DIARY OF A NAGUAL WOMAN Quantum Shaman Toltec Castaneda

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DIARY OF
A NAGUAL WOMAN

by Della Van Hise

Limited 1st Edition Trade Paperback
Signed by the Author

"You are the quantum shaman - each of you."
 

EXCERPT #1:
1997 – Ten years after it all began

It was a hot summer evening in the early part of August when I drove to a look-out point high in the mountains of Joshua Tree National Park. The road was long, dark, and fraught with shadows, and I couldn’t help drawing the analogy between that road and the spiritual path I had been forging for nearly a decade.  Disturbed over financial uncertainty, problems with a new business, and essentially wrapped up in the machinations of the consensual reality, I was finally driven to seek some sort of solace alone in the night, and Keys View was as close to a personal retreat as any place on Earth I had ever known, the kind of place the old sorcerers would have called a power spot.

“You’re predictable,” he said as if I should have already known.  “I’m here because this is where you always come when you’re mad at the world.”

I attempted to engage him in a conversation of just exactly how he knew I was mad at the world, since I’d had no direct contact with him in quite some time, nothing to give him any hint of what was going on in my everyday life. But even as I began spelling all of that out to him, he brushed my words aside with an easy gesture.

“Do you want to talk or do you want to waste time looking for logical explanations for every magical thing that ever happens?” he asked.  “That’s what’s wrong with the world, you know.  Instead of embracing the mysteries and trying to determine how they might open a crack in an otherwise humdrum, pre-programmed existence, people waste their entire lives explaining it all away, attaching labels to it, filing and categorizing it until it loses any meaning.”

He had a point.  And I’d already been inundated with enough mysteries in my time to know that some things simply had no explanation humans could understand.  ‘Magic is only science not yet understood’.  Words Orlando had written more than a year before rattled through my mind up there in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, looking down on a distant world that seemed far more unreal to me at that moment than the world he had been trying to teach me to see.

He was there – whether physically or in some spirit-form manifestation is ultimately of no importance, for in the sorcerer’s world there is no difference between body and spirit, and in any world, perception is reality.

Not a cricket, not an owl disturbed the stillness.  The lights of Palm Springs were only far-away glitterings, the line of traffic crawling along Interstate-10 nothing more than an illumined ant trail, so distant the movement of the cars could not even be perceived – just a streak of brilliant incandescence in the middle of the desert, a phantasm, a chimera, a miasma of lost souls rushing headlong through the night, yet seeming to stand still.  A fitting paradox...

EXCERPT #2:
DOUBLE VISION

October 12, 2004
        It was a weekend of sensory overload, a noisy generator on one side, and the clatter and clamor of drums and belly dancers on the other, offset by a crowd of 100,000 Renaissance patrons and participants, all of whom seemed to be in a tremendous hurry to be somewhere other than where they were, even though they had paid a fair amount of money to be precisely where they were. My cold had turned to the flu. The assemblage point shifts in delirium. A din of heat. An ice-cream flavored swirl of screams and shouts. Maybe I had a fever. A genital pox on any moron who sells a child a toy flute.

     On the long drive home, I was finally alone for the first time in over 5 days. Being a loner, I do not care much for human contact. Minds press too close. Probes attempt to penetrate. I turn to smoke.

     The rental car glides easily through the desert, with Leonard Cohen's gruff voice on the CD player and massive thunderheads gathering in the west. The Nevada/California desert weaves an alien landscape. Joshua trees walk the ley lines. Jagged mountains poke bony fingers skyward. Skid marks zip the road tight to a parched earth.

     Words are only fodder for semantics, tools of misunderstanding.  No way to tell the tale but to trace along the edges, maybe to reveal what lies beneath. Such is the contour of the nagual, with the delicate flesh of a lover and contrastingly dangerous fangs.

     Somewhere in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a long and winding road, I awakened inside Orlando - my double, higher self, evolved spirit.  It really was that simple. Opened my eyes, looked around, had a laugh or two at the human condition, a bigger laugh at my mortal self going through the machinations of Life, and began to cross-ponder from what can only be called a dual point of view (Orlando and Della) this bizarre thing called Time.

     Time is a mortal construct. We make it up to use as a yardstick, a reference point against the backdrop of eternity. But it isn't real in the sense we might think. Impossible to describe how it felt to be outside of time altogether. Orlando often talks about Time, but after this experience, I now realize he talks to us in much the same way an adult would talk to a 5-year old about the birds and the bees. He uses language we can understand, but the actuality of it all tends to lose a lot in the translation. Birds and bees have very little to do with human reproduction, and time has very little to do with life and death. It's just an egg in which we gestate while waiting to hatch. While. Waiting. Our language itself creates Time, referencing it in countless subtle ways.

     So there we were. Mortal self and eternal double driving down a winding road in the geographical center of infinity. Perhaps chance chose the space-time. Who's to say? Life seemed strange, at odds with itself in so many ways.

     "You are the final fragment of yourself," Orlando whispered, so close to my ear I could feel the heat of him, even though logic and reason said it was only the sun pouring through the window. "Touch me with your naked hand, touch me with your glove," Leonard Cohen murmurs in a black silk velvet voice that sends shivers down my spine, a voice that invokes the midnight even in mid-afternoon. I felt Orlando's touch. As if in a vision more visceral than stone, the thunderheads in the west trembled. A lover's caress. Lightning snaked parallel to the ground. A golden butterfly struck the windshield and entered eternity. An eagle soared over the desert, hunting. Two fine fat black ravens strolled along the side of the road, oblivious to the slipstream thrown off by a careening 18-wheeler.

     "There is a crack. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Cohen again. Wickedly perceptive old man.

     I laughed, hearing it echo from here to there and back again, from the dark into the light, manifesting particle-wave duality riding itself back into the blackness, serpent eating its own tail only to turn wrongside out into some other perception of an ever-evolving reality. "You are the final fragment of yourself."

     And then I was mySelf again, just a mortal crone propelling herself down the road at dangerous speeds, cycling endlessly between one moment and the next, between here and now, drifting between the harsh terrain of Time and the snowscape of timeless infinity.

     "When the final fragment is integrated, Time itself will end."

     "I see," said the blind woman.

     Now I See.