3 introduces the snake and he is described as עָר֔וּם. This is the same word used just before to describe the nakedness of Adam and Eve. Yet, in this line about the snake he is ‘shrewd’.  The standard translation of this word עָר֔וּם is ‘shrewd’, rather than ‘naked’.  For the snake cannot be naked!  It is immoral. The note beside the line says there is a play on the two words. Rashi says that the snake saw Adam and Eve having sex, and that he coveted her. He is ‘shrewd’ in that he encouraged her to eat from the forbidden tree. However, that is not the sense one gets when reading the same word to describe both. Rashi even says that the line that should have followed the description of Adam and Eve’s nakedness was that God provided clothing to cover it, as he does later.  There is a lacuna here. Much is left out. That this line with the snake follows immediately after the line about Adam and Eve is doubly significant. It misplaces a line that should have been there, and it strongly suggests sexual intent.         

וַיִּֽהְי֤וּ שְׁנֵיהֶם֙ עֲרוּמִּ֔ים הָֽאָדָ֖ם וְאִשְׁתּ֑וֹ וְלֹ֖א יִתְבֹּשָֽׁשׁוּ׃ The two of them were naked,^gHeb. ‘arummim, play on ‘arum “shrewd” in 3.1. the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame.

וְהַנָּחָשׁ֙ הָיָ֣ה עָר֔וּם מִכֹּל֙ חַיַּ֣ת הַשָּׂדֶ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר עָשָׂ֖ה יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֑ים וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אֶל־הָ֣אִשָּׁ֔ה אַ֚ף כִּֽי־אָמַ֣ר אֱלֹהִ֔ים לֹ֣א תֹֽאכְל֔וּ מִכֹּ֖ל עֵ֥ץ הַגָּֽן׃ Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say: You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?”

Like in the passages about Moses and Zipporah and the circumcision, these lines regarding Adam and Eve and the Snake, are about penises. The snake is a walking penis. Circumcision is about the penis. Oddly, circumcision removes the עׇרְלַ֣ת foreskin of the penis, which is like a garment. There should have been a line following in which God provides clothing for their nakedness. 

Why is the snake even here? Perhaps he is the misplaced Serpent from the Creation. In the Akkadian Creation story, the Goddess who arises from Chaos is impregnated by the Serpent who comes into a being from the wind that is stirred up when the Goddess rises from the waters.  As mentioned earlier, in the Iliad, it says that wind can impregnate a mare. The thought that there was this kind of sex was in the ancient world. 

If tohu is Tiamat or Leviathan or a Serpent, and vohu is the Behemoth, then God breaks apart Tiamat and the Behemoth who were in sexual embrace, and the wind of God hovers over Tiamat and He impregnates Her. Darkness is on the face of Tiamat. The Darkness is the opposite of the Light that God creates on that first day, the very next line. This light is what is left after the Darkness has taken all. It is not a full light. 

Patai and Graves report  that mythical water monsters in relief decorate six small panels at the base of the Menorah candelabrum shown on Titus’ triumphal arch at Rome. In 70 A.D. the Romans destroyed the Temple of which only the Western Wall in Jerusalem still stands. Titus and Vespasian, then generals, were sent to Israel to end the war. They returned to Rome with treasures taken from the Temple, of which the Menorah was most significant. 

Titus died in 81 A.D. and his younger brother, Domitian, succeeded him and erected the Arch of Titus in Titus’ honor. Inside the passageway of the Arch of Titus are two great relief panels. They represent the triumphal parade of Titus down the Sacred Way after his return from the conquest of Judea at the end of the Jewish wars in 70 A.D. One of the reliefs depicts Roman soldiers carrying the spoils, including the seven-branched candelabrum, the menorah from the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. 

On the lower left panel of the Menorah, a pair of dragons face each other in similar positions, though their wings and tails differ. These may be read as two Leviathans: the Fleeing Serpent and the Crooked Serpent. The symmetrical and identical fish-tailed creatures with somewhat feline heads shown in the top left and right panels are, perhaps, the ‘great dragons’ of Genesis 1:21. The dragon on the lower central panel, with its head twisted haughtily up and backward, suggests Rahab (‘haughtiness). An indistinct monster on the lower right may be Tehom or Ephes. 

In the line below, Isaiah 40:17 the two terms, Tohu and Ephes, are synonyms. In the Hebrew line the two terms sit next to each other, even though there are two clauses that constitute the sentence. Ephes means nothing, and that is how it is translated in this selection from Isaiah. However, Tohu is not the abstraction of nothing as it is usually translated but Tehom, equivalent to Ephes, a water-monster or matriarch or patriarch other than God.  Darkness is on the face of Tehom. Tohu and Bohu are in embrace, and as Darkness is described as being in embrace, more or less, of Tehom, then Darkness may be the Behemoth. 

Isaiah 40:17 Though the Hebrew prophets disguised the names of  Apsu, Tiamat, and Baou as empty abstractions, yet in this line from Isaiah, immediately follows a passage recalling God’s feats in the days of Creation. Here the two words are again, Tohu and Ephes, sitting again next to each other, and again synonyms.  Tohu and Ephes, both oddly together. Isaiah either intended to hearken back to the second sentence of Genesis to treat the word Tohu as meaning emptiness, accepting the Editor’s choices, or he went back to that line, the first line of the Torah if the actual first line is actually its title, and used words that represented certain images that were real to his audience, the water monster Tohu-Tiamat and her consort, Behemoth. 

כׇּל־הַגּוֹיִ֖ם כְּאַ֣יִן נֶגְדּ֑וֹ מֵאֶ֥פֶס וָתֹ֖הוּ נֶחְשְׁבוּ־לֽוֹ׃ All nations are as naught in His sight;

He accounts them as less than nothing

In another quote from Isaiah, 34:11-12, the two terms at the beginning of the second sentence of Genesis, those two things called Tohu and Vohu, emptiness and nothingness, and nothing are brought together, Tohu, Vohu and Ephes. 

In Isaiah 34:11-12,  Tohu, Bohu and Ephes are used with plain reference to their mythological meanings, when the prophet predicts Edom’s destruction. (Hebrew Myths p33). 

וִֽירֵשׁ֙וּהָ֙ קָאַ֣ת וְקִפּ֔וֹד וְיַנְשׁ֥וֹף וְעֹרֵ֖ב יִשְׁכְּנוּ־בָ֑הּ וְנָטָ֥ה עָלֶ֛יהָ קַֽו־תֹ֖הוּ וְאַבְנֵי־בֹֽהוּ׃ ^eMeaning of Heb. uncertain.Jackdaws and owls^-e shall possess it;

Great owls and ravens shall dwell there.

