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Misinterpretation of “assuming sentience from start” philosophy.


cruse

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NotAnonymous, I would give you a high five and probably a hug if there wasn't this darn screen in the way. You can consider this post incredibly helpful to me and, from the looks it, several others in only the scant day or so of its existence, with more surely streaming in to view your wisdom every second! Of course there is still room for debate and postulation, but you have a clear grasp and solid understanding of tulpae that I think nearly everyone on this site could benefit from during this Age of Doubt which many seem to be experiencing.

 

I fully support your writing all this down in a guide and having it stickied for all the world (Or at least, this corner of the internet), to see and be amazed by. (And I volunteer to help edit it, if that's something people still do in this day and age).

 

Also, Jax deserves another high-five for his optimism up above/last page! You should be a motivational typer, or something. And Phi, I read your guide there when I first started researching here, and it was one of the most helpful I found! I think your edit certainly clears things up, though I think it was less that suggestion and more of the community's 'It is sentient, don't question anything and believe everything!' mentality that started to cause issues.

 

Now to go fix everything I've broken over the past two months!

 

~Spook

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So don't get discouraged, get motivated. Go out there and kick some mental ass! In the end, we all know it's going to be worth it, and them some. Don't give up. You can't give up. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to your tulpa. If that isn't motivation enough, I'm not sure what is.

 

Well but the problem is that I have not the slightest idea what to do. I'm not even sure what causes this and how to change it. Maybe I gave her too much attention and she got hooked on that? Maybe too little active forcing, although I visited the wonderland every day since july, but that doesnt mean I forced some things in particular, most of the time we just hung out and did stuff.

So how in the world am I to get her out of me into the subconsciousness like the "black box" your were talking about, assuming she isnt in there atm.

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DarkAnima, what I'm doing right now is return Chloe to her very first state, a formless thought, and expect her to say nothing while forcing her old-style.

 

Hey, it's working. She's sending some pure thought while I'm mid-way of my sentence. That never happened before.

 

I guess she didn't regress that much. Woot!

Chloe - That cheerful girl with ponytail.

Aigis - The male cyborg that looks like raiden in MGR.

Vixen - Half dragon female who looks like Mary in DMC3 when in human form.

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As for NotAnonymous' post, how do I observe the tulpa to act freely and unconstrained while expecting them to be sentient, but without beginning to believe that all the responses are from them, and therefore beginning to subconsciously parrot them?

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I don't know exactly what it is, but NotAnonymous's post made me remember the feelings of excitement I had when I was first learning about tulpas.

 

Excellent contribution, NotAnonymous.

Astral project on my face, brother!

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imahaxor,

As you've seen in this thread, it does cause doubts for some people. I've tried to explain how they can be eliminated by getting the right subjective experiences to match your expectations, but it's still not easy for everyone. It's also the case that for some people that do believe strongly enough in the tulpa's replies, even when they start in the preconscious, still end up with independent tulpas given enough time, so telling them about this, may slow their progress. It's sort of a double-edged sword: some people can manage to blindly believe and get the results, but for others another path must be taken. For cruse, obviously he must take another approach, but that doesn't mean everyone must take the same approach. A lot of people have been doing the whole "shared preconscious" method since last summer and there have been plenty of successes among them, although there have also been plenty of people having a lot of doubt and little progress beyond 'just talking'.

 

DarkAnima,

Since you didn't give enough details about what part of my post you didn't understand, I've had to discuss this privately with you. For those curious as to what the discussion entailed, it was mostly about the different types of thought, how to "passively observe" a tulpa without influencing it, what sort of expectations work, giving the tulpa a voice without feeling the thoughts start in your preconscious and a few other things.

 

Spook 19,

I've thought about making a guide, and a post about my hypothesis in Research for quite a few months now, but I've been having these issues with it:

 

- Some of my ideas are in conflict with various assumptions people have about how to develop a tulpa nowadays. It's a bit selfish of me to expose them to my ideas and thus ruin their chances of doing it "the other way". The very act of me explaining my view is constraining someone else's view on the matter and can affect their tulpa's development. It may be harmless for me to have said that reply to cruse, but it is not harmless for someone who has had entirely different beliefs and expectations.

