This post focuses on the sphere of evolution in the Golden Path.
I’ve integrated the Western Magick perspective with the Golden Path by Gene Keys, enriching both streams. In this post, you’ll read about the qualities of WATER and how these qualities can be interpreted with your particular Gene Key located in the sphere of Evolution.
Other posts with other correspondences:
- Kindling Your Fire – The Sphere of Life’s Work
- Working Your Water – The Sphere of Evolution – This post!
Let’s get started!
In the first month of the Genius Retreat, we contemplated the sphere of Life’s Work, which corresponds to Fire—essentially what you’re here to do in this life, and more deeply, how it relates to actions that cause change in the unfolding events of the present moment and those that follow.
When you live out your Life’s Work, some may even say The Great Work, you take center stage in your life, which inevitably brings up shadow patterns. These patterns can emerge from within yourself, from others, or both, creating valuable opportunities for growth.
Remember how the Shadow of Fire involved a certain stuckness when expressing or repressing your passion. There’s an identification with a specific perspective which underlies your life’s work, which prevents you from truly living it out in service to the whole.
Now, we enter the Element of Water within the sphere of evolution.
In Magick, we calibrate our imagination with science, recognizing that everything can be imbued with meaning. Some meanings seem universal across vast societies, providing a “pillar-of-meaning” quality to it.
Imagine then a Fire-Ball on your right and a Water-Ball on your left, then visualize them merging in front of you. What do you get? Cold-Wet Fire? Warm-ish Water? Steam? Herein lie the great mysteries!
Traditionally, Fire and Water are opposites, yet they work hand in hand (like the programming partners in the Gene Keys). In Western Magick, Fire feels hot and dry, whereas Water feels cold and wet. Water represents the cooling down and a step further towards manifesting one’s Fire, one’s Life’s Work, and Passion.
If you’re skeptical of the word choice “hot, dry, cold, and wet”, consider any two orthogonal adjectives, take their conjugations, and map out the 2×2 matrix of possible conjunctions. If you name Fire as a word summarizing two adjectives A and B, then Water will indicate the two negatives of the same adjectives.
Listen closely, because the true meaning of Water is often overlooked!
In essence, Water represents a process of returning to equilibrium. After you heat something up, it cools down to reach equilibrium with its environment. A river flowing from a mountain to the sea is another exquisite metaphor for achieving equilibrium with oneself and the environment. Water is how you perceive your personal “Emotional Physics to make Chosen Action Real in the world”. Making a decision disrupts equilibrium, and water helps restore balance. Thus, for every decision (fire) you make, you’ll feel an adequate amount of change (water) to complete the decision.
The Sphere of Evolution represents a unique and automatic correction process, allowing you to live out your Life’s Work in harmony with life, at each breath, challenge, or change. Evolution is an academic word for Change, usually implying long-term change, which is remarkable to contemplate.
Your sphere of evolution emphasizes “acceptance of the current” without adding any extra perturbation to it as it passes through your senses, environment, and experience. Adding extra perturbation means attachment to turbulence, where shadows cling the most.
You might have heard the saying “be like water”. Visualizing water as a gracefully swirling fluid around rocks and pebbles, swimming along the river’s living population, hints at the true nature of our evolution. Have your Fire establish a small change in the environment’s equilibrium, like a task to be conducted, and the amount of water felt will be proportional to the task’s magnitude. Small tasks require little water, while huge tasks, like building a house, require a lot of water.
So symbolically speaking, Water is a process, and hence when used it has to do with how life is flowing through you. If you now consider the Gene Key, which is associated with this sphere (the sphere of evolution), you’ll learn the quality you’ll likely feel when life is truly flowing through you.
Your Quality of Water speaks to your capability of allowing and accepting feelings, and any necessary adaptations to your perspective and consciousness, as you engage in the process of working out your Life’s Work.
