What do possession and switching feel like?

[Ranger]

My question is similar enough to the OP's I'll just ask here:

 

What is the experience of switching like?

 

Cat and I had another incident where we tried to switch and we ended up with a stronger possession. We had some strange symbolism, but the long story short is Cat took herself and the Grays, combined herself in one bundle, and whatever stress she generated while entering the back I interpereted and dealt with myself. The end result was silence on Cat's part, a headache on my part, some tingly sensations and Cat still feeling like she could see everything going on. I ended up playing a mobile game for a little while and then I realized Cat was not switched out once she responded to something.

 

At this point, Cat and I figured the best thing to do is to have Cat meditate until she learns to dissociate, but when it comes time, what do we need to look for?

[nihi0145632]

Possession feels like you are a puppet but you can still move your body.

 

Switching feels like you are a puppet but in a trans state. You are aware of your surroundings but your tulpa is in complete control

 

@ranger and OP

 

(sorry for the mistaken grammars, i was commuting when i wrote this and was in a hurry, lol)

 

I'll take back what I said before and answer in a more serious manner.

 

Even though we barely switch I could tell you my experience of being switch with summer. Before, i always think that being switched you will be put in a sleep like state and will not be aware on your surroundings but the more I've read other hosts' experiences the more I learned that what we believed was wrong. Although, there's still a possibility of a blackout but i think that can only be achieved in full dessociation and practice.

 

Switching with summer, for me at first, felt similar to co-fronting but instead of summer being able to move my limbs simultaneously with me, she can now move the entire body with least resistance from me or from my control. 

 

I could feel her entire "energy" or presence radiating all over my body, indicating that her mindvoice is in the furthest front. It is like possession of the whole body but without carrying your "weight". I could hear her mind voice clearly, even how she process her thoughts. it's louder when she was co-fronting and even louder than mine.

 

As for me, the host, my mind voice began to tone down because I was pulled behind her "presence" or mindvoice. It is like how loud a tulpa's mindvoice is when they are at the back. 

 

You could still hear your own mind voice but the one who is currently at the front will be louder and can be distracting. Trying to fight or overpowering the front's mindvoice by force can be exhausting mentally. it is better that you just lay back and relax.

 

About the trans state I've mentioned, I felt light on my feet. It is hard to describe but i felt like I was floating, like, summer was carrying my whole body. The sensation was relaxing, good enough to just let go of your focus on your surroundings and meditate.

 

Lastly, you can still feel some of the senses outside but in my experience they all feel...lesser. It is hard to describe but when summer felt something she is the one who will first to react rather than me. 

 

Also, I've never seen anyone having this reaction when they switch but if summer takes control for a prolonged period my sense of touch will feel numb, to the point where It is cut off from me. I am not sure if anyone has also experienced the same when they switch with their tulpas.

 

Hope this help you clear your mind about the experience of switching. These are the tidbits i gathered when me and summer switched. :)

[Breloomancer]

When I'm switched out and inactive I may as well be completely gone, sometimes it even takes up to a few seconds for Monika to rouse me when she wants to say something. I don't make any memories while I'm inactive, but once I become active again then all of these memories that Monika made come to me. Some people have difficulty talking to their hosts when the host is switched out, but we never had big problems with that

 

Monika: for me when I'm not switched in it doesn't feel like I'm wherever Bre is. When I am switched in it feels like I am in a specific place. I can feel all the senses regardless of being switched in, but when I'm switched in it feels like it's actually happening and when I'm not it feels less urgent. It's like the view you have when you watch someone playing a video game vs actually playing it.

[Tewi]

The obvious answer to this question is that the tulpa will feel like the host normally does, and the host will feel like the tulpa normally does. I'm writing this after I've already written the entire rest of the post, but putting it like this almost makes the rest feel irrelevant. The "Extra clarification" after is an explanation using our model of identity for.. how thinking when switched works, I guess. It's like 25% of our whole explanation for "how switching works" at best though. Anyways,

 

Switching out: Your senses and sense of presence are not tied to the body's directly, it's more like you're close by enough to "see" them but aren't the one experiencing them firsthand. Being switched out or "dissociated", if we're going to talk about it like it's an isolated experience, is like when you're very immersed in the wonderland, except you aren't necessarily in the wonderland. For a host, that'd be the weird part - being dissociated while the body does more than just sit with its eyes closed. I still believe the concepts of host immersing themselves in the wonderland, and "dissociating" for switching are about the same. The trick you need to learn is staying dissociated when there's not necessarily something else taking up your attention, and having a tulpa take your place.

