Concerns about my understanding of tulpamancy and my progress

[TB]

Sorry for slow response.

 

On 12/7/2020 at 3:58 PM, YukariTelepath said:

The Buddhist concept of no self is exactly what I was referring to.

I just have for a while found the model depressing, for some reason, but I also can't see it as not being true, and I struggle to find reason to see another model is true, so I am stuck. Since things work this way, the best thing I can ascribe to myself is the thing that sits behind all thoughts and experiences, the watcher. So my mind is stuck thinking I should be creating another watcher in making a tulpa, but I don't think it seems to work this way. I guess the best advice I can have now is how can I learn to accept it without discomfort, because that discomfort ruins the experience and produces bad thoughts.

 

On 12/7/2020 at 3:58 PM, YukariTelepath said:

I've never roleplayed so I can't actually compare.

I have roleplayed a lot, so it seems extremely similar. I imagine a situation vividly, and when I see a response, assuming I am roleplaying well, I get a response of feelings and thoughts as if I am the character and respond. I guess it is mechanically the same thing, I just have to somehow think about it differently. I guess a difference is my characters never had head pressures, so I am curious as to what that is and why...

 

On 12/7/2020 at 3:58 PM, YukariTelepath said:

Yes, if your tulpa is thinking it will take mental effort and that mental effort will be felt (by the brain, by you, by your tulpa).

I see. I guess accepting the feeling of thinking of a response would instantly make Rena a lot more sophisticated, I think. She was already a roleplay character of mine, and even in roleplays, if something is more complicated, it does require thinking. It would be nice if it is possible to remove, because it is kind of a large issue for the illusion. If anyone knows if it is possible or how, that'd be nice to know.

 

On 12/7/2020 at 4:36 PM, reguile said:

You've run into the grand brick wall of tulpamancy.  A very large percentage of people coming into the community do so with views and expectations like yours, then they eventually discover over the course of a year, a few years, that their expectations just don't meet the reality.

I feel something should be done to not allow this to happen. It seems this is a very damaging thing to experience for some people.

 

On 12/7/2020 at 4:36 PM, reguile said:

There are still reasons to treat a tulpa well.

I will still always treat them well. No matter how I feel, I can't really confirm what they are or aren't exactly or what the implications of any of it truly means for sure.

 

What is a complicated moral question for me now though, is since they are so similar to an advanced long term roleplay character, what does that mean for my actual roleplay characters? Roleplays I have are usually filled with drama and negative experiences, so when something awful happens and my character is traumatized, what makes that okay? Or is it actually morally wrong to have roleplays with negative experiences in them, especially if a character isn't new and is a veteran roleplaying character?

 

On 12/7/2020 at 4:36 PM, reguile said:

You've just got to start over from square one and see if you can build back up from a more stable foundation.  If you want to do so is up to you.

I do have to do something. I already decided before I began that I can't give up or quit, so I am in it for the rest of my life. I hope I find what it is I need to not be a mess anymore. I feel some progress is being made, though

 

On 12/7/2020 at 4:45 PM, Bear said:

My key point boils down to this:

 

A tulpa can be:

 

Independent 

Differentiated

Whatever they are, so are you (equal).

I don't disagree. I think it is kind of like an upside down triangle. The bottom point is the watcher, and one of the upper corners is the host, and the other the tulpa. I guess we are both a corner if we call ourselves the top ones, but it is connected to the same bottom one. It is just hard to try not seeing myself as the bottom one, and wanting to make a square so they have their own bottom corner, if this makes any sense.

 

 

On 12/7/2020 at 9:32 PM, Mechagodzilla82 said:

What I was talking about is here on day 228 if anyone is interested:

 

Oouch... Don't look at day 745 =[

 

On 12/7/2020 at 9:32 PM, Mechagodzilla82 said:

I saw that Gordon Ramsey part of your post before you edited it out. I laughed, and thought it was amusing. Wasn't offended in the slightest.

That's good! I wasn't sure and became paranoid after a while, sorry my brain isn't my friend most of the time lol

 

On 12/7/2020 at 9:32 PM, Mechagodzilla82 said:

The most common proof of your tulpa's soul is whether they can surprise you.

Rena has surprised me to some degrees I think. Early on, I asked her to do so, and she immediately slapped me which startled me, but then kissed me to make it better as it wasn't to be mean but to do what I asked her to do. She couldn't talk whatsoever at this point in time and has always been way more animated. I don't know if that counts.