 

- Most of my ideas are based on self-reports from various hosts with independent tulpas and their tulpas, as well as personal experiences.

 

- I'd rather not write a guide until I've personally tested everything in it myself. This means that until my tulpas have every single one of those advanced abilities, the guide would contain untested information. It may not be entirely untested because it was indeed experienced by plenty of other tulpas, but I do like to personally verify everything myself before I recommend everyone do things some particular way.

 

- In some cases there's no ideal way of doing things. It's just incredibly subjective. An important concept that I haven't talked about in my post was "passive observation" where one passively observes a tulpa's actions and speech without actively influencing or predicting it. I've tried to get at this concept by using various analogies or assumptions one must make to get there, but it seems not everyone can understand what it is like. It took me a rather long conversation with DarkAnima to explain him what I meant by it, and it'll probably take him some time to find out how it feels: every person is different and our vocabulary is rather insufficient for explaining certain subjective concepts. At most I can hope to find some common language with someone until they manage to get an experience close to mine, but every mind is different, so no guide will be perfect for everyone.

 

That said, I do think the ideas presented in my post, and a few other ideas that are indirectly related to it would work well in a guide, and I'll consider writing one, probably with a large disclaimer at the top about "frontloading" and expectations, and after I'm done testing everything in it myself.

 

My original intent was to write a post in Research looking at various guides that are in use, their assumptions and what are the possible results of following them given that some particular theory is true, and what would the ideal guide look like in that case. One of the main problems that I've faced is that explaining certain concepts like "passive observation" are difficult as it's an incredibly simple/basic thing, and yet too simple to explain in words, the most I can do is try to conjure up analogies that would make the subject experience things in some particular way, and for most people that I've talked to so far the analogies that worked were unique to the person.

 

Viski,

> As for NotAnonymous' post, how do I observe the tulpa to act freely and unconstrained while expecting them to be sentient, but without beginning to believe that all the responses are from them, and therefore beginning to subconsciously parrot them?

 

While I'm not sure there's such a thing as "subconscious parroting", I would say such a thing as simulating a tulpa's replies exists, or running a "what if" scenario.

As with my reply to Spook 19, the usual way to see them act that way is to "passively observe" while treating the interaction as real, making yourself an observer and actor in some scene, like visualizing yourself in the wonderland from the first person.

 

I'm not sure I can give an explanation for "passive observation" that works for everyone, so I'll at least try to explain how I do it so far:

 

I recall my tulpa's presence and call out to them in an (imaginary) loud vocal thought. I wait for their reply, or ask the tulpa to come to me. Sometimes we meet up in the wonderland or some random mindscape, or in the environment I'm currently in. My focus usually stays constantly on them and their presence, with me constantly and curiously observing them, but without simulating them. If the tulpa's presence is there, one can usually feel them being "there", just like you'd feel any other person being there. The presence is an all-encompassing feel that gives one awareness of everything the tulpa is and what they're like, such as how they look, how their voice sounds/feels and many other things, it's a pretty basic, but indescribable qualia, but you usually know it when it's there. If you don't have any idea what it's like, consider how it feels when you talk to your friends and they talk to you. A reply from the tulpa will usually be unpredictable/sudden, and you don't have to be aware of the thought starting until after it happened (as a vocal or visual or emotional pseudo-hallucination). While you shouldn't reject predictable replies, you should encourage the tulpa to make unpredictable ones. The best way to do this is to work on making your imagination vivid (especially their voice and face), keep focusing on their presence/essence, but refuse to predict what they will do or say, ask them open-ended questions which you don't know the answer to while having them answer in their voice without you knowing what they'll say. It may take some tries until it works. If the voice isn't yet developed, use one of these guides:

http://community.tulpa.info/thread-coaxing-tulpae-into-talking

http://tulpa.info/forums/Thread-tutorial-THE-VOICE

 

