Dear Reader, I am grateful for you being here. It has been four months since I published an article here at Third-Eye LASIK. In the interim, I have been preoccupied with two events:
The publication of a brand-new novel
A victorious bout against a set of paranormal activities that threw me for a loop
Below is an account of the second event.
“Don't be opening no portals,” my wife had repeatedly told me. This to my continual delving into esoterica, which had summarily replaced literature and history as reading material for the last three years.
I happened to one day run into Adele, the proprietress of the used book store inside the mall. She often appeared hauling heavy blue milk crates of books from the trunk of her hatch-back. My eyeballs snagged onto the Hebrew letters embossed upon the spine of two crates’ worth of auburn leather-bound books.
“Say, Adele,” I said, “what do you have there?” My rapport with her was good enough to feel comfortable lifting one of the volumes from its perch to inspect it. It was a complete set of The Zohar, written in Aramaic and translated English.
Yowza.
If I had become a kabbalah-obsessed Captain Ahab sailing the high seas of hermeneutics for overly complex systems to unlock the cosmos, then I had just happened upon my White Whale.
Second only to the baffling Sepher Yetzirah among the kabbalah skyline, The Zohar is a towering literary edifice that deconstructs the Torah while imparting rabbinical wisdom in a sort of tale cycle resembling The Thousand and One Nights and its Hindu cousin the Panchatantra.
In what was likely a sly game of pseudoepigraphica wherein a text is passed off as much older and written by someone of more impressive import, in this case one Rabbi Simon bar Yochai, one Moses de Leon of 13th-century Spain was the likely author, at least based on close philological study. He probably did this to lend it more credence before his fellow rabbis and to throw his wife off his path, much like I had been doing with mine.
The Zohar is neither a fun nor an easy read. In fact, most kabbalist texts are also neither. Thinking kabbalistically is fun and edifying, but one must take the requisite supplements to be able to pull off all that heavy epistemological lifting.
Of most kabbalistic texts or currents, The Zohar is couched in more than one ontological schema, often jumping from one to the next and back again while handling a theme from the Old Testament, such as Abram turning into Abraham upon circumcision.
(Above: The twenty-volume Zohar)
I haggled Adele down to $200. I would slice up my White Whale and package it into freezer bags to later partake of when the appetite dictated. No way would I tackle it all at once, though I suspect more than a few yeshiva students have been compelled to do so.
As far as I know, I have zero Jewish blood. The Diaspora didn't quite reach Meso-America, The Netherlands, or Ireland as much as it did North Africa, Spain, or Poland. Yet I'm sure there's some Jewish corpuscles white-water rafting through my veins while clutching their yarmulkes for dear life. But a certain sensibility has led me since forever to look askance at these industrious people and offer a nod or two of familiarity.
I've been chopping away at The Zohar, interspersing its volumes with racy issues of Savage Sword of Conan and even racier volumes of logical positivism. I was eating the proverbial elephant one bite at a time. As of now, I've wholly ingested the trunk and maybe the mandible. I've read four of the twenty volumes.
Perhaps the thing that makes The Zohar nigh-impenetrable is its sheer length. If said elephant is pointed at to be ingested, just imagine it trumpeting you away in fear while raising a front leg to stomp you to death on the command of a Mughal emperor.
There's a reason why most quotes yanked from the Zohar come from its first two volumes—Bereshith A and Beteshith B. Very few get much further. Such unapproachability adds to its mystique. It becomes a thing to be respected, maybe even feared.
Just go and ask the flashing lights all around my house.
Okay—
Okay—
What I'm about to divulge in short order is not some analogue, or some hyper-hypothetical to impart the literary power of this collection of written kabbalah. As I stated earlier, I haven't found The Zohar to be delightful reading, though I do intend to finish it.
What I'm about to divulge also explains my four-month absence from Substack and all other substrata of the digital geology that makes up our modern existence.
About two months ago, after a long day of work and jiu-jitsu, I decided to knock out thirty or so pages of volume 3 of The Zohar, Lech Lecha and Vayera. The book lay obediently on the arm of the sectional against which I often leaned the back of my head as I read. This perch of mine sat not quite directly under a recessed ceiling light so much as at a ten-degree angle. Anyway, this light had been chirping on for a few minutes in a Morse code of bad wiring. Along with my daughter, who sat on the opposite end of the sectional, fiddling with her iPad, I decided to ignore the faulty circuitry's desperate plea and knock out those thirty pages.
I grabbed the volume and clutched it to my chest, then lay down supine (facing up). I cracked open the page to where the bookmark had separated the pages. The light overhead came to an abrupt stop in its flashing.