He shall measure it with a line of chaos

And with weights of emptiness.^fI.e., He shall plan chaos and emptiness for it; cf. 28.17; Lam. 2.8.

חֹרֶ֥יהָ וְאֵֽין־שָׁ֖ם מְלוּכָ֣ה יִקְרָ֑אוּ וְכׇל־שָׂרֶ֖יהָ יִ֥הְיוּ אָֽפֶס׃ ^eMeaning of Heb. uncertain.It shall be called, “No kingdom is there,”^-e

Its nobles and all its lords shall be nothing.

There was an ancient belief that mares could be impregnated by the wind. (Iliad 16:149 etc..)  Like the wind being stirred up when the goddess rises out of the chaos and then becoming a serpent impregnates her. The image of the goddess being penetrated by the serpent, or the wind, is preserved in the Torah account of creation, of course, suppressed. Like things pushed down, no matter how hard and no matter with how much determination, has a way of cropping back up. The Torah like all great literature reflects our consciousness. The middle path is almost impossible to tread without error. Some step, no matter if it is one hundred miles until one falls off even just a little, is enough leverage for what has been beaten down to rise up again, like John Barleycorn. The serpent/penis rises up in all its glory, even in the story of Moses, the Torah’s greatest hero. The scene wherein he is attacked by God in the shape of a serpent, and the circumcision by son by his wife Zipporah is highly suggestive. The rod on which Moses put a serpent and which is then worshipped until much later King Hezekaiah destroyed it only adds to the mystery of the serpent in the Torah. The Torah Editor tried to erase the traces of the earlier creation accounts coming from Babylonia and elsewhere. He created out of the ruins of those stories, his own, that featured a most powerful God who created everything out of nothing. 

This fascination with the penis has roots in India. There the lingam and yoni are worshipped in meditation. They represent the erect phallus and the vulva. Some proponents suggest that the religions that came out of the Fertile Crescent at the beginning of the second millennium B.C. had their foundation in India. To this day the most profound practices to gain union with the godhead or to convert the limited human personality into a divine personality are found in the meditational sadhana traditions of India. There are meditational practices in Judaism, for instance, but they are not the focus at any level of orthodoxy. One cannot find in the Torah the method to gain the level of any of the characters in the stories from Moses on downward. The Shemona Esrei prayer that Jews pray three times a day is a meditation, but there are no teachers to guide the practitioner. One can become a moral person through Musar, and a fine individual through Talmud study, but that does not hold a candle to one who has shed the personality. 

The Aghori Vimalananda said: “I have never believed in religion. Religions are all limited because they concentrate only on one aspect of truth. That is why they are always fighting amongst one and another, because they think they are in sole possession of the truth. But I say there is no scripture or one holy book or one experience. This is why I say, when people ask what religion I follow, ‘I don’t believe in Sampradaya (sect), I believe in Sampradaha (incineration).’ Burn down everything which is getting in the way of your perception of the truth.” 

In its essence, religion’s goal for the practitioner is to reveal his true face, that face unadorned by any vestige of personality whether virtue or neurosis. If so, what value of  any rule or ritual or sacred belief? In India the investigation into the self didn’t require the elaborations of a religion, although Hinduism and later Buddhism did develop. Religiosity is inevitable, however, given that man is a social animal. The stories that Jesus traveled to India during the unaccounted for years after his bar mitzvah reveal the emptiness of Judaism for one who wanted to delve headfirst into self-knowledge. The idea that there is something worth finding if one strips away the illusory reality that is all too real does not easily follow. It is counter-intuitive, and beyond a glimmer of understanding for anyone not introduced to it by a teacher or an advanced practitioner of meditation. The one place where such people assembled and strove to accomplish this was in India, and that source animated all other religions that flowed from it. 

In conclusion, the snake in Genesis has elicited all sorts of treatments. That he is the devil is problematic. Even in Job he is only carrying out God’s directions when he brings suffering to Job.  In the following passage he is the one who brings death to all living things. 

The Zohar Chadash says that Samael or Satan saw God teaching Adam the Torah and the angels praising them. He then went down to earth as a snake and a shadow was upon him. He appeared as a woman so that he could seduce Eve the better. He seduced and deceived her until she would say a line starting with a mem. He took that letter and placed it on his left arm and he waited until she would utter other sentences that began with two other letters, vov and tov, that together with the mem spell the word ‘death’. That word has carried over into English as the chess term, check mate, ‘mate’ being the English pronunciation of ‘mavet’ or ‘mot’  in Hebrew  מות. He induced her to utter the two other letters of the word ‘death’, the vov and tav. He tried to join the letter together but the mem flew up and down. Then he finally succeeded, the vov surrounded the mem on all four sides, and then the tav did also. The mem was in the middle. So was death established for all living things including man. This is otherwise said:  death has risen up in our windows; this is Samael, for he is one of the windows of heaven. What man can live and not see death? Suddenly he overcame Eve and heaped filth upon her. Then God came down to see their appearance, but Adam and Eve hid. They didn’t want to hide their nakedness. Rather they were ashamed of the filth poured on them by Samael.
This is taken from the Zohar Chadash, which contains parts of the Zohar missing in manuscripts used by editors of the Mantua version. The material was chiefly collected by Abraham Halevi Berokhim from manuscripts found at Safed. Quoted by folio of the Warsaw (Levin-Epstein) undated edition.

Bibliography

1. Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. New York: Greenwich House. 1968

2. H.J.Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology Including Its Extension To Rome. New York: Penguin Group. 1991

3. David Rosenberg, Abraham, The First Historical Biography: New York: Basic Books. 2006

4. Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction To Biblical Hebrew. Norwich, England: Page Bros. 1976

5. Robert E. Svoboda, Aghora, At the Left Hand of God. New Delhi, India:Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd. 1986

6. Yoseph Milstein, Chok L’Yisrael, Deuteronomy 1. Hollandale, FL: Kadmon Genesis Publishing Corporation. 1996

7. Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner’s Art Through The Ages, Volume 1. Boston: Cengage Learning. 2016

Neap Tide at Laguna

Crooked slope of strand

Merman’s eyes

Bod of seaweed

Bent to sea,

Sight cleansed

Of filth

A life

Well lived,

With breath 

That stinks,

Urine, gall,  

Pustulence all.

At the neap 

Bird opens beak 

Cawing secrets 

Had we instinct

To hear rhyme

Of the mere 

Might overhear

Roar of waves

Drowning words

Roar of time

God doth speak.

