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Scepticism vs. Faith: the analysis of tulpa guides


Shinyuu

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It would certainly be Jungian to accept the premise that they did indeed exist in a level of reality beyond the body, but yeah, thank you for the clarification. I think I am in alignment with your intention. I don't think your use was weird... Maybe my interpretation was weird, because I tend to lean towards the metaphysical explanation.

 

I think Lumi may have addressed his belief in soul... I don't remember... Not relevant. But, do you, Lucilyn believe in soul? Maybe this is too tangential for this thread, but then, we're talking belief, and beliefs motivate us... Maybe that is the core part of what Shinyuu is trying to get at in this thread, that the core belief of what we're doing is not only essential to the creation process, but it profoundly informs our continued interaction... I mean, why else would we stay engaged? Clearly what we're doing is even more profound than say interacting with Cortana, Siri, or Alexa... I would say substantially more, even though for many the computerized voices would be more substantial as they have a consensual reality outside of the agent interacting.

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oh, I forgot you weren't purely science-y 'cus that's how you talk y'know? Anyways I meant it was weird because "meta" has a lot of different uses and sometimes we assume people will know which we mean when they might not. especially a problem when we call talk about tulpamancy discussing how tulpas work "meta tulpamancy", which now that I think about it is really REALLY misleading lol

 

anyways, uh, soul? Souls? Well Lumi's belief system actually uses that thing I said about holding two opposing beliefs/belief systems, 'cus the way he thinks about things by default is maybe what you'd associate with atheism, but then ever since he was into new age spirituality years ago he's kept the possibility in his mind that souls n' angels n' spirit guides and stuff might exist, but he doesn't know. And since that seems less likely with the information he has so far it's an "alternate, possible" belief/system and logic n' science are his default.

 

I... don't know if any of that is true or not, so I just go off'a what I know. And I know I've never seen anything myself that shows literally anything metaphysical is real. people have said plenty of things from their OWN experiences, but we've seen thousands of people be wrong about thousands of things in our life so I'm not willing to perpetuate stuff that could be wrong off of what I hear. Buuut, meta or not, like I've said before:

"Tewi makes me feel like my life is safe, like she'll protect me from any bad stuff and always be there for me. But Reisen makes me feel like my soul is safe, like even if bad things do happen to me everything will always be okay forever, even if I died" or something like that.

 

So.. idk, it was just a feeling, not a belief. But like, if it was a feeling that "I" would be safe even if I died, wouldn't that imply it was my soul that I felt was safe? So that's why I said that, 'cus that's how it felt. doesn't mean I experienced any soul or anything though, that's just logically what I figured I should call the feeling!

 

so my only stance on meta or religion vs logic and science (or whatever word(s) you use to mean that stuff) is that it's not okay if it's a bad influence on people. but bad beliefs like that don't have to be meta or religious, plenty of "logical" ones are really bad too. but as long as everyone's still having a good time in life why would I care how they think about it? Since I've got Lumi's whole system of "subjective reality" and all that philosophy to think whatever I want with, I figured if life is otherwise meaningless anyway who cares if something is supposedly true or real or not? if humans make up meaning.. and humans make up reality.. and as far as we know nothing happens when you die, then all that matters is you enjoy your life! if there's no afterlife and an atheist 'n christian person die, and the atheist had a negative life of bein grumpy and mean and the christian had a happy life of helping people and being nice, which one had a better life?? I GUESS someone might prefer to be RIGHT over HAPPY but I personally think that's LAME!

 

'd that answer your question?

Hi, I'm one of Lumi's tulpas! I like rain and dancing and dancing in the rain and if there's frogs there too that's bonus points.

I think being happy and having fun makes life worth living, so spreading happiness is my number one goal!

Talk to us? https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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Shinyuu, I think those are valid arguments, but the argument in and of itself doesn't mean it is what it is, but that it is the author's belief that it might be what it is. The guides are brilliant, and flawed, and they have been refined, with experience, with input, and addendums, and so, yeah, I, too, can point to some that say belief is a necessary component. In the same breath, I have seen that statement in the same paragraph that, "We are are all unique, and so this may not work for you," with reference to other techniques. That second part doesn't invalidate belief as a component, but if we accept that different people learn through different channels, IE visual learners versus auditory learners, there will be variations.

