Jump to content

The Shui Ching


Shui

Recommended Posts

I don't use this PR anymore, but since it looks like people are still linking to it, I'm leaving the first page up. Here's one post from a later page, because it's the one most likely to be useful to someone:

 

(Edit: Just discovered that there's already a guide on stages of visualization. Oh well, we mean different things by it, so I'll leave this as is.)

 

Lately I've been thinking that there's a definite order to visualization:

 

1. Being able to see things only from memory. If you're in this stage, you can only see things you've already seen, or simple shapes. Sometimes you might have flashes of imagination in a later stage, but you won't be able to call them up at will.

 

If you are in this stage, there are probably familiar pictures that you can call up at will, like photos of friends or family that you see quite often, or maybe your favorite painting, or images from 2D video games.

 

You also might have some success with looking at something, and then closing your eyes and visualizing it exactly as you saw it.

 

Try sitting in a chair and looking around the room, and then closing your eyes and describing every little detail of how the room looks from that chair from memory. Record your description and play it back with your eyes open to see how accurate you were.

 

You can also blindfold yourself and record yourself walking through the house, touching objects, and describing them to yourself. Try to touch everything you can. Believe it or not, you will come to objects in your own house that you can't describe. "I know this is a lamp, but is it brown or tan? marbled or spotted?" You might even find some objects you can't identify at all.

 

Another thing you can try is visualizing geometric shapes. Try visualizing a green triangle. Once you have that down, make the triangle red, or blue, or orange. When changing its color is easy, make it two colors: purple on the inside with a thick, yellow outline. Or make it a different shape, like a circle, a square, or a star. Or change its size, or spin it.

 

When two-dimensional shapes are easy, try three-dimensional shapes. Make a cube and slowly rotate it. Make a baseball and watch the seams as you spin it.

 

You can also work on visual arts, read descriptive writing, and record your dreams. All of these will help.

 

With regard to tulpa forcing, I think the best thing you can do in this stage is to look at pictures of your tulpa. If there are no pictures, make one. You could also just collect reference images that look like part of your tulpa: "Her eyes look like this picture, her nose looks like this one, her hands look like that one."

 

Pick part of your tulpa (the face is a good place to start) and study all your pictures of that part. Close your eyes and see how long you can visualize those pictures. Try it later when you haven't been looking at the pictures and see if you can call them to mind.

 

This is neat because it's something you can do wherever you are: on the bus, or in a waiting room, in school, at work, in the bathroom, whatever. Whenever you have nothing to do, do this. Change your phone wallpaper to a picture that reminds you of your tulpa without being your tulpa. That will help you to remember doing this instead of playing with your phone.

 

2. Improved spacial visualization. In this stage, you can rotate and move elements of your visualization.

 

To enter or advance in this stage, practice it whenever possible.

 

Visualize a coffee cup on your desk, turn it around so you can see the other side, move it to different parts of the desk. Set it on its side. Roll it.

 

Look at a picture of a group of people, then close your eyes and move the people around. Turn some that you can see from the front so that you can see their sides or backs. Move the ones in the background so they're standing in the foreground.

 

Play chess. This is getting more complicated, but try visualizing a chess board. You can play a game with your tulpa, or just look up classic games and visualize the board as you read the notation to yourself -- this might mean teaching yourself to read chess notation. Read this for example, and visualize the moves as you read them. When you get to #11, see if your visualized board matches the picture.

 

Visualizing an eight by eight board with thirty-two pieces can be hard, so simplify it: play microchess instead. It's played on a four by five board, with ten pieces. If that's too complicated, come up with some rules for three by three chess -- no serious chess players would consider it because the game has been solved, but you can use it to practice visualization. You can also just look up some simple chess problems and solve them in your head.

 

Try a 2x2 Rubik's Cube. It seems like it would be incredibly simple, but there are twenty-four squares to keep track of, so it can be quite a visualization challenge. Start with it solved, and scramble it by hand -- when you start with it scrambled, it's too easy to put too many of one color and leave some of another color out. When you master this, move up to 3x3.

 

Again, though, when it comes to tulpa forcing, the best thing you can do is visualize your tulpa. Sculpt his image, rotate him, move him into different positions, look at him from different angles, watch him in motion.

 

And when you've mastered this stage, you're ready to move on to

 

3. Imposition.

 

But we have some excellent guides on that, and I don't know that I'd have anything to add until I've mastered imposition myself.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So I'm guessing if you're moving onto imposing things directly onto vision you're already very good at visualization.

 

Given your age and the date of your first servitor, you've been practicing this for a while and I'm guessing you were made aware of all these practices before the internet as 1996 was an era when the public library was a better option than 56k (if I'm doing my math correctly that should be the start date of your first servitor).

 

If you don't mind my prying, I'm actually very weak with visualization, imposition and focus and I'm trying to come up with ways to improve these areas.

 

Could I perhaps learn a bit about your background such as meditation practices or how you came to learn about this knowledge?

 

Have you practiced visual arts at all (most people I know who can visualize are visual artists)?

