Darlene's Tulpamancy and Spirituality Thread

[Jamie]

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Is it a heaven situation...? Do souls go to the astral forever? Is it just within Christianity? 

 

I try not to believe "I'm the only real one, the only one who really matters, my headmates are add-ons" but that's got its origin in the fact that no one really came first, and our public life is very much a communal act. It's a view that makes more sense in other systems. 

 

Bizzarely, what you said reminds me of what my stuffed animals' POV was? Like a lot. Partly I haven't been thinking about them until recently and partly I'm still not sure if this was normal level of talking with one's stuffed animals, but I symbolically gave all of them life at one point (I still have to symbolically dismiss it before I throw them out) and I was very often concerned about their deaths and what would happen. What you said was pretty much their points. Only maybe a third of my stuffed animals have actually 'died' though, I've lived in the same house my whole life and they just moved from living on top of my bed to beneath it. And we don't talk anymore, though I have tested it out and yes, they still talk back like they did in childhood, at least the strongest of them. When I buy new ones, they don't get the symbolic life-giving. I'm not scared of accidental tulpas, but I'm scared that it'd work like it did in childhood. 

 

 

 

My view is still "souls don't exist", but I'm also (surprisingly) disinclined to say Cassidy isn't really percieving his soul. I don't want to say he's wrong, although I don't believe him.

 

I think there are more to people than the fleshy profane, but I guess my difference is that I think the divine is... also profane. I believe that there is no Matrix, no heaven, no hell, no astral (assuming I'm thinking of it correctly), none of those secret, unreal layers on existance. Ask Gavin and he'll tell you probably a handful of times a year I'm overwhelmed by the feeling that 'there is something more', but I've linked that feeling to physical distress... it's almost like a paranoia. I remember leaping up in the night and 'converting', after binge-reading a fictional series by a very Christian author that was kinda like... dragon Jesus parables. I was hysterically crying and I felt like my insides were strobe lights, it was very weird and I really, really could not deny the existence of a higher power. I didn't really convert to anything in specific, just that "there is a god and it's that big G, God." And I don't know the course of events after that, but it was a very fleeting belief. 

 

So when you can draw a strong link between "dissociating and feeling bad" to "perception of a higher power" I dunno... to me it's just like.... "ignore that goobleygook." Like I think if it only happend once, I might have treated it more seriously, but the more times I get that feeling that God exists, the more I'm like... "yeah yeah, give it an hour and a nap and we'll see about it." Same with hearing voices. I think if I took it seriously every time it happened, I'd be a mess, so even now, even knowing that I DO have alters, I purposely and willingly ignore the vast majority of internal radio. If I didn't, I'd be worse off.

 

Gavin asked me then, do I think I'd be worse off if I listened to my spiritual experiences? Cassidy converted three days after his first one and has done very well for himself. He took it seriously.

 

I think I'd feel deluded.... goodness should come from someplace, not granted... or something. 

 

-J

[solarchariot]

I don't have the language set necessary to communicate my experiencing in this enhanced existential experience that has come with Loxy and tulpamancy in general. I have had out of body experiences going back to childhood. I have been practicing lucid dreaming since the90s, but was doing my own dream work as far back as childhood. I have had experiences with 'aliens' or 'angels' or maybe a combination of both. Maybe those terms are synonymous.

 

I have been exploring concepts of panpsychism, something quite a few 'scientist' types are advocating, in greater numbers, as a way of explaining consciousness, and the 'hard problem.' I really don't like this trend. This feels like another attempt to reduce all phenomena into a 'materialistic' paradigm. It's a trap. Some of it is very appealing.