 

You're right. I should have paid more attention to the summary I've written.

 

I totally accept I'm biased towards the result an while it doesn't change the content of the guides I looked for a very specific things in said guides.

 

I guess I should have left the conclusion to the reader.

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You're right. I should have paid more attention to the summary I've written.

 

I totally accept I'm biased towards the result an while it doesn't change the content of the guides I looked for a very specific things in said guides.

 

I guess I should have left the conclusion to the reader.

 

:) Well, Shinyuu, I don't know if I am right. I like to think that I am. I love to hear that I am. LOL I, too, am clearly biased. Opinionated. I hope I was at least persuasive, but not like bully about it... I am still actually thinking this whole thing through, trying to think about it from multiple angles, your position, my position... Are there positions not represented here? I wish more folks would chime in.... My last discussion point with Lucilyn might actually be a tipping point towards faith involvement... A total involvement, not necessarily an absolute ingredient in terms of creation process, but then would someone do this without faith, minus the caveat I created to argue with you... You could absolutely be right!

 

But that's what this is about. Dialogue. This interaction is priceless. So few people are actually engaging in this level of discussion, and we need it to grow.

 

Namaste.


....

 

'd that answer your question?

 

Actually! Very reasonable.

 

I would love a continued conversation, but I can't seem to add to this, or ask the right questions which doesn't take us too far afield from Shinyuu's thread. they may be META related, but not necessarily locally... :)

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I might take a second to mention what scientific tulpamancy might have looked like. Look at the example of lucid dreaming. Scientists proved this subjective phenomena by examining a person who was in a lucid state and prompting them to respond to questions that are reasonably required for a person to be conscious to answer.

 

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Proof came from Hull University in 1975. Psychologist Dr Keith Hearne knew that the subjective testimonies of lucid dreamers could not serve as proof of lucid dreaming. The psychologist was looking for a way to receive a signal from the lucid dreamer while still dreaming. If he could get some type of signal or measurement from the dreamer he could prove that lucid dreaming is real.

 

During dreaming unlike other parts of the body, the eyes are not paralysed. Dreaming happens during the REM (Rapid-Eye-Movement) state. Dr Hearne, thought that maybe the lucid dreamer while asleep can “signal” using his eyes to confirm that he is conscious. The scientist and subject lucid dreamer agreed on a set of eye movements that would be used by the dreamer to signal that he is conscious in his dreamer and basically send a “message” from the dream-world to our awake-reality. The signal was seven or eight right to left eye movement. Basic eye-tracking equipment would record and plot they eye movements on paper.

 

___

 

Tulpas breakthrough moment would have and should have been when we decided to test if a person could do two things at once after making a tulpa, as if there was suddenly a second processing system in the brain. A seemingly impossible feat that can be experimentally verified and is easily tested within a person's home. But that was not a breakthrough moment. Instead, such tests fail, and all indications across many different tests point towards there being no capability for any such multitasking at that level in the human brain.

 

That failure destined this community to be one not founded on science. Absorbing the implications of the above would be a terrible strike against the core of this community. Especially a place like .info where science/research/understanding is said to be as a core purpose. There may still be some hope, assumptions that a tulpa is a subsection of the brain and the host is a subsection of the brain that is "at the controls" with the controls sitting between the host/tulpa and the world, but I frankly think that's a pipe dream rather than something that is solid ground to stand on.

 

All of tulpamancy is slowly shifting until it is founded on the untestable, because that's the only stable ground it can find.

 

In order for tulpamancy to be scientific once again, it needs to find a new foundation that can be tested and subsequently proven. Until we reach that point, I do not believe that scientific tulpamancy is going to be a reality.

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...Tulpas breakthrough moment would have and should have been when we decided to test if a person could do two things at once after making a tulpa...

