Sapere aude!  Dare to use your own intelligence!  This is the battle cry of the Enlightenment.  Immanuel Kant

Gosh, 'nerves' have come in a bit sooner than I would have expected.  Lying in bed this morning, early, I felt that hard-to-describe collection of sensations ... quite a full, slightly aching feeling in my chest, and in my belly also a background sense of fullness ... and unease, caution ... and almost like a distant, silent firework display intermittently lighting up the horizon ... a play of slight sensations in my gut that quieten as I internally turn to look at them.  I recognise this feeling.  It's what I experienced at times in the lead-up to my kidney donation operation a bit over two years ago.  OK, in three weeks today I'm due to take my first psychedelic trip for nearly 50 years (I took a dozen or so LSD trips between the ages of 19 and around 24) ...

  "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."    Marcel Proust

"There isn't any formula or method.  You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done."    Aldous Huxley

"If you teach someone to meditate or to do yoga or to go on pilgrimage to some holy mountain, nothing is guaranteed to happen.  Yet if you are given 5 dried grams of magic mushrooms or DMT or some other potent psychedelic, whoever you are, a freight train of significance is going to be coming your way in a matter of moments."    Sam Harris

“Your assumptions are your window on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”  Isaac Asimov