In one experiment, I banned the use of the word “I” from my conversation for one week. Mad Aleister recommends what Skinner later called “negative reinforcement” in cases of relapse; he violently slashed his arm with a razor every time he slipped and said “I.” Your less hardy narrator substituted a less heroic control: I bit my thumb, hard, at each slip. By about the fourth day, I had a very sore thumb and an even more painful ego. The subjectivity and self-centeredness of normal human consciousness was hideously obvious to me. By the seventh day I had entered an altered state of consciousness
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