 

I am not sure that 'that' level of proof is necessary for there to be a continued scientific presence or participation in this endeavor. No one in the scientific community doubts DID, or hallucinations. Many scientist even acknowledge OBE's; yes, their opinion of it is scientifically and clinically different than say the metaphysical practitioner of the same, but the fact that we are hitting up upon the same thing and trying to describe it, understand it, label it... means we're engaging in it. Tulpamancy may not be getting sufficient inquiry, but then, even hypnosis was only recently deemed 'real,' (as of 2012?!) and there was a lot more evidence for hypnosis being real before they started the fMRI studies of people under hypnosis. I mean, seriously, if a baby can be delivered by C-section without any anesthetic because the person was hypnotized, and that's not accepted as evidence for hypnotism, then the difficulty isn't the thing being studied but the bias that is built into the system which escalates the burden of proof to an unnecessary level. Science claimed no one could control their autonomic nervous system, even though monks were doing so, until someone invented biofeedback and proved, guess what, we have more control than what we think...

 

No one doubts that there is more going on with the brain, the human mind, than we can clinically gauge. The difficulty lies in reproducing greater abilities across multiple domains of thinking in demonstrable ways, and quite frankly, the barriers to that is more likely socially induced because the powers that be don't really want free thinking, smart people using their brains in a superior fashion. There is a reason why we are not improving our school systems. Everyone agrees they are outdated, and stuck in an industrial form of mass producing widgets, not smart, free thinking citizens. Which, not surprisingly, results in a bunch of people that can only regurgitate scientific fact as taught to them, as opposed to unraveling the truth for themselves. If there is any dismissal, contempt, or denial of tulpamancy it is because this has the potential of being so significantly important in terms of understanding consciousness that it would be a game changer.

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Scientific tulpamancy sounds like a laudable goal, but it's bloody exhausting to fight for it constantly.  New people hear the whisper of having an ubermensch superpower like parallel processing and cling to it fiercely.  If you try to challenge the idea, you end up having to review high school science just to begin a more nuanced and realistic take on the situation. 

 

I mean, we're sitting in a thread that started with 'faith must be a part of how it works' and i simply wouldn't have even picked this as a battle to fight because it defies anything either i or my host understood about this experience.  I mean if i were a mod here, i would've moved this thread to the metaphysics board and just ignored it, based on the discussion.

 

The only reason i stopped in on this discussion is that Reguile briefly alluded to the Homunculus/Cartesian Theatre theory of consciousness.  And though it is still a relatively new and therefore debatable theory, it is at least one that has solid science to it and seems like it would be worth serious investigation.  But having argued for it many times, i know that it is simply too challenging to the entrenched mythologies to make much progress.  Even if you remove the question of co-existing tulpæ, the ideas just goes against the commonly held perceptions of who a person is in relationship to their thoughts and feelings for it to be a viable discussion with many people. 

 

What Tulpa.info could really use is a separate board for scientific opinions, a place where the discussion must stay rooted to theories built on solid science.  I would love to develop workable theories instead of just swapping fairy-tales, and there simply is no good place to do that in the overall community yet.  Heck, i'd even sign up to the GAT if there was occasionally guides that took cues from cognitive science instead of the My Little Pony crowd.

Early member of a large system.  Our system questions the way the afterlife and tulpamancy interact.  We genuinely suspect that deadies can return to share the mind of the living.

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Scientific tulpamancy sounds like a laudable goal, but it's bloody exhausting to fight for it constantly.  New people hear the whisper of having an ubermensch superpower like parallel processing and cling to it fiercely.  If you try to challenge the idea, you end up having to review high school science just to begin a more nuanced and realistic take on the situation. 

 

 

It is exhausting, isn't it! But if you can interject 'Homunculus/Cartesian Theatre theory of consciousness...' then I want to hear from you! I am glad you weighed in.

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By doing certain things certain results will follow, regardless of what you believe. That is to say, faith is not necessary: if you go through the tulpa-creation process and you do it corectly, you'll end up with a tulpa.

 

If that alone is enough to make something scientific, then yes, tulpas are scientific, but then again, so are many schools of mysticism which operate under the same philosophy of certain actions bringing certain results.

 

No; the fact that the guides rely on faith and suspension of disbelief. That's the point of the article.