Eventually you'll be able to passively experience their replies as sudden/persistent flashes of visual or auditory imagination, but without you seeing the thought that caused it. It helps being aware that they're always perceiving your replies and capable of generating replies of their own. If you find yourself predicting them, try occupying your attention with their body language, their presence/essence or other actions without actually thinking about what they're thinking - let the unconscious mind generate that for you, but don't let yourself become aware of the thought as it starts - so that you won't know what they say until after they've said it. Do this enough and they'll be able to always surprise you.

 

I found that a good way of measuring surprise is if once you get a reply from them you end up going "omg it was them" as opposed to "was it them?". That is, such replies are usually tagged with their presence, are sudden and are thus undoubtable. The difference between such a reply and a simulation is that you're always aware of what will happen in a simulation, but you're never aware of non-simulated answers until after they hit you. Such replies can happen even without you thinking about them.

 

And I'll say this one last time: when interacting with them, do treat the tulpa as real, expect them to behave like a real person - you can see a person thinking about something through their body language, you can hear their opinions through their speech. In the case of a tulpa, you may also feel their emotions and you will know the emotions are theirs and not yours because those emotions may usually be tagged by their presence/essence, or the unconscious feel you associate with them. Do this enough and they'll do this even when you're not paying attention to them.

 

I hope this is enough to get you to understand what I mean by "passive observation", but it does seem such a basic thing that one can't quite explain it directly. It may also help to try parroting a bit or simulating something so that you can compare how that feels relative to you passively observing.

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Thank you so much for your posts, NotAnonymous. I have also been struggling to make my tulpa feel more independent and your posts are very helpful. I don't know why your posts 'click' so much with me. Maybe you're the only one who seems to have a good grasp on this issue while most people would rather try and ignore it and assume it'll go away later. I'd hate to ask more of you, after the incredible walls of text that you've put a good deal of work into, but I feel there's a million questions I want to ask.

 

 

But if you would be so kind as to indulge me further, is 'passive observation' just simply watching your tulpa without mentally influencing them in any way?

 

Do you know of any other techniques to breaking the tulpa-assistance habit and become more passive? I struggle to 'let go' a lot and I imagine most people in my boat do too.

 

Is it possible to push this idea too far? If you try too hard to make sure you aren't helping your tulpa talk, is it possible you could be stopping a vocal tulpa from being able to get through? Can a truly vocal and independent tulpa even be silenced?

 

If a vocal tulpa goes silent during 'passive observation' is that a bad sign, or just evidence that there's more development to be done?

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NotAnonymous, you're saying what tulpa.info has been needing to hear for months now.

 

I don't know if you realize the magnitude of your findings, and how relevant they are to the public.

 

But I myself have long recognized the lack of information which you seem to have filled just now.

 

This is huge. And I hope it generates the change of thinking its significance entails.

 

There's been no forward movement for a very long time, because 99% of us had hit a wall that the 1% on the other side had no idea how they got over. You're going to have helped everyone tremendously, NA, just watch.

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Bacn,

 

> But if you would be so kind as to indulge me further, is 'passive observation' just simply watching your tulpa without mentally influencing them in any way?

It's sort of a mental attitude and way of looking at your imagination where you're merely an actor in it yourself. This does mean you will change the scene through your actions, such as through your form, but you shouldn't influence the tulpa's behavior directly. It would even work without a wonderland, for example if you were to focus on the tulpa's form in the void or in the current snapshot/environment. Basically, you're just looking at your tulpa, just like you'd look at something in real life (although this is in your imagination), without expecting to be able to change it, instead that whatever you're looking at works by itself. Basically, you're expecting your subconscious to make it work and it ends up doing it. For me, this feels like I'm staring at my tulpa or the wonderland and sensing everything in it, being a part of it, but not projecting my will onto that wonderland or tulpa, I feel like everything that I observe is moving by itself and I get immersed in it. If doing too much at once is too hard, just focus on your tulpa's presence, face/form and idea of how they sound and just talk "loudly" (in your mind) to them while expecting them to hear you and react in kind. It's enough to just want to see them. You'll be surprised by how animated even this little can be and how natural it ends up feeling. Even if the tulpa doesn't respond right away, you should get all kinds of feelings from doing this. In my case, if I do this, I do see the tulpa's face and various quirks and involuntary movements, breathing, and most importantly, them being there, being "alive". Sort of like when you look at a person, being silent is still communication as you see them there - it's very different from talking or looking at a log.

