13:38 
I had a bit of a fight last night with someone I live with last night, ended up taking time out in a quiet spot with a friend to have a think and a chat to someone with a completely different perspective on the world. I just needed some guidance, some direction, some sense of where I was going wrong. It seems to be the time of year for it.
You have to assume you’re going wrong somewhere, don’t you? You’d be daft to think that you were entirely blameless.
So I sat down, in the cold, wondering if it was going to be one of those times when you have to push yourself to the verge of hypothermia before anyone would show up to have a quiet word (while running through a mental risk assessment of how long I could afford to spend waiting and whether or not I wanted to get home in time to see Buffy). Eventually, once I’d got to the stage where I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes any more, a shadow of Panther materialised from the shadows around me, with the message to seek Her out once I’d got home.
So I did. I went home, had a spot of continuing disagreement and upsetting conversation for a while, then had a bath. As I lay in the bath, shivering because the water wasn’t very hot, I was still upset and it was really rather cold last night, I cast about to present myself to Panther.
She can be brutal. For all that She hides Herself in jungle shadow, She makes you look at what lurks in the shadows of yourself. There is no hiding in darkness from Panther. She makes it necessary for you to stare into the shadow and face up to what is there, for if you don’t you place yourself in the dangerous position of not knowing whether there is something in there that can bite you. And if Panther is around, what is in there could eat you for dinner and feed portions of you to Her children.
And I looked, and what I saw I knew already, which in some small way was comforting because it meant that I was not blind and had come some of the distance already. However what I knew was still there, and had not been taken from shadow, dusted off, and made to look presentable in a very long time, if ever. Some things should live in Shadow, some things are most valuable there, as long as you know them, but there are very few things that should be left in such a state that you can’t take them out, dust them off and make them look presentable should you wish to.
I need for this thing in the Shadow to be presentable for a while, uncomfortable though it is, and much as it will tire me. I should be grateful, for I only need it to be presentable in limited circumstances which will not be present every moment of every day. The only trouble is that those circumstances are likely to prevail for quite some time.
I also had a very odd dream last night with a couple of dolphins in it, in a place where they really shouldn’t have been. But neither of them bit my fingers, and their skin had the most amazing texture, it was the most incredible feeling to touch it, and they did seem to have sought me out and were pleased to see me.
Old friends and new ones. I probably couldn’t introduce you to any of them. Me and my imaginary friends.
12:50
It’s funny. Someone just suggested that he was contemplating something I immediately considered to be inanely stupid, and so I ran through a formal risk assessment and presented it to him. He told me it was novel way to approach such non-consensus things.
I don’t think so. I’ve been doing formal risk assessments for non-consensus projects for as long as I can remember. I do them for anything that seems to involve some degree of physical risk (I include mental faculty in that), and quite a lot of things that involve energetic risk. There are very good reasons for this.
This world has the physical as the primary plane. Physical takes precedence. The film "The Matrix" amused me immensely because so many people out there decided that what it was saying was that the world is a dream and you can do what you like. The way I watched that film it told me that if you live in the physical, you can do anything you like in dream and it can’t hurt you because you exist somewhere else. When you go Elsewhere, your body remains behind, and as long as you know that what you are leaving behind is the part of you that lives and breathes, what exactly can they do to you? Nothing that you don’t let them, nothing that you don’t do to yourself.
This is not to say that you can’t be made to do some pretty horrible things to yourself, and end up with some significant physical injuries, no matter how experienced. The external often reflects the internal. But that degree of assurance, self-knowledge, is what makes a good worker, in my experience. Someone who can differentiate at the same time as not segregating. Few and far between, people like that.
If something involves actual physical risk, then it is something that should not be taken lightly. A formal risk assessment is a good way of going through your preparatory stage and working out if there is anything you should do that you haven’t done already. Not all non-consensus activities take place on the purely energetic. Some of them do need an element of physical presence and when that happens, your first thought should be to the safety of your physical body. If your heart stops beating and your brain dies, that’s it, game over. If you get separated from your physical self but your physical self remains intact, someone can always come get you. If your energetic body is injured, your physical body will sustain it until you can be healed. It doesn’t quite work to the same degree the other way around. You can manipulate the physical with the energetic, but if your physical body dies, that’s it. Your life is over.
Life Comes First.
No matter how desperate you are to learn a lesson, adjust part of your personality, or how necessary you feel it is to put yourself in an extreme situation in order to further your path, Life Comes First. If you die, that opportunity has been wasted. Not much of a lesson learned there.
What about life after death? Whether you believe in it or not, that’s a whole different ball game and doesn’t detract from the fact that you won’t be able to do the same things once dead that you can while alive.
I would be surprised to discover that I am the only one who goes through some sort of risk assessment when preparing for a Job that involves some sort of physical aspect, I really would. It only seems common sense to me.
