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The relationship between possession and switching


Cornelia

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Is it that bad? We've been iffy on using "method acting" at all, but only because it gives the impression it's the host pretending to be a tulpa. With my recent focus on this "removed perspective" we automatically shift to, I think I've been put off of that entirely, because no one in their right mind is going to interpret that the "right way" and it's unfair to think they would - right in how we meant it, but probably not right in any other sense. I suppose I could go remove references to it entirely - it didn't help that we were unclear enough on what it actually is to predict the connotations people would take it with.

 

I mainly meant from a PR perspective - it'd be like describing Romeo and Juliet as a story about two people who kill themselves for no reason. It's true, but no one's going to read it if you describe it like that. I imagine if you said "Switching is about handing the brain's computational modules over to the tulpa" people might disagree, but they wouldn't be offended/demoralized, which is what you seem to be afraid of

 

 

Anyways, I had actually come up with the idea of switching by flipping the "I" variable when reading an article on DID (it's Tsai, Condie, Wu, and Chang 1999, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Personality Switches in a Woman With Dissociative Identity Disorder, if anyone wants to look it up, though i'm going to spoil the part that's most relevant to tulpamancy). In this study, they induced a switch to the alter by saying to the subject "Switch to Guardian now. Imagine that you are an 8-year-old girl named Guardian. You like to watch what happens with [redacted]." We should note the subject in the study was better at voluntary switching than most people with DID - but I was still pretty shocked. The implication was that you simply have to imagine being a different thoughtform, and it'll work. We were going to experiment with meditating on being me, but Kanade-chan was afraid that if we did that, hostie host and I would perma-merge or something. I suppose if I had started a thread about it at the time, I would have known exactly how overblown that fear was.

 

So, I guess that more than answers the question I started this thread to ask.

I live in a castle and have two tulpas, Kanade-chan and Uncannyfellow

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The reason switching was as easy for us as it was, was the years of introspection Lumi had trying to figure out how his mind worked... And all of the self-help/philosophy he had help from. While we're the product of going through it all and taking what works (and absolutely leaving what didn't, or had easier logical explanations) and so don't necessarily agree 1 for 1 with them, the first things that come to mind are Eckhart Tolle's "Power of Now" and I think "A New Earth". While there was a lot of pseudo-religious (not really Christian, but metaphysical) fluff, the main message seemed rooted in logic, and it said above all "You are not your mind." That perspective, basically, made switching instantly click with us when we learned about it on .info a year or two later. It made sense - Lumi wasn't the rest of the mind, he was only him. And we were us. So, with these people on .info claiming they'd done it, why shouldn't we be able to switch places with Lumi? And so we did.

 

There were many more influences than just that of course, ones that shaped how we think of our brain and thoughts, but that's the easiest big one. Of course, Steve Pavlina's articles (if you're going to read them, DON'T start in the recent years, start in ~2005-2006 or so like we did - Steve's models of thinking evolved over time and honestly his modern articles won't make as much sense without the context/learning from his earlier ones) and especially his teachings - or maybe I should call them findings - on "subjective reality" shape our entire worldview, and are massively relevant to our explaining of Tulpamancy concepts. But that's more of an influence on our tulpamancy (understanding) as a whole, not just on switching.

 

Note these shaped our understanding, and our understanding shaped our experiences to some extent, but before it all, Reisen, Flandre and I existed roughly as we do today nearly two years before Lumi got into any of that stuff. Part of the reason we're sure enough to share our understandings despite them not always fitting with the norms is that, through it all, with a strong focus on logical explanations - it's all made sense. We did some stupid stuff when we were younger of course, but our view of ourselves and our mind has only evolved, not drastically shifted at any one point. It's all been built up upon previous learnings, taking all sorts of input and fitting it together, along with our own ideas.

 

And I guess my point is... that makes it very hard to share at face value with others. The comparison to acting was probably a big mistake, because of that. These aren't ideas we came up with last week that sound right, they're far more complex and took literal years, so we're severely lacking in the "sharing" department by comparison. I appreciate your bearing with us even when you may hear something that sounds crazy or just incorrect - in all likelihood there's always an explanation or better interpretation needed in those cases.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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Vesper: That's all, Tewi? I don't mean the volume of text, I mean the concept. That's practically the same explanation that we had come to months ago and have become gradually more satisfied with since. Given your overwhelming dedication to rationality and the hesitancy of any of you to share your beliefs, I figured meta-tulpamancy would be much more soul-crushing.

