ashenbrown p.r.

[Shui]

Sounds like a good idea with the hypnosis. I could really afford to do that myself. I'm running into some visualization problems.

 

As for the dreaming, I don't have much experience with lucid dreaming, but I could interpret that in a few ways.

 

Your mind might be telling you that you're not seeing Cain as a part of your reality yet. Maybe instead of finding him, you need to build him up. Maybe you could sculpt or carve his form and breathe life into it, or something like that.

 

It also might be that you're trying too hard. I've heard of people trying for months to have a lucid dream, and then having one the very night they give up on being able to do it. Maybe if you take a break from Cain, at least in your dreams, it'll come more naturally.

 

But of course these are just guesses.

[ashenbrown]

On Returns

Hey everyone! What's up? I've been away for a while. The truth is, college got real this semester, and I've been so consistently busy that I haven't had time to do the important things in life, like update my progress report. But I'm pretty much out for the holidays now, so hopefully...I'll be doing better on keeping up with my report.

 

On Research

Clearly I've not been around. But I didn't just forget all about the world of Tulpas. On the contrary, I've spent what little free time I've had doing additional research on Tulpas.

 

I got my hands on a book called Magical Use of Thoughtforms by Dolores Ashcroft Nowicki and James Brennan. As a disclaimer, I don't buy that there is anything particularly magical about Tulpas. They are just a mental construct, right? It's all very scientific. But the title of this book kept coming up in my research so I ordered it nonetheless.

 

I don't want to mislead you. It was kind of a horrible waste of money. Many parts of it were laughably incoherent and rooted in superstition. However, there were a few redeeming passages. For example, James discussed at length how the Tibetan Buddhists used the tulpa to reinforce ideas of impermanence. He said that students were tasked with conjuring up a specific deity through concentration - that is, they were told to make a tulpa. They were assured that these tulpa iterations were, in fact, real deities. However, this was all a ruse and a test. The successful pupils were the only ones who were able to realize that their creations were just hallucinations, and nothing more. I thought the whole concept of tulpas as a test was pretty cool.

 

There were also mentions of Alexandra David-Neel, and her creation of the Friar-Tuck like monk tulpa. But I'm sure we've all heard that one already.

 

On the whole, though, I never did discover anything gamechanging. I guess I'm hoping that there is some obscure technique that I haven't tried yet that will work just right, but maybe that's a pipe dream to begin with.

 

On Confessions

Alright, confession time. Here it is: I haven't been forcing with much tenacity. Over the last month or two, I've been doing a pretty bad job. Don't think that I gave up or got frustrated, because it wasn't that. This semester was just particularly taxing on me, and some of my personal goals had to be shelved temporarily to deal with that stress.

 

I've been debating over whether or to go into specifics. I guess I will. I shouldn't be telling you this, but - hey, full disclosure. I had a pretty close friend who committed suicide this semester. Nobody saw it coming, and I still don't know what happened. Dealing with that did some weird things to my emotions that kept me from Cain. For one, I had nightmares about her for weeks. For another, I couldn't picture Cain's face because I could only see hers. There was literally a period was I was afraid I was accidentally going to make a tulpa in HER likeness. I just stopped forcing altogether.

 

Now, I'm not telling you this because I want sympathy - that's not it. I don't need it now anyway. I'm truly in a much better place, and have resumed forcing with gusto. In fact, Cain has been surprisingly supportive in helping me move past all of it. I guess he gets it.

 

On Progress

Lastly, I wanted to tell you guys something. Over the last few weeks, I've been getting back into forcing. And something big happened tonight...I think. I was doing a hypnosis session, and I was picturing Cain's appearance, and all that good stuff, and...something grabbed my foot. It scared the shit out of me. No one was there, but clearly someone was, because someone grabbed my foot. I don't know exactly what this means, but from what I've read, weird shit like this is often a precursor to progress on the imposition front, so I'll take it.

 

If you have any questions or comments, lemme know.

[ashenbrown]

On Lucid Dreaming, Pt. 2

So, I made a post a while back about how I've been trying to spot or generate Cain in my dreams. This is still an ongoing project, but I've had a consistently depressing amount of success.

 

For a while, I would try to imagine he was behind a closed door, and then throw the door open. But the room behind the door would be dark, and if I walked in, I would wake up.

 

I am still having problems, but now in a different way. I decided I could just find one random person in my dream and morph him into Cain in front of me. Does that make sense? So I tried it last night, only all the people in my dream kept running away from me before I could. I was just chasing people around all night.

 

I'm stumped as to why my mind is resisting this particular endeavor so much. I've always been pretty naturally gifted at lucid dreaming (and basically nothing else), and I don't get why it isn't working for this.

 

Any thoughts?