Can I take both pills? Philosophical speedballing.

[dreampunk]

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

— Morpheus, The Matrix

 

First off I'd like to start by explaining the title. This is just purely intellectual masturbation, so feel free to skip this, altough I try to keep it short and serve as a orientation of the way of how I think about this phenomena. I think the analogy of taking both pills is somewhat accurate on what I am trying to achieve here. I do not wish to let this escalate into tin foil hat-esque journey into the rabbit hole oblivion of delusions, hallucination and what not. Neither I am satisfied with just plain and boring reality. Instead I voyage into the depths of insanity and try to emerge with my sanity intact. Hopefully I bring something worthwhile back.

 

This is my personal progress on self-induced persistent hallucinatory experience. I chose specifically to not use the term tulpa. I will not offer separate explanation for this and I will next define what I aspire to create and that might more than sufficient explanation for this.

 

I will consider myself successful in this experiment when following criteria are fulfilled:

1)The self-induced hallucination is persistent. Meaning when little to no effort on my part is required to perceive it so it's automatic or habitual in nature.

2)Audible, tactile and visual aspects are emphasized. They must be "real" enough (hard define what's real enough, but generally so that I could mistake if even for the briefest of moments for them to be real).

3)The hallucination is consistent. Meaning minimizing variance on appearance between sessions.

 

As you can see, I completely ignored the sentience and separate identity/personality. I am prepared to work a year on this project (maybe more, depending how this goes). I find it ludicrous to assume the personality doesn't take time and effort (I'd expect it would take a lot more than a year to develop a fully mature and complete personality). Do not even ask about sentience. I'll just say it's more roleplaying than true sentience, but maybe I'll prove myself wrong. Probably not. Even if it is possible, I cannot see the advantages of it. I will emphasize this point to only point out the mind's capacity to self-delusion. True sentience will be hard to distinguish from just roleplaying with your subconsciousness (which it would essentially be, but taken bit more far).

 

If I however discover through this exercise the previous points about sentience and separate identity to be wrong, I think it will serve the tulpa creating community to break down the whole process to it's bare components, so the key points are more clearly identifiable. So whatever happens, I will primarily focus only on the hallucinatory aspects of the phenomena and hopefully it will bring some insights into it.

 

I have begun already, but my personal notes are on paper and they would be quite cryptic if posted here. I will organize and "translate" them into sensible words and add my explanations and remove anything personal information I wish not to share (mostly irrelevant fluff, aesthetics and such things which I am not comfortable to share and feel they are irrelevant. I will however share things I am not comfortable to share if I find them somehow relevant).

 

So off I go to "translate" my week worth of haphazard scribbles. As a side note, I try to remember the whole session and write down as exactly as I can, so these scribbles serve me quite well. For the curious they resemble my dream diary entries I used to have as I was dabbling in lucid dreaming.

[waffles]

Clearly you place emphasis on hallucination - in fact, that's all you seem to care about. Why? If you don't care about sentience and whatnot, then why not just take some hallucinogen and cut yourself a few months' work?

[dreampunk]

Clearly you place emphasis on hallucination - in fact, that's all you seem to care about. Why? If you don't care about sentience and whatnot, then why not just take some hallucinogen and cut yourself a few months' work?

 

I knew I forgot something. I meant to write about that too, but lost my train of thought.

Hallucinogens don't work that way.

Anyway, I will answer to that question in my next post and I think it fits rather nicely as an orientation to the description of my first session.

 

But it will have to wait until tomorrow as I have to actually get some sleep.

[Xantan]

It actually sounds like you might be trying to make a servitor. It's like a tulpa without personality or sentience. You can think of them as computer AI, They do what you"program" them to be able to do.

 

Am i correct? if not then i'm sure it'll be much clearer when you describe what kind of person you want them to be.

[dreampunk]

Part two of the preliminary post.

 

In this part I will answer essentially to why I even bother.

 

I'll divide into three separate categories of motivation. The cerebral, primitive and plausibility.

 

Plausibility

 

Short version: I do this because (based on my unrelated experiences in life) it is possible to achieve what I'm trying to accomplish.

 

I'll start of with the one most clearly supporting experience. When I was young, I had quite active and vivid imagination. I have always been (and still am) quite introspective and generally more concerned with my inner realities. So one day I was playing around and stuff on my own. Most of the play took it's course in my mind and for some reason I stopped and tried to imagine a pair of red horns on a person standing nearby. I succeeded and startled as they briefly appeared on him. I however never tried this again and didn't even think about it until recently. So basically I imposed my imagination on reality. And yes I do understand kids are more immersed in their imagination and most of the creative abilities are snuffed out by education system and work.

Second comes my experiences with extreme alcohol induced hangovers. I've had several hangovers (accompanied with sleep deprivation) where I could in a dimly lit room see hypnagogic imagery in my hands (held over the source of light making them darker) or other darker areas. Also if I fixated on them longer, more complex and clear patterns emerged. Faces, objects and what not.

Third is my experiences with lucid dreaming. This is self-explanatory.

 

So these experiences support the plausibility of inducing a hallucinatory experience. The plausibility aspects are the reason I completely ignored the sentience and the reduced importance of "personality" on the subject.

I find it unnecessary to assume sentience is required, possible or beneficial. Same for separation of identity. The memory feats, companionship and various claimed abilities of tulpas do no require sentience nor the separation identity. Companionship: hallucination and roleplaying by subconsciousness. Memory feats can be reproduced with just training. What I am trying to convey here is that making tulpa wont make you achieve you couldn't achieve without them. Also assuming sentience and separation of identity raises more questions and makes it unnecessarily complicated. How would you realistically could even make a distinction with true sentience and mind just acting it's part very well? There are plenty of pitfalls here: delusion, wishful thinking and what not that make it extremely difficult to verify even to yourself.

 

The Cerebral

 

Here I define some of the "higher" motivations I have.

First some overlap here with the previous point so I will not repeat them. The there's just the sensation of awe produced by doing something this magical (this if something, is truly magical). Just reaching towards the limits of mind might be sufficient motivation for doing this. There's also the anti-procrastination effects I believe it will have. If there were one, I would be the World Champion in procrastination. Basically I will try to get myself to commit to some plan and follow it through, hoping it will somehow transfer to other areas in life.

 

The Primitive

 

This basically boils down to sexuality and sex related. It is mindboggling to imagine how it would feel like to have sex with hallucination. A serious competitor to internet pornography I'd say. Also sexuality is pretty strong force of motivation.

 

 

Then there's the how part which is mostly just doing something that sounds reasonable. I chose to use meditation/autosuggestion (where do you even draw the line) coupled with visualization. Time and experience will most likely change the method, but I wanted to keep it as simple as it can get.

[dreampunk]

Log Day #1 15.12.2012

 

This was the first day I formally started working on this project. Before this about few weeks ago I got interested in tulpa phenomena (again, I have dabbled and researched around this subject years ago but more in the metaphysical sense when I was into occultism) as a psychological rather than occult thing.

 

The writing I have done in this short period of time has already clarified and changed a bit about how I think about the whole thing. I started out with just thinking about what kind of entity I want to create and sketched out a personality, traits and aesthetics.

 

I began by turning off all the lights and playing a song on repeat on my phone and put my on my headphones. (For those who are curious it's Cosmosis - Afterglow. It puts me quickly in the right state of mind for meditative work.)

I started formally stating in my mind that I consider this project to be started.

Next I imagined an orb of darkness in front of me.

I imagined a vague female shaped humanoid in there, not giving any definite or specific form besides it being female. I wanted it sort of naturally develop.

The I started giving myself subvocalized suggestions. I stated to myself that this is possible and basically told myself what I told in the previous post about the experiences on plausibility.

Next I began sort of "uploading" the personality and traits I had chosen and memorized previously. (I was originally basing my workings on the faq_man's guide).

Then I began sort of visualization process. I began playing on the form and altering it until it started settling on something pleasing. I wasn't thinking about details just the general form.

Last step I spoke (subvocalized) to her about random things. I had not intentionally named her and one of the last things I did I told her to tell her name. I got no reply and ended the session by visualizing the entity (which now had some basic form) to returning to the orb of darkness (sort of incubating chamber).

This took about 25 minutes and I found myself a bit rusty (it has been a long time since I have previously done any meditation work) and my mind was easily distracted. The song is kind of double edged since at some points it cause me to get distracted, but it also helped me to snap back at the right mood and boosted my concentration.

[Xantan]

What I am trying to convey here is that making tulpa wont make you achieve you couldn't achieve without them.

