What is fear? Well, fear is largely the perception of what could happen to you should a scenario that has been created within the mind become a reality. The other side of fear is when you are already in a situation, sometimes unexpectedly, then fear can take the role of the situation that you are and what is already happening to you. Fear of pain, fear of rejection, fear of loss, fear of failure, these are all situations that you will feel uncomfortable about and having spoken about the ego then you can start to bring the two together and the ego now kicks in and self protection becomes your controlling method of attempting to regain control of a situation or to get out of a situation. There you go a relatively good side of the ego. Either way fear is what could happen if something else comes about. “if I fall I will get hurt” is the visualization part and then unspoken the feeling of ego, the feeling of being uncomfortable with the possibility of experiencing pain is what then links to the superego and the mind says “but this is wrong”. You see the human psyche is a very complex one. Now when we think of fear we tend to discard the emotion and reflect on the action, but yet most people when faced with fear discard the action and concentrate on the emotion, and they sink, deeper into the valley of being incapable of positive action. Until they reach the very bottom and then, all of a sudden they lose the fear and action takes over. Now how this is applicable to the craft, well let me tell you. When you fear something that you do not understand then the imagination tends to wander and visual representations of unrealistic outcomes starts to take over. With this happening we lose touch with the here and now and an imbalance occurs. This imbalance is the direct enemy of being capable of creating a centre of concentration of the will, in the conscious our intent is there but in the subconscious we may fear the outcome of what we are doing, and there goes the “cone” of power. Fear is energy within itself, it actually generates quite a large amount of energy and this energy flow can overtake the conscious attempt at building the energy towards our intent and then the two tends to cancel each other out at one point. With the overtaking the workings can then turn and “bounce” back at us. What do we do then, well we tend to then use the ego to say “I could not have affected this” and we start to look into the articles within the working, did the candle burn long enough, did I put in enough herbs why did that stone crack and many more perceptions of what could have gone wrong. What we should sometimes do is to evaluate the self. Where was our cone of power, did we have two cone of power, one driven with fear and the other with intent. I have even heard people say “don’t use that book the workings are useless” nonsense your intent may just have been cancelled out by your inner fear. So we can now start to perceive how fear can effect what you are trying to achieve, that is why I work with my students to rid them of fear, to get to know themselves and accept themselves the way they are.