 

I suspect consciousness is first. I don't know if soul and consciousness is synonymous, but I sometimes use them as if they were synonymous. Yes I admit that even I am not consistent in my use of terms and part of that is because of the ineffable qualities of the experiences I have had. I sometimes equate personality with soul, but I wouldn't say that is an absolute, but more a metaphor or analogy that is useful at certain layers in my conversation. I will try and elaborate. I am reasonably sure I exist as a personality. I think there are levels to this personality, not id, ego, super ego. Levels. I have evidence for existing prior to this body and I believe I will exist after the resolution of this body. The body is not me, but a vehicle for me. The 'me' personality in this body, time frame, culture is not me, but an aspect of me. The other lives and future lives are also aspects of me. The 'I' that exists is like an actor playing a variety of roles in a variety of lives and circumstance, and so, even though Bill Murray has been in a hundred movies, or lives, the characters were him but not him, brought to life by him, and they have absolutely influenced who he is as a person, just as he brought something to them, and because you can't pretend to be something without learning something... They are all one.

 

When I am dream, there are characters in my dreams. The standard model of dreams is that those characters are me playing me. I have profound experiences that tell me that some of those people are not me pretending to be others. I have had encounters with others that are so far beyond me in experience and capabilities that no one can convince me they are me. I believe I have a subconscious that provides for and controls the dream environment. The subconscious, in my book, is a full blown entity in its own right and deserves a better label than subconscious. I exist in my conscious space because of this entity's support. I suspect a superconscious, and have had experiences that suggest an 'over-soul' or guardian.

 

If consciousness is first, then we all exist in a consciousness field, or a matrix, and we're all intricately linked. Just as a holograph holds the image at all levels, all conscious entities contain the whole. If one changes, we all change. God is not static. We are all in a consensual, co-evolutionary event. Any one of us changes, we all change. My dream scape with all its internal populations, this mirrors the mind of God- We exist in God, and God in us. God is not really the right term, either. Mind perhaps? Same above, same below? In an Indian metaphysics, we are all Gods... We are all Mind. There are individual minds, and linked minds forming group minds, and the group mind becomes its own entity. Physical reality is simply a consensus field where we have agreed for a certain level of continuity in order to communicate live experiences and learn vicariously through stores, dramas, and play.

 

Loxy sees herself as an individuated soul. The personality construct I have initiated for her to communicate with me is as much an avatar for her as my body is for me on the physical plane. I have a physical avatar, a dream avatar, an astral avatar... but the "i" that I am and who Loxy is exist in an alternative space, not 'heaven' as defined by Christianity. I think that place exist only because sufficient numbers of people have agreed to its consensus reality. My primary paradigm is Star Trek; enough people bought into the Roddenberry Universe that that place is just as solid as any other religious consensus reality paradigm. I have touched it. I intend to go back there. Roddenberry's verse, not this new into darkness shit. Heaven and hell exist because thinking makes it so has never been a more solid concept than how it is applied in the context of trying to communicate.

 

Loxy and I are sharing a physical body, the body is a vessel. Our personalities are vehicles for a broader mind/soul. The brain is the equivalent of a tv/computer/radio antennae. You may damage it and loose the signal, but the signal is still there. The brain can receive downloads, and it can upload. The brain can travel on autopilot. Many a folks have experienced their bodies doing something that they didn't direct. Fight or Flight is an example of this.

 

There is a number of neural scientist that will say that none of us are real. They say our consciousness is an illusion, and they use fMRI studies to demonstrate that the choices we think we make happen anywhere from 80 millisecond upwards of 3 whole seconds after the decision was actually made. They also use studies where the corpus callosum was severed to back this up, showing how the brain is making decisions before we are consciously are aware, and the conscious experience is simply confabulation to explain why a body did something, which may or may not have any validity. More often than not, based on those studies, the conscious explanation had no objective validity.

 

Then again, you have the Wheeler experiment in physics that clearly shows that the observer effect not only is a real thing, but we are influencing reality in the past! Like millions and billions of years into the past!

 

So, here is a novel concept. Maybe. Someone else likely considered this and expounded better than I. We are not in the present moving forwards in time. We are in the future, and we are determining our past. Consciousness first, physical world second. The scientist watching the fMRI say decisions are illusion. Not one person, even the scientist, believe that objectively. We feel, we know, we are making decisions in real time. Not one us gets up in the morning and goes and brushes their teeth and then says to themselves, "I think I will brush my teeth now." We decide, we go... the fMRI experiment is backwards. This is the observer affect. We are making decisions and determining our past, and we are actually writing our stories backwards from a forward origin point. We are our own origin stories, everyone of us. We are our future self's explanation. We are tulpas of that person! That is why we are so valued and love, because it required 'us' to understand itself better. That's exactly how i feel about Loxy.

