The lonely places to which the witch may make her nocturnal pilgrimages are liminal in nature, for it is the purpose of these journeys to encounter the virtues and wisdoms of the other, and the liminal and betwixt has always served as an intersection between the worlds. It is here, in the places wild and between, that the witch seeks to commune with and receive teaching and guidance from the spirits and the faery, and here the telluric serpent is drawn forth that intoxicates and brings vision and power to the witch. Thus it is that the wild and lonely place calls to the witch and is her true home; the earth is of her bones and the bones of her ancestors, and carried within the witch-blood is the chthonic and animalistic wild wisdom to be realised, fed and nurtured via the witch’s arte.

Gemma Gary, “The Witches Cross”, Serpent Songs: An Anthology of Traditional Craft

Many empirical data show that our consciously experienced present, in a specific and unambiguous sense, is a remembered present. The phenomenal Now is itself a representational construct, a virtual presence. After one has discovered this point, one can for the first time start to grasp the fact of what it means to say that phenomenal space is a virtual space; its content is a possible reality. Bodily self-modeling is not a real-time process; temporal internality in a strict analytical sense is never achieved. The ultimate realism of phenomenal self-consciousness, therefore is generated by a possibility being transparently represented as a reality (an immediately given fact). In short, mental self-representation is a process whose function for the system lies in approximatively depicting its own actual state within a certain, narrowly defined temporal frame and with a biologically sufficient degree of precision. It is not a process by which we truly are “infinitely close” to ourselves.

Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity