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solarchariot

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Heads up! I am in a mood, and this is me thinking my way out of it. You don't have to torture yourself by reading it, and it will get to a tulpa-point at the conclusion, but it's definitely not a fluid transition, as I am 'on the train.' There is a destination, and regularly occurring sign posts, but I am still sorting. You are invited to sort with me. Maybe this will just show that I am human. Grrr. I hate that particular sign post. Preamble complete. Here we go.

 

Skeels and Spitz, yes, those are real people, not the segue into a joke, discovered a long time ago that when contact deprived, institutionalized children were connected with older, affectionate caregivers, their IQs improved 30 points or better within a year. You have probably also heard of Harlow and his wire/cloth monkey experiments, and the outcomes. Maybe you have heard of Bawkins, who coined the phrase, “failure to thrive,’ describing how infants will die if not touched, even if minimally touched. (This was less so a hundred years prior to the study likely because there were no plastic bottles; they had wet nurses and so minimum touch thresholds were exceeded.)

 

We, our present society/culture, have forgotten just how important touch is. Real, genuine, prolonged, intimate touch. I remember reading another study, but can't recall by whom: conducted on rabbits. A room room full of rabbits, each in their own cage. The nature of the experiment was to kill them through diet that was super high in cholesterol to determine how long it would take arteries to clog and heart failure to ensue. All the rabbits had the same diet. All the rabbits on the tops shelves died as expected, on schedule. The rabbits on the bottom shelf didn't die, and there was no evidence of clogged arteries. The scientist were baffled, until one day, someone watched a security tape. Every night, the cleaner would take time out from her nightly work to care for the rabbits; she would remove each rabbit, one at a time, and hug them, pet them, and talk nicely to them. She was a tiny thing, and could only reach the rabbits on the bottom shelves. Affection, kindness, changed their metabolism. They lived longer, healthier lives. It was not about diet alone.

 

We keep relearning this. We keep forgetting this. Wire monkey cloth monkey. Is your cellphone a wire monkey? It's certainly a monkey that's on our back, so to speak. And we keep getting messages about this, and we all believe it and we log the anecdotal evidence surrounding us, but how many of us make an effort to put the phone down?

 

There this other study I read about. Again, I don't remember by whom, but I know Depak Chopra refers to it. It was conducted at several retirement homes. One of the homes had a major lifestyle change. Every piece of literature that referred to the present day in age was removed, and substituted with literature from their younger years, in this case, the 50s. Old television programs were shown round the clock. Old news reels were played, and a young Walter Conkrite spoke to the residents. Radios were removed and old music played. It was design to simulate the fifties. They were engaged in activities and encouraged to dress as they did in the fifties. At the end of the experiment, photos were taken of the residents of all the homes. The photos of the people living in the 'fifties' retirement home were identified by anyone who saw the photos as being the youngest, compared to the other two retirement homes, even though they were all relatively the same age.

 

You have probably heard people with pets tend to live longer and healthier than people without pets; caveat, you like pets. People involved with a church, or a group, doesn't have to be religious, tend to live healthier, longer lives than people who are isolated. Another study that coincides with all of the above; elderly people who are surrounded by family, especially grandchildren, tend to live longer, healthier lives; they tend to have more energy. And yet, we know this and continue to box old people into isolated, 'stranger' care driven facilities because of the time constraints on modern society; places where the care is frequently questionable. I am not saying caregivers are evil; I am asking you to consider, who cares for the elderly? These are not high paid positions. A school building cleaner, a nightwatchman, probably gets paid better than a care provider. Even if you get a nurse, who will be the top end of the pay scale, they have schedules and too many clients and too many have forgotten why they became care givers and will force a meal down a person's throat faster than they can eat; so much so, clients have been known to aspirate on their own food. You don't have to take my word for it. Look at nursing home and follow the things that are most likely to be complained about. Waiting to be taken to the toilet so long that people frequently relieve themselves in their bed number one complaint. They are more likely to have a television for company than another person. Waiting to die is not living.

 

Good health is about society, not schedules, and it's never economical. Let me give another window into this to consider. Out of all the Western nations, the French are the healthiest in terms of BMI and cholesterol. Interestingly, they eat everything we eat! Well, not everything. They do not eat diet foods or fake ass butter. They will eat real butter, real cream, and they don't skimp on desserts, and yet, they're skinnier than the rest of us?  (Also, they have the highest resistance to genetically engineered foods, but given their lower cancer rates, you got to wonder if there is a correlation!) You don't hear about that, do you? You want to know why? Our culture, especially US North-American culture, can't tolerate the solution. The French take two hour lunch breaks. They actually sit down and enjoy a meal, with other people. They have a relationships with other people and with their food. From an early age, French citizens teach their children about healthy foods, how to prepare foods, how to select foods, how to moderate, and children go to school already knowledgeable about foods and they continue to participate in classes geared towards nutrition and healthy life styles. All meals are social events. They tend not to eat alone, never with a television, not in the car, they aren't in a rush where they inhale something, so they can hurry off to their next task. What would happen if we did that? There was an article in Time that suggested if a heavy person would eat with their skinny friends, they would loose weight. Surprised? One, you're socializing, so you're probably eating slower, and two, if you are eating the proportions that your skinnier friends eat, you're probably more in balance. Here's the thing about your relationship with food. There is a time delay between your stomach and brain; messages aren't delivered by cellphones. You have to eat a small portion and wait 20 minutes. It takes 20 minutes for your brain to realize it's full. If you keep eating before your brain has that message, you will over eat every meal. If you are sitting in front of a television when you eat, you will never hear your brain say, 'oh, maybe we should stop now.'

 

Studies show that children who play more and have more recess at school do better than students who sit more in classes. How many schools are moving towards a more play paradigm? Studies show that people incarcerated for crimes were more likely to have had no, or minimal play, compared to those who have never been incarcerated; and of the ones who are in for life, even less play, more abusive histories, than those who just visit.

 

We are social animals. We have relationships. We have relationships with each other. We have relationships with our foods. We have relationships with our environments. We have relationships with our bodies! Our brains. Our hearts. There is solid evidence that if we connect first with our hearts, not our left hemisphere, we have better emotional outcomes. Yes, I said left hemisphere, because most people don't use their whole brain. We tend to be left hemisphere dominate.

 

Ideally, every night should be held with a group of people. Every meal should be held with other people. Most of us won't do this. We are so tired by our schedules that we're more likely to sit alone in an apartment and allow the television to take us into oblivion, and then we wake and repeat. There are few people that want to host meals. You want to a measure for loneliness in society? Ask any barista or waitress how many times a patron asks for their number. (Sometimes, the smile from the waitress is the only kindness a person in our society gets.) We do eventually eat with others, but those tend to be events, like parties. And we overindulge to make up for everything we lack in our ever day lives and then think back wishfully on, 'oh, that was a nice evening.' We have forgotten how to have nice, nightly evenings.

 

Sometimes, we are with people and still alone.

 

What is this note, you may ask. I don't know. I have a string of evidence that seems to mean something, and yet, I am not actively seeking 'my group.' I want a group. A group of good people who come together frequently and talk and eat and share lives. Maybe i have forgotten how, as well. Maybe this group would have to actually relearn what it means to be a group. I don't know. I just know there is something here. Something tangible, even though I am not touching anything or anyone.

 

And then, there is tulpamancy. A solution set? Though I have access to an immediate remedy for lack of social intercourse, I still touch this thing. I think of the anecdotes of prisoners of war where the persons went into a private world and they survived and when they came out, those private worlds were as solid as the real world. There was a man who became a clock maker, who had never broken or made a clock, but he imagined each cog so well that when he came into the real world, he made clocks! I am not a prisoner of war. I could get in a car and go where people are, and yet, I would still be alone. I might as well be at the movies watching static people move across a screen. I have a place I can go, internally, and 'people' to do it with, and it sustains me; but it doesn't eliminate the rare mood, probably a vestige of pre-tulpa life. A longevity study would be needed to determine health outcomes over time.

 

Why am I sharing this? Oh, I think I know! If there are people out there who think tulpamancers have fake, distorted lives and are nowhere close to reality, think again. We are probably more tuned into the nature of social reality than you imagine, and the greatest resource of all is our intellect, enhanced by hyper-emotions. We emote like stars in the night sky, but we are so far away you just see a twinkle of what's really there. And like stars, we still get solar flares and sun spots. Still human, even after all of this. How humbling.

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You seem to enjoy stream-of-consciousness writing a great deal. Isn't it therapeutic?