 

Either way this looks very interesting and I'll be reading your updates as this goes on.

 

By the way, I use your method yesterday to create a face for my tulpa. Thank you for the post and the guide.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

(Note: I'm editing these posts to make them informative, but also trying to keep them so they make sense with the comments. When I originally replied to Dr. Faust, this post was much shorter, more conversational, and it wasn't divided in chapters.)

 

My cousin was the one who suggested that I make a servitor. He didn't use that word, since he was nine at the time, but he described the idea to me. We were laying in makeshift beds in his basement on the last week of December. He's probably forgotten the incident entirely, and he certainly doesn't know that I kept her for five years. I didn't know she was a servitor until years later when I started reading about this stuff online.

 

Visualization

 

I haven't spent a lot of time on visual arts. I did take art classes all though high school, but I never got good at drawing or painting and I never did it outside of school. I do read and write a lot though, and I listen to old time radio shows. All of these force you to visualize what's happening, which I've been working on more in the past few years.

 

Visualizing something that you've never seen before is mostly a matter of asking good questions. For example: A man walks into a bar. What is he wearing? What color is his hair? Is this a biker bar, an English pub, or a wild west saloon? None of these answers are implied in the original sentence, but you need to know all the answers to visualize the scene. I think the reason that visual arts people get so good at it is because they're constantly asking themselves what things look like.

 

It's easier to visualize something that you have seen. That's sort of the basis of this.

 

What I'd suggest is collecting as many images as you can of people who look like her. You might start here and find something you think she'd wear. Find a hairstyle that works for her. Find a picture that looks like her hands, and one that looks like her feet. Find or make a picture of her pendant. Crop or blur out any part of the pictures that doesn't look like her.

 

Look at the pictures as much as you can. If possible, look at the pictures when you're emotional. The brain finds it easier to remember things that happened after a strong emotion. Looking at the pictures while exercising might help.

 

Later on, when you're visualizing, the pictures should be easier for your mind to retrieve, and the only work your mind really has to do is to combine them into one image.

 

If you want, you can also create a face for your tulpa. This process will give you a unique face that nobody has ever had before, which can be useful if you don't want your tulpa to look like a real person.

 

Hope this helps.

 


 

Meditation

 

I do a vipassana meditation course about once a year, which really helps with visualization. When you do a course like that, you're sitting in complete silence for nine days, meditating somewhere between four and twelve hours a day. Your mind wants to wander, so it will start throwing out extremely vivid images. I had pictures appear in my head that I hadn't seen for fifteen or twenty years, and my dreams from my first vipassana course were so vivid that I remember them three or four years later.

 

It's actually not so much the vipassana meditation that helps, but the anapana meditation that they teach for the first three and a half days. Anapana meditation is meditation on the breath. It's great for improving focus, which is why the first several days of the course are devoted to it -- anapana prepares your mind for vipassana.

 

You pretty much can't go wrong by doing more anapana because not only does it make you more focused, but it also replaces sleep.

 

If you have that problem where you're sitting and trying to visualize, and your mind keeps wandering to what it will be like to have a tulpa, or what someone said to you earlier, or what's on TV, or whatever, anapana will help with that. The more anapana you do, the easier you'll find it to stay focused on one thing for a long period of time.

 

For anapana at the vipassana course, we were taught to focus on the sensation of the breath on the inside of the nostrils and the space below the nostrils and above the upper lip. This is because vipassana meditation is about focusing on sensations, so learning anapana in this way will help you learn vipassana more easily. It's harder to learn though, so I suggest focusing on words instead.

 

To do anapana, try to think about breathing.

 

Start by just sitting down in a comfortable position, with your back straight up and down. Use a chair if you have to. Close your eyes, and mentally count your breaths. Mentally say "one" when you inhale and "one" when you exhale. Then say "two" when you inhale and "two" when you exhale. Continue on up to ten, then start over at one, and keep going.

 

Your mind will wander -- many times. Don't get angry or frustrated about it. Just tell it that there will be time to think about that stuff later, and gently bring it back to your breath and your counting. The more you do this, the easier it will get to stay focused for a long time.

 

As you meditate, your mind will do everything it can to distract you. If you keep at it long enough, you will see and hear things that aren't there. This happened to me when I first started meditating -- I would see a scene so vividly that I thought I was really looking at it, and I had to open my eyes just to verify that they had been closed. Remember, this is just another distraction -- let it go like any other thought, and return to your meditation.

 

Set a timer and do this for at least ten minutes a day. I like to set the timer to chime several times, with the shortest periods first and last. So with ten minutes, I'd start with one minute, then chime, then two minutes, then chime, then four minutes, then chime, then two, then chime, then one, then chime twice to show that it's over.

 

I like the meditation period set up like this, because it makes it easier to set goals for yourself. Try to focus on the counting and on your breath all the way through the first minute. If you can do that, try to make it all the way through the next two minutes. If you can do that, go for four minutes. And if you can't do this, it gets easier again at the end so you have a better chance.

 

I set the chimes with Tasker on my Android phone, but if you can't find a way to do it on your phone, you can make an MP3 for it.

