He has written a fascinating book, ASTONISH YOURSELF! 101 EXPERIMENTS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE, which he calls an entertainment but which is much more than that. I highly recommend that you buy the book and try the experiments. Since Chapter 27 speaks directly to matters central to Cinemorphics, I present it below…for your entertainment, of course.
CHAPTER 27 Invent Lives For Yourself
Duration: a few months
Props: none
Effect: disturbing
You only live once, as they say here. Others, elsewhere,
Will assure you that you have already lived out several
previous lives. No matter. You can multiply your own
lives yourself, and feel them proliferating. To do so you
need to carry out a relatively long and fairly demanding
experiment, but whose effects are well worth the effort.
During a period of several weeks, try systematically
inventing lives for yourself. Tell your new barber you
were a taxi driver in Detroit before you delivered pizzas
in New York. Recount your years of teaching in Australia
to a distant cousin. To your nephews spin yarns about
places you never saw, livelihoods you never made (who's
to know, after all.), great and small adventures, of fox
hunts and fogbound ports.
Do it properly. Don't just tinker. Recount the same
stories several times. Spice up the anecdotes, add new
details, fill in the blanks and eliminate implausibilities.
Tell the same stories to the same people. Take care not to
get muddled up. If need be, take notes, fill out cards, do
research. Persevere.
After a few months, you'll be familiar with these
alternative lives. You'll have answered a lot of questions,
and explained a good deal. You will have described,
narrated, taken up, and repeated the key episodes of your
various parallel autobiographies. Above all you'll have
implanted your fabrications into the minds of people who
believe what you've told them, and who will pass them
to others in the version you made up for them. They
believe it.
Why don't you? The point you need to reach is when
you start to doubt whether it's all false, and when you
can't quite tell what belongs to fiction, and what to your
real life. Or when-it comes to the same thing-you can
admit to yourself (without forcing or sudden delirium)
that what you used to consider your "true life" is really,
in fact, just one fiction among others. No more, no less.
