Can't focus on narration

[Antoaths]

Like the title says I find that I have a very hard time keeping focused on what I want to do here. For very short periods I can do some good narration and have even gotten pretty good with parroting but I find that my mind quickly wanders to other subjects. I go from trying to have a conversation with my tulpa (still pre-contact) to talking to my boss or writing out a forum post in my head, usually before I even realize I'm doing it. I always remember to come back sooner or later, but I just can't stick to it for any length of time. It's probably an ADD thing.

 

I doubt there's really any good advice other than to keep trying or drugs for the aforementioned ADD, but I thought I'd try asking anyway.

[Stevie]

Don't feel like you have to just direct your entire stream of thought to your tulpa. Make conversation, expect a reply, that's it. I don't think it's as much about quantity as it is about quality. It's hard to stay engaged with talking to someone who can't reply yet, but keep trying. The fact that you're returning to narration right after getting distracted is a good thing. I wouldn't worry too much about it dude.

[Zaya]

I'm not sure it has to do with ADD, but if it does, I guess I've lived with it, undiagnosed, for my entire life.

 

I have this issue as well, and it plays a big part of my life. My vice is hypothetical situations, I play out stories and various possible scenarios ad nauseam. Like space.

I think of space a lot. Space stations, what planet would be best to paraterraform, should we forego planets and make use of lagrangian points?

I'll be thinking about something important, then WHAM

what if someone were to run out of oxygen outside of a pressurized zone on a mars colony?

And that will be my thought for the next five minutes.

 

The kicker is, I've learned to control this For the most part through mindfulness and meditation.

By mindfulness, I mean the act of really thinking about what it is you're doing or what you're thinking about at any given point in time.

MEANING: when you lose track of what you're doing or mindlessly let your mind wander, your thoughts can run away and you zone out.

This mindless state will persist until 15 minutes later, then oh damn, I forgot to keep narrating!

There are many books on mindfulness and how to stay mindful, but at the core of all of them, they basically just tell you to practice keeping your thoughts on one topic as long as you possibly can. When you go mindless, put your attention back on the topic and persist for as long as possible without letting your mind wander.

 

By meditation, I mean a dissociative state that involves relinquishing active thoughts.

Meditations like this simply reinforce mindful thinking, but it's like active tulpaforcing in that meditation allows you to set aside time to specifically to think mindfully and think in the moment. (i say mindfully because although many meditation techniques teach you to relinquish actual thoughts, they advise you to concentrate on one specific topic or specific topics, such as in the pranayama breathing technique, many advise focusing on the breath, how long the breaths persist, etc. This allows the person to learn how to relinquish invasive thoughts and focus on an important topic, which is how mindfulness is achieved for longer durations.)

 

I'm not an expert at either of these topics, but by dipping my feet in the pool that is these techniques, I've been able to learn how to relinquish many invasive thoughts and how to concentrate for much greater durations.

I would advise researching various topics such as these and creating a regimen that suits your schedule and your needs.

Hope this helped, good luck in your endeavors, and welcome to the forum!

[Linkzelda]

[hidden]You kind of answered your own question with the advice thing, but here’s why that would be the case:

 

- In your circumstance, you feel the conversations with them is still pre-contact, or I guess still a work in progress in your eyes. So, when you try to put things into context with real life via multi-tasking, and talking with other people, obviously, your mind is going to be, for a lack of better words, trying to prioritize based on the circumstance. Sometimes, this may lead to you acknowledging the monkey-mind brain of ours that seems to have a constant influx of distractions, difference, delusions, etc.

 

- And while there may be a desire to try and make it internally consistent, I would, IMO, acknowledge that we can’t really just regulate our minds to where it becomes internally consistent. With all of the metaphors people use to describe the mind, you could chalk it up to it trying to make sense of information coming in out, and just what’s going on internally as well.

 

- So, when trying to tackle that conflict with a tulpa in development, it doesn’t seem to be a nice nesting ground for them to develop, especially when you’re trying to do several things at once. So, you could do it procedurally where you invest some time where you’re just talking with them alone rather than trying to go for mind-voice here, real voice to someone there, and trying to dodge a car coming at you near a full speed there.

 

- If you want them, your tulpa, to put things into context, and vice versa for you, it starts from trying to cultivate some way of identifying them to where instead of your brain reveling in whatever is going on, you use those distractions as a tool for discussion. What I mean by this is eventually learning to not censor those chances, even if they seem weird and akward.

 

- We kind of censor things for the sake of consistency, and even sanity for some. But what I learned is that if you’re struggling to get an ice breaker conversation going, you might have to get a little freaky, and out of your comfort zone. Over time, going in and out with those fluctuations will be at your beck and call, and hopefully, the scattered mind of a brain we have becomes a useful asset to us rather than a trickster trying to bring us down.[/hidden]

 

 

To chalk that up, try to talk about anything; even if it’s narrating what you did with a squirrel wielding a gummy bear AK47, the more context you put them in, the easier it may be when you shift into this reality, and try to do these things with them for those cases. Find whatever methodology that allows you to spam that stream of consciousness until it becomes an industrialized process.

 

I remember doing hours of describing things in my head to them. One moment I’m stocking up for guns and ammo, and the next I’m trying to avoid a Minotaur in a parking lot full of vehicles. I think when you get used to the sporadic imagination, and to not let it paralyze you and make you foam in the mouth, it’s not an ADD issue (self-diagnosed, or not), it’s just a fear-of-your-competency issue that gets addressed over time. And something else to point out is that some people may get a cringe factor going on with their imagination with their tulpas because of things like it feeling RP-ish, or just not really in context of what goes on in the world, and what have you. That cringe gets worse and worse in fear of the imagination becoming their only form of conceptualizing reality, but it's just a supplement for whatever goal they have in mind.

 

. Just pure imagination with little to no distraction. The only thing stopping me from going further at the time was actually wanting to sleep, and feeling hungry, lol. And I still want to go further than that in the near future too. It all started from those 5-10 minute sessions, and building my way up to there. Because of that, I get hyped up of even doing something like that again, even if it's just for 5 minutes, or so.

[Antoaths]

I think what I'm seeing as the real problem here is less that I can't keep focusing and more what I end up focusing on. I go from conversing with my tulpa to conversing with some other imaginary person, which is how I've pretty much always filled dead time in my thoughts. And yes, by conversing I do mean a two (or more) sided conversation. Like for example I would think what I wanted to talk about here, what you might say to me about that, back and forth until I realize that this is probably the worst possible thing for me to be focusing on. If my thoughts were only about what I ate for dinner or that song that won't get out of my head then I wouldn't really be so concerned. The problem is that my normal stream of consciousness looks so much like parroting that I feel it's probably undoing anything I've actually managed to accomplish to that point. After all, if it were that easy I would have accidentally created one ages ago, the only difference is focus and intent.