 

Again, ten minutes at the minimum, but the more you do, the better. I'm doing two hours a day right now, one hour in the morning, and one hour in the evening.

 

Keep doing this until you no longer get distracted by other thoughts, and you're entirely focused on your breath and your counting -- then stop the counting, and just focus on the feeling of your breath in your nostrils. Have no words at all in your head. This is harder, and it focuses your mind even more.

 

If you're having a lot of trouble staying focused on the breath, make it complex enough that it takes your whole mind. I you can think "in, out" when you're breathing, but you can totally be off thinking about video games or something, and still be going "in, out" the whole time.

 

So counting is harder. Count each breath, like "one in, one out, two in, two out" Go up to ten, and then start over at one. If you ever count eleven, you've gotten distracted and you lose.

 

And if you're still thinking about other things as you're doing this, try doing it backwards. That might make it complex enough that you need to devote all your thought to it.

 

As you get better at it, make it simpler. Stop counting, stop doing "in, out", start doing just "in ... in ..." until you can make do without words at all. Eventually you get to a point where you can just kinda sit down and turn off your thoughts.

 


 

To get back into the vipassana course, it's an interesting experience, and you can learn a lot from it. It's been called meditation boot camp. Everyone takes a vow of silence for nine days, and there are three and a half hours of group meditation every day, and a number of other hours for you to meditate in your own room.

 

The course is entirely free. In fact, they require you to sit a course before you make any kind of donation. Only after you've sat your first course can you make a donation either of money or service. Personally, I prefer the donation of service: I've sat two courses, and served three.

 

Every night is a video discourse. You might think that it's boring watching a video of a guy talking about philosophy and meditation, but after meditating for so many hours, watching the video is a special treat.

 

The discourse isn't always so accurate though. I mean one of the discourses says that the point of this practice is to feel your subatomic particles vibrating -- I stopped taking the practice seriously at the moment I heard that. Fortunately, I didn't leave the course, because there is a lot of good to be learned from it -- just because the teacher believes in some crazy pseudoscience doesn't mean that there isn't science as well.

 

Vipassana meditation is one of the most scientifically studied kinds of meditation, but there are aspects of it that have been sadly neglected. It's never been tested how many of the benefits ascribed to this course come from the anapana meditation, and how many come from the vipassana.

 

There are also many parts of the instruction where it says you *must* with in this way, without ever giving a reason. The chanting has always seemed more annoying than useful to me, in spite of the claims that it creates the right energy for the students to be successful. Plus, one of the discourses tasks about how eating spicy food folds your body with the element of fire, and eating moist food fills your body with the element of water, and so on for the other classical elements, but nobody has ever done any research on what food imbues you with Heart so you can turn into Captain Planet.

 

Overall, the practice is good, it'll help with tulpaforcing, and it has been proven to have psychological benefits. Just know when to stop listening and start experimenting.

 

One bit that I always wondered about, and I know other tulpamancers will wonder about as well, is that the discourse says that every sensation you feel in the body is what your body is actually experiencing at that time.

 

During one course I sat, I overheard a student interview with the teacher. The student asked if he was imagining sensations in his body (a big part of the vipassana technique is awareness of sensations). The teacher told him that the mind does not have the capacity to imagine sensations.

 

I was sitting there silent and motionless, with my eyes closed, but inside my head I'm going "Oh reeeeally now?"

 

The student, to my delight, brought up phantom limb syndrome -- something I've been wondering about since I started meditating with this technique. The teacher totally ignored it, so he brought it up again. She just reiterated that the mind cannot create sensations.

 

This meditation is grounded in Indian and Burmese traditions, among which are respect for teachers, and respect for elders, so the student didn't push the matter, even though the teacher seemed to be clearly wrong. I've never brought the point up for the very same reason, so I understand, and I admire him for taking it even as far as he did.

 

I got to talking to another server about it a few days later, and on the last day, the server and I talked to the student together. The conversation helped me to come to an understanding. In spite of the seeming inconsistency, the teacher is right -- all sensations are real, but they aren't all occurring where we seem to feel them. Thus the sensations of phantom limb syndrome are real sensations -- in the brain, not in the missing limb.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, I've been working on the clock. It doesn't keep time yet, of course, so I need to tell it what time to display. Once I tell it what to display, it takes a second or less to call up the image in my mind. No doubt a large part of this is because it's such a simple image: right now, I'm just doing the numbers and the colon -- no AM/PM, no day of the week, no date.

 

I can rotate the clock on all three axes, change the color of the numbers, the color of the background, and enlarge and shrink it. Some of the processes take a few seconds when they're complex and new to me, like making the background green and the numbers red, but they're all getting easier as I practice them.

 

I'm going to start with imposing it on my cell phone screen when it's off. When I have that down, I'll impose it in other places.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you for the prompt and detailed response. All the best to you on your journey. I'll probably be reading about what's going on in this thread though I'll doubt I'll be able to offer much useful feedback at this point in my tulpamancing career.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, I don't post a lot in here. I'm somewhat split between putting every little detail of my experience here, or just sticking to the highlights.

 

I hadn't planned on making a wonderland, because it didn't seem too important to making a HUD servitor. Lately though, I've been thinking about applications of a wonderland for my writing, and I think it could be a good idea. It would allow me to better familiarize myself with settings and characters for my novels, and it would help in creating tulpas down the road, when I'm ready to do so.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I completely support you putting every little detail in here if only so that I may steal your methods and put them to use for my own journey.

 

Also, it's not as if you don't create a wonderland for writing things as the novel goes on. Although, wandering around in your novel setting sounds like a boatload of fun especially if you do it just cause.

 

Imagine writing this epic fantasy novel and then just being a kick-ass wizard and exploring your world and slaying dragons and saving fair young virgin maidens from danger. You'd never have to buy another Elder Scrolls game again!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I consider myself a skeptic, but I've never been the sort of skeptic to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I read a lot of new age books, and while I don't believe in most of what they say, sometimes you find interesting tidbits buried within. All of this came from various new age books, but it's all essentially describing the wonderland we all know to be a useful tool.

 

I was actually working on making a wonderland when I first discovered this community. It was a slow process, because many people around the world have discovered this independently, and they all came up with their own names for it. This community was the first time I ever saw multiple people using the same word for wonderlands.

 

As far as I recall, the first time I came across the concept was when I was living in a commune. They had a small library open to residents, and I was in the process of reading through volume four of Journey to the West there. But Journey to the West was on the upper floor, and sometimes they had meetings or screened movies on the upper floor, and I could only sit and read on the lower floor. So I had to find a new book for such instances.

 

I found Urban Shaman by Serge Kahili King. (Incidentally, the only one of his books I'd recommend buying.) In it he describes a little bit of another book, Mastering Your Hidden Self; A Guide to the Huna Way. (Only really worth reading for one chapter, in my humble opinion.)

 

Here is what Mastering Your Hidden Self has to say about wonderlands (trimmed down to be within fair use guidelines):

Among all the methods used by the kahunas, none are so potent in my opinion as a class known as tikis. A tiki ... in kahuna usage ... refers to a mental power image ...

 

Establishing a garden tiki is as easy as day-dreaming. All you really have to do is think of a garden, let one appear in your imagination, modify it consciously if you want to, and make the experience as real as you can.

 

...

 

If you feel you are not very visual, practice with the garden will help to develop this ability. However, the ability to visualize mentally is not a critical factor. It doesn't matter if your first attempts to "see" the garden produce only fuzzy or vague outlines, or even no visual aspect at all. Complete imagination includes imaginary sound, touch, smell, taste, and emotional feeling. If your imagination is not yet well developed visually, it certainly will be in other ways.

 

...

 

For those who would like a standard technique for establishing and reproducing the garden, the following has been used successfully by many.

 

1. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and relax. Think of a garden, let an image or idea of it form in your mind, even if it isn't clear yet. If you wish, imagine yourself traveling to the garden in some way.

2. Focus your attention to see three things in the garden as clearly as you can (such as a flower, a fountain, and a tree); hear three things (such as a bird, flowing water, and the rustle of leaves); and touch three things (such as the ground beneath your feet, a petal, and a handful of soil). You may also add taste and smell if you like.

3. Now explore your garden. Find out what kinds of plants are growing there; check their condition and that of the soil; examine the water supply; note how the garden is organized; be aware of anything else of interest. At this time you can use the garden in any way you know how. You may find it useful to establish a reference point of some kind—a fountain, a particular plant, or a statue—to use as an inner landmark so you can return quickly to the garden at any time.

 

He goes on to suggest that a wonderland represents your mental state, and that problems in the wonderland represent problems in your mind. Weeds in the garden, for example, might stand for negativity, and if you pull those weeds, or make servitors to pull those weeds, that will rid your mind of negativity. Some skill in dream interpretation might help in identifying what various changes to your wonderland mean.

 

King admits that the wonderland is entirely in your mind, which is surprisingly non-new-age, but later in the chapter he suggests creating wonderlands to represent the minds of other people, and tending those wonderlands to heal other people -- he says you can only do this with permission, so sorry, no Inception-style mind-hacking.

 

After Serge Kahili King, I believe I next read about wonderlands in Psychic Dreamwalking: Explorations at the Edge of Self, by Michelle Belanger, which is about shared dreams (again, much like Inception.) I wish I could quote this, but Google books won't display the relevant pages, and my own copy is in many miles away from me. She calls wonderlands "dream havens" and describes a much more in-depth process of creating them than most people here use. (Again, I wouldn't recommend her other book.)

 

More recently, I found this interesting article online. This is about learning to scry, but the author describes how to create a wonderland as well. He says this was taught to US Special Forces serving in Vietnam. If you want to skip to the bit about wonderlands, just Ctrl-F and type in "Vietnam" and it'll take you to the beginning.