Shanti Mandir: Swami Nityananda, 1996

It is really like submerging oneself underwater for a long swim. It is striking to enter this place, Shanti Mandir. To the outward eye it appears a suburban home. Put away for a moment the self-armoring permitting one to joust with the enemy without, a meeting takes place within these walls. The air is different inside. One doesn’t at first know why. The feeling differs from the outside where the broad daylight splashes down on the lawn of dry grass. Swami Nityananda has said that words, no matter the genius of the writer, can describe the ultimate state of consciousness. He compared this indescribable state to the instant when first meeting a friend. It is like the shock and astonishment of the first glance, an awakening, a delicate moment quickly rushed over and swallowed whole by the whale of regular time. Entering here is to encounter, if one allows it, a deeper and long lasting experience of that moment. It can be sustained. The elements encourage it.

The main entry brings one into an overlarge living room with a sweeping area of carpet. In this room at the far wall looms a large murti of Bhagawan Nityananda sitting in meditation. His eyes are open, regal, aware and alive. He awaits you, but one can pass by without taking up the invitation. Other rooms are relatively unimportant to the visitor. One passes through the living room to go down through the navel of the house, a wormhole of sorts, a dark passage down the stairs into the meditation hall where the intensives occur. One can imagine knee high water through which one must wade. So thick and resplendent is the energy of the place, and so small is the room, that one cannot avoid it. 

In that room dwells a sacred energy, the shakti, a sacred thread leading the aspirant to a more awakened state of consciousness. One must give pause here. The eye, ever roving, sees a wonderful portrait of Baba sitting cross legged in a chair, his eyes open, looking slightly to the left as if he is drinking in the surrounds. A lamp behind this photographic portrait fills its surface with light. Is it a still image? It seems almost to breathe. He is almost smiling, is it his eyes, but the expression is not formed. A dish lit with a candle sits on the altar directly below this photograph representing among other things the lamp of consciousness. Its flame does not flicker, unlike most of our consciousness. 

The disturbances in the fields of consciousness or thought modifications must be stilled,  Swami Nityananda often says. So forceful is the thrust of this place that it shuts down the regular phantasms of thought going hurly-burly through the mind. Usually the mind is an open gate allowing all and everything to enter unchecked. It is practically a sewer. Here the gate mercifully is partially closed. 

A doll-like figure of Bhagawan Nityananda wearing orange robes sits facing this dish. But he is small and not the focus on which the eye rests. Off to the right of the altar surface is a black and white photo of Bhagawan’s profile. He is looking up at the large image of Baba. On the left of the altar is a digital clock whose digits pronounce the time in bright red characters. The mind when it returns to its regular state first wants to know the time, then how much time is left, and then how much time has passed. The nature of time itself remains unanswered.

On this the Guru Purnima Weekend Intensive and Yagna, a thread of consciousness teases us. It comes to us from out of a great dark wood lying perilously before us, seeming impenetrable, a forest of demons, harsh passage, a drowning in darkness, unutterable, not-to-be-named. Where has Baba gone? In that photograph lit behind by a lamp? It is attractive, even noble, perhaps alive, but if so, in what sense? Yet Baba the man is not here. As Swami Nityananda reminded us, Baba left his body on October 2, 1982. We do not worship the man precisely, but the guru principal in him. I believe he gave part of his self to Swami Nityananda as if pouring it into a waiting cup. Time has neither beginning nor end, yet it creates beginnings and endings. The king is dead! Long live the king! The true treasure, the crown jewels of consciousness, has been handed down. 

Of what stuff worldly or unworldly is the Guru Purnima made? Are we the more aware because we have traversed the bounds of this day, come to its conclusion, mediated for the last session keeping perfectly still, saying the HAM-SA mantra while gazing inward? During the third session of this Intensive, while Swami Nityananda spoke, the men and women assembled before him sat in rapt attention, completely in the spell of his voice, like dots before the great exclamation point. Do all these hearts ache to hear what it was like to have been in the company of Baba? Do we wait for the pearl to be dropped from Swami Nityananada’s lips, that we may take it up and gain siddha hood? What drives all these people to sit here in meditation the entire day?

There are three people here today for the first time who heard about Shanti Mandir through the internet. I spoke to Jeff last night. The Shanti Mandir website sparked an interest to read Baba’s books. Last night he was reading Is Death Real? By Baba. He told me that there is contained in those pages remarkable wisdom, and that he could feel the shakti when reading The Play of Consciousness.

Swami Nityananda said that there are two kinds of people, those who are happy they got ‘it’, and those who are sad they missed ‘it’. The ‘it’ is having had the opportunity to have been in Baba’s company. Undoubtedly there is a certain aura, a magic or a rarified air about those who have been part of the train of a master. When that master passes from the scene the remembrance of him, the feeling and the nostalgia remains. The old stories are told endlessly. The old participants gather and reminisce chattering among themselves. Oh for the glory days! They missed the real scene. 

The true theater is invisible to the eye, but real in essence. Though the guru has form, he is of two parts, Swami Nityananda said, the guru principal and the human being. The guru himself, however, casts a long shadow. It is like watching a movie and becoming entranced by the beautiful scenery and the actors, the heightened struggle, its cathartic effect, and the denouement, all the while forgetting that the story is only that, a story, a sign, a hint, an invitation to set oneself on a quest for the self. 

The beautiful pageant we witnessed and participated in yesterday, the day-long meditation intensive, the evening arati, the fast chant and the sangha, all created a buoyant feeling and happiness. Will it be there tomorrow?

Shanti Mandir is a bright place on the map. Many of us drive long distances to arrive here. Do we come here to be in the presence of the guru, Swami Nityananda, and to be happy? Swami Nityananda told us yesterday a story about a man who sought happiness. He met a sage one day who advised him that if he could find a man who always was laughing and if he could get this man’s shirt for himself, then he would have found happiness. The seeker thought this good advice, and he set out on his journey. He looked and looked, but in the end it took years to find such a man. He found that every man was happy and then sad, laughing then crying, in short, exhibiting the emotions and turbulence that is common to every man everywhere. 

One day he came upon a man laughing and laughing loudly in a nearby wood. The seeker thought to himself, “I have found him at last!” He approached him, but the laughing man kept his back to him. The seeker asked, “May I have your shirt?” The man laughingly said, “What?” “I’ll give you anything. Only give me your shirt.” The man turned and faced him showing he was not wearing a shirt. In fact, he was the same sage who had set this seeker out on his quest years before. The sage gave the seeker an inner-shirt or blazing heart of happiness. The seeker earlier at the start of his quest was not ready to hear. As Swami Nityananda said, “We all own shirts, which one has given us happiness?”

The story is absurd. The object of the search has nothing to do with laughter. As Swami Nityananda said, “We revere the guru’s possessions, yet these objects will not by themselves give the disciple the genuine certificate of graduation from the siddha university. The sign of this certificate is unshakable inner contentment.” What shirt other than in stories conveys to its wearer inner contentment? It is like trying to describe in words the ultimate state of consciousness. Up until the very last moment the seeker in the story fully believed there was such an object in the world. He expected with every last fiber in his being to find that shirt.