It not only stopped, but it swelled in its brightness. I shrugged and filed that away under the folder of What the Fuck?
The Zohar itself claims that its Aramaic text is holy enough to protect a house and even bless a reader who, though not fluent in that language, gains much spiritual benefit from having his eyes scan over the sacred script.
The second standoff between The Zohar and LED bulbs happened after having gotten home from grocery shopping. I hauled into the kitchen two full paper bags and plopped them onto the granite island. As I long-craned out a bag of seedless green grapes, I felt something brush the crown of my head. This caused me to look up. Two recessed lights above me began to go crazy. I grabbed the nearby volume of the Zohar, Volume 5, and cracked it open. I shoved it up to the light on the right. As the light began to behave itself like a light that has gone through boarding school does, my wife and daughter walked in. “Honey,” my wife said, “look at Daddy.”
I had no need of getting the reputation of Eleven from Stranger Things.
A week before this event, another light in my garage had been flickering wildly with no rhyme, reason, or rhythm. Almost directly below it were the two milk crates of The Zohar, the volumes I had deemed too heavy to schlep all the way to the back spare room, which serves as my library. I figured I'd transfer the volumes piecemeal as motivation to continue reading them.
This particular light began to flicker almost mockingly. At the peak of my paranoia—and I'm not afraid to call it that, for whether internalized or of real objective import, it was happening and I didn't like it to be happening—this light had become so terrifying to me that I dreaded going to the garage and turning on the lights.
At one point I was discussing this phenomenon with my wife. I was outside the garage looking in, while she stood facing me five feet from the light, her back to it. She was telling me to not be afraid. I was saying, “Yeah, ok, but what the hell is happening?” She turned back to look up at that light. It did the light version of putting its naughty hands behind its back and behaving. When she turned back to face me, it glowered. Then it did it again—she turned back and it behaved; she turned to face me and it glowered. By then, I had decided that I was directly causing the light(s) to flash, and/or I was the object of the flashing.
(Above: the unread volumes of The Zohar, parked in my garage.)
(Above: the notorious light directly above The Zohar volumes.)
I know what you're thinking, Dear Discerning Reader: “Uh, confirmation bias. Uh, whackjob physics. Uh, paranoid schizophrenic ideation. Uh, bullshitter. Uh—”
I myself for some time hovered around that final ‘Uh.’ See, all this light flashing had happened on the heels of various previous disturbances, such as:
Plants moving on their own, with no possible origin of incoming wind, as all the windows were closed, it being 5:30 in the morning in the dead of winter as I read and nursed a coffee.
A foot-switch lamp turning off on its own only once in its ten-year existence, timed perfectly to me reading a book on the ancient Greek goddess Hecate, known to make her presence felt by dogs barking, moonlight, or, get this, lights.
A heavy movement of objects in the dining room, heard not just by myself, but by my wife and daughter.
The 5-gallon water cooler jug often gurgling loudly before sloshing the water back and forth in a violent standing wave of frustration, after fifteen years of never once doing so. (Granted, a quick Google search produced the possibility of a water line that needed to be bled of trapped air.)
The kitchen pantry door creaking open or closed on its own.
I've never been the boy who cried wolf—not even when my eyes saw an actual wolf. I often tend to rub my eyes, do a double take, and question my current state of sanity before alerting others.
But all this came after a Thanksgiving dinner that culminated personally in a door that led to the garage in my wife's aunt's house (where I once rented a room and met the love of my life), closing on its own after an impassioned conversation about the paranormal at the nearby dinner table, where I had on various occasions volubly stated the likelihood of rational explanations to such phenomena as I am now bringing to your attention.
As with many inexplicable events, I was at the time more intrigued than terrified by that door closing in its own that Thanksgiving Day. I entered the garage to search for a culprit—having, as I said, lived there before—only to find nothing. The garage had no open doors and windows, so the door, which had to be yanked toward the garage for it to be shut, had to have been physically manipulated by way of the spherical knob.
I had to take that as a celestial challenge to my prior certitude that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. I shot eyes of surprise at my wife's aunt, Carmen, who could only grin and nod, not really wanting to voice any acknowledgement of recent paranormal happenings about the house.
At the far, frayed end of the thread that led to my slipping sanity, I clutched for dear life while questioning my own supply of that not-inexhaustible commodity. The entire series of events came to a head with the whistling I began to hear, most especially in my garage.
My jiu-jitsu friend was over on the typical Thursday night that we reserved for drilling advanced techniques offered by the instructional website BJJ Fanatics. We were going over a set of techniques called the shoulder crunch. From my Bluetooth speaker issued the PJ Harvey song “A Place Called Home,” as we violently flipped each other over on my home mats. Nothing takes the tension off such a jarring technique as some casual whistling. The only thing was, “A Place Called Home” has zero whistling.