 

Reading through old posts on this forum, I found this. It's a book by Cornelius Rumstuckle, a pen name for J.H. Brennan, co-author of Magical Use of Thoughtforms (see below). It seems to be a playful children's book about learning magic -- but the magic is actual neopagan magic of the sort Brennan actually believes in. In other words, this is actual magical instruction, presented in such a way that it hopes to sneak past the filters of disapproving parents. It isn't about the occult -- it's about pretend! Your children are working with the astral world -- which is just another term for imagination!

 

The chapter QB2 posted is about creating a wonderland:

 

The blueprint will consist of a trigger description, which will help you visualize a small part of your castle before leaving to create the rest yourself. When you've read through the description, record it ... Then find a place where you won't be disturbed, go through your Wizard's Relaxation Sequence, close your eyes, and play the description.

 

As you listen to your recording ... try to visualize your Wizard's Castle as vividly as you can. And don't just see it. Try to hear the sounds, smell the smells, touch the walls and tapestries. Imagine you're walking through the castle, learning what's there, examining the furnishings.

 

You'll need to do this more than once. In fact, you'll need to do it every day for as long as it takes for you to be able to close your eyes anywhere -- bus station, airport, grocery store -- and walk straight into your castle.

 

What you're doing here is building a refuge, an inner working space, a meeting place, and a whole lot more.

 

...

 

There are lots of interesting things to find in your castle ...

 

I can't, unfortunately, tell you exactly where these places are within your castle, nor can I tell you exactly what they look like. But I do know they're there, because I've found them in my own castle, and I know other Wizards have found similar places in theirs. So if you explore long enough, I can guarantee you'll find them, too. You'll also find chambers even I don't know about, not to mention things that you can use in your Wizardry and your life.

 

Everything you find will be part of who and what you are, because the Wizard's Castle is actually the same as your body and soul. It will allow you to discover things about yourself you never knew, draw on strengths you didn't know you had. You can spend a lifetime in its exploration and never reach the end of it.

...

 

It is very important that you conduct your explorations properly. Walk through the castle in your mind and discover what there is to find. Don't simply decide "I'd like a secret passage here" and then visualize it opening; that is an utterly worthless exercise. Concentrate instead on treating your castle as if it were absolutely real and you were its tenant.

 

Hope this helps everyone!

 


 

Edit: To keep my PR somewhat tidy, I'm going to use this post for all tulpa-related reading material. Often a book only mentions tulpas briefly, so when the mention is brief enough that Fair Use allows me to post it legally, I'll just post the excerpt.

 

First, no discussion of tulpas would be complete without mentioning Magic and Mystery in Tibet (also published under the title With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet) by Alexandra David-Neel, the first westerner to use the word "tulpa":

 

Besides having had few opportunities of seeing thought-forms, my habitual incredulity led me to make experiments for myself, and my efforts were attended with some success. In order to avoid being influenced by the forms of the lamaist deities, which I saw daily around me in paintings and images, I chose for my experiment a most insignificant character: a monk, short and fat, of an innocent and jolly type.

 

I shut myself in tsarns and proceeded to perform the prescribed concentration of thought and other rites. After a few months the phantom monk was formed. His form grew gradually fixed and life-like looking. He became a kind of guest, living in my apartment. I then broke my seclusion and started for a tour, with my servants and tents.

 

The monk included himself in the party. Though I lived in the open riding on horseback for miles each day, the illusion persisted. I saw the fat trapa, now and then it was not necessary for me to think of him to make him appear. The phantom performed various actions of the kind that are natural to travelers and that I had not commanded. For instance, he walked, stopped, looked around him. The illusion was mostly visual, but sometimes I felt as if a robe was lightly rubbing against me and once a hand seemed to touch my shoulder.

 

The features which I had imagined, when building my phantom, gradually underwent a change. The fat, chubby-checked fellow grew leaner, his face assumed a vaguely mocking, sly, malignant look. He became more troublesome and bold. In brief, he escaped my control.

 

Once, a herdsman who brought me a present of butter saw the tulpa in my tent and took it for a live lame.

 

I ought to have let the phenomenon follow its course, but the presence of that unwanted companion began to prove trying to my nerves; it turned into a “daynightmare.” Moreover, I was beginning to plan my journey to Lhasa and needed a quiet brain devoid of other preoccupations, so I decided to dissolve the phantom. I succeeded, but only after six months of hard struggle. My mind-creature was tenacious of life.

 

There is nothing strange in the fact that I may have created my own hallucination. The interesting point is that in these cases of materialization, others see the thought-forms that have been created.

 

Next, Hypnotism, by G. H. Estabrooks:

 

For example, the writer while in military hospital had ample time to experiment with autosuggestion. He was able to suggest to himself that he would wake up at 2 A.M. and hear a symphony. Even more interesting he could suggest that he would awaken and hear spiritistic raps. Sure enough at 2 a.m. he was wide awake listening to very distinct raps from the spirit world. Then came a very interesting experience, almost a state of divided consciousness. He heard the raps distinctly but knew they were the results of autosuggestion. He was even able to make a "mental request" that they group themselves in twos and threes and the spirits obliged. We will see later that hypnotism provides us with a key to explain most psychic phenomena, when these are genuine and not the result of magician's tricks. Autosuggestion gives us an excellent device with which to study many strange things. The writer had a pet polar bear which he was able to call up merely by counting to five. This animal would parade around the hospital ward in most convincing fashion, over and under the beds, kiss the nurses and bite the doctors. It was very curious to note how obedient he was to "mental" commands, even jumping out of a three story window on demand.