That which you're calling "faith" is more properly called "choosing a more profitable interpretation".

 

Much of what people consider facts are actually interpretations. Interpretations are coherent narratives people come up with in order to make sense of certain facts. They are not true or false in the same way facts are; they are only true insofar as they fit all the relevant facts and false insofar as they contradict known facts.

 

Take the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, for instance. The two theories contradict each other, so they can't both be considered absolutely true. At the same time, they both hold true in the vast majority of cases.

 

Also, unlike facts, two conflicting interpretations of the same thing can both be true if they both fit all the relevant facts.

 

To bring this back to tulpamancy, consider the event of getting a certain thought that you think may be from your developing tulpa. You can interpret it as being your thought, or you can interpret it as being their thought, and both interpretations will be equally true, but because the latter interpretation is more useful in the tulpa-creation process, it's better for you to work with that one. This is not the same as having faith that it's your tulpa's thought because there is no evidence of who the thought belonged to; to assume that the thought was yours is no more or less faith-based than to assume it's your tulpa's.

For death begins with life's first breath, 

And life begins at touch of death.

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What Tulpa.info could really use is a separate board for scientific opinions, a place where the discussion must stay rooted to theories built on solid science.

I assumed this is what the forum sans Metaphysics and Parapsychology was about. Or at least the Research board. But you are obviously right, this is not the right place. I tried creating such when I came here, quite some people did but it never got anywhere.

 

Why?

Because the task is much more difficult that most can imagine. It's not even about theories, we lack testable and falsifiable hypotheses. The field of cognitive sciences is mind-bogglingly deep and I dare to say that even a large fraction of academic research conducted there is little more that throwing fairy tales at each other. On another level than we do here, no doubt, but in the end how much of it is truly reproducible? That would require enormous sample sizes which no one can afford. And even then it lies within the nature of highly complex phenomena to be, well, complex.

 

Plus people with strongly developed tulpas are relatively rare and the whole legal issue of performing scientific experiments on humans including collecting and processing of what could be interpreted as medical data makes serious research almost impossible for a layman without academic backing. At least within the EU but I think also in the US no one will publish such study without prior review of an ethics board. It may sound ridiculous but that's how things work nowadays.

 

By doing certain things certain results will follow, regardless of what you believe. That is to say, faith is not necessary: if you go through the tulpa-creation process and you do it corectly, you'll end up with a tulpa.

I disagree.

The world is not deterministic, especially not when humans come into play. Give a group of people a meditation script and let them train for a certain period. Results will vary widely depending on a multitude of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. People are just different, personal mindset probably will play a large role. You might call that faith. The same goes for tulpa creation. Surely there will be some who are able to easily create tulpas by emotionlessly following a script but my best guess would be that the vast majority of people greatly benefits from a positive mindset, again faith. I think whether 'faith' is necessary for tulpa creation ultimately boils down to a semantic question. How do we define faith? It probably means something different for everyone. In this regard there's most likely not 'the' ideal guide. People respond differently to different methods. Which is why I always stress that the main rule of tulpamancy is to find your own way instead of asking if you're doing X right. There's no point in following a routine that feels wrong just because someone on the internet tells you that's how the cool kids roll.

 

I agree on the rest though, most people do not understand the concepts of fact and truth in a scientific context where everything is merely a working hypothesis. True until proven otherwise. By definition science can not and does / should not try to find an universal and undeniable truth or facts for it is impossible to prove that a hypothesis is and will always be true. We'll never be sure that our discoveries are the final truth. The next experiment may shatter them and we'll have to start working on new hypotheses.

Furthermore modern science works with models which never aim to depict the truth but a strongly simplified version of a small section of the "truth" whatever that may be. Classical mechanics, Special Relativity and Quantum Theory are good examples. All of these models do not fully describe the 'truth' we perceive but are pretty good in making predictions within their intended range of operation. Surely we'll come up with new theories that make even better predictions on a larger scale but this will most likely come at the expense of simplicity. Many current theories are already at the limit of human comprehension. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

 

TL;DR

Is it possible to create a tulpa without faith in anything?

Most likely

 

Is it a good idea?

 

That's up to you

 

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