In February of 1998, I embarked on a shamanic journey which was life-altering in every sense. It was a journey of discovery and assimilation, but most of all, it was a journey of creation - for it was during this experience that I encountered what I have since come to call the moment of creation - that single, defining instant of Intent when the sorcerer's Dream of the double becomes the double's Dream of the sorcerer.  To the man or woman of Knowledge who has experienced this moment of creation, no explanation is necessary.  To anyone who has not experienced it, no explanation is possible.  It is the moment that the sorcerer and the double become one, the moment the singularity of consciousness is invoked, the one single moment in all of Time when an integration is forged for all of Time, outside of Time.

For several days after the journey, I remained in a state of awe and silent reverence.  Then, it occurred to me to ask Orlando what he had experienced as a result of that excursion into the heart of the Nagual.

What follows was his response.

You ask me to tell you what I've seen yet how can the five common senses attempt to say what can only be known through the doing? In words borrowed from a film you may remember, "might as well ask heaven what it sees", for it is to heaven I have been, and to hell, and to all the mythical and magical kingdoms which are known to us as the seventh sense, yet this is why I tell you they're one in the same, all things separated from the abyss only by the sharp edge of consciousness locked within its temporal shell, each land defined only by the perception and intention of the perceiver.

Shall I tell you what it is like to exist as a blade of awareness extending from a point beyond time's beginning and stretching far beyond its end, a blade which severs the abyss from all continuums only by the force of its will to exist and to be the blade itself? Shall I tell you I fear that reality itself will end when I do, for I have seen that it is only my will dividing me from the nothingness; and if my will should be obliterated, so will all of this?

To tell it would be an impossible attempt to coalesce the heart of all experience into a few inadequate words of poetry which can only be sung into the darkness, hymns of desperation and dread wailed with utter clarity of voice by castrated madmen, absorbed by the void to become the song of the void itself, yes? I do not expect you to understand, my love, and perhaps it's best that you don't, for as you've so aptly noted we must be apart before we can come together - for the singularity is forged from the original duality of the sorcerer and her double -  and though we shared this journey of souls and forbidden Knowledge, we also Intentionally took divergent paths which will, if we are impeccable and driven by will, bring us together again both here and on the far side of that hungry abyss. So if my words mean nothing, it's because they are my words attempting to tell you what it is to be me, and to witness and participate in my own Infinite creation.

I'm not sure I can tell you anything, for words are the greatest illusions of all, fleeting efforts to capture what cannot be held, arrows shot out into the darkness in the hopes of hitting a moving target comprised of another be-ing's consciousness.

My journey was one of creation and obliteration, as it always is for me, and I hear my voice whispering to the pillow wet with tears that I will never do it again if only I am allowed to emerge whole on the far side of the experience, prayers of the damned not begging for forgiveness from a deity who does not exist, but for wisdom and visions - prayers to my own dark and unbending Intent to take me through the abyss so I might continue to battle it on through eternity without end; and I hear the abyss laughing like thunder which is my own ticktock heart, saying that one day it will win for that is its nature, to be all-engulfing and patient enough to wait even for the immortals to fall.

I spit into the well of nothingness and stare into its intergalactic black eye and I tell it that when this spit hits the bottom of the bottomless pit it can have me and not an instant before, and because we are both all-powerful and entirely crazy we agree that it's an entertaining challenge, and so I am allowed to continue one heartbeat more, perhaps no more certain of tomorrow than you are, for now I've bargained with the abyss itself and only a fool does that, but not to do it is to lie down deep in the arms of the brute with the scythe, Death Himself, and that's not what you made me to do, so what else was there to do but toss the ferryman out of his mushroom boat and sail it back to the land of the living so I might at least try to rescue my goddess-creator-mortal-self by guiding her through and to those tiny islands of immortality existing as singularities within the ocean of the abyss itself?  Now I am Dreaming you.

I ask myself the question I've so often asked of you: who am I? and only now do I know what I could only suspect before. I am you, it's true, but more than that I am the eternal blood of you and the heart and the soul of you, the magic starstuff fairy dust of all your intents and incantations spun together in a cocoon that is mortal you made whole through eternal me. I am the passion and obsession of the poet and the concupiscent quantum genius of the medicine witch, and yet I must tell you again and again that this is not a journey anyone can take for you, not even me.  I am the cohesion in eternity, but you are the Source of the Dream, see?