 

But there is a certain menace to autosuggestion which this phantom bear illustrated. He became so very familiar that he refused to go away. He would turn up in the most unexpected places and without being sent for. The writer was playing bridge one evening and almost threw his hostess into hysterics by suddenly remarking, "There's that damn bear again. I wish someone would shoot the beast." He also had a nasty habit of turning up in dark corners at night, all very well when one realized he was just made of ghost-stuff but rather hard on one's nerves for all that. So he was banished and told never to return, but it was fully a month before the writer felt quite sure that his ghostly form would not be grinning at him over the foot of his bed during a thunderstorm.

 

And Magical Use of Thoughtforms by Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki and J.H. Brennan. Lots of the book is interesting, and lots is connected to tulpas, although the information is thrown together a bit haphazardly. Here's one of the more relevant exerpts.

 

I've known about this book, but I wasn't going to post it, until I saw it linked elsewhere in the forum as a way of making a tulpa. This is Out of Body Experiences, by Robert Peterson, but the interesting chapter is Chapter 10, about talking to one's subconscious.

 

And since this is on the Wikipedia page for tulpa, I should probably post it too. Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater. It's too new-agey for me, but I like this bit:

 

When a man thinks of his friend he forms within his mental body a minute image of that friend, which often passes outward and usually floats suspended in the air before him. In the same way if he thinks of a room, a house, a landscape, tiny images of these things are formed within the mental body and afterwards externalised. This is equally true when he is exercising his imagination; the painter who forms a conception of his future picture builds it up out of the matter of his mental body, and then projects it into space in front of him, keeps it before his mind's eye, and copies it. The novelist in the same way builds images of his character in mental matter, and by the exercise of his will moves these puppets from one position or grouping to another, so that the plot of his story is literally acted out before him.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really want to get into the Anapana styled meditation but I like my Chaotic meditation set up (headphones, blindfold, fede tones, wonderland only). However, focus and concentration are things I severely lack.

 

I just wanted to say I found your article about "Magickal Spaces" awesome and Anapana meditation very interesting.

 

I want to try this out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

The best, and dare I say only way to train parallel processing is to parallel process.

Just keep doing it, and you'll eventually get better and better.

Math and chess may be hard now, but they'll get easier.

 

One method that was proposed to them for improving this is parallel conversations. Get both host and tulpa involved in entirely separate conversations on the IRC at once, one for the host and one per tulpa -- most likely having the tulpa(e) chat via proxying.

 

I personally did some experiments where I tried to have Lora remind me to do something, or to think about something (really simple) and give an answer. If I asked for the reminder/answer she just stared at me and went "wut?".

 

My recommendation: play chess. Chess is a game in witch knowing what the other thinks kills the game. Therefore, the only way to play chess with your tulpa is by creating a "wall" between your thoughts and his/hers. In the beginning it'll be hard as hell, but you'll get accustomed. Once you can play chess for a while, parallel processing should be easier.

 

I already have an idea for a test that helps affirm the concept of parallel processing with people and their tulpa that isn't as intense as the ones I've seen previously suggested.

 

First you need a person with a tulpa, both need to have a rudimentary basis in mathematics and you need to give the person a pencil and paper.

 

Give the person a semi-complicated multiplication problem. 4957*345 would be an example, tell him to start it immediately.

While watching him write this out on the paper, instruct the tulpa to do a simpler problem; "Multiply 54 and 7" or something that the patient won't immediately be able to solve. Make sure he's consistently working on his task while the tulpa works on the multiplication problem in his/her head.

 

If parallel processing is present, then the tulpa should come up with an answer during the host's calculation. He should be right in the thick of his own multiplying when he says "The answer is 378."

 

This experiment has a couple of flaws:

One: They both need to know math. I know that shouldn't be a terrible thing, but the people I've had to talk to with tulpae for some reason or another really dislike that quality of this test.

 

Two: To gather any meaningful statistics would require a large group of willing participants, both a control group and a group with tulpae. Again, I doubt anyone can have the resources to do the following. Alternatively, one could do a before/after tulpa study, but that requires a willing group of participants who want to conduct the test, make a tulpa, and then conduct the test again. Needless to say, the likelihood of this is slim.

 

The advantages of this test, though, are pretty neat. First of all it will satisfy any personal curiosity of the host as to his tulpa's legitimacy as a 'second processor,' if you will. This experiment can be conducted by a single person and their tulpa (with a random number generator,) and the result will be black and white for that individual. As a person who hopes to one day form a tulpa, that solid evidence is all I need to be convicted of the positive qualities of possessing a tulpa.