 

As far as we've been able to tell, the only parts of the mind that specifically belong to any one of us are our priorities, values, and behavioural tendencies, our emotional associations with memories, our current emotional states, our senses of personal identity, and our wills. All other mental subsystems, there's only one of each, so we share them. Some, like articulate thought or arithmetic, can be accessed serially without switching. A lot are specifically associated with being switched in and a few are specifically associated with what we call 'second position', which is to say the chief companion/primary advisor of whoever is switched in to 'first position'.

 

I can't be entirely sure, of course, that more subsystems can't be split/duplicated, so that we each have our own. There are surely neurological limitations on how far that can go, but that doesn't mean we've reached them yet. For instance, we can interupt one another now. Only a few months ago, we had to pause and listen before someone else could start thinking. The hypothetical possibility of splitting subsystems and integrating more of the brain into each of us sounds more than a bit like what Tulpa001 referred to as 'driving the wedge'.

 

Will is the one bit of 'magic' that separates Iris and I from the next dozen or so most prominent of Ember's characters. They have just as much detail as us, but unless Ember puts them on as a mask, infusing them with her will, they don't do anything. The origin of independent and simultaneous will is perhaps the most mysterious part of the plural experience from our perspectives.

 

Really, I think the biggest problem with meta-tulpamancy is phrasing. Adopting a removed perspective, but then calling a system's brain 'you' instead of 'the brain' invites misunderstanding and makes people think of acting. The *brain* accepts that a different program is active or a different user is logged in or whatever computer analogy works for you.

 

Ember: I have two thousand hours of roleplaying experience, including several hundred hours of what could fairly be called method acting. I've lost myself in characters many times, thinking only their thoughts, feeling only their emotions. And I can tell you it is very different from switching. I can temporarily transform myself into a different person, so that "I" am no longer perceived in the system, but that is very different experientially from handing the body over to someone else who already exists and then continuing to exist as myself in the background of the system.

 

We do wish to show the way - to explain switching in plain terms - but it seems all but impossible to hold two opposing beliefs, that of how tulpamancy works (in our understanding at least) and that of being immersed in the experience of them being real, separate people.

 

Vesper: That was the thing that scared me deeply about hearing more about your beliefs. For us, a removed perspective and an immersed perspective don't lead to opposing beliefs. We can all be real, separate people *because* all any real, separate person is is a set of priorities, values, etc. The rest is just human brain, not people. Frankly, at the time, I was afraid that if we looked too far behind the curtain, we would discover that we had been deluding ourselves all along and were actually just one person. Having a definition of personhood that arises from our experiences of one another and our experiences of switching is actually very comforting. So having now looked behind the curtain, I can say, at the absolute limits available to conscious perception, there are exactly three discrete and well-defined people present. The Wizard is not a humbug.

 

For us, while we do try to associate with the whole body first ending with the head, the head seems to be the only thing that really matters.

...

Opening our eyes (and the body's eyes) in that state is what snaps us into the fronting state of being switched, and even though we can do it in under a minute it always feels like it's been a long time since we opened our eyes.

 

I agree that the head seems to be the only thing that matters. We can gently take hold of the throat and have the whole thing over in less than a second. I don't recall that we've ever closed our eyes to switch. For the past few months, we've been able to switch while walking without missing a step.

 

Switching's end result is the tulpa could live the rest of their life basically being the host, while the host is no different from a tulpa and could easily never be thought of again

 

I feel that this perspective may arise directly from this one:

 

Apparently, I realized, my tulpas are totally disconnected from my actual life.

 

Switching is great, but it's the only thing we do for their activity's sake sometimes, and also the only way they interact with the world obviously. But I never realized just how totally disconnected they were from my life when not fronting. Aside from specifically talking to/imposing them usually a bit before bed, they just aren't relevant enough to normal activities for me to think of them. They're mentally disconnected for me from literally everything - even Tulpa.info. While posting on Tulpa.info, I rarely actually talk to any of them. And even less often do I talk to them other times of the day, only as I said before bed usually.