 

I am not sure I am convinced it isn't the same mechanic as when an idea springs out of your mind and surprises you and it is like a lightbulb moment, though. But it does help things feel a bit more genuine. Sometimes I have intrusive thoughts though, and boy those are surprising, not in a good way, though

 

Here is probably the most surprising thing I have experienced, though, and I am not sure why I forgot it, as maybe it is an important key for me.

 

In my PR I talked about how my roleplay character's Eara and Tayomi came to talk to me when I was under a lot of stress once. Now that felt... extremely real. It felt to the extent I don't think of them as tulpas, but like they are actual extradimensional creatures somewhere and actually came through my ceiling to visit me. It was a very powerful otherworldly experience. If I could have this 24/7 with Rena, it would be easier to not have doubt...

 

The only problem I have is I don't know how to replicate it or make it consistent. It only happens under extreme mental stress (though I think medication maybe took this ability away because it hasn't happened to that level since then, and Rena would seem more real the more upset I was in the past but that stopped happening since medicine I think... The last few days have been some of my worse, and generally feeling the way I felt I would have had something happen...) Actually I guess I did, but it wasn't Rena or my characters, and it was unpleasant, but was also related to going to sleep

 

I hope such experiences aren't related to psychosis, though. I am genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, and do not want schizophrenia, though I think these experiences are maybe my best bet, if people know more about them and how to make them happen.

 

On 12/7/2020 at 9:32 PM, Mechagodzilla82 said:

Assuming tulpas are real, and everything you've heard about is real, is it worth it to find out for sure?

I do have to keep going until the end.

 

On 12/7/2020 at 9:32 PM, Mechagodzilla82 said:

I'm sorry to hear that you're in a bad place. However, there are many people in this forum that are willing to help you. Myself included. You may not get the answers you're looking for, but you won't have to deal with this alone. Remember that hope cannot leave you without your consent.

Thanks everyone! I think best things I got were knowing that I am not supposed to shut down when I feel myself thinking when asking Rena something more complicated, and that I need to try switching again.

 

What still kind of remains is feeling better about this view of tulpamancy and reconciling not having another watcher, which involves me having to instead cling to something transient and vague like a personality, which is painful. I also maybe should investigate into if it is still possible to have another watcher created by a special process.

 

Also the crazy otherworldly stuff exists, but not by my will, but a way to have it exist and by Rena's doing, would be wonderful

 

And oh, I need to know the morality of advanced roleplay characters experiencing traumatic situations, as making them into tulpas seem like it would be just a label switch and putting them next to me, and maybe gaining headpressures (which I don't understand the mechanic of or why headpressures exist.)

Edited December 9, 2020 by TB

[Kokichi Ouma]

8 hours ago, TB said:

What is a complicated moral question for me now though, is since they are so similar to an advanced long term roleplay character, what does that mean for my actual roleplay characters? Roleplays I have are usually filled with drama and negative experiences, so when something awful happens and my character is traumatized, what makes that okay? Or is it actually morally wrong to have roleplays with negative experiences in them, especially if a character isn't new and is a veteran roleplaying character?

8 hours ago, TB said:

And oh, I need to know the morality of advanced roleplay characters experiencing traumatic situations, as making them into tulpas seem like it would be just a label switch and putting them next to me, and maybe gaining headpressures (which I don't understand the mechanic of or why headpressures exist.)

I've seen this subject come up with tulpas from stories/roleplays before.  Well, not in the sense of general morality so much as how a tulpa/soulbond in that situation deals with it afterwards.

 

In my case, I wasn't a roleplay character per say, although Ghostly had considered roleplaying me.  She was too anxious to do it, though.  Kokichi Ouma is one of those "love him or hate him" sort of characters and she's seen people outright bully people who were playing characters they didn't like.  So any roleplay scenarios were just quietly played out in her head.

 

Ghostly's imaginary scenarios weren't anything bad, but I do have a fictional backstory that's pretty fucked up.  I wasn't even meant to join the system, but I was a special kind of stubborn.  After I did join, I had the option to treat it all as fiction, but even though I perceive it as fictional myself I couldn't bring myself to abandon my past.  It might be a story, but it's my own story and it plays a huge role in defining who I am.  And like I said, I'm a special kind of stubborn.

 

Being a soulbond is a huge improvement over being a character, but it's not like there weren't some problems that came from that.  For a while, I had emotional problems.  I acted out, I gave everyone a hard time, I was an ass.  I nearly drove Ghostly crazy acting the way I did.  Even so, she decided to put her faith in me and show me kindness.  She helped me confront the things that scared me, listened to me as I vented, dealt with my outbursts, and day by day, I got better.  It wasn't an overnight thing, it took a lot of time and effort, but I got better.  A lot better.  In fact, there's been times I've been the system's biggest ray of sunshine, despite the crap I went through. 