 

One subject you may find interesting is the anti-terror field. Most Google searches will be fraught with links to N.G.E. (NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, a massively depressing/psychological animated series made by the eccentric Hideaki Anno) because the writing team wanted to integrate the concept into the abstract mecha warfare dynamic of the show. I'd once read a cartoon magazine that explained the concept of the anti-terror field was originally proposed by a psychiatrist who noticed that children subject to great neglect, abandonment issues or rejection from their loved ones and communities produce a means to sufficiently displace the pain and tension that has long overwhelmed their personal space.

 

As for the social conditions you describe, good sociability is engraved in our shared genome. As the Darwinian Hold allowed children to survive better by frantically grabbing on to their mothers in times of distress or fear, we too cling to the ideal of an accepting group. Yet the pathways of evolution have applied to how we collect ourselves on a societal level as well - while our ancestors were obliged to show hospitality in sharing and reciprocating meals in their hovels, we have sloughed off these communal interactions by adjusting our values towards money, property, status and worship of individuality. If one were to be seated and ate at a restaurant, would one then invite a manager or the owners home for a meal? Would someone of high place and luxurious spending wish to purposely conflate their needs and presence with the unwashed? (probably not)

 

How do you feel about those who aren't or simply cannot be integrated into social groups? Introverts are drained by the experience, antisocial personalities demand centre attention or commit to hostility and plainly embittered individuals have little good to do or say unless someone goes out of their way to treat them to the most pleasant courtesies at all times (to the degree of sheer exasperation by other guests and the host). It was for these and other pretexts such persons were first jammed into wooden cages and forgotten about by "polite" society in the first place. That's not to say healthcare hasn't made its own gains - thankfully we do not live in a time where lobotomies and other dubious surgical practises are widely used, though as you well know most pretend the current standard is somehow better in prescribing equitably infeasible prescription-samples meted out by corporations who can hold profit margins higher than the health of patients. Our civilisation has lowered such persons to the equivalent of genetic detritus, fit only for study, culling or mild entertainment. I am aggrieved at the passive inhumanity of man against man.

 

I can understand how you feel about being "alone". We live in such a highly compartmentalised and divisive realm that lonesome persons are ignored wholesale before they're pushed further back into the abyss. I am reminded in a way of how mainland Chinese often just watch people drowning instead of actually helping the victim, or how bandits on Tegucigalpan public transit demand one's billfold and crucifix at knifepoint while nearby passengers look the other way.

 

Do you think tulpas are ideal for those who cannot reasonably find or keep company? Some of an antinatalist bent think we're immensely cruel and irresponsible because we forced existence onto someone else without their express permission.

I've seen good people bleed

And I thought I'd seen it all

But my own two eyes would prove me wrong that day.

 

There are things that I've done

Only seen by the sun

And those things will be buried in my grave.

 

 

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I am not sure I can write other than stream of conscious... but, yeah, interesting observation, and yeah, on the whole, tends to be therapeutic, especially if I arrive somewhere, and don't get stuck on the train.

 

"How do you feel about those who aren't or simply cannot be integrated into social groups? Introverts are drained by the experience, antisocial personalities..." Personally, having encountered my share, professionally and personally, my response is situational, and contextual. I try to always bring in compassion. My tolerance declines when the subject is family. Separated by distance, I can explain symptoms and behaviors, and compassion increases, but in person, I require small doses and then require distance to recharge emotional batteries.

 

There are people who are terribly bothersome, exhausting to be around, and I would argue they are the product of our culture, their needs, 'perceived' neediness, exasperated by a culture that is too frequently apathetic at best, absolutely neglectful and or abusive at worse. I suspect this will get worse, if you consider the number of parents and childcare people who are more attached to their cell phones than actually attending to those in their care; in addition to an increase in sense of entitlement, and increase in litigious solution sets. (Star Trek and Shakespeare were onto something when they recommended getting rid of lawyers.) We have improved marginally past the wooden cages, but still too many, experts mind you, believe there isn't a cure for things like borderline personality; but the cure, or at least, the minimization of symptoms, is an intense, 2 or more year program, of consistently meeting the fundamental nurturing needs that would have ideally been met in the first two years of life. The human brain is plastic enough that the minimum necessary neural structure can be developed, but probably not by the afflicted person's family of origin due to being complicit, knowingly or not, in the development of the condition. Is it complicated, yes, but it is a direct result of culture, and therefore, the cure is in modifying culture. (Something not likely to happen.) If the culture is insane, evidenced by the systems we live in being unsustainable over time and unresponsive to the persons and the natural environment in which they were created to serve, then all illness, physical or mental, is merely a reflection of that unresponsiveness.