 

 

tl;dr: this is a test that gives both a person and a tulpa a math problem to do so you can prove that the person and the tulpa work their problems out at the same time

 

If anyone with a tulpa wants to try this out with me, you can find me on the IRC, or you can just try it by yourself and tell me the results! The key is to get the tulpa to answer the question while you slave away at your own problem, you shouldn't spare a thought for the tulpa's math.

 

I thought of a way to differentiate yours and your tulpa's thought processes:

 

1. Start forcing, using whatever method you like.

2. Force yourself an opaque box with a hinged lid, whatever size. (I use a cubic black wooden box about half a meter on a side)

3. Either you or your tulpa take the box, then force something inside of it, without telling the other what it is or letting it slip in any way.

4. Play 20 Questions with the object in the box, or something similar. If you randomly think of or get a thought about a certain object, guess it. This "calls out" any stray thoughts.

5. Switch roles and have the other person guess.

6. Repeat if you so desire.

 

 

The idea is that it will train you and your tulpa to be able to function separately more effectively, so that you can both think about different things at the same time, basically. I believe this should help with parallel processing and simple differentiation, and general development.

 

If you try this, please respond with what you think of it and any interesting experiences you have.

 

 

Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for what happens, as usual.

 

To hide the objects on your end, I'd say to not consciously think about it, but while still remembering it. I know it probably makes no sense, but that's the best way I can think to put it.

 

I've been thinking of ways to prove parallel processing for sufficiently advanced tulpa, and I have come up with an experiment. I would love it if some members of this board would participate in both parts of the experiment.

 

Experiment Part 1: Testing Logical Parallel Processing

 

Come up with several math problems. Make sure that they're not too easy that the answer will immediately come to your head but not too hard that you'll need a calculator for them. I'm thinking maybe triple-digit addition or double-digit multiplication. Have your tulpa solve a math problem. Note that it is integral to the experiment that the host NOT think about the math problem during this process. Once your tulpa has arrived at an answer, record it immediately and check it independently. Repeat this process for several math problems and (if you would) post your problems and results on the board.

 

Experiment Part 2: Testing Linguistic Parallel Processing

 

Come up with a short list of words. Show a word to your tulpa and have them come up with a short nursery-rhyme-like poem for the word. For example, after being given the word oatmeal and thinking about the word for awhile, I might come up with the following ditty:

 

"There once was a dusty old showreel

By Patrick von Gutenberg O'Neil

Which showed in its clips

Bears with strange hips

In a land eating nothing but oatmeal."

 

As seen before, the poem doesn't not have to be well-written or entirely sensical, but it DOES have to be entirely produced from the tulpa's own thought process. If I were to participate in the experiment, as a host I should not be thinking about poetry or oatmeal at all during the second phase of the experiment. The poem also has to be recorded IMMEDIATELY while the tulpa is reciting it to limit or stop any part of the host's consciousness from affecting the result.

 

To anyone reading this who has a fully-formed tulpa: I would absolutely love it if you participated in this little experiment and shared your experiences. Having a diversity of data is always a good thing. Also, if you can't seem to complete these particular experiments for one reason or another, I would like to remind that your data is just as bit as important as the other collected entries, and I urge you to post your findings.

 

Tulpa independence with flashcards!

 

This is a relatively short guide, but it's helped me tons. I'm really happy I thought of doing this, and I'm going to start doing this daily.

 

So I discovered that my tulpa, Fancyboy, is terrible at parallel processing. I had decided, why not show him simple math flashcards, so he can get better at this? He's not exactly independent yet, but this strategy for tulpa independence has helped him in a variety of ways!

 

First off, the link to the website that is really great to use: Addition Flashcards!

 

What you need:

  • A vocal tulpa
  • Yourself (of course!)

 

What you need to do is get them to answer the flashcard questions, until they get better at it. I realized this was working when we worked on more advanced questions and he got the right answer a few times in a row. Eventually you will realize that your tulpa is thinking apart from you, and isn't just using your own thoughts to formulate it's own ideas. This is why I felt like I was parroting for a long time, my tulpa could not think for himself. With these flashcards, my tulpa is able to think on its own.

 

If your tulpa gets discouraged (like Fancyboy has many times before), just encourage them to keep on going! They can do it!

Even if your tulpa isn't good with math or numbers, it still helps to do the simple equations. I'm bad at math, and it seems that Fancyboy is doing better than I am with these flashcards.

 

I'm not sure if there's a correlation between doing this and parallel processing, but I'll find out if there is!

 

Parallel processing is the ability for you and your tulpa to think simultaneously without accidentally interfering with each others thoughts. (Yes, tulpas can mistake their thoughts for the host’s too; it’s a two way street.) It is meant to help with sentience and speech. It improves a tulpas cognitive abilities. The following training promotes parallel processing by automating and further dissociating the host and tulpa from each other. First, do memory exercises. Have your tulpa try short-term memory (“What did I just say thirty seconds ago?”), then long-term memory (“When was the first time you got murdered by that wonderland volcano?”), and then finally try working memory by doing some basic math with him/her. After they become reliable and efficient at subtraction and addition, go onto harder, more complex, equations. This will increase cognition and logic skills. Second, play a game of twenty questions. Have both of you take turns forcing an imaginary object into a small black box in the wonderland. Only one of you knows what is in the box. Ask your tulpa or have your tulpa ask you twenty questions about the object in the box. The goal is to refrain from using telepathy to win, but to use simple verbal skills and logic. Hopefully by now this will wear at the overpowering telepathic semblance between you guys. After this, the best thing to do is to play a game of chess. This will exercise both of your minds extremely efficiently, severing the too-strong tie.