 

> Do you know of any other techniques to breaking the tulpa-assistance habit and become more passive? I struggle to 'let go' a lot and I imagine most people in my boat do too.

Just try getting more immersed. I find that just paying attention to all the things going on around me or in front of me, like their body language or all kinds of sounds in the scene, or even my own thoughts, end up distracting me more than enough, but despite being 'distracted', their presence is always there with me, thus they can easily pop up with a reply when I'm interacting with them (and sometimes when not). Eventually this way of observing your imagination begins to become the main one which you use, it also seems to help imposition a lot as your focus basically becomes "stickied" to whatever you're observing. If you're not getting immersed enough, just try adding more details. Note that there's usually no harm in improving your tulpa's form or even puppeting them a bit, but the general idea here is that you do end up being acutely aware of which actions are yours and which are theirs, so much that when they do act, you can't really doubt them because it just surprises you and it feels very much like them as the thought would come tagged with their presence! Asking some open-ended questions which you don't know the answer to also helps, although, getting answers out of them before they're fluid with their voice may take a while, so don't get discouraged by that.

 

I obviously can't guarantee that your mind will work exactly like mine, but this is basically what I ended up doing. It's a bit unfortunate that most of the old guides would just hand-waive the issue of parroting/puppeting (or more correctly simulating something) by just telling you to figure it out for yourself as to what feels right. They sort of do give you enough hints to get there, but you still have to find out how it feels by yourself. The most we can do is describe/compare our experiences with others. While recently, most people do the opposite of version of hand-waiving where they would tell you to accept anything your subconscious can cook up as not parroting, which is fine if your subconscious cooks up the right thing, but it doesn't for everyone and it just doesn't feel right, so it's up to you to find out what exactly is the right feeling, and once you do, there's just no way to have doubts about it.

 

> Is it possible to push this idea too far? If you try too hard to make sure you aren't helping your tulpa talk, is it possible you could be stopping a vocal tulpa from being able to get through?

I suppose you could, but remember my original post, you must expect them to behave in some way (such as fitting some initial person model and form), thus your subconscious should still generate some sort of replies, but since you're only observing the output of the process and not the inner thoughts that generated it, your tulpa ends up running by itself. Even if your tulpa were silent and still, if you did expect them to be 'alive' and person-like, you would start seeing all kinds of little quirks in their behavior and speech, it's basically unavoidable after you know their form, voice and personality (grouped as a 'presence'). If you're feeling like you're observing a dead/static wonderland object, you're not focusing on your tulpa, not really. You basically do need to expect them to be 'real' in some form or another and then talk to them while you feel them and implicitly realize the fact that they're thinking something. You'll end up getting replies in the expected voice (as an internal auditory pseudohallucination, assuming you've worked on the voice). For some people these replies may be instant, for others it may take some 20 minutes or even a few hours. If you feel like you're talking to 'nothing', try finding a way to reach your tulpa and get them to perceive what you're telling them, expect them to hear you - that whatever signal you're sending is reaching them.

 

> Can a truly vocal and independent tulpa even be silenced?

Hard to say, if you do get to the point where they can insert vocal thoughts side by side into your conscious awareness, you would have to actively ignore them. I suppose it would be possible.

