We are now holding opposites aside and through their separation the creative force of Emptiness reveals itself so we can feel it between our hands. But we need space for everything to happen.

When you hold palms close to each other, from the outside you feel the pressure of the Fire and Water trying to reunion, and from inside you feel springy resistance of Emptiness preventing them from touching each other.

Try to gently sway your palms making them a bit closer and backward, just a few millimeters. Do you feel your palms glued in some position, so something resists your attempts to move them in both directions in and out?

Let's change this static balance and make a cavity. Instead of moving your flat palms wider, slowly bend them into an angular shape, so you will see a slowly growing rhombus of emptiness between your hands. This yet empty cavity stretched from the thin border of Emptiness between Fire and Water is Ingwaz.

In the horizontal view, it looks like this:

We have a vacuum inside the cavity as a result of the pressure of Fire and Water from outside. It tries to flatten your palms back and restore emptiness as a thin stable layer.
But instead, just let Fire and Water evenly fill it by entering the left and right tips of your rhombus.

• Water and Fire meet in the center of the Emptiness.
• The Water in contact with the Fire is heated more and more until evaporates into the Air, the essence of transparency, so the quality of transparency is extracted from the Water and concentrated above the Emptiness in the form of the Air.
• The Fire in contact with the Water cools down and solidifies, so the quality of density is being collected from the Fire and condensed into hardness below the Emptiness.

This process you don't directly control. You just hold your egg and observe what's happening inside.

At the end of the first phase, when you have your Ingwaz stretched between your palms, let's rotate slowly your hands into a vertical position:

Your left Water hand now covers the north pole of this egg and your right Fire hand supports it from below.

This is how you undertake the first phase of the alchemical process. Two more phases are waiting for us further in the book.

As we have already discussed, creation occurs outside of time. We have used ingredients that are yet to be created in subsequent phases, and it's acceptable. The phases are not ordered chronologically as they appear in our discussion. They overlap each other and occur simultaneously, yet for learning purposes, we need to deconstruct them first, to understand which notes to play in this chord.

It's okay if something isn't working yet or isn't ideal. The non-chronological structure of this work encourages you to move ahead and return as many times as needed. Sometimes it's even necessary to skip some parts that aren't working yet and go find the missing detail in the "future" to come back and finally make it work.