Rule #1 - Consider Everything An Experiment

Individuals practicing self-experimentation develop unique cognitive skills through deliberate personal experiments. The narrator describes conducting various experiments: one month without mirrors, speaking only in questions, treating objects as sacred, and one week of slow walking everywhere.

Experimenters cultivating simultaneous awareness develop what William James called a consciousness that functions as “a laboratory aware of its own experiments.” The self becomes researcher studying the self, creating a bifurcated perspective unique to sustained self-inquiry.

Individuals suited to experimental living possess specific psychological characteristics that enable sustained self-inquiry. These traits can be cultivated but appear naturally stronger in certain personality configurations oriented toward exploration over stability.

The experimental temperament particularly values threshold moments—the space between what you expect and what actually happens. These individuals actively seek and cultivate comfort with in-between states that others find unsettling.

Practitioners experimenting with dualism develop enhanced perceptual agility by treating apparent opposites as variables rather than fixed categories. Children naturally possess this capacity before social conditioning crystallizes binary thinking.

Those exploring extreme dualism experiments sometimes encounter out-of-body experiences (OBEs) where awareness separates from physical location. The experiencer becomes both the body left behind and the awareness hovering above, often near the ceiling.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832, Frankfurt) exemplified the experimental life, famous as poet but equally committed to scientific inquiry and phenomenological exploration. He refused conventional divisions between artist and scientist, living instead as a unified investigator of reality.

Anaïs Nin elevated experimentation to her entire philosophy of living, treating every moment as artistic creation. She confessed in her diaries: “I must get out of myself in order to see myself,” exemplifying the experimental stance that transforms mere existence into aesthetic practice.

Albert Einstein, though famous as theoretical physicist, was fundamentally an experimental human whose scientific research led him to profound insights about consciousness and compassion. His philosophical conclusions emerged from years of inquiry into the nature of reality.

Those willing to revolutionize their lives must confront the conditioning toward security, conformity, and conservation that appears to give peace of mind but actually damages the adventurous spirit. The quote references those living in unhappy circumstances yet refusing to take initiative because they’re trapped by false security.