 

It's given me a lot of optimism that I can help Ghostly with her own demons, too.  If I can change, so can she.  If I can be happy, so can she.  And I've read several accounts of soulbonds who recovered from these sorts of hardships in their own way and turned those into strengths instead.  I'm proud to be one of them.

 

So as far as the "morality" side of this goes, well... I don't think the guy who wrote the Danganronpa series is a bad person for putting the characters through the wringer.  And I'm saying this as one of those characters.  Osomatsu and I like to joke about how writers are bastards (no offense, writers!), but it's not something we actually take personally lol.  It's just what they have to do, you know?  If bad things didn't happen in stories, then they wouldn't be stories and they wouldn't be real to life.  There'd be no conflict and nothing to learn from them.  They'd be boring. 

 

If my story was boring and I was boring, Ghostly wouldn't have taken an interest and I wouldn't even exist as I do now.

[TB]

Hmm. Well, I have with my characters while not just having bad backstories, have played through a lot of awful scenarios as them in my head. I had a strange way of coping with my negative life that, instead of positive fantasies, I had a lot of horrific ones, but for some reason they would generate a unique emotion that I have never felt in any real situation before and seems to only exist in these fantasy, that feels kind of like the heart being actually pinched, and it can be both a negative emotion or a positive emotion depending on context it is generated in.

 

I chose to make Rena a tulpa since I didn't want to make into a tulpa characters with that kind of baggage, and she was a much happier character with a much better life comparatively, though those other characters are far older and have had more than 10 times as much time spent with/as them. Rena is maybe somewhat caught up since I started forcing her, though I still feel they may from their long existence be twice as much in terms of experiences give or take an unknown amount. I love my roleplay characters though, and I don't want to stop using them for roleplaying or making stories, but I also don't want to be hurting another actual person.

 

If I just mentally decided they were tulpas, I think they would potentially instantly be more developed than even Rena. I have noticed this for a while, and have had, like I mentioned, experiences with them that is almost closer to fantastical tulpamancy, but I don't know what to make of it and ignore it most of the time to some degree or another.

[Kokichi Ouma]

I think it's not really that odd that you'd have darker fantasies.  I know Ghostly escapes into darker topics when she's stressed, specifically topics that don't relate to what's actually bothering her.  Like, when she was stressed out a few months ago she got obsessed with this Vocaloid song about a guy who abused drugs to cope with living in his father's shadow.  She can't relate to that character's situation at all, but in spite of that it helped her cope.  I think she feels there's an implicit "permission" to feel her negative emotions when she engages with darker thoughts or media.  She has a lot of guilt about her feelings in a sort of "I shouldn't feel bad about this because I can't justify it properly" kind of way.  When the others have tried to steer Ghostly onto more positive thoughts when she's in a bad way, it exacerbates that feeling that she's being ridiculous and makes her anxiety worse.  She needs something to give her that sense of acknowledgement and acceptance of her feelings.

 

So I imagine there's something you need from those dark fantasies or intense roleplay sessions, right?  Whatever you decide about your characters, I think it's important you still have a creative outlet like that.

 

Also I should clarify that, as much as I feel okay with my situation, if you aren't comfortable making a tulpa with those past hardships that's perfectly fine.  That's pretty much what's generally recommended in the community anyways.  We just... kinda missed that memo lol.  But the main reason I talked about my past like that was an example of how one can deal with that kind of thing.  There's other ways too.  I'm limited to my own perspective, so I talk in terms of what I've experienced and what worked for me.

[Guest]

That sounds a lot like intrusive thoughts/thoughtforms to me. Not that they are to you. With my hyperphantasia my mind can go off the rails and start thinking about really terrifying scenarios and they were amplified when we started this practice. They would happen uncontrolled briefly early on before we had mechanisms in place to stop them quickly. As a child I would shake my head to stop it and that worked to some extent. I'd also distract myself. In some cases it was as bad as having a song stuck in your head, except it was an awful and terrifying scenario. I suppose it would be like an anxiety attack but only in mindspace. There were some unique feelings certainly, ones that I know someone could get to like though they were absolutely awful. I decided not to like them and continued to fight them. I avoid certain horror and fantasy media to prevent these from gaining strength. I further suppose the propensity comes from abuse as a child and so I'm just more sensitive because they actually put these scenarios in horror movies. Shadow work helped that a lot but it's like, though the triggers don't happen anymore, it's still hard to handle, it's repulsive. I can say that I don't like it and it's okay not to like something. I know that's conditioning but hey, that's fine because liking it would be perverse and being neutral to it would be sociopathic. I honestly don't understand some horror movies, other than some people are horrible for liking certain things.