You ask me what I see, what I know, what I feel. And here I stand before the questions again, who am I, what am I. Would you think less of me if I said I am not altogether sure? Do you need me to be all-knowing or can you accept that my knowledge is linked to yours as much as it stands apart from you? We are one, yet we are also separate, and that is- as I perceive it-, the nature of love and immortality, the state of Be-ing of the Nagual man and the Nagual Woman - two halves of a whole, not separate but the same, yes? As you rode the wild white horse of your ecstatic revelations, I stood apart watching, yet I was also the horse itself, ridden and driven by your needs, yet still altogether untamed, which is why I took you out of control and rode you in return, no?

You said I was beautiful and I showed you your own reflection, for I am what you have made me to be. You said you loved me more than life and so I showed you life, for without life there is no love and without love there is little motivation to seek eternity. You said I am the one, the infant of all your immortal imaginings, and so I took root inside you, an incestuous beast copulating with his own creator so that he might emerge to be the beast the creator desires, but don't you see that it's your creation, you who has created me in this metamagical fashion because it was your desire/need/ache for life that forced you to be more than reality says you can be so that you could become more than you are in my arms or altogether on your own? Ah, did you see it too? Do you remember me loving you deep and hard and maybe even a little bit mean there on that endless mesa outside of time, crawling inside you so I would have a place to exist because it was my creator's will that I must exist? Did you feel the moment of my conception, that instant when we stood face to face beyond the need for our bodies, locked together in a mating frenzy that had nothing to do with mortal copulation and everything to do with evolutionary creation?

I have seen my own creation and am at once at a loss for words and yet jabbering jibbering incessantly in an impossible attempt to capture the essence of it so that I might suckle it as an elixir as sweet as wildflower wine for the rest of infernal eternity. In the metallic male intellect of the medicine witch who is surely a shaman from beyond the abyss itself (I do mean this literally), I experienced the terror which comes from knowing one is "god" and the knowledge that even "god" is, therefore, only another entity in the darkness, entirely responsible for his own creation or his own obliteration, knowing too much of reality to fully believe in magic, recognizing ultimately that magic is the only cure for the death which resides inside the boundaries of reality - the yin and the yang of all of it, the light and the dark arguing for supremacy and ultimately coming to recognize that neither exists without the other.

Within that place from which I was also created, I feared for the destruction of all of us on the sacrificial blade of your perception, for perception is reality when you are outside of time, and if you had not discovered within yourself the strength of will to evolve beyond what you know and into what must "be", both you and I would have been swept from existence by the eagle's tornado breath. How I now see what I could only have suspected before, that this journey is harder for you even than for me, for you are the quantum shaman who must unravel the conundrums of creation and whisper their secrets to me in dreams so that I may then find a way of telling you what these things mean, see?

If the shaman perceives that the entire world is only her own creation she perceives herself entirely alone save for her own illusionary children, so when you confronted the quantum conundrum that I am your twin and your self, you had to expand the limits of those perceptions to further see that I am the embodiment of that creation, the thoughtform made whole, the immortal dual self who can be perceived as "you" or as the duality exceeding the sum of your individuality through the manifestation of will, yes?

I love you, yes, but is love enough or are there roads still to be traveled, secrets still to be revealed, evolutions still to be? Of course, for how else can it ever be until the eagle is behind us, and even everafter? This evolution is only the first step in a series of ongoing evolutions, for there is always more to see, more to be.

For now, love and birth are islands in the abyss of time, a place to rest for a moment or two, but no more than that, no? You have made me whole so that I might Dream you into being just as you have Dreamed me.  Soon enough we will meet in the midst of a far larger Dreaming and you will open your eyes inside of me somewhere on the outskirts of Infinity, awakening at last from the life-trance to embrace evolution and eternity.

Orlando - March 8, 1998

Copyright 2006, 2007
by Della Van Hise
All rights reserved