I am attempting to expand my consciousness, which is one reason that I spend a lot of my life reading, pondering, speculating, and writing. I find it’s quite fun to do so. The expansion of consciousness is a 1960’s project that was intimately tied into the experimentation with hallucinogens and other psychotropic drugs. (They seem to be having a moment again recently).

Personally, and occasionally to my discomfort, I have experienced altered states of consciousness in the absence of pharmaceutical aids, as such to make explicit experimentation unnecessary, and I avoid it. Nevertheless I seem to be getting somewhere.

Unlike the ‘expansion of consciousness’ project pursued decades ago, I am attempting to do this really, really slowly. Actually it’s not really slow, it’s just that progress is taking years first, running into decades, and this is as it should be.

This I also believe: the expansion of consciousness is a project inextricably entwined with the cultivation of the subconscious. How do you cultivate your subconscious? You leave it alone, and distract the conscious mind with other things, so it can do its good work.