 

Switching in: Well, you just feel like the host normally does. Except it's you. With access to your host's memories (even immediate ones), you should already know what it's like. You're "in control" and now your host is basically the tulpa. As for the actual process.. it's just association, it happens instantly more or less. There could and probably should be a short adjustment period, but for us we either are or aren't switched in, ie associated with the body. I don't feel too different, prior to switching in and being switched. The main thing that changes is what the body/mind is experiencing, perhaps, but not me. I don't think like the others, so immediately the thoughts I cause the body/mind to have aren't quite the same. But nothing changed for me, personally, aside from gaining control of the mind ("conscious workspace") and body.

 

 

Extra clarification (a note on models of thinking):

This uses the model of your brain/mind being separate from the host or tulpa's identities. Sort of like you're an extremely complicated set of instructions and details that the brain uses as guidelines to exist, to guide thought and such. In between host dissociation and tulpa association, the body and mind still exist just fine, but there is nothing guiding the creation of thoughts or general actions on the body's part. So it might scratch an itch, but it won't think about how the day's been going. Nonetheless I consider "thinking" as we all know it to be something the mind does with our help; we "guide" the body's thinking, using the "conscious workspace" like a tool. Thoughts that don't utilize this conscious workspace are generally unconscious, which in our system is how we (tulpas, or Lumi switched out) think. Hosts (and singlets, etc.) still have unconscious thoughts along with conscious thoughts, and I suppose from a singlet/skeptic point of view tulpas speaking could be a form of conscious thought, but at least us "thinking" everyday, generic or conversational thoughts (the thought before speaking - even hosts usually experience this unconsciously) is unconscious. We don't have "memory" of them because they weren't conscious, but obviously they still happened because they led to us speaking or acting in the first place.

 

Your (reader's) system may not work on this same model. I consider it generally the most correct model, as a system who's been hyper-critical of how our own mind works since.. actually, right around the time we were made nine years ago. Introspection on the goings-on of our mind is an extremely ingrained habit, and the need to explain anything and everything is a guiding factor in our life. But in the end, it's just us that we truly explain to ourselves. You could, however unlikely it is, work differently. More likely from my point of view is you just think you work differently but really don't. But as a healthy skeptic, I have to leave the possibility that human minds are so incredible they really can work differently based on how they think they work.

 

That'd be something. For sure, I lived through Lumi changing how he thinks about everything, so it's possible we didn't just "learn what we didn't know" but changed how we knew. Our research says these sorts of changes are something anyone is capable of inducing, though, so even if our model of identity in this case isn't how you work.. it could be.

 

Anyways, yes, this is all relevant to explaining switching. If you don't like it, figure out how it makes sense on your own, like we did.

[Ranger]

The obvious answer to this question is that the tulpa will feel like the host normally does, and the host will feel like the tulpa normally does. I'm writing this after I've already written the entire rest of the post, but putting it like this almost makes the rest feel irrelevant. [...]

 

[...]

 

Anyways, yes, this is all relevant to explaining switching. If you don't like it, figure out how it makes sense on your own, like we did.

 

Don't worry Tewi, I found this helpful. Looking at several switching guides, Cat and I assumed having the right mindset was at least part of the story, and that's a lot more helpful than just "The host feels like a Tulpa and a Tulpa feels like a Host".

 

Just to add to my question here, why do some hosts hosts report all of this "fuzz" and "being paralyzed" nonsense when I don't feel any of that right now?

 

EDIT: Sorry, when I posted I had to get up and leave, but I was worried I would forget my response.