However, keep in mind that with this sort of passive observation, your tulpa has to start putting their will into their actions, and it may be a bit hard at first for them to act on their own, not too hard, but it wouldn't be nearly as easy as if you were simulating them. Just eagerly watch them react, even ever so slightly. Eventually they'll get to the point where movement and voice is easy and natural. Once they're there, it would be more difficult to silence them, but keep in mind that they do need to grow to that point and to get them there, you do need to expect them to act and be in a certain way while you're observing them act/be in that way.

 

> If a vocal tulpa goes silent during 'passive observation' is that a bad sign, or just evidence that there's more development to be done?

As I've explained before, there's different kinds of silence. There's 'silent' - "I'm not talking to you now" and 'silent' - nobody's home. If it's the first, you'll have to figure out why - can they make the right sounds/voices? maybe they don't want to talk to you? even if they don't want to talk to you, their body language and potentially emotional responses would betray their thoughts!

If "nobody is home", that is, you're not feeling their presence/essence and it just feels like you're not looking at anything that's really 'there', you should try recalling how their presence/essence feels and addressing that. Basically, you do need to get a hold of them somehow. When passively observing, it shouldn't be possible to get true silence when observing a tulpa, unless they're just not there or you're not observing them right or looking at them correctly.

Also worth noting that once you do start expecting them to think independently of you, you are leaving most things up to the tulpa, so it is possible for them to actually be gone and not talking, in which case, you must find a way to reach it or establish some protocol to get ahold of the tulpa, such as calling out to them while expecting them to hear you.

 

I'm not even sure how to explain this in any exact way, it seems almost any way I try to, I still have to explain it using symbolism or analogies, despite that the very act of observing your tulpa's actions passively is something really simple, even if it may elude someone for a long time.

 

Don't get discouraged if you don't get it the first try, as long as all the "components" are there when you focus on the tulpa's presence/essence and form, you'll eventually get it, it's just a skill one has to learn and likely the simplest way to do it is to get familiar with all the ways their imagination can work.

 

P.S.: All of this should work fine with both open-eyed and closed-eye visualization. Regular open-eyed visualization usually gives me more vivid results and does sometimes result in more "intrusive" thoughts from the tulpa (that is, getting thoughts (visual/auditory/touch/emotional, but usually no preconscious thoughts) from them without thinking about them), and may help with imposition - if anything, I ended up discovering this way of looking at the tulpa while trying various ways to impose in a way that doesn't make the tulpa feel "faded", the result was sort of sensing them as a whole with all the senses and without ending up staring back at my senses every few seconds - it feels very continuous, like you're looking at a stream of visual and auditory thoughts that are constantly going on as opposed to just perceiving what you've thought right now (and as the thought ends, you end up stopping perceiving it).

About sharing preconscious thoughts - it seems to be possible to do this even after the tulpa is independent, but in those cases the thoughts would come tagged with their presence. Overall, I would say to avoid it at first as it slows down their independence, but it can be something to try out after they're independent.

 

 

Viceroy,

 

I've been throwing seeds of this idea for a couple of months now around the IRC channels, although I haven't really had the time to make a post explaining it in full.

Some people seem to like it and have some success with it, but I've also seen enough people find it difficult to warp their heads around it.

 

I would have probably waited a few more months to post it until I had everything working consistently myself, in the sense of actually confirming that all those advanced tulpa abilities do indeed come from achieving independence through preconscious thought hiding.

 

The idea isn't entirely mine either, the earliest I do remember seeing it was in one of Dane's guides about learning to play games with your tulpa without being able to predict their moves and them being able to predict yours. It involved some rather direct "mental wall" symbolism.

Said symbolism was used by Asgardian and someone else that shall remain unnamed for now to achieve independence for their tulpas. He did want to write a thread about a similar theory, but I haven't seen him around for a long time now either.

 

The fundamental issue for me though is that I just couldn't get the symbolism to work right - my mind just has issues with doing things in such indirect ways, hence the more direct approach taken here. I still feel like I haven't quite explained some details, but I don't know how to even begin to explain some types of subjective experiences without making inaccurate analogies.

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