 

I always assumed this was common knowledge. there's nothing mystical about tulpa, they are a product of our minds and limited by what our minds are capable of. Now i'm curious if some have a differing viewpoint.

 

secondly, i was actually a bit concerned when you laid out your preliminary posts. It seemed as if your intent was to create a fully imposed tulpa, but also to disbelieve anything she says or does as being something you said or made her do. if i am correct in my understanding, you see tulpa as advanced roleplay that gets taken up by subconscious processes so that reactions "appear" to come from a seperate identity?

 

This is very close to what i believe, so if i'm wrong, and you view it differently, i'd love to hear it explained fairly straightforward (ie: 500 words or less). Where we differ may be that while i acknowledge that it may be complicated roleplay, i believe seeing it as a seperate person, and believeing in their sentience, is more conducive to the creation process. Having conversations, and sharing experiences, with a seperate identity is more rewarding than believeing you are just talking to yourself and creating your own answers. This in turn should prove to be a stronger reinforcer for the conditioning.

[dreampunk]

 

I always assumed this was common knowledge. there's nothing mystical about tulpa, they are a product of our minds and limited by what our minds are capable of. Now i'm curious if some have a differing viewpoint.

 

secondly, i was actually a bit concerned when you laid out your preliminary posts. It seemed as if your intent was to create a fully imposed tulpa, but also to disbelieve anything she says or does as being something you said or made her do. if i am correct in my understanding, you see tulpa as advanced roleplay that gets taken up by subconscious processes so that reactions "appear" to come from a seperate identity?

 

This is very close to what i believe, so if i'm wrong, and you view it differently, i'd love to hear it explained fairly straightforward (ie: 500 words or less). Where we differ may be that while i acknowledge that it may be complicated roleplay, i believe seeing it as a seperate person, and believeing in their sentience, is more conducive to the creation process. Having conversations, and sharing experiences, with a seperate identity is more rewarding than believeing you are just talking to yourself and creating your own answers. This in turn should prove to be a stronger reinforcer for the conditioning.

 

I'll start with the sentience. As there currently exists only anecdotal evidence due to the extremely subjective nature of the phenomena, I will attempt to keep my anecdotes as accurate and useful as I can. This is achieved by basing them on scientific and logical principles and theories as much as it is possible.

In the case of assuming sentience, applying Occam's razor leads me to conclude (because it offers no more explanatory power but assumes more) that it is an unnecessary assumption. Thus I'll favor the approach I formerly stated.

 

I agree partly with you however. I believe it can affect positively on the imposition (this is of course purely hypothesizing as I just started, having nothing to test on and anecdotal evidence is just not reliable enough to come into any conclusion). I think fooling the mind into thinking the entity is real might make it easier to impose.

Having more rewarding interaction with my hallucination is quite irrelevant to my current interests. My experiences might prove me otherwise, but I make it point to not assume any more than it is necessary. Even then I should critically examine and outright doubt the sentience to conclude anything about it.

And in the end, implying true separate sentience would also imply something metaphysically separate as well. And that would be just ludicrous based on our current understanding of the laws of physics.

[waffles]

True separate sentience requires separate existence as a mind, but this does not involve delving into the metaphysical. In fact, Occam's Razor isn't as applicable as you may think here, because only one assumption must be made: that the mind and the brain are not as tied together as we think. I'm aware that I'm turning up in your progress report and postulating my own theory, but I'll explain nonetheless.

 

It would be standard practice to assume that base structures of the mind are attributable to base structures of the brain. This means that something like human consciousness is enabled by dedicated structuring, that cannot be uprooted or reconstructed. This would mean that tulpas cannot achieve the same level of sentience as a human, because they would never have the same neural apparatus for such a thing. However, this is not necessarily the case - bear in mind that neuroscience around consciousness is particularly sketchy. Rather, you could make the assumption that regions of the brain are more like specialised computation units, and that a function such as consciousness could potentially be duplicated. Upon this assumption we could postulate that a tulpa could be sentient at the same level as a human, the neural apparatus for such a thing being replicable.

 

The point is that tulpas being sentient is not completely ludicrous, and you should at least keep an open mind towards the matter.

[dreampunk]

I will now dump the rest of my logs in one post.

 

Log day #2 16.12.2012

 

Due to procrastination my session was brief and undisciplined. I was about to go sleep and decided to do something related (to form a daily habit).

