When you f**k up one of them, it’s like you get unmoored. You can’t go back but you aren’t going forward either. After you’ve f****d up enough of these, it’s like being in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. There may be land somewhere, but you can be pretty sure that it’s a long ways away. You’ve got limited water, the sun is beating down, and you have to come face-to-face with the fact that you can’t get out of this alive by yourself. Even with someone else looking for you, it’s going to take a miracle. You are absolutely f****d.

Butch, a mode 9, describes what it feels like to have messed up three consecutive transitions.

When you go through a transition, you have to leave behind what had worked and move towards something new. I have talked about it before as the feeling that even though you might have a great job and a great personal life you have to move. You don’t know where you want to go but you know that you can’t stay here.

Sometimes you miss a transition and don’t navigate it properly. If you are Mode 7+, the risk of this is incredibly high. And let’s be honest here: most people who are reading this and think that they are mode 7 aren’t, and many of the people who are bewildered and why I’m now looking at them in the audience are. I run into a very large number of people mode 7 and above, but they are rarely people who want it. For good reason, because the higher modes have more chances to screw up a stratum transition (they have more of them) and are less likely to get support through them, since almost no one in power is mode 7 or above.

So what can you do?
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