yenu rambles on about his inner friends

[yenu]

Hello.

 

Sometimes I have the desire the communicate some things that have happened with my mind-characters (or tulpas). So here is a thread. I will probably only post very sporadic, but who knows. Since I encountered the term "soul-bound" last month here in this forums, I consider it to be the most accurate description of what my mind-characters are.

I may or may not take inspiration from tulpa-forcing techniques or aspire to some traits that are more commonly associated with those (like possession, imposition or "wonderlands" (a term I don't like))

 

Our basic forcing technique has always been writing; not stories but "just talking" between us. So if the definition "soulbound" includes that the characters are developed for or in a novel (or other fiction writing), some of us do qualify, but the majority actually doesn't, even though almost all have appeared in my fiction at least once.

 

Our "core" team consists of me (yenu) as host, Lūna, Zatarra, Graiho, Jimo, Jonas and Nailann. There are about a dozen "minor characters" in the background, some of which have been active as soulbounds/tulpas in the past or just turn up very sporadically. I do not make a sharp distinction between who is a tulpa/soulbound and who is not, rather degrees of autonomy.

 

Since Graiho is the most extroverted and the most comfortable with public spaces, she also get's to have my avatar picture. :-D

 

Graiho: And I am allowed to write here. Huzzah!

 

As of now, I do not particularly care whether I'm just parroting those minor characters. All of us have started with a parroting-heavy technique, anyway.

 

I might introduce my MCs in further detail, or let them introduce themselves. For now, I just have one small thing I learned recently to share.

 

- - - - -

The "imagined writing technique"

 

Since my primary forcing technique was writing a character-chat for myself, I had some kind of trouble with communicating off-keyboard. Talking in my head kinda worked sometimes, but most of the time I don't really get into it, it doesn't feel right.

 

So two days ago, I contemplated about this while lying in bed, and I found out that I could simulate the writing experience. When doing this, I imagine typing every word I say physically, and also everything my tulpas say. Including smilies.

 

What I noticed is that since it costs a much higher amount of concentration to just uphold the "typing", I am automatically more focused, and my own thought don't get in the way that easily (which was one of the problems with talking to tulpas just as mind-voices).

Once a good communication is established, I can still skip the typing, if necessary (since it reduces the speed of the conversation drastically).

 

Well. That's what I had to share. Will try this for the next weeks. :-)

[yenu]

We just had a huge meetup-chat with everyone (except Jimo, who was apparently sleeping or something).

 

I've come to terms with that we are per definition closer to being a soulbounding system than tulpas... but since I found this community back in 2014 (?) I have wondered, how much more is possible for us and what we want.

 

So, I figured that I don't want to try imposition after all - visualizing has never been my thing and it would feel like a terrible chore, for once. I dabbled a bit and I made up some very small wonderland with one room but it just doesn't do it for me. I would love to have the mental capabilities of doing a memory palace, but I just don't or I'm too impatient, so... no imposition for now, except mind voice of course, which is at the moment sometimes there and sometimes not - and whether I have talked with the character a lot doesn't seem to be of much relevance. Nailann just talked to me for the first time in many months, and somehow her voice was clearer than Graihos, who I talk with every day.

 

But.

 

I do have some interest in possession/switching. It is something I would like to be able to do. So I asked all characters, and most of them don't want to try it.^^ But Nailann does, and two others at least agreed to try a bit, so this is something we will focus more in the future.

 

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do it. My characters don't fit perfectly well in the "tulpa"-category, so I have the feeling that tulpamancy guides of possession won't be ideal for us.

 

The best I have come up so far is playing piano... because there I have an automatized process (if I know the piece perfectly by heart) so I can mentally sit back and let my tulpa influence *how* I play it. This has worked in the past, but I have to re-learn it a bit.

(Incidentally, this is something that almost all of my characters enjoy, even those who expressedly don't want to try possession.^^)

[yenu]

The last month we did a bit less, but now it seems we have started to get more active forcing done. :-)

 

New technique:

Finger signalling

 

I am used to write a chatlog with my tulpas, not so much doing anything where I don't write. When I'm walking in the streets I do like to talk to them, but I was always confused about who was talking what, so I devised this:

 

Each finger of my left hand is connected with one character. The ring finger for example is Graiho, so whenever she talks in my head, this finger gets pressed down (onto an "imaginary button" on my hand or wherever). When I (host) talk, I stretch all fingers.

 

This allows us to talk stuff without me having to concentrate all the time on "who said what again?". It also allows them to switch voices. Graihos voice is kind of consistent, but not that stable yet, the others don't have a recognizable voice at the moment, so this finger signalling helps a lot. Of all of us, I (host) actually am most unpredictable in terms of what voice I use, I sometimes have a mindvoice that sounds like random friends of mine.

 

I jokingly spoke in some kind of Orc-voice for a while, which was absolutely hilarious. (Graiho: I can attest to that. When he first started talking like that, I cracked up. Also, we can do sound effects now, whee!)

 

(Kinda) new technique:

Four arms

 

We talked about imposition and how none of us are really comfortable with visual imagination stuff. So, this idea is an adaptation of a lucid-dreaming-technique I once thought of:

Imagine you have four arms. Two regular ones, and two imaginary ones, with which you can also do things.

 

So, basically, we don't like to do imposition outside of our body - instead we are visualizing us in the same space. Sounds weird, but it actually feels more naturally.

 

When doing this, Graiho kept boxing random people on the street. :-D With an imaginary hand of course. I don't know how this will develop, but it at least allows my tulpas to touch stuff in my proximity without me having to use my own arms.

 

Since we are more than two, it is technically not "four arms" but ... fourteen? ish? Anyway.

 

random autonomy stuff

 

I asked Graiho to tell me something completely random (she is "queen of randomness" after all) and she told me that she likes Hillary Clinton. o_0 Now I am not a citizen of the US, or even an American, but I kind of like Sanders. So we now have two slightly different opinions of politics. When asked, she said, she liked Hillary because she is the "right kind of evil". lol.

 

It's often hard to differentiate between what I think and what Graiho thinks, because while she started out pretty different from me, she has influenced me to a point that I kind of talk like her sometimes. Which is a positive influence, anyway. She is much more extroverted than I (host) was, a few years back.

 

Another random fact, discovered today: Graiho is the most impatient person of us all. :-D Like, waiting at a red traffic light, she is like "Nooooo, I can't wait, whyyyy?" :-D