I experienced a shock of awareness upon first seeing Swami Nityananda this morning on the front steps of Shanti Mandir. I hadn’t expected to see him there. Usually he is not there when Janice and I arrive. Looking up as I approached the steps I saw him on the top step as if by magic. He was a bright emanation, and the warmth of his simple greeting only deepened my astonishment and happiness. He didn’t give me a shirt. But that is not what I am seeking after all.

The Guru Purnima celebration this year like the years before is marked by a meditational intensive and a yanga to Shiva, the primordial guru, who appropriately enough is fond of sitting in the cremation grounds. Concerning the ego and its death, Baba said to leave the ego at the door of the ashram. The ego can be forgotten, left at the door, as it were, like a coat at a dress-event left with the checkout lady. Once one surrenders the ego, happiness appears. Or do you suppose that torment, dissatisfaction, sadness, the burning of Hell and its frozen wastes is the reality underlying everything? In the presence of the guru these habiliments are scorched beyond use and recognition. They are absolutely useless, dinosaurs, a non existent shirt. While happiness, inner contentment, has an unshakable foundation because it is founded on a bedrock of inner conviction and borne of experience, sadhana, perseverance, and endurance. One adorns the temple of God with the riches and treasures collected during the inward journey. Its end is not an end. Its beginning is not a beginning. Shiva is without either. Where does happiness begin? It underlies even the burning grounds where Shiva sits in profound meditation. The death of the ego is not to be mourned. It might grieve for itself. There is no self like that to be mourned. It’s like the shirt that was no shirt, an illusion planted in the mind until the time arrives when it is right to hear.

The Guru Purnima, like all the other events at Shanti Mandir are meant to be a giant theater pointing to the inner contentment and the supreme inner state of consciousness. The meditation intensive requires us to sit as still as possible, repeat the mantra, vanquish the thoughts pulling this way and that, and to breathe in the sweetness of the guru’s presence, the taste of the lineage before him. We listen to Swami Nityananda’s inspired by his hope that he can impart to us some of the feeling he has acquired over the years of his sadhana so we may be roused to our search blessed with grace of his gurus Muktananda and Bhagawan Nityananda.

Part One: Through the Ga

It was following sleep and before waking, neither sleep nor death, the way of the heart and the way of the mind extinguished. It was nothing, yet a sweet nothing. After yesterday’s events with the dragons, he felt the need for surcease from wonders.  His father had expired years ago from sheer exhaustion, a dire illness. His physical frame shrank to a little that remained.  He hadn’t thought of him much, and then there he was with him inexplicably, through means the dragons had acquired.  He shuddered from the contact.

At the corner of his eye a gate hazily drawn as if by a child appeared.  It enticed him because he had tired of the life of dreaming, and the gate promised a point of departure. It hovered exceedingly thin, even gossamer like. He touched its fibers but it lost its coherence and fluttered away, without even so much as a sussuruss.   

The warrior stepped through at the last moment.  He stood upon a dirt field flecked with grass and mottled with stones. A lush garden was combed beneath the ground by the ages of time, and of this the warrior was totally unaware.  To him the field was hard and dry like bone.  Where were the inhabitants?

He heard a grinding of stone and looked in the easterly direction.  From over a slight rise of the ground two powerful horses burst into view pulling a carriage careening behind.  The earth shook at the pounding of their hooves. As suddenly as it had appeared, it halted thirty paces away. Two women stepped from the carriage eyes blazing with such anger it marred their natural beauty.  The warrior wondered what miasmatic potion they had drunk to render them so beastly.   They beheld the warrior and sneered.  Then they charged.

The warrior fell back, but their ferocity forced him to hurt them, and to strike them senseless. They lay on the ground at his feet.  He looked again up at the carriage, and to his shock the same women stepped from its doors.  He looked down, but they were gone. They charged him with deadly intent with knives in their hands.  He ran at them and rolled into a ball.  They fell headlong and lay scrawled on the ground.  He watched, looking for movement.  The warrior ran toward the carriage doors.  What was inside?  Before he made it the women jumped out again, only this time they had the heads of snarling bitches.  They lunged at his throat. He thrust his forearm pushing their teeth barely aside, then dove headfirst into the carriage and closed the doors.  The bitches howled in frustration.  The warrior wished the carriage would move.  It lurched forward a bit, and then sped off at an incredible pace.  He looked out the window and saw that he was entering a forest.

“At root is suspicion of lies and truths unmasked until the very air is snakes.  Would I dance with a shadow in the few minutes before dawn, a shadow of my own making, not more false than I am existing?”  He pondered while the carriage rolled on and halted in a clearing where a house stood.

A dragon walked out of the house loosening his overcoat and bringing forward a sheaf of papers bound by a loose string.

“These are the drawings of the daughters of the moon,” he said.

“Are those the women who attacked me?”

The dragon pulled a drawing from the bundle. “Do you mean to find Outremer?”

“I mean to find nothing in particular.” He nevertheless stepped out of the carriage to inspect the paper. He was intrigued by the name of the place. Its mystery allured him.  He remembered that his friend John had dealt with strange places with mythical names that existed perhaps only in his mind. 

The dragon handed him the map.

The warrior saw it was covered with writing in an ancient script that resembled Attic Greek and Biblical Hebrew combined in a curious way.  That only increased his interest. In the past he had studied dead languages, intending to discover what constituted reality at its root.  It was a fruitless conceit. The ancients had made heady claims.  He thought the truth was embedded in language, especially the classic ancient works now relegated to study only. “Forgive my overlong fascination.”

The dragon bowed his head in acknowledgement, but the warrior was so engrossed he didn’t notice the inside of the dragon’s head was fire.

The dragon proffered a bottle of water he had removed from his coat. “Can you see yourself in the glass?”

Indeed. The warrior saw an image of himself swimming about in the glass. “This is impossible!”

The dragon opened another pocket and a hood of small dragons flew out and dove into the bottle and began to swim about the warrior, causing a whirlpool to develop.

The warrior grew dizzy and faint.

The dragon put his face up against the glass. “Do you like my mustache?”

The warrior fended off the urge to sleep, feeling that if he surrendered he might never awaken.  He saw the dragon’s face change into a hundred others, Swain’s, John Ramsey’s, and more.  Outrage boiled over in his stomach.  At last an aristocratic chiseled visage settled on the dragon.  The warrior did not recognize it.

“I am the victor,”  boasted the dragon. Then he gathered the unconscious body of the warrior in his arms and flew off into the skies.

Part Two: The Mountain

The warrior felt the claws of a great bird wrapped about him. He struggled to free himself, but the grip only bound him more tightly and practically crushed the breath out of him.

