The Lena Ghio Paradox/Le Paradoxe Lena Ghio: Recapitulating Carlos Castaneda page 2

Friday, May 4, 2018

Recapitulating Carlos Castaneda page 2

«Who is the Nagual Juan Matus » © Lena Ghio 2015-2018 / « He put his hands on his hips and swelled his chest and asked me whether or not I liked his appearance. It was only then that I noticed he was wearing a suit. » Tales of Power page 106 Carlos Castaneda 1974

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Although I was raised within the judeo-christian system of values and approach to the spirit world I found the approach most compatible with my mood and verifiable in the writings of Carlos Castaneda. His writings are not about a perfect man or a system that a community must adhere to or else. In fact, he may have been a yarn teller! However, every reader of his books could get his own challenge according to how the writing came to him. For me, it is inconsequential that he was an ordinary lecherous man. His words catapulted me into a way of thinking and being that I value above all.

Today, May 4, 2018, I am in the first stages of dissolving the life I have been living for decades. This involves getting rid of all my superfluous possessions. For the past 5 years I explored Emerge Art. I was amazed by the experience I had as water created magical images to respond to me and the fact I possessed the technology to record it. I was so bedazzled I was sure I had found an art practice with which I could sustain my life financially. I was so wrong! During those 5 years, I met resistance at every turn and ridicule and now I face the loss of everything I own. The first weeks of April when my options began shrinking and I received the latest rejection email from a project aimed to present cultural diversity in art, I felt a great pain in my heart chakra and fear. Who would I be now? Where would I go?

At the same time, I observed that the stem of a rose I had cut and put into a glass of water had created new roots. What a striking metaphor for moments like those described above that we must all face eventually.

In early March I had an extraordinary experience of the luminous energy field that surrounds my body. I have kept the water in which the above image of the Nagual appeared and use it in the same way flower essences are used. I add a few drops in an once of water alcohol mixture and consume that mixture a few drops at a time. I realized the above photo on September 18, 2015. I have ingested that fluid, a few drops at a time, since then. But I had never had any particular insight until this March. After a dinner with friends, where we shared a glass of wine and laughter, I was walking back to the Metro with my friend when I was jolted into an alternate view of reality. I became aware of the phenomena that is illustrated in the Emerge Art above, in the water I had been consuming for 3 years now.

The air was cool and crisp and I was breathing slowly and deeply when I saw myself as an empty luminous cocoon in a jolt. My physical presence was non-existent, although the real environment remained the same. I saw luminous tentacles stretching out of the edge of the luminous cocoon but I had no eyes proper to "see" that because I had no body. I became aware of the infinite nature of the Nagual. I understood what happened when people saw different versions of Don Juan Matus when in his presence. I became aware that a lineage of Nagual was a simple energetic fact I was now privy to. Our individual bodies disappear, but our energetic identity is a long endless river.

We are at a time when our diverse cultures are smashed together in wild confrontations whether it be because of immigration, technology or exigent circumstances that force people to flee their native lands. In the current art world, the concern is to politically defend this diversity at the cost of the forces that bind us, which are now judged to be silly, and the values all humans share. My art practice is about what we share and need as humans even before we have a culture. It is about the mysterious underlying forces that sustain us that I document using the scientific method.

to be continued…