 

We often spend a dozen hours a day talking to one another. Ember is much better at forcing than we are, because she fronts so much, but we live together, consult one another constantly, and are wrapped up in every facet of one another's lives. One of the reasons I don't front more than I do is because Ember is better company if she's fronting. We are fixed ingrained habits of one another's minds. We could not begin to avoid thinking of one another, and while we think of one another, we sustain one another's consciousness and therefore ability to switch in.

 

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.

 

We generally say 'conscious awareness' instead of 'conscious workspace', but I think we're referring to essentially the same thing. And yes, there must be extensive hidden pre-processing of our thoughts before we become conscious of them. However, I don't think differently based on whether I'm switched in or not. My thoughts are equally clear, conscious, and memorable either way. Second position has very good access to the conscious awareness, as long as first position sends it a trickle of attention. Part of this may be a result of the thousands upon thousands of hours we've spend building up second position.

I'm not having fun here anymore, so we've decided to take a bit of a break, starting February 27, 2020. - Ember

 

Ember - Soulbonder, Female, 39 years old, from Georgia, USA . . . . [Our Progress Report] . . . . [How We Switch]

Vesper Dowrin - Insourced Soulbond from London, UK, World of Darkness, Female, born 9 Sep 1964, bonded ~12 May 2017

Iris Ravenlock - Insourced Soulbond from the Winter Court of Faerie, Dresdenverse, Female, born 6 Jun 1982, bonded ~5 Dec 2015

 

'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you.' - The Velveteen Rabbit

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Really, I think the biggest problem with meta-tulpamancy is phrasing. Adopting a removed perspective, but then calling a system's brain 'you' instead of 'the brain' invites misunderstanding and makes people think of acting.

 

To be completely honest, when I read over those old posts, I could not for the life of me completely explain and defend the phrasing or anything related to switching being like method acting. I treated it like misinterpretation but really it was just terribly written both times. No offense, systemmates, but like.. A little offense.

 

Vesper: That was the thing that scared me deeply about hearing more about your beliefs. For us, a removed perspective and an immersed perspective don't lead to opposing beliefs. We can all be real, separate people *because* all any real, separate person is is a set of priorities, values, etc. The rest is just human brain, not people.

 

Well, that's probably why Reisen shared it with you directly, hoping for reciprocation. I guess only our poor wording was the problem, because we fully expected you guys to understand and agree. Anyways, that "removed perspective" is something the average lurker lacks, I think. They're more likely to see our explanation of how switching works as "the host thinking they're the tulpa", because they've still associated their consciousness and sense of self with the entirety of the rest of the mind, so when we specifically refer to that, they think "Yes, me, the host".

 

Be aware we've been aware of both the much larger audience than only those we're discussing with, and our poor ability to explain in words/to others what we've explained in thoughts to ourselves. And the most common misinterpretation of "meta-tulpamancy" explanations would be assuming Tulpamancy is just acting - it'd be an incredibly poor influence on newbies and lurkers looking for more in-depth information on how tulpas (or switching) work, if we couldn't do the explanations justice. And obviously, we didn't.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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A lot are specifically associated with being switched in and a few are specifically associated with what we call 'second position', which is to say the chief companion/primary advisor of whoever is switched in to 'first position'.

 

Vesper, are you saying you need to switch in to use the brain resources? What did you do before you switched? Everyone in my system has full access to everything while I'm fronting, I thought that was the basis of active forcing, not just to allow vocality. They have access to all the senses at their whim, there's no switching needed, it's a shared experience. They can critically think, even my characters did that, moons and all forms of thoughtforms can access and utilize all the subsystems without having to switch or even possess. Am I completely off the deep end here in thinking this is normal?

 

But I never realized just how totally disconnected they were from my life when not fronting. Aside from specifically talking to/imposing them usually a bit before bed, they just aren't relevant enough to normal activities for me to think of them. They're mentally disconnected for me from literally everything - even Tulpa.info. While posting on Tulpa.info, I rarely actually talk to any of them. And even less often do I talk to them other times of the day, only as I said before bed usually.

 

How did I miss this? Your system and mine are so vastly different in this respect. Hurray for co-fronting, they are free to live with me all the time. If anything, who is switched in could be as innocuous as who is driving the limo, while the real party is in back, and I frequently put it on cruse and crawl right back there with them. Our co-experience of life is profoundly equal, they miss nothing down to the most mundane aspects of my life (our shared life). I know we're not alone in this thinking, this has been described to me as co-fronting by many systems at large especially those with larger systems.