This is why the pathway between Fire and Water is called the pathway of Challenge. Remaining stuck in the shadow of Fire means nothing changes in one’s life; it’s only after walking the pathway that challenges start to occur, perfectly proportional to one’s ambition and divinely ordained capability. Notice the difference between the Fire of Life’s Work as the passionate driver and spark of purpose, and the Watery Evolution as the naturally adaptive executor. Consider how many tasks require a few words to describe the change, while completing the task requires many hours, days, or years of “sitting, working, and grappling with this decision to bring it to completion”.
When contemplating the sphere of Water, it helps to view the sphere of Fire and Water as a dynamic duo, the flip side of the same coin. Completing the following sentences can provide insight into the shadow dynamics of these two spheres, which are crucial to appreciate and recognize.
- “My Life’s Work takes the form of {YOUR Life’s Work GIFT} as I’m being a {YOUR LINE in Life’s Work}. Do I sometimes lose {Line of Evolution}, and do I try to regain it through my shadow of {Evolution shadow}?”
- “As I consider and contemplate the vast possibilities of my life’s work, do I tend to force {your evolution line}, by considering all the things I could do through {Your Life’s Work Shadow}?
- As I {Shadow of Life’s Work} myself in being a {Life’s Work Line}, does this coexist with the feeling of {Evolution Line}, accompanied by {Evolution Shadow}-infused imagery or concepts?
I have the 26.1 and 45.1 in my Life’s Work and Evolution respectively, here’s how I’ve filled these in:
- “My Life’s Work takes the form of Artfulness as I’m being a creator. Do I sometimes lose Self-Esteem, and do I try to regain it through my Shadow of Domination?”
- “As I consider and contemplate the vast possibilities of my life’s work, do I tend to enforce Self-Esteem by considering all the things I could do through Pride?
- “As I Pride Myself in being a Creator, does this coexist with the feeling of Self-Esteem, accompanied by Domination-infused imagery or concepts?”
Later, I’ll provide keylines to enrich your contemplation with Gift and Siddhi-level sentences, as we should focus on those levels more, since they encompass the shadow as well.
As I’m invoking Western Magick Vocabulary, consider how the True Magician is first and foremost a Master of Balance. After this, he’s a master of gentle perturbation, gently tilting the balance to cause change according to Divine Will. The key is understanding that your Life’s Work depends on your willingness to feel deprived and empty, delaying pleasure for later, and sacrificing short-term dopamine hits for a grand life.
In this sense, Water is your greatest quality. Not only because change is constant, but because even if others perturb and cause change in your life (through their Life’s Work), you can learn to equip yourself with your unique power of Water, entering into trust and acceptance of your path to the summit, while balancing the vision of your Life’s Work and the challenges it brings when living out your Gift.
Shadow of Water
Water is often associated with concepts like “Feelings” and “Emotions”. The Shadow of Water involves attachment to negative emotions, unacceptance of repeated agitation, which cause mood shifts that represses us, or makes us reactive. It’s not so much having an experience of bad emotions, but our cravings for “high” emotions, and an aversion to “low” emotions.
When we’re attached to non-change as change occurs, that’s the shadow of water. In a single key concept, the Shadow of Water is the lack of adaptability.
The shadow of water is your conscious water-like experience (think of properties of physical water) that makes you want to avoid participation in the riverflow, perhaps even go against it. Slow-moving waters are often murkier and less clean, with tons of accumulated debris and waste floating around from incomplated challenges, failures, and unlearned lessons.
The Shadow of Water is this part of you that doesn’t want to descend from the Waterfall of Change.
This includes all things initiated by yourself or others, brought through your system, causing you to experience coherent energies over time. This can be listening to music, entering triggering situations on social platforms, or offline interactions. It can be trouble with sleep, haste in the mornings, or hesitations in communication. Your line keynote describes the “kind of water energy” that will be challenged and asked to evolve and change, becoming stronger and more exquisite, especially when engaging with the Gift frequency.
Here you see exactly how your Life’s Work can evolve to its Service Level, allowing you to evolve through Water and your Evolution.
The Central Reminder of the Shadow of Water is a possibly painful but enlightening answer to the question “Where am I not flowing into the presented obstacles in my life? Is it perhaps represented by {my evolution line}? Instead of pushing through my challenges, can I relax into the flow through {my evolution gift}?”