Impatience is also a bad enemy, perhaps the worst. If you are so impatient to do a thing that you don’t have the capability to do a full risk assessment, then you shouldn’t be doing that thing. Crawl before you walk, walk before you run. Psychedelics are a case in point. If you intend to Journey with the aid of the Plant Spirits because you have an aspect of your personality you do not like or wish to amend, then assess just how capable you are of handling that Journey with that aspect of your personality still intact. Some personality aspects mean that the risk assessment, if done honestly and thoroughly, will indicate you should not be undertaking that Journey.
Life Comes First.
Do I have the robusticity, the strength of Will, the self-awareness to deal with what my Teacher will show me? What is the personality of my Teacher? How well do I know him? What has he said to me so far? If you have not even met with your Teacher outside his Land then you should not be contemplating such a Journey at all. Once you reach his territory, there is no going back until class is over. There is no asking for the school nurse, there is no storming out of the door. There are no class-mates to take some of the flak or to hide behind. If you have been progressing through your path carefully you will have another Teacher who may well be able to interrupt the lesson or guide you through it, but woe betide you if you show up for a lesson without having completed your homework. No Teacher will show sympathy then.
Assess the risk. Have I done my homework, what could be the consequences if this goes wrong? Could I get sick? If yes, then how long for? Would you need to take time off work (your day job)? How would that affect your position with your employer? If you lost your job as a result of your Journey would it matter? How easily could you find another?
How would your capacity to provide shelter and food be affected if it went wrong? How can you minimise the risk of it going wrong, and minimise the degree to which it could go wrong?
No matter how important your non-consensus life is to you, no matter how well integrated it is with the rest of your life (and if it is entirely well integrated none of this is news to you anyway), if your brain stops and your heart stops beating it is all over. If you destroy your mind by Journeying to one of the Changing Territories without adequate preparation, both in terms of that exercise and in terms of self-knowledge, then your capacity to live could be decreased.
If you are planning something with inherent physical or mental risk, think about it. Think about it some more. Think about it yet more. Think about it until whenever you think of a thing you have thought of it before. Then try to find some new things to think about. Request to talk to that which you would have teach you before you go anywhere near the classroom. Treat it as an interview - the Teacher may not want to Teach you, you may decide that you are not ready. There is no shame in that - quite the opposite. It shows courage to admit that you are not ready, and awareness to recognise it. Those who go blundering in because they can’t wait to be told they are welcome will always have a rough ride, and may not ever recover.
Life always comes first, because where there is life, there is a way.
Wednesday, November 07, 2001
12:55
I feel very alone right now.
While I’m very happy that we moved down to Devon, I’m happy with my job, I love working for the Environment Agency, I enjoy doing the Bicycle User Group thing, delighted to be getting a new bike, and itching to get out onto the Land with my new tourer, I really miss the work I used to do at the Rollrights. I miss the strange projects in which the RP bunch used to get involved. Every so often we have a meeting to discuss the staff reorganisation in the EA, in which the concept of "virtual teams" gets mentioned and I remember that the RP lot used to constitute one of those. I miss that side of my life as it was before I came down here.
The pagan scene in Exeter seems to be pretty non-existent, although there seems to be more going on in Plymouth. It’s just a long way to go when you don’t have convenient transport, and I’m not cycling all the way to Plymouth once a week for a pub moot! This seems very odd, given that we have a Star Child and the most fabulous cathedral, not to mention all the stuff out Dartmoor way. But I do miss it.
This is why I feel alone, because I don’t have anyone to do these sorts of things with. Like cycling, it is easier to push yourself in non-consensus activities when there is someone else around who is sort of doing the same thing, rather like having a training partner in the gym. Even if most of what you do is solitary, it is ever so helpful to have other people to talk to, face to face, to keep yourself sane, really. It’s nice to get together with like-minded folk once a week or so over coffee to have a gossip and discuss techniques or different points of view, and have other people with whom to arrange more adventurous things.
I am planning on booking off the week leading up to the Solstice. I should have my new bicycle by then, which I hope will open up some gates currently closed to me. I intend to take a crow bar (ha!) to the gates I currently find locked, probably during that week. There are plenty of things I can and will do to get myself active again, but I don’t really know what to do about the lack of like-minded and experienced company in this area. I’ve half a mind to work out just how hard it would be to get down to the places in Cornwall where I know there are people who know what they are doing.
Other doors are closing right now, which fills me with disappointment and a mixture of very strong feelings, which I mustn’t allow to affect me too much. This is easily the sort of thing that could push me back into getting sick again and I can’t and will not allow that to happen. The knock-on effects are a cause for concern, as I am not sure how easily I will be able to segregate this disappointment from the rest of my life. I am not a person used to separating non-consensus issues from consensus ones, but it would be entirely unfair of me to allow this issue to bleed over. It is not really anyone’s fault, although it would be only too easy to start passing out blame. It is just one of those things. Blame would not be constructive, useful, or appropriate.
The closing of those doors also leaves me more alone.