Golem

It was when I first began creating him that I knew he would be my greatest ally against the world.

In many ways, he was better than I—faceless, nameless, with no complications or limits. He appeared to consist of clay, gray and malleable; but it was mindstuff and breath—chitta and prana—that molded his initial scaffolding. He faced me from ten feet afar—close enough to me to indicate affinity, yet far enough to give himself a running start should he become all of a sudden sentient.

He stood as if perched upon an invisible stool, or his inchoate anatomy was like that of a plastic figurine, predestined for a sedentary fate and not at all standing to commence the great cavalcade of motion that I would subject him to as he followed me for the rest of my life.

Rather than feel a sense of physical depletion from having established his featureless shape, I felt a gentle pressure behind my chest cavity. The breathwork had exercised my lungs, and rather than burn with over-exertion, they tingled with the slow simmer of vigor. For the more I regulated and extended both my inhale and exhale, the easier did he appear in my mind's eye.

Fresh from reading Henri Corbin's Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth and Paul Foster Case's Color and Sound, the idea of creating a golem became my latest concern when it came to meditation. There are of course countless ways to meditate, and countless reasons to do so. The thought of creating a being, however imaginal that being be, to run parallel with me as I stumbled from one moment of life to another, had a great appeal. I've been needing all the help I can get my hands on.

My first encounter with a golem as an idea was from a song by Canadian sci-fi thrash metal band Voivod, titled “The Golem.” Many people may know the golem as the egregore from the eponymous novel by Gustav Meyrink.

More fascinating is the cryptic and possibly ancient Kabbalah book Sefer Yetzirah, wherein instruction is presented with irony-free language for building a golem.

So what is a golem?

A golem is a clay figure into which life has been breathed by invoking it with combinations of Hebrew letters, circumambulations, and prayer. It is meant as a bodyguard or a protector. A more twisted interpretation and consequent practice would be to make one for free labor or carnal utility.

A Golem. Not just an amalgam of Frankenstein and the mandrake root, this mythical figure of Jewish folklore predates both. The most famous golem was that of late 16th-century Prague, which was summoned to protect an entire Jewish community from persecution by the Holy Roman Emperor.

My golem would not be a mindless servant. Instead, he would be a companion. But make no mistake: we were not meant to be equals; I intended to use him as a scapegoat for all my hangups. I would data-transfer all my bullshit onto him as if he were a hard drive of incompetence and dysfunction.

I mean to use this dude to outsource most of my grief and anxiety. Like Fiverr for neurotics, but even cheaper.

When domestic disputes end in gridlock, with misunderstandings and perceived slights blown way out of proportion, I will elbow him in the floating ribs and say, “You deal with it.”

When a usually half-hour commute explodes into an hour-plus free stay at the world's largest parking lot, I'll look askance at the guy in the passenger seat, dutiful behind his seat belt, and go, “You have the panic attack.”

Once I know my death is at hand, I will sit up from having been splayed supine upon the altar of Fate and place him in my stead and say to the Sword of Damocles, “This is your guy.”

I return to contribute to his construction the next day. He says, “What took you so long?”

"I have responsibilities. Family. Work. Writing. Jiu-jitsu.”

“Must I be last?”

“No,” I say. “You mustn't. I should move you up in the rotation.”

“I am kind of important.”

“You're right. I can't argue with that. If I plan on offloading all my strife onto you, I should take you more seriously. I shall dedicate time to you upon awakening.”

He shuts up and I begin building him. I feed the Hebrew letter shin into his mouth and close his lips. This serves the dual task of shutting him up and feeding him the life force that is fire, which is what shin stands for in an elemental capacity. Shin literally means ‘tooth,’ as in tooth to chew away all suffering.

He becomes more sophisticated with each breath. No longer appearing as clay or some other earthen substance, he takes on the form of evanescent light. In the action of me transferring all the dross and dirt of my being onto him, he too has had them turned to smoke and ash so that he can glow with the effulgence of pure light. The letter shin has already done its work.

Man, the world is so noisy! I'm at a park in my car. I'm one minute in on a twenty-minute meditation when I hear some girl to my left congratulating her dog on a successful bowel movement, as if that's worthy of trophy bestowal. Then a murder of crows strikes up a caw-apalooza to my right, somewhere up in the sky where there shouldn't be any beef as there is on earth but there is.

The golem reassures me. “We here. It's why we do this.”

“Yes.” I finish the meditation. It is glorious. Each breath, measured and deep, is the stroke of an oar as I guide us to the middle of a calm sierra. No wave, no trouble, no concern thrown at us by the outside world, can disturb our craft as we guide it to the center and weigh anchor.

The golem and I cast our rods to catch shimmering specimens of indomitability, drinking High Noon seltzers and reminiscing about that time, a lifetime ago, when the things of the world got to us. What are clouds of bad thinking to us when we have the entire sky to call our own?

We sound the letter shin. Sssshhhhhh—

The Hebrew letter Shin. The last of the three mother letters, it represents fire. It even looks like a flame. It looks like a molar too, one meant to consume things like generational strongholds, hangups, and anxieties.

There are so many spiritual guides, texts, practices, rituals, tenets, precepts, commandments, and cosmologies. Yet so many of them fail to drive home the capital importance of meditation, of calming the mind, of communing with the Eternal, in order to take control of our own thoughts so that we are not mere creatures who react against the world but intently carve paths that provide us meaning.

In a recent post titled The Practice of Practice, occult author Damien Echols emphasizes the importance of just such a practice. While far from a guarantee of initial success, the act of just starting out is money in the bank.

Each person deserves to meditate as he or she sees fit. You can build an adytum, or temple sanctuary, out of your body-mind. You can sail across an ocean of tranquility. You can scale a previously insurmountable obstacle in the form of a vision quest. You can go Zen by thinking about the back of your own head or going blank. You can be present, stop reifying, and allow appearance and awareness to become one. You can pray to God. You can monitor your breathing and tap into your parasympathetic nervous system, thereby taking charge of your reptilian brain and amygdala.

I do a little of everything. The construction of the golem is just the latest in my effort to plunge recklessly into the mundus imaginalis. As a novelist, this works best for me. I've always found the most engaging and clever storylines to be spiritual workings of the highest order. Fictioneers like Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Barth have been my psychopomps and teachers for the last thirty years. It would only be natural for me to go along with that paradigm.

My pit stop at the Western Esoteric Tradition has been an extended stay, but I feel myself drawn farther East.

Regardless, we are meant to collect as many metaphors and correspondences as our spiritual utility belt allows room for.

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is not,” said the founder of Jeet Kune Do and godfather of MMA, Bruce Lee.

“I think we'll be seeing a lot of each other in the years to come,” the golem says.

“I think you're right.”

We high-five.

High-fiving my spiritual body double—now that's the shit.

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.

My current novel Crushed Trachea Blues is a fun, literary murder mystery featuring suicide by jiu-jitsu, an AI Charles Manson, and lots of tacos. It is available in ebook and paperback.

Its follow-up The Sisterhood of the Wick will be out in November.