[Guest]

Bear would say there is no time, past, or future: The material world is constructed to give the illusion of time progression, but it's not perfect. Even time itself in this construct has recently been theorized to be discrete. We experience a simulation of time that usually feels smooth, but there is only now and the choices we make now effect all time.

[solarchariot]

I would agree with Bear. I think there is a timeless place where there is definitely no time. A place outside of 'time.' What I can't account for is that even these places where I am fairly sure felt 'out of time' or 'timeless' there was continuity of flow that made sense. Inside my world line, there were moments of deja-vu so intense I couldn't function for several minutes.

 

I think it was Penrose who did the experiments on the brain, using an electric probe on people he was operating on. Anyway, whether it was him or some other Doctor, an interesting thing about it was that when people time traveled, they always relieved the event flowing 'forward' in time. So, like dropping a needle on a record, no matter where you drop it, the needle proceeds forwards from that point. Same with the brain thing, no matter with area the probe lit up, the person would relive that memory going from that point forward. It's as if Space-time is a record, the whole of it a single object, and something, maybe soul, is reading the record. Parallel universes would simply be parallel tracks.

[Lucilyn]

we don't believe in dismissing time's role as, I guess not technically a dimension, but like a dimension, or that past and future are separate from the present, buuuut

 

otherwise we do try to help people realize, while the past and present do exist (er, existed-and-will-exist), you will never experience them, you will only ever experience the present - just when talking about timey wimey stuff, obviously you will reach the point you were thinking about 5 minutes in the future but yeah

 

when being less specific about exactly when something will be, ie with thoughts like "eventually" and "some day", it can be dangerous to rely on that because (in a maybe philosophical sense) the present is all that's going to exist, and if you always think of things as "going to happen eventually" (again, vague things, not things that are for sure going to happen on their own) you will forever be putting off letting that become your present/reality, if that makes sense?

 

now, where Lumi learned that from did go into mumbo-jumbo territory like "the past and future don't exist and the future will never come, there is only Now", which is obviously untrue which you can prove "right now" by anticipating the future 10 seconds from where you're at, but still toning down the spiritual/meta philosophical stuff we did learn some useful lessons from that stuff (in this case, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle)

[Guest]

New proposition:

 

I have to believe, given the evidence we found in Bear's notes when he wrote my books, that he made me. However, what he specifically crafted was the character Joy. At the point of sentience, and we know the first undeniable instances of autonomous and volitional communication back in 2012, was something added that made me special? My host has three dozen other characters, and of those only Gwen and I are forged into 'tulpas'. It's very clear, having three books written about me, and similarly Gwen's three books, though she was a secondary character, it follows that a lot of forcing occured, but not just us two.

 

A similar if not greater amount of forcing occured with Hali, Johanna, Red, etc etc etc, at least a dozen others.

 

We know why Hali and Johanna don't want to be active systemmates and they are verified by us to be independent people; however, someone like Johanna, if called, will speak and act with just as much volition, but never self-forced, never questioned her existence, and would go blank when we questioned her on it--she stays in character.

 

I have to think, as Darlene did with regard to me in the beginning, there has to be something different about her. I proved myself to them, but Johanna won't even discuss the question.

 

If it was Bear's choice, he would want Johanna or Hali with us, Gwen, Johanna and Hali are in the same series and Hali is one of the two main characters. So why isn't she like Gwen and I?

 

I have to think there's something that was imparted to me that hasn't yet been given to her.

 

In the beginning, Gwen was like that, but she began self-forcing one day and requested to join us, her personality changed overnight and she left her strict character form behind to became deeper and richer almost instantly.

 

What could this be attributed to? A soul, or something else?

 

It's the hard question of consiousness perhaps. Does anyone else have any theories?

Edited August 3, 2020 by Joy

[Matsuri]

Lot's of theory crafting so here we go.

