Chapter Two: Jack

“There is a hidden world around us asking to be recognized. It’s up to us to open ourselves to the possibility of seeing it.”

– Chris Bledsoe

The mysteries started early for Jack. When he was five or six, he began practicing Jewish rituals. It didn’t occur to him to wonder why a boy whose family was not Jewish would do such a thing, or how he would know what to do. He just thought that maybe there was something childlike about this faith, or these rituals. 

Belief in past lives was out-of-bounds in his family’s belief system, so he didn’t know what to make of it, and didn’t spend any more time thinking about it until much later in life.

He became aware that his mother was an alcoholic in the years that followed. Relocating from Pennsylvania to Virginia before Jack was born and becoming a parent later in life had been a hard adjustment for her, and she coped with it through her family’s traditional solution: Drinking.

When he was just ten years old, Jack's mother died. In many ways it was an ordinary death - a betrayal of the body, a graceless unraveling. 

In the hollow that followed, Jack's father did his best to strengthen his bond with his son as they both grieved. But the story of men is often the story of leaving or being left. Eleven months after Jack's mother slipped, or perhaps stumbled, from this world, his father died of a stroke. A boy, now alone, his grief now doubled, and not old enough to cope with the trauma.

In the years that followed, Jack retreated further into the sanctuary of his own mind. The pain of his losses crystallized into a cold and constant companion, a second self that shadowed his steps and slept curled against his back. The years went by in a blur of sadness and hardship. He dulled the colors of his grief with the rituals of young men - the burn of alcohol, the oblivion of drugs, the imagined escape that spiraled into addiction. He was walking with the same demons that had taken his mother from him. He felt that pull deep in his chest. And yet, there was a restlessness there too, a yearning for something just beyond his comprehension. Jack could feel himself stretching towards some great mystery that remained out of reach.

When death brushed by him again, it came more slowly. Jack watched as his godfather, once an oak of a man, gradually shed his leaves and returned to the earth. Long hospital stays can be slow, contemplative, even boring, but Jack was there, at his bedside, helping him say goodbye to this life. In one of those many moments together, Jack looked at his godfather. "Who the fuck built the pyramids?" he asked, as though asking for answers to every question at once. "I dunno," was the only answer his godfather could offer.

With yet another major figure in his life gone, something began to crystallize within Jack - an awareness of the vastness that lives beyond the border of our knowing. He could perceive glimpses of the tapestry of life, in which his small, strained existence was but a single thread.

As often seems to happen in this strange universe, a chance encounter steered Jack’s life in ways he could not have anticipated. He met a brilliant woman, a scientist by training, but with a mystic tradition acquired behind the Iron Curtain and an interest in natural healing. She was selling books at a local Farmer’s Market. Jack was entranced into her world, studying her ideas, learning, and eventually finding employment in a nearby holistic health shop. 

In the hills of Eastern Tennessee, these ideas had limited reach. Jack’s time at the shop was often free and unstructured, allowing more to explore the books and ideas and techniques the shop exposed him to: massage therapy, reiki, reflexology, natural healing. A co-worker, as though seeing through his outer casing straight through to his very core, said to him, “You’re a healer, I can tell.” 

“And I think you’re a hippie,” Jack thought. His actual reply was more along the lines of, “I don’t really … whatever, that’s fine. But I do like herbs. I think a natural pathway towards health is pretty smart. So, I’m down with that.” 

She pressed him, “No, you're a healer, I can sense it.”

Unconvinced, Jack eventually moved on, landing in a different, more technical career in graphic information systems. At a conference for work, unable to connect even remotely to his peers or his job, one thought kept ringing through his head: “This totally sucks.”

At the same conference venue, down the hall, was a massage therapy program. Jack, instinctively drawn to it, ended up enrolling in a year-long massage training program. At the same time, he rediscovered the book on herbal remedies he picked up at the farmer’s market years earlier. He reconnected with the author he’d met there. And Fate, as the poets would have you believe, can be both cruel and kind, rewarding and punishing, clear and confusing, never quite what you think. 

And so Iskra came into Jack’s life, connecting over a shared understanding. She acted as something between a mentor and a therapist, helping him find his footing in this new space.

Through Iskra, Jack met Jeremy, a younger man who was also seemingly brilliant, another scientist with a connection to the esoteric. Iskra, Jack and Jeremy spent many hours sharing ideas, learning from each other, establishing connections. Jack was still in the process of escaping past addictions, and while mostly successful, couldn’t quite let go. 

“I’m going to send you light energy now,” Iskra tells Jack, as he and Jeremy sit with her around her dining table. She closes her eyes, and Jack feels nothing. But as if from nowhere, he hears the strangest sound. He describes it as an “alien, insect sound, like if a praying mantis were able to telepathically communicate…. Tsss-tsk-tss-tsksss…” It’s as though Iskra and Jeremy were communicating with each other through some other-worldly transmission.

“It is done,” she says. No one in the trio acknowledged the strangeness of what had just happened, and Jack wondered if he’d imagined it. The conversation flowed on into the night, and eventually they parted ways. Jack, while driving home, became aware that something inside him had shifted. Something subtle, but very real: He was done drinking. The urge was gone completely. He was bewildered and in awe of the experience, and thinking to himself, “what the fuck was that?”

That night Jack dreams. It is a dream so vivid, so alive, that he still feels it to this day. He walks into a cabin, and there are people waiting for him there. He knows these people are significant to him, but is unsure of who they are. Looking back, he suspects that one of them is his current girlfriend, one is a local artist who has been very influential in his life, and several others he can’t quite identify. Soon another woman appears, a black woman with electric purple strands through her jet black hair, with a commanding presence and a power over the space they’re in. She doesn’t speak, but she communicates information to Jack. 