‘You are lost,” the bird grinned.

Outward they swept across the gray sky. The warrior slipped in and out of consciousness. He opened his eyes and peered over the clouds in the bright sunlight.  He saw a mountain in the distance. The bird shot like an arrow toward it. He flew high above it and then whirled round and round in descending arcs.

The warrior could now discern the mountain was in reality a mountain of men. He  dropped him on top of the mountain and then flew upward toward the moon.

“These men are dead!” He stood on the chest of a man who had once lived perhaps just like he had.  He examined the features of the man but didn’t recognize him. The mountain was fantastically tall. Some of them had been warriors also. He noticed glints of armor, strangely shaped helmets, chain mail and swords. He bent down to pull out a sword from the heap and a thrill of hope entered into him. He glanced into the sky, but the bird had disappeared. He continued gazing into the sky and thought it pure.

“Like your self?”

The warrior turned to meet his company. “Who are you?”

“My name is of no importance.”

The warrior could not help but notice that he was massively built with muscle knotted across his chest.

The man cut the head off a corpse and threw it at the warrior.

The warrior tried to dodge, but it struck him on the leg teeth-first. The warrior pulled it off and felt an old wound awaken in his leg.

The man guffawed.  “You forgot the head defense?”

The warrior charged him, but the man easily blocked him and threw him into the piles of men everywhere.

“Arise, warrior.”

The warrior grimly picked himself up, and warily approached him.  “Why do you quarrel with me?”

“Do you think this is Outremer?”

“No. That is a paradisiacal place.”

“A mirage?” He jumped from corpse to corpse in large bounds eventually finding his way over the horizon.

The warrior became very still and listened.  He imagined he heard waves lapping against a shore. He started off in that direction and came at last to a cliff.  Water flowed far below.  “Better there than here.” He dove heedless of the outcome. He floated down landing on the water’s surface.

He could see dragons furiously swimming in circles below him churning the water. At that moment of recognition he shot upward and thrust his sword into the dragon’s throat.

The dragon dropped the flask and it smashed against the hard ground.  He clutched at his throat and pulled out the sword.  Much blood also splashed to the floor. “You have not defeated me.”  He clapped his hands and departed for other planes of existence to ponder his strategy and to heal his wounds.

The warrior stepped into the morning sunlight, remembering to bless his godlike being and the gods, few though there be and far away, if any, who favored him.

Part Three: What Is A Dragon

What then is a dragon? Once the dragons were porkers, and this can be explained, if not simply, then in the following convoluted manner. In an earlier time, the porkers had concluded sorrowfully that their time in the world was eclipsed.  One forward thinking individual found a route to continue living in another form, and the story of this transformation can be found following this introduction.

A joke told about porkers can be divulged here with fear of reprisal.

“My asshole is smaller today than it was last week,” said a little

round of a man, an executive, a merchant, a banker, a big wheel,

“And I’ll tell you, sometimes it’s real hard to shit.”

Perhaps you can envisage in your mind’s eye an overweight man, bald, with glasses, shirt and tie loosened, sitting confidently at his desk, looking straight into the camera. And so the story begins.

Part Four: Metamorphosed

“For my next rent payment, ladies and gentlemen,” the porker boldly declared, “I will metamorphose.”

The gaily colored convention of seasoned individuals, hardened beyond the call of necessity, tittered and applauded.  

“Who is this poor fool?” one of the ample ladies whispered to her friend.

“I don’t know,” her friend answered, “However, he is unknowable, and that makes the equation a smidge more interesting. Don’t you think?”

The drama built steadily to a crescendo.  So far the porker hadn’t altered one bit, in spite of his earlier declaration.  Maybe the color of his eyes had changed.  At best, it was uncertain.

The question was more personal.  Would the porker be able to accomplish this feat before so many strangers? That he was a practicing magician and an older executive for a firm of joyous bankers certainly entered the question.

A colleague said, “I won’t believe my eyes, no matter what happens.”
The porker meanwhile had become enveloped in a green smoke of no apparent origin.  His outline, as seen through this fog, assumed a different character. A technician off stage lit the stage lights to a brighter incandescence.  The remaining lasso of smoke drifted away to reveal the metamorphosed porker. Before them all breathed a living dragon.

“I come from higher worlds to greet you all,” he calmly spoke into the microphone. “Up there,” he motioned with his hand toward the ceiling, “We don’t deny the face of the Almighty like you do down here. Oh, no,” he chuckled.  “Over to the meat department, my friends.” He encouraged them to follow.

The convention had gathered in the neighborhood upscale food market to hear the porker declaim on the risk to middle income families by the farm scare. The newspaper ads had contributed to the build up to the convention. “A Most Profound and Intelligent Speaker.”  “Gifted with Wisdom and Experience.”  And people responded with their presence.

There were some, it must be noted, who held misgivings. After looking at the notices one woman commented to her husband, a butcher, “I’ve never heard of him.  However, the photo reminds me of an old high school sweetheart.”

Her husband responded, “And I learned my trade from a man who resembles this man, and I was happy back then.”  Both of them could have added hurtful remarks, but they withheld their spite, and it was generally good that they did.

The men and women duly trailed after the dragon to the meat counter.

“Where is the butcher?” the dragon demanded.

“He’s not in,” answered the food clerk, “He’s off on Thursdays.”

“Well, no matter,” he mumbled. He saw a woman in the group who was waiting uneasily and said to her, “Madam, are you unconscious of your true worth as a human being? Is the call for an undertaker in order?”

She brightened immediately. “By all means, I’ve been seeing a psychologist for the longest time and still I cannot picture myself like he wants me to.”

“Cheer up, Ms. P,” as he could now read her nametag. “I think you’ll be merry in no time.”

He then turned to the people assembled near him. “I’ve led you to the meat counter so that you can look into the mirror running its length.  Stare at yourselves for a moment of sustained attention.  Try to achieve that sliver of clarity that you will stake like a beacon in the center of your mind.”

Many of them tried, and some remained steadfast in their suspicion of the dragon who grinned, though his face was at rest, making him look grotesque in the mirror.

“Is that his true nature?”

The dragon broke out of his momentary reverie, “One cannot by his own effort attain true nature.”

Some of his hearers, unconvinced, moved over to the oriental food section to find a sea weed cracker package.

The dragon continued, “Inattention to the self is like sleep when one wanders in other twilit worlds. Eventually the sands of time peter out.  Ponder the slabs of meat, ladies and gentlemen, and consider well the peril in which you also sit, as it were, on a plate.”

Concluding his rather short speech, he left the market in a flash of brilliance.  It was his teeth.

“I think the dragon is nuts,” said Mr. Yunkle to the food clerk, who had no mind at all and only shrugged.