 

I turned off the lights and put on my headphones.

I proceeded without the autosuggestion part straight to visualization. I did only have vague plan of what I was going visualize, letting the form develop as I progress.

I started visualizing the general form and it developed to something I didn't prefer. Next I began talking to her (in my mind only) and asked (or told) about her name. A name popped into my head before I subvocalized the sentence.

The dialog was something like this:

Me: Tell me your...

(At this point the name just popped into my mind.)

Me:..name.

Before interpreting it as something that it wasn't (sentience) I remembered how similarly I named my dog.

I kept talking to her, telling her to show me her face while visualizing the facial features.

I got somewhat clear image of her face but it was quite difficult to maintain and required heavy effort to do so.

Then I just tried to memorize the face and visualize some details.

The session took about 15 minutes and I immediately went to sleep.

 

Log day #3 17.12.2012

 

Headphones on and lights off.

I started with the autosuggestion part.

Then I started speaking with the entity.

I tried to remember the previously imagined face, but I found out I couldn't. I told her again to show me her face and again started to visualize about the facial features.

This time completely different face started to emerge. I visualized her lips and eye color purple, so visualizing them only would trigger me to remember the rest of the facial features. I found this helpful and I could repeatedly see the face and even add some minor details into it. When I was satisfied I wouldn't forget the facial features, I began visualizing the rest of the body (just generally). When I was happy with the general look, I visualized the body turning extremely pale (as a distinct cue or trigger similarly to help me remember the form and I also wanted it to be pale).

At some point I found out I was getting more and more distracted by the song so I decided to end the session.

Session took about 25 minutes.

 

Log day #4 18.12.2012

 

Headphones on, lights off.

Autosuggestion routine.

I began recalling the facial features about thinking the triggering colors (purple eyes and lips and pale white skin). Also I found it extremely difficult to recall the exact facial features, but succeeded briefly. The form however constantly morphed (growing taller and such). It was quite frustrating and I got very easily distracted by the music.

Session lasted about ten minutes.

 

Log day #5 19.12.2012

 

Yet again procrastination made me almost miss out completely.

 

Heaphone, lights, autosuggestion.

I began visualizing the triggering features and could with little effort recall the previously established features and forms. This time I just visualized them again and again to strengthen the form so it wouldn't morph and evolve every time I started session.

Session lasted 20 minutes.

 

 

I found out the writing helps me quite much to pinpoint what I actually want to accomplish. In the light of my writings, my actual workings are quite undisciplined and haphazard. I would like my workings to reflect my ideals so I am terminating this "entity" and this project. I actually had brief session of visualizing the entity to going back to the orb of darkness and slowly dissolving into it, leaving only darkness behind. I also formally stated in my mind something along the lines: I have chosen to abandon this project. Goodbye (name).

 

I will however continue with a new project. I will base the form and face on a real person. This is to help me visualize (stable form right from the beginning). Also I did plan out some kind of personality to the previous entity which I will not be doing for the next. I want my workings with this one to reflect on my written thoughts about the whole phenomena. Also I'll make a somewhat rigid schedule.

 

The next project is based on these ideas. I will try to create a thought pattern so automatic that it closely resembles an obsession. There will be a casual (not logging it particularly, habit formation pattern which is basically trying to think about the entity at every waking moment) part to this schedule. This is to be done until no effort (to little effort) is required on my part, so the pattern of thought is constant and automatic.

Then there is the visualization aspect in which I log daily. I already know how it will look, feel and sound like. I attribute no personality qualities, but will not discard any emerging qualities however.

Finally the autosuggestion/meditation part. I will (at least in the beginning) keep these separate sessions and log these also. I will make some basic autosuggestion routine and might add something as I progress. Mainly I will log just what I have done and how long and the feelings and thoughts afterwards.

I will begin with short sessions (trying to eliminate the effects of procrastination which make it difficult to start these). Something like 5 minutes per session, incrementing gradually over course of weeks or months to full hour per session. I also try to have them at same time of day every day. Habit formation is the key word here.

I will spend this day making somewhat rigorous schedule and the exact message of the autosuggestions and somewhat formal visualization routine. I will continue to post in this same thread.

Also tomorrow is significant date for me personally (every year, not related to the doomsday hype, or specific year) so it also good day to start anew.