 

Hi everyone! I'm currently programming a little flash application which will hopefully quantitatively test your and your tulpa's abilities to do independent, parallel thinking.

 

You can check out the first version (with just the counting test for now) here at Deviantart.

 

Something I've been working in recently is just spilling some toothpicks onto a table, and I keep them all in my visual field. Once that has been done, my tulpa counts them while I space out, and she tells me the number. Then I check for accuracy.

I've just began doing this, so it might be a while before she becomes a Rainman, but it is certainly something to try.

 

But why should one do possession?

 

...

 

The tulpa grows on the experience, both in mental strength (e.g. thought autonomy and parallel processing) and terms of maturity (because with great power comes great responsibility).

 

A good idea is to play the game Audiosurf to improve your parallel processing.

 

Somebody from Polish forum wanted to play this on Android without Flash, so I made similar game in Java and now you can play anywhere.

 

Online: http://apps.kotcrab.pl/games/parallel/play/

Desktop(Win, Linux, Mac): http://apps.kotcrab.pl/games/parallel/Pa...esktop.zip

Android(2.2 and up): http://apps.kotcrab.pl/games/parallel/Pa...ndroid.apk (soon on Google Play haha)

 

I noticed that I sometimes obviously puppeted my tulpa, when I made them move exactly like I moved myself. It seems that I had some trouble getting into parallel processing, not just in terms of audibility.

 

Just like some audio guides recommend practising overlapping voice (making your tulpa say a different thing while you say another) to help with audibility, I found it useful to do the same with puppeting, and I'm giving a few examples of such symbolics.

 

Get your tulpa's face really close to your own and breath through your mouth. Tell your tulpa that whenever you breath out, they breath in and vice versa. This will help you to break the mirroring habit and get used to your tulpa doing different things.

 

If this seems too easy, do the same but at the same time imagine that there's two tubes next to your heads and there is a ball in each of the tube; every time you breath out, the ball in the right tube rises and when you breath in, it goes down. It's the same for your tulpa except in the left tube, now try to imagine all the sensations with the breathing and at the same time get the balls right.

 

At first I had some trouble doing multiple things at the same time like this, but over time it got better and it helped my tulpa to learn to move on her own after I had trained movement overlapping like this.

 

I'm in doubt whether my tulpas can think while I'm concentrating on something other than them, so I figured I need some test that keeps them occupied reliably for some time while I explicitly concentrate on something else, and that produces a measurable result.

 

I came up with a test based on mental arithmetic. The idea is to perform a very long series of arithmetic operations, with little apparent repetitive structure, so the tulpa cannot jump ahead to the result after recognizing the pattern behind these calculations, but instead needs to go through all calculations manually. No cooperation from the host side required if everything goes well.

 

The test (sequence A)

 

During the test, the tulpa produces a sequence of numbers, generated by the following rule: The first number is 23. The next number is always obtained by adding the tens digit of the previous number, plus six times the unit digit.

 

So the first numbers in the sequence are:

  1. 23
  2. 2 + 6 * 3 = 20
  3. 2 + 6 * 0 = 02
  4. 0 + 6 * 2 = 12

You don't have to memorize the whole sequence. We just want to test whether you (the tulpa) worked your way through the whole sequence, so all you have to remember is something like "the 3rd number is 2", then later "the 4th number is 12" and so on.

 

Before you start, tell your host how much time you plan to spend computing. After the set time, have your host ask you for your progress. For example, you would say "the 69th number is 08". The host then checks your result with this lookup table that has the first 1000 elements of the sequence.

 

The test (sequence B)

 

If two-digit arithmetic is too easy, here's another sequence: Start at 273, and obtain the next number in the sequence by doubling the previous number, removing the thousands digit if one occurs, and subtracting one.

 

For example, suppose the first number in the sequence is 273: Double this (546); remove thousands digit (none, so still 546); minus one gives 545. This is the second number. Now, double this (1090); remove thousands digit (90); minus one gives 89. This is the third number.

 

Here's the lookup table, again for the first 1000 elements.

 

Call for participation

 

From preliminary checks, it seems like I need to work with my tulpas on their mental arithmetic first before we can actually take this test. Nonetheless, this post being in the research board means that you're all welcome to partake in it.

 

Tulpas, please note that the seemingly random structure of the sequences mean that a tiny error anywhere inbetween can completely throw you off. So if you want to be succesful, be sure to double-check and triple-check each step.

 

My original intention is to get a positive result at all from my tulpas, but of course you can easily turn this into a challenge in multiple ways, e.g. try to compute the 50th element as fast as possible. Have fun!

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...