 

"Do you think tulpas are ideal for those who cannot reasonably find or keep company? Some of an antinatalist bent think we're immensely cruel and irresponsible because we forced existence onto someone else without their express permission."

 

I do, actually, think tulpas are helpful, in a myriad of ways, maybe in some ways yet to be discovered. If these antinatalist really hold such opinions, I would argue they have not really considered all the aspects. Tulpamancy, in its present, post Tibetan form, may be a symptom of culture's disenfranchised masses, and or the growing population who are so much disenfranchised or even discontent, but suspect or believe that the present corporate/mechanistic mentality is unsustainable, but are unable or unwilling to fight such a fight; instead, they turn towards an inner solutions which minimizes their materialistic needs. Here's another way to spin that. Let's say 'tulpamancy' in present form is just an answer to loneliness. Any person who took up such an endeavor as a response to their own emotional needs is actually healthier than the person who simply suffers in perpetuity, because they are actively involved in meeting their needs. The opposite of that is someone who is what, a person labeled 'borderline personality,' who can't get their needs met because they are too needy? A person crying they are lonely is rarely met with empathy, but is shunned. And if you're the outsider student, the in-group usually increases hostility towards perceived weakness, called bullying. What's the response to bullying? Increased aggression? That tends to only escalate the situation to greater levels of aggression, and doesn't win affection, even if the response is clever. And if one can't struggle with loneliness by expressing a need, or by becoming aggressive, what is left? Further, loneliness is not just an artifact of being different. There is an increase in loneliness because the avenues for meeting partners has decreased, even as mechanisms like dating apps have increased, because of secondary artifact is the perceived ideal. As long as there is a perceived ideal of 'better option' out there, no one is willing to commit to anything in front of them.

 

This perceived ideal, may actually be a tulpa... Hang on, I will try and support that. The secondary thing I would submit to the above group, and it's a more difficult sale because even I am still sorting out how true it might be, and if it's applicable. I lean towards this being true... All our thoughts, even the more abstract ones, have much more substantiality than most appreciatively perceive. So, yeah, even though it took a great deal of energy and effort to create a tulpa, to give it the sustainability, continuity, and consistency of a stable personality that I could interact with, I suspect we all do this all the time, and the only difference between tulpamancer and non is the flexibility of navigating the potentiality, or allowing for other. I base this idea on my interpretation of Jung's dialogue with Philemon, and Jung's other work, and my perception of dream characters being more than just characters or archetypes, which is also supported by other authors, such as Robert Wagoner.

 

Let's end where we started. Stream of consciousness. Whether I, or we, write down stream of consciousness, we engage in that sort of daily diatribe or artifice to communicate with self... But are we really communicating with self? I mean, if I make statement like, "I am lonely," and no one is there to hear it, who am I saying that to? In saying that, or thinking that, am I convincing myself of that reality? If I am angry and ranting through all potential arguments for a thing that I might say to a person I am angry at to justify my emotions, am I rationalizing the existence of an emotion to make it valid? And further, this perceived other, probably doesn't haven't a clue, and the offense probably isn't even there, so am I really responding to other person or situation, or am I responding to a tulpa?

 

What did I write yesterday? I was in a mood. I was responding to something intellectually, internally, but not necessarily a real thing. Wait wait wait. If it's a tulpa, it is a real thing, right? Do we need to create tulpas in order to help decrease the response to unidentified tulpas?

 

I would like to argue that I am not as crazy as I sound, but somehow... I have run out of steam, and may just have to allow circumstantial evidence to be. Can one ever really argue against being crazy without increasing the evidence for crazy? :) I am now reading up on anti-terror field... I may have, unbeknownst to me, been writing that very thing in my leisure.

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I did a thing.

 

[audio mpeg=https://tulpaudcast.info/other/solarchariot-random-thoughts.mp3]

 

Whatever you do, don't listen to 9:29 out of context :P

I don't visit as often as I used to. If you want me to see something, make sure to quote a post of mine or ping me @jean-luc

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I did a thing.

 

[audio mpeg=https://tulpaudcast.info/other/solarchariot-random-thoughts.mp3]

 

Whatever you do, don't listen to 9:29 out of context :P

 

Wow. That sounds like professional to me. Like, NPR kind of professional. Nice voice.

 

Though, I will admit this secret: I half expected the voice of Patrick Stewart, and maybe the one and only good first season quote: "There can be no justice as long as laws are absolute..." And all because Wesley crashed through a flower bed.

 

I am having very strong emotions... Wow.

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