We will now simultaneously keep Fire in the right hand and Water in the left hand.

We have already trained ourselves to feel both awakened hands in the meditation of Simultaneity. Let’s start now from this very good base point. Once you’re in balance, feel your right foot, which stands on the Fire. Don’t rush into Fire; you need a steady stream in your hand, but not more. Take your time to ensure you keep Fire in your hand without much effort. It should only take a fraction of your attention to keep it flowing through your hand.

Once you’re ready, invite Water to your left hand. It may sound easy, but it’s quite tricky to tune into Water and not lose your Fire, as they are quite the opposite. It’s okay if you’ve got Water but lost Fire — just try in the other direction. While having Water in your left hand, try to keep it and, in parallel, tune back to Fire and recover it in your right hand.

Kenaz Rune

You remember we were talking about separation and the rune Kenaz.

When we just begin the Creation starting from Kenaz, we take Water from the top and Fire from the bottom. Yet we map them to a horizontally oriented system of coordinates, Water from the top comes to the left hand, and Fire from the bottom - to the right.
As a result, in the first phase of creation runes and grid of realms appear rotated to the left side.
Kenaz normally looks like this:

But from the practitioner's perspective, an upper ray of Kenaz matches the left hand, the lower ray matches the right hand, and levels of the grid appear as vertical, while you are sitting at the tip of the rune:

Just as the universe was first separated, in this initial phase of the alchemical process, we want to be divided into two halves from our starting mixed and impure state, to be recreated at a higher level.

Let's separate our own energy. It's okay to be separated and dual. We, in fact, already are; it's rather a matter of realizing this.

There is another nuance in the amount of both energies and how they're distributed in our body, and in our ability to run two focus points truly in parallel.

Our goal is not only to hold Water and Fire in our hands but to fill our entire body with them side by side.

It may help to let Fire or Water occupy more than just the hand — it's then easier to maintain a steady stream because, due to higher volume, it has better 'inertia' and can sustain itself.

On the other hand, it is easy to let it fill the entire body and wipe out the opposite energy, hence breaking the balance.

One of the key points here is your eyes.

When you tune into Fire, a specific subset of your personal properties resonates. Like an emotional profile and associated mindset.

The same goes for Water — you are a different person when you are Fire or Water.

You can't see your own eyes and you don't need to, but eyes are connected to the very essence of a person’s being.

So when you are establishing this dynamic balance, let the Fire aspect of your person look through your right eye, and the Water aspect will start using the left one. It's hard to explain, but you need to recognize your eyes' expression even if you don’t see them. This involves the expression of your eyes and, as a result, your facial expression. It's about the tactile sensations of your face, especially of the eyes.

You can first try to fully tune into Water, then separately do the same with Fire, and reflect on your eyes and facial expression not visually, but based on how you yourself feel it.

Then, get back to our Kenaz practice and try to attach and maintain a steady state of Fire and Water on the right and left halves by reflecting on your right/left eye expression and right/left face halves. Remember, this connection is very subtle; try not to fake it physically, but only reflect on whatever authentic expression is there on its own.

Isa Rune

No need to rush, says the Water,
No room to hesitate, says the Fire,
You must open the door for yourself:
Pull and push at the same time.

There is a vertical axis of symmetry, a thin border of Emptiness, which separates our left Water half from our right Fire part, so they don't conflict nor get lost in each other.

A thin line of Emptiness at the very center of ourselves - you are probably already aware of its presence from your life story, from those moments of silence when the Great Spirit was looking at you from behind the scenes.

There is a rune for this - Isa.

We are still working on the first phase, which means we see the world left-to-right, not top-to-bottom, but if we rotate our picture, paradoxically, Isa remains vertical:

Do you now see a dashed line in the middle representing Emptiness?
If you succeed with separation and can hold both energies together but apart, you probably noticed how the idea of an axis of emptiness helped to stabilize the entire system. It's because Isa is a force of Emptiness that holds Kenaz preventing it from collapsing back to unity.

Rune itself appears horizontal now, connecting Water on the left and Fire on the Right. It represents the principle of simultaneity. But its essence is Emptiness.

You can feel Fire and Water directly. But you can't feel Emptiness alone. Because Emptiness is not substantial, it is force, and force reveals itself only when applied.

Take a magnet, and try to feel the magnetic field around it with your fingers - you can't. Take another magnet and move it around holding the opposite pole towards the first magnet. Now you can feel how the magnet in your hand is repelled.
It's just a metaphor, but now we are going to feel emptiness in a very similar way:

• Stand or sit comfortably, and close your eyes.
• Summon Fire into your right hand.
• Invite Water into your left one.
• Slowly, to not lose your Fire and Water, move palms towards each other to make a prayer gesture or Anjali Mudra but keep a bit of distance between palms.
• You are now touching the vertical axis with your palms, a thin layer of emptiness, which divides your Fire and Water halves.
• This axis goes through and beyond yourself, up and down across all five worlds: Water, Air, Emptiness, Earth, and Fire, making them all resonate.
• Feel this stillness, balance, internal silence.
• It's a source of order in the world and the Great Spirit lives in the thin line of emptiness in the very center of the universe, dividing duality like a horizon line and watching us from behind the scenes. You are now touching the Emptiness.

Ice is an order.

Liquid water is chaotic, molecules running here and there, bumping into each other.
Ice is a crystal, each molecule sits in its place, and they are ordered.

Emptiness is space and time, something that gives order, and allows us to distinguish things, to say where and when things start and end.

Isa is a simultaneity of everything, it fixes everything in its right places every little moment. Even if everything changes in the next moment - it becomes a new order.

Emptiness is dissolved around us, it's like invisible glue everywhere which holds our universe, not letting it fall apart or collapse back to the initial uncertain state of unity of everything with everything. Even in a non-empty place - still every thing, every bit of it is submerged into emptiness like a fly into invisible but slightly springy amber.

We have two more vertical axes waiting for us on the path.

Ingwaz Rune

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 a bit more 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 towards each other, and from inside you feel the resistance of Emptiness preventing palms 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.

First Phase of Creation

— Lacking the Fire
and the steel of celestial Ice.
Lacking the view unshielded
from the height of the flight,
by the cold wind,
teach, Mother Bird of Prey.

— Upper-left is Water,
Lower-right is Fire,
In the middle, a bit of Void, Human,
Enough to set you free.

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.