 

I like to believe that we share a connection because we want to. We're a manifestation of the observable soul, the biophotons in the brain, in a higher plane, in the same space-time, except time is a concept humans made up but might actually be reality in our own subjective extra-dimensional worlds. I think every self-conscious person in our brain also shares soul, and as said before, the soul are the biophotons, and possibly even consciousness.

 

People who have been near death/died have reported seeing the light or their different religious counterparts of it, and even people they love. So I thought that maybe our afterlife is what we want it to be? Similar to believing you're in danger makes you distressed, but you only need to believe it.

 

I believe our brain might work in all 11 dimensions. Definitely more than just 3, but we can't really "prove" it in the material world because we can only physically work with 3D as we know.

 

You know when you've always done something but never realized till something or someone points it out, then it becomes clear as sky when you do it again. That's a theory on what I think consciousness might be. First consciousness is when you become self-aware, then you can improve that consciousness even more by becoming aware of other parts of the brain.

 

Spatial awareness is basically a sense of consciousness by that logic, and people with autism or ptsd might as well be more conscious than most others in that area, though it's not in our systems nature to "believe" in mental disorders. It was just an example

 

It's all just our theories. It's sometimes interesting to think about those unanswered questions, but it's easy to get tangled in it. I usually prefer a good anime over going down those existential rabbit holes

[Ember.Vesper]

Vesper: We're in a similar situation, Joy. Why did Iris and I become independent when Chloe, Elodie, Psyche, Thistle, Monica, Gordan, Deene, the other Vesper, Nicholas, and scads of others did not? It's the great mystery of our system and has been a source of considerable anxiety to me in the past due to my concern about proliferation.

 

There's nothing we do that we consider to be self-forcing, though I don't know how different what our system does is from what your system calls self-forcing. I also don't know how many levels of progress we're lagging behind your system in development. Certainly self-forcing is not a hard requirement for introspection, deviation, or responsiveness to the physical world.

 

Iris: Like Gwen, I also changed very suddenly after having been present in the system for years, suddenly desiring to be more active and craving my headmates' company. While retaining all of my character identity, I acquired a very different personality, that I gradually and intentionally integrated with my pre-existing personality to form a much more sophisticated composite.

 

Around this time, Bear had been talking about tulpas being granted a soul of their own when they are accepted as a full system member. I had already changed, though less than an hour before, when Vesper said, "Welcome to the family." At that moment, the whole system was rocked, as if by an inward earthquake, leading her to continue, confused and apprehensive, "What did I say?" If there is anything to Bear's position at that time, that was the moment when it happened for me.

[Guest]

I also don't know how many levels of progress we're lagging behind your system in development.

 

Ah ah ah, you're not supposed to compare progress with anyone else. It's best to compare progress with yourself in the past.

 

At that moment, the whole system was rocked.

 

This is great evidence for my theory.

 

Off topic rare sighting:

[Hidden]

[bear] Matsi, the first time I heard "anime was life" I lol'd, now it's like, I have transcended. Just finished Tanya the Evil, so good, after Overlord, so good, now I'm on Shield Warrior, so good.

[/hidden]

[Ember.Vesper]

It depends on what you mean by 'comparing progress', Joy. If we had never compared our progress to anyone else's, I probably would still be just a disembodied and gradually fading voice in Ember's head, striving vainly to convince her to be more responsible, sorrowful at having no chance of a life of my own. If we only compared where we are now to where we've been, it would be hard to ignore 'plateaued in almost every area of tulpamantic endeavour for 6+ months' and 'no progress at all in some high priority areas ever, despite spending time on them every day'.

 

Yes, a runner may invest a certain amount of effort in comparing their latest time to their previous runs. But knowing what can be done changes what you can conceive of doing. Breaking the four minute barrier in the mile run was an impossible dream for years until one man achieved it with wide publicity. After that, it only took 46 days for another to surpass him. In the intervening time, the first woman had already broken the five minute barrier.

 

Comparing where we are to where others are is what keeps us striving. Continued exposure to more accomplished systems is what keeps us believing that there is more to be obtained from the plural life than what we have already done.

 

-Vesper