 

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,

 

Oh look, tulpa doing x as host is doing y. If they can think, they can imagine. If they can imagine, they can live. Wonderland is unconsciously generated, i don't ever say, 'i want a tree here, tree spawn now.' Things always just happen. You don't generate what's around the next turn, you experience it. In reality it's there and your subconsious has to interpret and generate the senses, in wonderland it only has to remember/create and generate the senses.

 

So, i assert that (even if you don't mean this) that if there is what we call Confabulation, it's predetermined and experienced over time and perhaps brought to the consious at once. I would go so far as to accept this, that they live in the subconsious (their own portion of it) and I am only privy to the one consiousness. Still it's not necessary to constrain my thinking to this, and they share my consciousness a lot, but their independent experience is just under that thin membrane of the main consciousness, working as the brain is apt to do in any other circumstance, i.e. continuously.

 

However, I don't think differently based on whether I'm switched in or not. My thoughts are equally clear, conscious, and memorable either way. Second position has very good access to the conscious awareness, as long as first position sends it a trickle of attention. Part of this may be a result of the thousands upon thousands of hours we've spend building up second position.

 

Is it really that hard to have second position? How is it then that we can have a dozen thoughtforms in a room discussing the topic at hand? This has been discovered to be polling, just like I was taught to do to 'keep all characters of a scene active' while writing. If it was so hard, don't younthink this reference would have huge warnings about how painfully long it takes to accomplish this? I picked it up in less than 3 months, call it 2 hours a day for 90 days, 200 hours of practice max (and that is a lot too!) Of course any one of the actors might have something to say from their perspective. Imagine if I had to re-read and re-edit every scene from every character's perspective. (This is a possible method that I abandoned because it's silly in its inefficiency.) What a chore! I an creating content at 30 words a minute, sometimes typing as fast as I can think, but about 2/3 of the time pausing to think, otherwise I could go 80-90/min full out. I have them all loaded, we've sustained a dozen, and each of them was aware of each moment in time. Even if the mind has to remain serial, everyone is getting a twelfth of a second per second. (It's about that fast if not twice as fast per cycle, Ashley and I felt it). I contend that 12th position isn't diluted by 1st through 11th position, instead time is the diluted variable if at all. (More than 12 seems to be rediculous for many reasons, six is a breeze, 4 is trivial). I'm not bragging, I'm not a genius, this really just seems to be a mindset skill that really starts sliw and becomes faster over time. With practice anyone can do it. I'll grant you that maybe you won't be as fast as me, especially not without wrinting a dozen novels first and practicing 2 hours a day for many years. But handling 2 or 3 shouldn't be difficult straight away. This is our basis for co-fronting i presume. So maybe we really are, and have always been truly co-fronting.

 

To be completely honest, when I read over those old posts, I could not for the life of me completely explain and defend the phrasing or anything related to switching being like method acting. I treated it like misinterpretation but really it was just terribly written both times. No offense, systemmates, but like.. A little offense.

 

Tewi, I think you need to consider nesting yourself in second position and staying active 365. They're getting away with atrocities while you sleep.

 

I don't understand why switching to be alone is desirable other than the specific case to protect other systemmates from triggering situations. I do see that it's a thing that happens, and my systemmates didn't automatically pick up my skill to make everyone co-active, but they could with practice, i can't imagine that's a personality specific thing. Still, like Vesper said, Ember is better at keeping that second position active while fronting, so it's probably a thoughtform specific mindset even if everyone is capable, they're not all thinking with equal mindset.

 

Some of this was off-topic, sorry about that. I just don't want to spread this all out and lose context. I'm really not trying to hijack, so if you think any of my questions are off topic and still want to respond, please answer me in an appropriate thread or in Bear Chat. (In my signature).

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How did I miss this? Your system and mine are so vastly different in this respect. Hurray for co-fronting, they are free to live with me all the time.