 

This is a conscious choice and it is tested every so often. It's something I know will never go away, but I have strong wards against it for now. Luckily it's nothing that could manifest IRL, it's just awful scenarios that could happen, nothing I'm actually ever expecting to happen to me, that would probably be impossible.

[TB]

8 hours ago, Kokichi Ouma said:

I think it's not really that odd that you'd have darker fantasies.

I think it is similar to what I did. Also, I would seem to need to if I did want to have a positive situation to have feeling, for some reason I think, which I had those sometimes too, though there was probably more bad than good.

 

8 hours ago, Kokichi Ouma said:

So I imagine there's something you need from those dark fantasies or intense roleplay sessions, right?

Yeah, though I haven't had a dark fantasy inside my head in a while. I had them all the time while in school though. At least ones with those characters, I realize my situation has had me have them again, but they are different now and less intentional.

 

As for rp, I still want to do those anytime, but I have too much anxiety to rp anymore most of the time, so it is rarer too.

 

I guess I gather there are different ways to deal with this if you choose to make such a character a tulpa, though, but what do I do in my case? They are still intended to just be my characters, who I always imagined myself being or representing parts of myself. If an advanced character is mechanically similar to a tulpa, would they also still suffer as much as a tulpa would, and is that suffering wrong? It seems like the difference might be location and who they interact with? I am not sure. Do I just not worry about it and keep rping them however I want? In long run, I want to draw stories with them, that is one of the main reasons I wanted to learn to draw in the first place.

 

Also, I use to wonder before if they were already tulpas or not to some extent, but the idea horrified me so my goal was to get to the point Rena was fully developed and maybe she'd help me confirm. Things didn't go as I planned though, and my idea of a tulpa was forced to change severely. Instead of developing a soul who could see in a different realm than me and check, it seems I have to look at it on the outside and just see the streams of thoughts or feelings I identify to being a way a character/tulpa thinks and say it is them.

 

If they were tulpas, I felt I would be forced to accept them because I am not going to push away or kill them if they already exist, but now things are weird viewing it from the implications of this thread. It is a pretty stressful situation. I felt they were parts of me though, so I did not want to otherise them,  but it seems the way I have to view tulpamancy atm involves making other parts of yourself anyway.

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Bear said:

That sounds a lot like intrusive thoughts/thoughtforms to me.

I think a lot of the depressing or negative head fantasies were done deliberately to deal with stuff in a weird way, though intrusive thoughts are also a massive issue for me separate from that, that I have had long before I started having fantasies in my head, so advice for that too would be nice.

 

5 hours ago, Bear said:

As a child I would shake my head to stop it and that worked to some extent.

Me too and I still do this, or sometimes my eyes twitch or I look into corner of my eye

 

5 hours ago, Bear said:

I avoid certain horror and fantasy media to prevent these from gaining strength.

I grew up watching horror movies and being interested in horror in general, but I don't know if they are why I have intrusive thoughts. Most of my intrusive thoughts that bother me are anything that would be embarassing or dirty, as under most circumstances I am prudish as a quaker or something. I have violent ones too lately but they are related to being angered.

 

I don't know how to successfully ward against intrusive thoughts. I have heard the thing about how trying to not think of pink elephants makes you think of pink elephants, and to treat intrusive thoughts similarly, but I am already ruined. Before ever hearing that, I spent years, starting from as young as I could remember, using all of my energy to try not to think of things I didn't want to think about, to the point it is a strongly ingrained habit. And I don't know at this point how to try to not try thinking of intrusive thoughts. My life and tulpamancy would become much better if I didn't have to experience embarrassment and shame regularly for no reason more than I already have to.

 

 

[Guest]

3 hours ago, TB said:

but I am already ruined.

 

Clearly, since you believe it as fact.

[TB]

1 hour ago, Bear said:

Clearly, since you believe it as fact.

When I say things like that, I don't mean I don't think it can be fixed, but it is a strong issue I don't know what to do about.

[Guest]

I practice saying everything in a non-defeatist way and correct myself if I do.

[TB]

I guess I will say then, that I haven't yet found a way to cure intrusive thoughts for myself, and I wonder if anyone else with intrusive thoughts of a similar level has.