Meditations II

The following two excerpts are from Roger-Pol Droit's Astonish Yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life, translated by Stephen Romer (Penguin Books, 2002).


Hurt yourself briefly
Duration: a few seconds
Props: none
Effect: back-to-earth

You are bored. The play is interminable. The lesson is without interest. Or you’re waiting for a phone call that doesn’t come. Or you don’t know what to do next, and you are in two minds. The world is veiled in a kind of mist. You feel you are becoming inconsistent yourself, as if your substance had begun to lose definition and to spread out vaguely all around you. As if you are becoming increasingly vaporous, milky, and weightless. You no longer know exactly who you are, or where you are. Boredom has started to dissolve you.
Pinch yourself. Hard. Where it really hurts. The inside of your arm, your neck, or your groin. The pain caused must be brief, but intense. Enough to make you utter a cry, which you may well have to smother. To outwit you defense mechanisms, act quickly. Allow yourself no time to anticipate or prepare for the pain. Be sudden. Try to take yourself by surprise, so to speak. Do everything in your power to hide your intentions. The pain must traverse you as though by accident, like a sudden collision. It must descend on you, like a lightning flash in the middle of the torpor of the day.
If you are sufficiently violent, the effect is certain: you recover reality, your body is returned to you, you know where you are, the mist dissipates, you emerge from your boredom, you return to your world.
Just one question remains, which you should ponder: why should the experience of pain return us to reality? Is it a simple reminder? The effect of contrast? Or have we, in the course of our millennia, created such a way of life for ourselves that pain has become the first symptom of the world? A piercing question (p.19-20).

Drink while urinating
Duration: 1-2 minutes
Props: toilet and glass of water
Effect: wide open

For hundreds of thousands of years the vast majority of humans have lived and died without trying the following experiment. It is, however, both extremely straightforward and extremely interesting.
Like everyone else, you urinate. And at other moments you drink. What you do not know is what it feels like to do both at the same time. This experiment will show you.
So, just have a large glass of water at hand. When you begin to urinate, start drinking. As far as possible, you should try to drink the water straight down, without pausing. You will feel quite bizarre sensations almost immediately. The water you evacuate seems to be synchronized with that entering your mouth. You will then visualize, and above all feel, your body to be organized in a way which until then you had never imagined possible. The water you are drinking seems to exit directly from your bladder. In a few seconds you will fell directly wired, from throat to urethra, from stomach to bladder—a physiology that is impossible but that you intuit, directly and unquestionably, to be real.
It has taken no more than a few moments for you to discover this wonderfully simple body, and you feel there can be no other. No more intestine, no kidneys, no filtration time, no waiting. Water pours through you vertically, a cool liquid washes through you in a peculiar and palpable way. Your system seems to have opened inside out, with the water flowing smoothly from inside to outside. It is like—take your pick—the cosmic flux or an automatic washing machine.
This experiment, which can be repeated indefinitely, which costs nothing, and which is likely to procure ever new sensations and surprises, has not hitherto been considered a thermal cure(p.28-29).