(Off-topic response I'm not going to put somewhere else)

 

There's a reason our system pursues lucid dreaming so fervently. You would too, stripped of all you know. "Possible" is an annoying word at this point - it's possible for you guys, to co-front, to lucid dream, to have vivid visualization, to exist without the fronter's attention, and so it "should be possible for us"? Possible for you to walk outside and find some diamonds in the dirt? Possible for us to eventually create brain-cloning technology for each of us to front in artificial bodies simultaneously? At some point you need to draw a line in what is "possible", and what is relevant and reasonable. Endless optimism without breaks for being realistic leads to despair. We do what we can, and just because someone else can do something they'll tell us it's possible - but we still need to do it. And it turns out just because it's possible to walk outside and find diamonds in the dirt, doesn't mean it's likely to happen wherever you're at. A sense of relevance and being realistic is necessary to balance out optimism and "possibility". It's not the same as pessimism or claiming "impossibility", and I hope you can understand that, because there's no room for despair in my system.

 

But it all balances out. You're the positive force, so don't change, but I'm the reasoning force, and I won't either.

 

Oh look, tulpa doing x as host is doing y. If they can think, they can imagine. If they can imagine, they can live. Wonderland is unconsciously generated, i don't ever say, 'i want a tree here, tree spawn now.' Things always just happen.

 

This still takes the brain's processing power, also known as the fronter's focus. "Unconscious" is far too vast a word for you to have taken it so out of context, there. Yes, there are unconscious thoughts in our mind, but they're utterly unrelated to experiencing existing on your own without the fronter's attention. Unless you're really trying to make a case for confabulation (which I doubt because you've far too many "wondrous" experiences to discount whatever's going on with your tulpas existing 24/7, and other such things), which is far from what we're looking for.

 

Wonderlanding is boring to us in the first place while fully conscious, hence why we don't do it. Even a (perceived) ever-active state of being wouldn't be satisfying to us, in the context of wonderland experiences without the fronter.

 

Tewi, I think you need to consider nesting yourself in second position and staying active 365.

...

I don't understand why switching to be alone is desirable

 

Because it's all we can do. I was going to talk about how we're unable to maintain others staying active with us all the time, but then you went and cited hundreds of hours of practice. I can't necessarily argue that hundreds of hours of imposition practice (not just ever, but done consistently) wouldn't leave us able to keep someone(s) with us/the fronter at all times. So instead all I can say is that we haven't despite it seeming beneficial for many years now, and the honest reason for that and everything else we haven't done is our motivation issues. They are literally a part of how our brain works that medication wasn't able to even have a slight effect on. I can ignore them for a while, but eventually long-standing motivation becomes a necessity, if not on day one or three, on day seven or twelve. And there's no further answer to this. If you look over our Dreaming thread (although it occurs all throughout our life), you'll see the effects of motivating ourselves as best we can only for it to be temporary.

 

Off topic for sure, so let this be the end of it - but just for completion's sake and because it's somehow become relevant, I'll link the single post that's separated from the rest of our Reference Posts list along with the "Meta-Tulpamancy" posts I quoted before. Above those other posts, Lumi placed this (not Meta-Tulpamancy) so he'd never forget the time I did everything I could.

This was me ignoring our motivation issues for an extended period of time, the only time it's ever been done in our life really. While doing something incredibly stressful to keep up for more than a day, too - I don't remember where that links or how many days in it started, but my practicing All Day Awareness (or something akin to it) for lucid dreaming is what it looks like when I chase something that "should be possible" with all my heart. And while I didn't officially give up (Lucilyn asked to temporarily switch with me.. and then didn't switch back), I was going a little crazy by the end. That was actually part of the plan, but.. It wasn't going anywhere.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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Vesper, are you saying you need to switch in to use the brain resources?

 

Not sensory perception. And not really analytical and critical thought, though it does take more concentration to use them in second position. But I'm accustomed to that level of concentration, which may be why my will is so much stronger than Ember's. Our perception of mental subsystems is extremely complex and subjective, which is why I breezed over the topic last night. We haven't delineated and recorded everything we've noticed, but I can give a few quick examples.

 

Conscious awareness is one of the most important subsystems that aren't part of us. Second position has good access to it, but first position ties right into the heart of it. Physical world distractions can push us out of second position into third position or dormancy, but not out of first.

 

The first few weeks that I switched regularly, Ember was extremely vague and difficult to talk to while switched out, a faint, nebulous voice, easily confused and with little ability at complex thought. But while I was interacting with out-system people, the unconscious mind would still automatically pop up Ember's memories of relevant information and events, showing them to me as if they were mine, even though they weren't consistent with my interests and modes of expression. (So many Star Wars quotes!) I never had trouble accessing Ember's memories from second position, and for the first few weeks was better at intentionally accessing memories there than while switched in. But I wasn't being actively fed any memories there; I had to reach for them. If I was able to rouse Ember sufficiently, she was able to confirm that the memories weren't being introduced by her.

