When seeking to expand our consciousness, it’s tempting to think there is some activity of “being more aware” that we need to do.

But, in my experience, it’s more a case of simply letting awareness follow its natural tendency to expand. Awareness, to me, is like a gas that naturally expands to fit the container it’s in.

Our reflexive tendency to grasp at and resist things constricts the container of consciousness, limiting its ability to expand. The right mental motion then, is not to actively try and cast more awareness onto our internal world. It’s to release our constrictions so it can expand of its own accord.

We are simply trying to get out of the way.

More like a kind of deep outbreath of release into expansion than a forced inhale of more awareness. More like an opening the fist of our heart than a hand trying to snatch after clouds of consciousness.

When they’ve scanned the brains of people in expanded states of psychedelic consciousness, they find it is a state of reduced rather than increased neural activity. A simple shutting down of all the parts of us that block consciousness from expanding into the infinite container of our hearts.

Awareness wants to expand. Expansion is its natural state. We just have to let it do its thing.