“Fifty dollars as down payment and this car could be yours!” the dragon shouted in a parking lot. He stood next to an attractive late model.

In less than five minutes a crowd of curiosity seekers surrounded him.

“Fifty dollars.” He held out his hand before their milky stares.

No one stepped forward.

“Can I find a witness?”

A thin, bent over, worried man, like all men too slender like a weed, pushed through the crowd. “This is my car.”

The dragon departed homeward upon learning the news. “I’ve metamorphosed,” he  wrote in his diary, “And still problems remain.” At a level of distraction unusual even for him, he wondered how everything could have gone so badly. “So did I carouse all my life in one guise after another without hitting on the real one?”  He examined his personal calendar, and noticed he had a talk later that evening.  “I’ve completely forgotten.” As its location was across town, he started out.

Part Five: The Speech

The dragon entered the room where the audience was waiting. He moved to the front next to the lectern and blackboard. The topic was listed as ‘Thinking, Thinking, Too Much Thinking.’

He opened by asking, “Have I long to think?”

Hearing no response, he asked pointedly, “What time is it?”
“8 o’clock,” Mr Dragon.

“Isn’t he cute?” Miss Wiven, of the town Boldenblue, commented.

The movement of stares bothered the fish, a symbol of the savior, which the dragon had drawn with colored chalk on the blackboard.  The piscine rendering was childlike yet conceived with other worldly sophistication. The fish considered itself a live personification.

“I wish you would talk to me,” said the fish to the dragon.

“Oh, come now, fish, do you really? A talking fish?”

“I haven’t another thought in the entire world.”  He floated in the black sea of the board. “I grow lonelier by the second, and I believe you could help me with a bit of conversation.”

“How flattering,” said one of the men watching the proceedings with great fascination.

The dragon turned toward the fish. “I haven’t been able to create a work of art for a considerable time.”

Ms. Wiven, who had been eavesdropping, “Why is that, Mr. Dragon?”

“My past haunts me.” He took a piece of green chalk and crushed it. Then he drew a circle round the fish with the powder. “Do you like it?”

The fish felt deep gratification.

“Of the past, I am loath to speak, but as this gathering has usual circumstances, I will depart from my usual custom.”

How they all stared at the dragon.

“In the past, I was not a dragon.”

The audience gasped. Mr. Honeyspout said, “I need some water. My wife just fainted.”

The dragon continued despite the ruckus. “I was a porker when I divorced my wife for infidelity.”

A joker from the audience stood up. “You couldn’t satisfy her highest and most wild sexual desires. You went limp like a fish.”

“Though that occurred many years ago, the images of her and the failure crowded my consciousness like a moth about a flame.  The smoke of the past consumed every last article of my manhood.”

“Aren’t you worried?” asked Mrs. Noonville.

“The door is barred because a warrior guards every gate, and he is vigilant.”

‘Then you are free of the past?” trying to snare the meaning of his remark.

The dragon deflected the question with a query of his own. “After all the psychologisms and learned fakeries of attenuated thought processes, does anything endure? Does love last eternal?”

The audience broke for tea and small cakes, and discussed the dragon’s questions.  Eternity is no small subject, and whether hurt feelings outlive the physical body is a matter of dispute. 

Hierarchs from many universes gathered for lunch one afternoon to mentate on the set of problems the sage dragon had proposed.  The dragon is known throughout the nine universes.   He is famous for just being famous like many who are famous. 

Part Six: The Mirror

The dragon settled in a meditative posture to dwell on the absurdity of the fish swimming into view and then disappearing. He quickly retired from that fruitless contemplation when he heard a commotion coming from the mirror in the entrance hall to his home.  It was a curious source for any kind of manifestation other than a reflection.  The mirror is the very definition of shallowness.

“When meditating, objects of thought appear as if out of nowhere.  Does self reflection have a foothold in reality?  The mind is a mirror of reality.  Or is reality a hoax concocted by the mind?” The dragon pondered.

He walked over to the mirror and unlike the other times when he merely checked his appearance for a flaw, he tried to peer through the mirror. To his amazement, he saw Manly, the tiny businessman, who sits usually between Hortense’s breasts, giving a lecture to a rapt audience. The dragon pressed his ear to the glass to hear better whatever Manly was saying.

Manly’s attention momentarily lapsed as the dragon unintentionally cast a subtle shadow over the lecture hall. The audience, drawn into a state of infancy listening to Manly, abruptly reasserted its independence. Decorum quickly frayed.

One woman hysterically pulled Hortense’s hair and demanded proof of Manly’s words.

Manly noticed the shadow, probably because he was so tiny and was alert to the smallest shift of light. He cursed the dragon’s intrusion and vainly attempted to stem the tumult.  All to no avail.  Hortense scooped Manly in her hand and sought an escape from the maddened crowd.  “The ruse has been discovered.”

He longed for her nipple.

“Not now, Manly. You must think of a way out of this.”  She was rapidly turning red from fright.

“I am withdrawn from thinking, dear woman.  My only desire is to know your nipple once more.”

She almost relented, such was the power of his smile.  “There is yet hope.”

He shrugged. “We could enter another realm, a mirror image of this one.”

“What are you babbling about?”

“Another consciousness has an interest in our fate, and we might escape thereby.”

Her eyes widened in terror.

“I mean that light overhead is both a light and a doorway into another world, that of the dragon.” He pointed.

She squinted. “How shrewd are your eyes.”

His eyes flickered with amusement.

Hortense, lovelier than ever, appeared in the mirror and then stepped into his foyer.  The dragon was much taken by her form and languid movements.  He reached for her waist.

Mortified, she drew halfway back into the mirror.  The dragon had hold of her foot.

“My foot!” refusing his advances.

The dragon let go thinking he might catch her later.  “I will not venture into that again without your permission. Only come back, and sit on my divan and converse.”

She nervously evaluated him, trying to essay if his words held any truth.  “I will come.”

The dragon flattened the cushions.  “Will you sit here a moment? I want to find the warrior whom I believe is sleeping in the next apartment. I think he can tell me what happened to the fish.”

She reclined while watching the dragon’s back disappear through the doorway.  Her eyes idly wandered around the room that was cluttered with books. “Is this dragon sane?” She flipped open a volume entitled Speeches For a Perfect Day.  “My soul. These are Manly’s speeches, printed and bound by a hidden association of mavericks.  How is this possible?”  She searched for a biography of the author. She shook her dress trying to locate him.  “Where are you?” He had simply vanished.

She felt drawn to the mirror.  “This is a most flattering representation of me.” She continued to study her hair when the phone rang and rang.  Finally she picked up the receiver.  The dragon said, “Come over to the adjoining apartment. I have flowers.”

“What is he up to?”

The phone rang again. “Are you coming?”