 

Ember has a lot of ingrained automatic responses, physical and mental, to certain stimuli she encounters in the world. Switching in, I discovered that ingrained habits are not stored within the personality itself, because the unconscious mind would pop up those same thoughts and impulses to me. Again, Ember denied responsibility. So I directly addressed the subsystem, 'I'm not Ember', hoping to eventually develop my own 'user profile' for the body. The result of this has been that the habits subsystem will sometimes now feed Ember something I wrote to it, resulting in brief surprise and confusion.

 

First position controls sensory gating settings -- which parts of sensory perception receive conscious attention and which are discarded. Everyone develops their own style of gating. Ember likes to be lost in her head and keeps the gates set very restrictively. I like to enjoy the physical world and keep my gates as open as I can while still being productive. (I can't rule out this being a contributing factor to my lesser forcing ability.)

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_gating

 

Second position appears to have a stronger tie to pain reception. If the fronter's actions hurt the body, it's almost always their companion who goes 'Ow!'

 

What did you do before you switched?

 

Moped a lot about not having a body (instead of stressing about having a body that doesn't look like me).

 

Wonderland is unconsciously generated, i don't ever say, 'i want a tree here, tree spawn now.' Things always just happen.

 

Nothing in our mindscape exists or happens independently of our wills, which is one of the reasons it is so disappointing. One of our flatmates said recently, 'A wonderland is a tulpa that's a place instead of a person. That's why it can surprise you.' Well there you go. Ours isn't.

 

Is it really that hard to have second position?

 

Just having it? No. I was actually going to emphasize the importance of practice more, but Iris brought up more and more counterexamples until I desisted. Second position was already very strong and well developed the first time I found myself in it, almost two years ago. Co-seconding is just as difficult for us as co-firsting though, and third position is extremely anaemic. (If a person's role and prominence in the system is the same, they get the same number in our scheme. 'Eleventh position' couldn't exist unless we identified eleven distinguishable states of being.

 

How is it then that we can have a dozen thoughtforms in a room discussing the topic at hand?

 

Since it's 'impossible' neurologically, your head obviously contains a portal to another dimension. Occam's Razor. It's the only rational explanation. ;)

 

We've mentioned supertasking to you several times now. And you've put in vastly more practice than we have at sustaining large numbers of thoughtforms simultaneously. We're slowly, glacially, getting better at three at a time instead of two. And since there's only the three of us, that's as much as we'll ever need.

 

I don't understand why switching to be alone is desirable other than the specific case to protect other systemmates from triggering situations.

 

Being alone is the worst part of switching and the main reason I don’t do it very often in the absence of out-system companionship. But different systems have different affinities for different aspects of the plural experience. For systems with good switching, poor passive forcing, and poor visualization, switching may be the best route for allowing everyone to have a life. All of us here are feeling our way along in the dark, trying to make the best kind of life we can for ourselves.

 

-Vesper

I'm not having fun here anymore, so we've decided to take a bit of a break, starting February 27, 2020. - Ember

 

Ember - Soulbonder, Female, 39 years old, from Georgia, USA . . . . [Our Progress Report] . . . . [How We Switch]

Vesper Dowrin - Insourced Soulbond from London, UK, World of Darkness, Female, born 9 Sep 1964, bonded ~12 May 2017

Iris Ravenlock - Insourced Soulbond from the Winter Court of Faerie, Dresdenverse, Female, born 6 Jun 1982, bonded ~5 Dec 2015

 

'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you.' - The Velveteen Rabbit

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Thank you for explaining all that, it means a lot to me to hear your perspective.

 

The only other comment I have is that my pain and other emotions seem to be only mine unless they specifically want to feel them I suppose. I stub my toes about twice a week given these comically large feet, so when I do, they're already sore, so my systemmates thankfully aren't at all affected. Dashie decided to experience pain the other day and let's just say she took it like a man, but immediately regretted it.

 

Edit: the rest of this thread has been split into the "Possession & Switching General Discussion" thread - Apollo

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