I brought this up to my friend and probably came across as cuckoo. I shook my head, attributed the phantom whistling to dehydration or one of our noses whistling, and forgot about the whole thing. Then I heard more whistling days later on several occasions as I left the garage for the house proper. And then I heard the whistling twice in my bedroom at three in the morning.
Desperate, I looked for answers; but more importantly solutions. All the aforementioned events have abated, and in most cases come to complete halts, once I began a daily practice of banishing.
I read Donald Michael Kraig's Twelve Steps of Modern Magick and Dion Fortune's Psychic Self Defense. Kraig, early on in his hefty tome, refers to something or things he calls “little nasties.” He writes that they are astral disturbances, possibly elemental spirits, that have always been there and go undetected until spiritual practice begins to prime the practioner by tuning him in to a frequency he was before not privy to.
This was reassuring. Not only was I not going crazy, but the phenomena were likely not malevolent. What threw me for a loop the entire time was my total unfamiliarity with the paranormal. Ms. Fortune, for all the merit of her classic book, comes across sometimes as neurotic and sees these phenomena as almost always malevolent, originating from hexes and curses spawned by expert black magicians. Kraig holds the view that they are harmless, and are annoying at best. He maintains the unlikelihood of their dubious origin, writing that such a magician capable of launching an attack would have been way too accomplished and equipped with all the ethical tact to not do such a lowly thing in the first place.
The only thing I'm certain of is that it pays to not be afraid. I cut my cinematic baby teeth on The Exorcist and The Poltergeist. Being not afraid of this weird-ass shit took some getting used to. I learned to enter the garage as if I were the best grappler in the history of jiu-jitsu, arms out and chest puffed— like Gordon Ryan.
(Above: Gordon Ryan)
Spreading my arms out and puffing my chest worked. Having just defended my neck and limbs against young, hungry monsters trying to strangle me or snap my bones in the dojo, what possibly can be done to me by an elemental that blows its entire wad in making a ficus tree shake?
Who knows what undetected energy circulates in our environs? My wife and I have discussed all the bad juju that people have brought into our house—jealous relatives, jaded Bible study housewives, former friends envious of a seemingly healthy household—
Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio podcast host Miguel Connor says, “We live in a leaky universe.” We do. I think it's all the more intriguing because of it. Substack's very own B The Author echoes this and has provided me with a wealth of assurance. Thanks, B.
Various sources state that poltergeist activity often stems from the presence of a pre-adolescent girl. I have one of those. All those raging emotions, shot through a sieve of hormonal novelty, may or may not be the cause of the jostling of a few books in the other room. Or a glitch of space-time may be circulating a loop. Or all this may be mental projections.
Some time in the future, we can only hope, in spite of its current myriad detractors, parapsychology may catalog strange occurrences and maybe even formulate a praxis on how to react to them. For now, all we can do is hurl about words like quantum or multiverse, which may not be wrong, but can certainly be abused and therefore later discredited and ridiculed.
I made the initial mistake of telling everyone about these occurrences. I was never met with ridicule. I was, however, offered differing takes on what was behind them and how to respond to them. Some people of the more traditional evangelical bent said it was the work of Satan and that the events had to be rebuked—though I was never told how to go about the rebuking.
Sunnier takes held that they were signs of forward spiritual progress. I heard the disclaimer, “If it doesn't bring you peace, then it can't be good.” But I disagree. Not all spiritual practice is roses and pastries. When I'm smack-dab in the middle of a three-day fast, I want to spinning-wheel kick anyone holding a container that reads Cinnabon. That's some dark shit. Dark, too, is all the shadow work that tries to reconcile a lifelong claustrophobia that culminated in not being able to tolerate a drive-thru. Yeah—
I'm going with it being a good thing, because I now have a daily practice that starts with banishing and ends with a gratitude for all the strides I've made in getting better and all the wonderful things I have in my life. I've seen no apparitions and suffered no physical harm. “Little nasties” for now have remained little.
The lights still freak out from time to time, but I just puff my chest before scaling a ladder to unscrew the offending light bulb, because I'd be lying if I didn't find that “little nasty” annoying.
Or I shove some Aramaic in its fat face and puff my chest and spread my arms.
Peace,
b
I've got a new novel out now. It's the follow-up to 2024's Crushed Trachea Blues. It's titled The Sisterhood of the Wick. Available in paperback and ebook.
Good to see you back!
Honestly, it's just really good to see you back around this old haunt, Bradley. Missed ya, bud.