“I am delayed by circumstances.” She put down the receiver. “What an annoyance.”

She went to the window to look outside.  Studying the movement of the clouds a desire rose in her breast to steady the ceaseless chattering that blew hazily in her head. “Is there a shred of wisdom in me? I could end up in an asylum if I do not watch myself.”  She attempted to compose her feelings and to think no more about it.  “Who is this dragon?”

A man crashed into the door of the apartment and barged in.

“Are you a madman?” 

“Everyone is mad at one time or another.”

“Would you say I am beautiful?”

He paused overlong.

“Are you slow on the uptake?”

“I am only considering how to answer,” answered the warrior.

“Well, the dragon proposed to me the moment he saw me.”

“How did you come to know the dragon? I have known him for a considerable time and he never mentioned you.”

“I only just arrived.  Could you show me the city?”

“I didn’t think you’d be interested in such matters.”  He stood by the window looking down at the street.  A swarm of men was forming at the door of the apartment tower.

Hortense got up from the divan to peer down also.  “What do they want?”

“They lay in wait for the dragon.”

“How peculiar. Is he famed for his righteousness?”

“I wouldn’t think so. Is that a joke?”

“The way he apprehended me when we first met reminded me of a saint.”

“Rumors about him proliferate. Are you ready to leave?”

They left the apartment and had rounded some of the stairs leading to the street when they met the dragon running up.

“Hortense! As if he was seeing her for the first time after a long absence. “I thought I loved you, but now I know I was mistaken.”

She gasped.

“Do you forgive me?”

“I don’t know. In the past my emotions ran away with my heart.”

The warrior stepped between them.

“You dare to admit this publicly?” she asked, ignoring the warrior.

The dragon nodded. “I have no one else to blame.”

Hortense cuffed him across the mouth. “You pig!”

The dragon turned to flee down the stairs.

The warrior caught him by the shoulder.

The dragon protested, “I have done all I could do.”

“You don’t know who I am,” Hortense pouted.  “Otherwise you wouldn’t have judged so quickly.”

“Who are you?” the warrior asked, squinting to look at her more closely.

“You must have the eyes to see.  All further explanation only leads to unending questions.”

The warrior could not discern anything extraordinary about her.  “You are special.” 

“Am I pretty?”

“You are exquisite,” the warrior spoke first.

Hortense blushed. “What do you think, Dragon?”

“There must be more to mere beauty whatever its boundaries.  Though where lies the border,” he shrugged.

“One who has found what he seeks has no reason to look further.”  She evaluated the warrior anew.  “He might prove worthy, though I have borne the affection of many men this lifetime.”

“Are you too weary to continue loving?” he asked.

She took the warrior’s hand. “Do not furrow your brow. There have been few women like me in all of history.”

The dragon laughed. “Such high whimsy. All of history indeed.”

The warrior had been eyeing her shapely figure all along.

“I may have loved you,” said the dragon.

“It was nothing. A trifle, a dwarf, a surfeit. Let us carry on as friends.”

“I am happy for us.”

She turned to the warrior. “What is your destiny?”

“I don’t know. Your appearance has changed everything.”

“I like you.” She smiled.

The dragon had been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the situation. “Shouldn’t we be going outside?”

“I felt like wandering, so I asked the warrior to come with me.”

“There is a side exit. I would like to avoid the crowd in the front.”

They slipped out using a partially hidden door blocked from view.  

“Listen, both of you. Death surrounds us. It is subtle.  Can either of you sense it?”

The dragon looked up and down the street. “This is most curious.”

“Show me an example,” the warrior whispered.

“You cannot defend me.”

“Is this the valley of the shadow of death?” The dragon showed his teeth, long and sharp.

“Not likely,” said the warrior. “We have walked these streets countless times before and always we have come through unscathed.”

“By chance.”

They walked the next blocks brooding over what Hortense had said. They turned a familiar corner. The street was deserted, windows boarded up, chains binding shut doors, and streetlights smashed.

“Is this our neighborhood?” the dragon asked the warrior.

The warrior cried out in surprise. A shape peeled itself out from the shadows, somewhat like a man, only larger and wider.

Hortense jumped behind the dragon who had stepped behind the warrior.

It moved forward to attack and the warrior stepped up to meet the menace. They fought hand to hand.  The warrior gripped his foe around the torso and twisted it. The dragon and Hortense heard bones snap.  Both of them had collapsed. 

The dragon ran to the warrior. “Are you hurt?”

The warrior pushed him away. He scanned the shadows for other dangers. Nothing appeared.  His opponent lay sprawled on the ground.

“I’ve never seen him before, even in my dreams.”

The dragon inspected the dead man’s face. “He is real enough.”

They turned to Hortense and sought an explanation. She was gone.  Had she melted into the shadows? They ran to the corner to see if she was waiting.  There was no one to ask.  They walked back to the scene of the fight. Hortense?  The dragon saw a pink piece of cloth wedged between two heavy steel doors.  Hers?

The dragon went south and the warrior north in search. 

Part Seven: The Examiner

The warrior rounded the block thinking to gain entrance at the front of the building.  He entered. All was dark.  A speck of light fell on the floor. He moved toward it. He hadn’t feared the dark since he was a child, though now a foreboding welled up unbidden. Something was squeezing itself through the tiny circle of light.

“The worm ourobouros?”

A figure of a man now sat and complained. “A lousy pinprick of light?” He produced a cigar and struck a match. He zeroed in on the warrior.

“I am the examiner. Let us begin by examining you.”

The warrior shuddered. “Are you a doctor?”

“Why do you mention doctors?”

“The hospital gown covers little, and the surgeon delves into the darkest confines of the body. There is no privacy.”

The examiner produced a scalpel from another pocket. “You must come closer. There is plenty of room and we could converse more privately.”

The warrior accepted the chair. “Proceed.”

The examiner lit a candle and walked over to a stack of shelves brimming over with books and manuscripts. He retrieved a particularly messy portfolio. “If only you paid more attention to detail.”

“What is this?”

“From the records of the past I have here the sheets covering your thoughts, motivations, hidden loves, hatreds, public acts, sorrows aplenty, and rather less joy.”

The warrior objected. “I don’t recognize those books.”

With supreme dexterity the examiner stopped the contents of the book from flying out as he laid it on a rostrum. It was a great and dusty volume of tightly written information.  The examiner examined the fine print. “You are a thoughtful man whose thoughts are thick, wild and dragonish.”

“I prefer small print.”

“Is that to match your small accomplishments?”

“Is Greek smaller in print than Hebrew? I read both in college thinking it would make me into a learned man.”

The examiner hastily flipped through the pages to find a reference. “In fact,” slowly gathering his thought, “The axis between those two cultures has mired you in muck.”