Jack was dumbstruck by the events. And slowly, the world began to reveal its true face to Jack. His relationship with Iskra became more intense, but also more fractured. She became controlling and unmoored. Little actions became big infractions, and she broke their connection. Or, at least she broke off direct interaction. 

After Iskra shunned him, Jack felt attacked by her as though through directed psychic energy, unable to understand the things that were happening to him. He started praying to any power that could help him. He reached out to Jeremy, who connected him to the Berkeley Psychic Institute. Unsure of how to get his life back on track, Jack signed up for classes, learning about deep meditation and psychic healing techniques. He was participating in learning, but his rational mind and cultural upbringing left him skeptical and non-committal.

At one point an instructor pushed beyond Jack’s comfort zone, calling on forces and entities that he couldn’t accept. He was mentally reeling, physically chilled, and wholly shaken; a potent cocktail of fear and paranoia overtaking him. As the class ended, he told his instructor that he was really upset and needed help. The instructor offered to do a psychic healing, which Jack accepted. The instructor entered a trance meditation, and told Jack, “I see a yellow line crossing through your brain, and I'm just going to dissolve that.” In that moment, Jack went from drowning in panic and anxiety, to a feeling of complete calm washing over him.

In the retelling, he described the aftermath: ”I'm like, what the fuck world do I live in right now? What is going on? This is a sandbox that I don't even know about and it's – shit is happening – and it's so much.” 

Confused and uncertain, Jack inched a step closer to some internal understanding of reality. He tried reading books on the subject, but was put off by the “kook factor.” Many of the authors sounded compelling for a time but then lost him when they strayed too far into uncharted territories. He decides he wants nothing to do with any of this supernatural stuff. But the universe keeps taunting him. 

One night, he’s out with his friend Dustin after playing a round of disc golf. He had tried telling Dustin about some of his weird experiences, but Dustin wasn’t having any of it. Then on the way back to their cars, in the darkening sky, they see a craft above them. Lights are shining from its multifaceted underside, and it’s moving slowly over their heads, in complete silence

“Oh there’s your X-files shit,” says Dustin.

 At some point they look away, and when they look back up, it’s gone. 

They don’t talk any more about it until six months later, when Jack brings it up. “You remember that time we were at the course and we saw that freaky fucking thing?”

“Holy shit, I haven't even thought about it since then,” says Dustin. 

“Do you remember what it looked like?”

“Yeah, it looked like an insect.” 

“Can you draw it?”

Dustin draws three overlapping triangles. Jack remembers it looking more like a cheese wedge. Since the sighting happened very close to Oak Ridge National Labs, they decide it must be some kind of secret or experimental military craft, and they don’t talk any more about it. 

Later, Jack has another vivid dream, where he’s walking across a green field, where there’s an apparent spaceship that looks like the bottom third of a pyramid, only silver. People are waiting to board.

He had a déjà vu experience that lasted an entire day, and started occasionally experiencing precognition, like anticipating that someone was going to call him just before they called. During a walk in the woods, Jack had the sensation of being almost transparent, like he could sense the space between the atoms of his body. “I felt like my entire body was that empty space and that the air that is here that's touching my hand was moving through me just as easily. It was totally invisible and everything was perfect, everything in the entire universe. Everything about me, and my life, and everyone's life, and every single action everywhere was absolutely perfect.”

As time went on, he gradually became more open to these experiences. He heard about well-known UFO experiencer Chris Bledsoe and his family’s long history with strange and spiritual events. This helped him to be more open and accepting of his own life experiences.

He met the self-described love of his life, Caroline, and shared with her some of his own remarkable experiences. Once, as a gift, he got her a reading from a well-known psychic therapist and medium named Vincent Genna. Vincent told them that Jack and Caroline had been together before in a past life, and were meant to be with each other. 

Jack and Caroline had another interesting experience together. They were sitting outside listening to a live skywatching session with other experiencers of strange phenomena. As someone else on the chat was describing the orbs they were seeing in the sky, Jack and his girlfriend saw orbs as well, moving in the same peculiar ways, and at the same time, roughly 500 miles away. 

Most recently, while praying to both Jesus and Hathor, Jack had what he describes as a mystical vision of the two figures appearing to him. He asked them to reveal their true forms, at which point they turned into a yellow-white star like our own sun, and a blue-white star Jack took to be Sirius.

These events seem to be happening more frequently for Jack. At key moments in life now, Jack regularly sees orbs in the sky, and on one occasion a meteor streaking across the sky. He takes these to mean he’s on the right track. 

As his awareness and understanding have grown, Jack has begun to understand that there is a luminous intelligence woven through all things. He has practiced extensive healing and extensive forgiveness. He walks the world as one who is both lost and found. The great tapestry of life is shot through with threads of the sacred and the profane. He understands that the extraordinary is not something to be grasped, but rather a way of seeing, a way of moving through the world with a heart cracked wide open. 

“Here is what I have learned,” said Jack. “All these fantastic things happen and what I'm left with is: Be a better human. That's the lesson ultimately. Share. Don't procrastinate. Love thy neighbor…. Anyone who comes to this realm, I want to call it a realm because this is a strange place we’re living in, but you're here to have an experience and to learn and grow and dance and love and learn how to share love. And that's been my main message lately. That's what I want to transmit to everybody and I want to say it as fast, and as soon as possible, because I know that life is short. And let's just cut to the chase because this shit is fleeting.”

And so Jack walks on, a traveler between realms, his heart a compass now pointing always towards love. For him, the truth of being is here, waiting for us, radiating across the vastness of existence, and shimmering in the space between heartbeats.