The Channel of Initiation

Gate 51, the Gate of Shock, provides energy for Individual initiative. Backed by the ego's will and courage, it embodies the power to compete, driving you to be one step ahead of everybody, to risk going where no one else has gone. You are designed to withstand shock and shock others, moving them out of complacency toward personal transcendence.

In opposition to the courage and willpower that energizes you is a potential for foolhardiness that endangers your vulnerable heart, both physically and spiritually. The secret to maintaining your heart's health is centering yourself through Strategy and Authority, sensing when you have the will to engage in battle and when you need rest to recuperate.

Gate 25's love flows out of fully accepting and living surrendered to one's form. Its role is to turn people toward individuation. Your innocence is not designed to bring love into the world in any specific way but rather to love without discrimination. A flower can be loved as profoundly as a human. This quality of love is often projected as cool or cold but is neither. The mystical potential is transcendent and universal.

Your spirit innocence is always being tested. You have the capacity to meet these initiations from life like a spiritual warrior, fired up and ready to compete for your spirit no matter what the circumstance. You may emerge wounded from such initiations, but your ultimate triumph and survival enriches your spirit and the spirit of those around you.

Initiation toward individuation takes a person from "we are" to "I am." True shamans are specially gifted innocents able to survive the quantum leap into the void that individuation and transcendence require. They then artfully initiate others into deeper levels of self-awareness.

Whether one leaps as a courageous warrior or as a fool matters not. Landing will be a shock in either case. Initiation or shock can come through an invitation not of our own choosing, like an auto accident. Life itself is the most profound mystical force of initiation for empowering a change of behavior or direction.

Initiating individuation is a mystical process at the heart of mutation and cannot be controlled. If it is your destiny, it will be a by-product of living true to yourself. If you seek initiation you will not find it. Initiation must find you so that you can surrender to it.

If you seek to initiate others without their invitation, they may fail, leaving you resentful and unfulfilled. Your Strategy and Authority are the most powerful mystical tools you have, along with the understanding that to survive the initiating shocks you meet along the way, you must tend to the needs of your heart, both physically and metaphysically.

If entered into correctly, competition stretches, tests, and even pushes you beyond your normal creative limits and barriers of physical endurance. Each breakthrough brings exhilaration and a new awareness of the depth of your own spirit. With each triumph comes a personal, even mystical, sense of your uniqueness which becomes an example of courage for others to follow.

You may find yourself empowering organizations with your gutsy ways of achieving personal goals. Love for life itself, and the constant competition that comes with mastering the material world, arouses and empowers you.