“Are you looking at the prayer I recited in the synagogue on Hanukah?’

The examiner bent over to scrutinize some writing. “I believe the two cultures are at war.”

“The Greek believed the body and mind to operate separately from God, whereas, the other, the Jew, believed that God the Father supervised all.”

“A classic dilemma. Where do you currently stand?”

“By currently you mean I am subject to change?”

“The evidence clearly shows you stay no course.”

“What is the use of a course one follows for one’s entire life?”

“You need look no farther than those who have success in financial matters.  Obviously that doesn’t include you.”

“My father once drove with me to Molly, his older sister’s house, in Center City Philadelphia. I was still a boy of 9. Stanly Stern, her husband, a very successful trial lawyer, played tennis with me at a posh court nearby.  Except for one time when he played catch when I was five, my father and I hadn’t played any ball together.  He wasn’t built that way.  I loved playing any kind of ball, wiffle, pinky, step, stick, wire, and half.  I had never swung a tennis racket before.  I felt my uncle was weighing me, and that I didn’t make the grade. Neither did my father measure up to his sister’s wealth and ease.   That was as clear as the day was a clear summer day.  My father tried with all his heart to provide a decent living for us, but at what cost?”

“Ah, the factor of cost!”

“The cost is dear. He died horribly.”

The examiner frowned. “You assign wrong values to events, conflating cause and coincidence. In effect, it has rendered you severely lopsided.”

The flow of words stopped.

The examiner thought it best to bring forward a witness. He left his chair and walked back into the darkness.  He returned, rolling a coffin to the forestage.

“I will now dissect the corpse.”

The warrior could hardly understand the use of a coffin. The dead were offal, repulsive to the gods who were immortal.

The examiner opened the lid.  There lay together two men.  There were definitely two heads, but the bodies had not rotted.  It could have been a freakish monster.  He began to cut into the remaining flesh with his scalpel.

“Your father has shrunken in death as he did in life. What about you?”

The warrior turned his head away because of the horrible stink.

“You are intertwined with your father and you can see your body and head wrapped inextricably with his.  The apple does not fall far from the tree. I will cut away the miasmic tumors that have kept him ensnared in this box.  The putrid odor will disappear, and the worm ourobouros will at last have his prey.”

“I lost something precious that morning when I answered the funeral attendant’s call to identify the body at the funeral home. I thought it wouldn’t affect me.”

“What you saw you drank into your system, for you bypassed the prefrontal cortex and went directly through the limbic system.  Part of you fell into the coffin with your father and it has lain there being consumed almost entire. It colors all of your physical manifestations and ghostly forms you inhabit. I will attempt to rip apart that fabric of being that has grown together with your father, and it will free you of the ‘out of self’ personifications that have plagued you ever since his death.”

The warrior stood frozen in thought.

The examiner turned back to the purulent mess. He cut and threw away into the darkness all of the obscene growths he found. Then he closed the lid and pushed it back out of sight.

He resumed his chair and looked directly at the warrior. “We have concluded our meeting. Do you agree?”

The warrior mutely nodded.

The examiner stood and walked back into the darkness to disappear.

The warrior remained a few minutes more, too stunned at the appearance of his father’s corpse to move.  After some time of vacant reflection he got up and exited the theatre. Of Hortense he hadn’t a clue.

Part Eight: With the Dragon

“Do you grieve for the dead H.? 

The warrior pretended to ignore the question, bothered as he was by the sudden appearance of the dragon.  Since his examination by the interlocutor, he felt a foreboding when he thought of the dragon.  What was he really?

“I ask you, if you mourn for H. or no, and if not, then what is it that bothers you?”

“If H. wants to rise, then let him. Other than that, it is no affair of mine.”

The dragon detected a note of bitterness. “Are you a liar?”

A tear formed in the warrior’s eye.  He turned to the side so the dragon might not see.  He spoke, “You misinterpret signs in your dragonish wisdom.  I would not spill what  is in my mind just now. Whether they be ghosts or formless attributes of the divine, I cannot tell.”

The dragon blew fire and lit torches that had been hanging dully on the walls of the alley. 

“There is a shadow among us,” he remarked.

The warrior tensed.

“Why, dear warrior? Do you think this shadow will harm you?”

“Perhaps it is one of my meditations taking form. Though I have not meditated for many years, when I look up to the left with my mind’s eye, I can revisit that place where all my meditations have been stored.”

He drew out his sword. “I will smite you if you come closer, shadow.”

The shadow blew in the ever changing lights of the torches. 

“I thought you fearless,” the dragon mocked.

“I am without fear as much as I have stripped myself of self loathing.”

“And so you have met the examiner?”

“You know of him?”

“After a fashion. I have in my library many books. An author I had never thought I would meet came into my world along with Hortense.”

“What kind of book?”

“A collection of mad speeches. I had only glanced at it.”

“So who is the author?”

“Manly.”

“Manly? The examiner told me nothing of his name.”

“It is too much of a coincidence that you are talking about shedding all of your illusions.”

“I had fallen into the grave along with the dead H.”

“I always suspected there were large gaps in your self.”

“The examiner cut them away.”

“Manly is clothed in many guises.  Though I never thought he could deal with psycholigisms and fakeries.”

The warrior beheld the dragon anew.  Those words rang a bell.

The dragon saw a light of realization seep into the warrior’s consciousness.  He didn’t yet want to reveal the utter illusory world in which humans frittered away their lives. 

Part Nine: Outremer

The warrior severed the last bonds that held him to the world. A train of wagons emerged from Outremer. 

“Are you sane?” the wagon master called to him.

The warrior’s eyes blazed in response, and the wagon master struck his horses with a knotted whip and the wagons heaved away.  A pile of dust from the road stirred up by the wagon’s departure. When the air cleared there was no trace of the wagon’s route. He moved to the edge of the road and waited. Would someone else appear?

He heard the sound of women’s voices. A choir of women singing celestial songs to the Lord walked slowly toward him.

“Is something hidden?” He readied himself for treachery.

They calmly approached him and they were beautiful to behold. A golden cast of light surrounded him. “Who are you?” they asked.

He didn’t answer so unsure he was of what he beheld.

They scattered like sparks of fire and their song melted into the wind.

Again he stood alone.

A magnificent white horse galloped down the road toward him with a rider sitting proudly on its back. “Are you my father?” the warrior asked dumbfounded.

The rider didn’t answer and didn’t seem to register that anyone else was about.  He pulled the horse off the road. A vast and unimaginably large field broke into view. He spurred his horse into the field and rode faster than the warrior could consciously understand, as if the wind itself had entered his frame and ridden toward the horizon. 

He puzzled over this vision, and then forgot it. A stream of water appeared to his right.He hopped into its cool water and strode along its channel, all the while in Outremer.