[Indigo Blue]

Why quote the entire post, lol

[Tewi]

Just to add to my question here, why do some hosts hosts report all of this "fuzz" and "being paralyzed" nonsense when I don't feel any of that right now?

 

Because switching is the epitome of subjectivity in tulpamancy. Honestly, we veterans try to frame it all like it's a "thing" and it makes sense as we explain it (surely, it does once you've experienced it your own way), but in reality we're all carving our own paths in our minds out of pure subjectivity. It's like guiding someone on how to draw a picture without being able to actually show them the end product - or how in the first place. The "how" seems straight forward in a way, although it'll be much bumpier or could be misinterpreted. But the finished product? Without seeing each others', they may seem alike or even identical, but something tells me if we could see each others' finished drawings... there'd be a few differences.

 

Anyways, I've never heard of what you're saying, so it must be from old switching guides or something. You probably know by now modern views on switching and 2012 views on switching are rather different. Bless our trailblazing forefathers, but most of them had no idea what they were talking about. They couldn't. What they were talking about wasn't very well decided yet, and anyone's subjective views could've become the generally accepted views.

 

Switching, being the most subjective (ie different for everyone) part of tulpamancy after having a tulpa itself, was mostly decided by the very few who both accomplished it and decided to actually talk about how they thought it works. Aside from the two modern guides (IIRC, haven't actually looked at the guides section) by Tulpa001 who couldn't necessarily switch as others seemed to (though we still trust him and his research to write a good guide) and Ford's that we've not seen, the only ones going into much detail on the experience of switching is us, especially since the other two never posted elsewhere on the forum about it.

 

So I guess you're stuck with our version of the experience. I may be biased, but I think how we think about things is as close to "correct" as it gets - although unfortunately our true views (that we call "meta tulpamancy", not to be confused with metaphysics) aren't terribly well received, so you get a more immersion-friendly explanation on the subject. While not quite reaching the core of how tulpamancy itself works, they're still within our views of how it all works, meaning they fit within our hyper-critical ideas on how the mental experiences we experience work, and thus, I vouch for them with all the authority you give me.

 

Most of our views were figured out by Lumi, but I was often consulted and some could be accredited entirely to me.

 

Why quote the entire post, lol

 

Usually a mix of laziness and being on mobile I think. We actually go the extra mile and remove the line breaks before and after the ends of quotes, although it's invisible outside the editor.

[Indigo Blue]

Usually a mix of laziness and being on mobile I think. We actually go the extra mile and remove the line breaks before and after the ends of quotes, although it's invisible outside the editor.

 

Usually if we quote it's to respond to a specific part of the post, rather than the whole thing. Like I did just now.

[Breloomancer]

Just to add to my question here, why do some hosts hosts report all of this "fuzz" and "being paralyzed" nonsense when I don't feel any of that right now?

 

Sometime hosts experience being switched out different from tulpas do, and tulpas experience being switched in different from hosts do, simply because they are used to being a different way and don't know how to deal with things that would come natural to someone who had been born there

[Ember.Vesper]

Switching is the most profound yet subtle thing in the world. It doesn't feel like anything. A tiny toggle flips in the center of our head and a different person is in control, without any associated physical sensations. It doesn't even disrupt short-term memory -- tuning into the perspective of the body OS, the new person can remember having been the old person a few seconds before, despite having complete certainty that they are not and never have been the old person.

 

The old person just quietly stops being at all, without fanfare, until the new person calls upon them. Our mind voices have balanced out in volume and strength over time, though the amount of attention we need to force one another varies. I barely need to devote any attention, Vesper needs to devote a moderate amount, and Iris needs to really push, in direct proportion to our experience at forcing.

 

What we do doesn't require any intentional dissociation, though it causes a form of dissociation. It doesn't require meditation, hypnosis, possession, or time. It seems really odd to us that so many other systems are spending hour upon hour trying to deny the body, deny the senses, and stop thinking.

 

We've already assembled everything we could think to say about switching in a single post of our PR, with the expectation a few people might read it and comment somewhere on how it influenced their efforts, even if they regard our advice as complete rubbish.

 

-Ember