Tuesday, November 22, 2005

TWO EXPERIMENTS

1. Drop personal history and self-importance. Costume yourself in some beat-up old clothes and become a homeless person/panhandler for a day. Take notes on how this makes you feel. Don't just think about it…write it down.

2. Un-occupied and un-employed. Stand in a relatively busy place and do nothing. Be un-occupied and un-employed for ten minutes. Don't pretend to be waiting for someone, relaxing, "people watching", or the like, if someone asks what you are doing. That would be "doing waiting", "doing relaxing" or "doing people watching". You have no job and you are doing nothing. Take notes on how this makes you feel.



These two exercises yield very different results, but both begin to expose who "you" are. The first, although not exclusively so, is discussed extensively by CARLOS CASTANEDA in his books about his apprenticeship to the (interestingly enough, fictitious) Yaqui shaman Don Juan.



The second is included in Bernard McGrane's THE UN-TV AND THE 10 MPH CAR which I highly recommend.