Gift of Water
The Gift of Water is the central gift of life’s capacity to adapt and accept what is. It allows one to tune into the song of one’s life, fully centered and engaged in transmuting the raw energy of the shadow pattern into creative, smoothly flowing water. There might be turbulence, rough water, or deep waters, but to flowing water and an open heart, no challenge is too big. The ways of water are pausing, allowing, and accepting—key steps to engage with the dynamics of alchemy.
Here, the essence of the Gene Keys is revealed! Pausing allows you to engage with the ongoing traffic of your life, through this sphere of water, slowing the traffic down a bit, feeling the ship as it floats in the massive river of life. Remember, water is the orthogonal opposite of Fire!
After pausing, allowing kicks in. You allow the state you’re in, the flow, and the change you’re experiencing. Allow in the discomfort, bodily sensations, and dis-ease… you allow them all in and shimmer. The Gift of Water can invite the shadow in for tea.
Triple Flame
If you’re interested with embuing your life with the quality of water and contemplation, I recommend The Triple Flame App, which I’m also honored to have desigend and developed. Triple Flame notifies you every three hours to take a three minute pause with 25K other people on Earth, enriching your balancing and watery life.
As you engage and contemplate the watery (equilibrium-causing and slowing-down) part of life, once you get the knack for noticing the shadow, you engage with it through the wisdom of the Gene Keys. Through your Gift of {EVOLUTION GIFT KEYNOTE}, you can pivot your emotional perspective from {your shadow} to {your siddhi}. This causes massive flow and movement for the greater good.
The Gift of Water allows one to surf challenges, climb mountains, and fight dragons in a balanced and realistic fashion. The Gift handles a wide range of experiences, so it’s recommended to engage with your Life’s Work challenges playfully: start with small steps, then take on bigger waves as you’re ready, opening the gates to breakthrough.
Siddhi of Water
The Siddhi of Water is becoming the entire river, from beginning to end. It embraces the murkiest waters, strong currents, and its purpose of creating waves at its delta.
The Siddhi of Water is becoming the Nile, serving all along its path by providing drinking water, cooking material, and a medium for washing clothes. The Siddhi of Water represents a profound step into the perspective of complete surrender to the current, where your part in the story becomes the whole river.
At the siddhic level, we encounter Archangel Gabriel, whose blessing of water made the desert green, for the green was already within the desert. By living out our lives through the gift and the evolutionary challenge of our unique purpose, we experience the transformative power and generosity of the cosmic current. This current weaves galaxies, suns, planets, and all forms that exist, allowing us to share and propagate the excellence of the gift, of witnessing something rather than nothing. Gabriel, in Hebrew, means “The Strength of God”, a wise contemplation for your Sphere of Water containing the Strength of God.
The Siddhi of Water grants a glimpse of the omnipresent river of experience, allowing you to become a prominent whole, made from limited parts here on Earth.
In essence, the Siddhi of Water encompasses all directions of flow in any dynamic system. Here, you are so accepting of your life’s work and the permanent openness of your heart that even the notion of balance is transcended. The timeline of Water and The River is not confined to hundreds or thousands of years; it migrates from Earth to Earth, over epochs, throughout galaxies, and across the infinite universe, forever and ever.
Bonus: Sphere of Water / Evolution Keylines
- {Evolution Gift} is the same thing as {Evolution Shadow}, but seen from a different, non-attached perspective. Can I see this?
- My greatest challenge comes from maintaining {evolution line} while engaging with these challenges through {evolution gift}. As I maintain my equanimity in my watery capability, I’ll bring down {evolution siddhi} into the world, one breath at a time.
- When I believe my suffering is unearned, and that I’m a victim of circumstances, my body feels the currents of {Evolution Shadow}. Yet, as I pause and allow the sensations to percolate, I can detach, allow the currents of change, and hence feel the Gift of {Evolution Gift}.
- If my Life’s Work creates my to-do list, I’ll complete it in the fashion of {Evolution Gift}, respecting {Evolution Line}.
If you’re interested in my ideas and products, consider subscribing to my monthly newsletter!
Also published on Medium.
