ejverwey
ejverwey
| Forum role | Member since | Last activity | Topics created | Replies created |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Member | Jan 2, 2016 (10 years) |
- | 1 | 0 |
- Forum role
- Member
- Member since
Jan 2, 2016 (10 years)
- Last activity
- -
- Topics created
- 1
- Replies created
- 0
Bio
Autobiographical information:
I, Eric-Jan Verwey, was fascinated by and drawn to religious mysticism from a very early age. As soon as I was old enough to travel alone, I went to India, and experiencing the power of the temples and myths of this ancient culture, have been making pilgrimages there ever since. Through a strange set of circumstances and an illness, my path eventually led me to Israel where my inclination towards linguistic Kabbalah commenced. Returning to my homeland, the Netherlands, I was inspired to master the Hebrew language in order to gain access to the source texts of this stream of mysticism. Now I combine daily study of medieval kabbalistic texts with regular trips to India visiting ever-more obscure and ancient Hindu temples. In between I also explore other streams of mysticism such as Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Jainism.
I have turned to writing as a way of deepening my own mystical experiences and my novels are an outcome of this. My writing process is not a conventional one, and I use a free-flowing technique where I am unaware of the outcome and follow signs and intuitions as they arise while I write. My books can be read as fictional novels but more than that they are the stream of consciousness and real-time experiences of a contemporary mystic.
Over the last ten years I have written several novels about the various mystical streams of Judaism and their connection with Hinduism and Buddhism. Zen and the Genesis of Tao is my latest novel.
The connection I unveil between the oriental conceptions of mysticism and Judaism is a result of many years of study and travelling. Having a MA from the University of Amsterdam (including studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a year) in Jewish mysticism, I have used existing theories from the Middle Ages for the novels, occasionally taking them further than one would find (explicitly) mentioned in the kabbalistic works themselves.
While my thorough knowledge of Jewish mysticism is academic, my knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism is experiential. Over the last thirty years I have travelled to India, Nepal, and Tibet almost annually, making pilgrimages to innumerable ancient temples and monasteries, studying the myths connected to them.
About 10 years ago I began offering kabbalistic charts. The charts were based on people's personal details (name, date of birth, etc), which I translated into the Hebrew script and then, mostly by means of gematria (the Jewish equivalent of numerology), made comparisons and drew analogies with the Torah and some of the most important kabbalistic books. The outcome gave people a deeper insight into their nature and disposition and highlighted their personal connection with specific sefirot (godly emanations). Using my master's degree in medieval Jewish mysticism (in Hebrew), I was able to use the original Hebrew texts for the compilation of these charts.
Following an inspiration to convey this kind of knowledge in a more visual form, a year ago I began creating and drawing amulets, first for myself and my family, and then for friends. As is the case with my books and charts, all the information presented is based on existing books from renown kabbalists, dating from the third to the nineteenth century. What all these books have in common is the belief that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet have magical, creational powers that can be drawn down to our realm and concentrated, intensified. To kabbalists Hebrew is, after all, the language that forms the very soul of creation, its letters providing the physical building blocks.
WordPress.com Forums 