It may be smart to run it a few times alone and then in the
company of others whose creeds collide and collude with yours in
this way or that. Watching illuminating films in the right mood
is only one way to set such experiments into motion.
Different traditions become pertinent to engage at this
point, depending in part upon the preliminary faith you bring to
the experience of indwelling. Christianity, Islam, Judaism,
Buddhism, Hinduism and Nietzscheanism all have currents within
them that focus on such practices. I myself am drawn to the
explorations of Marcel Proust. He concurs with Bergson on the
importance of indwelling. But, more than Bergson, he teaches you
how to make something of such an experiment if and as it begins
to run itself. For such an event is not easy to choreograph in
advance, as the dying man in Waking Life comes to realize.
Marcel needed a couple of fortuitous repetitions--in which
he first slipped on some cobblestones and then heard the clatter
of cutlery--to launch his experiment. An involuntary dimension of
memory was tapped, one in which the repetition of an earlier
sensory experience under new circumstances opened the floodgates
to a larger wave of memory. Under this spell Marcel experienced
vividly how waves of the past melt into the protraction of the
present, enabling new experiences irreducible to memory as mere
recollection or to simple repetition of the same:
But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in
the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal
Convention