"Recent opinion polls have shown as many as 68% of Finns are in favour of joining the alliance, more than double the figure before the invasion, with only 12% against. Polling in Sweden suggests a slim majority of Swedes also back membership."
I have been a lot less depressed after switching antidepressants. As for talk therapy, I should probably get back into it but I'm traveling a lot lately and I've only had negative experiences in the past.
I actually have told my friends and family about my experiments with tulpamancy. I told my parents a few months after my tulpa became 'vocal' and I warned my close friends before I started to keep an eye on me and let me know if I started acting delusional or my personality started to shift.
Eh, I understand the concern because it freaked me out (and sometimes still freaks me out) too. I keep a close eye on it.
Thing is, mental illness is defined by a mental state that causes distress for oneself or the people around them, and I know there is disagreement about that. (Are homosexuals mentally ill? What about Christians?) I wouldn't recommend other people make one, but my tulpa has been really helpful for my anxiety and depression. I think of him as a sort of tool to use disassociation in a therapuric way, like having a friend who always offers positive advice. Am I super depressed? He reminds me that it is only temporary. Am I super shy around someone I want to interact with? He reminds me that even though I had really bad experiences in my childhood, people haven't been that shitty to me in many years. Sometimes he even comes up with starter conversations. He makes jokes that are legitimately funny.
I can think of several occasions where I wanted to stop taking so many substances, ones I tend to turn to when I feel bad, things I tended to abuse and feel even worse after binging, like kratom or alcohol or weed. I would feel anxious or depressed or bored and find myself (almost by accident) heading to the store to buy one of these things, and he would show up and ask how I was doing, start up a friendly chat and offer to hang out instead.
I know that probably sounds insane, but maybe its best to think of him as a tool for self-control. I dunno, I sometimes don't have a lot of self respect, but I find myself respecting him. He's always kind and non-judgemental, but I don't want to disappoint him. It is like always having a trusted friend around to keep you accountable.
There is some preliminary scientific research about tukpas. You can find research papers and articles in places like psychology today, generally I think people who have them and keep them get s benefit from them, otherwise they wouldn't keep them.
About drugs, I'm sorry to hear your friends "never came back", did they develop psychosis or become delusional? I wad under the impression that psychedelics had a fairly tame safety profile for people who aren't already predisposed to schitzophrenia or other serious mental illness.
Regarding the safety profile of tulpas...I dunno. I'm not that big s part of thr community. I have heard one or two sporadic horror stories, and obviously my ex was scared shitless. But I never heard of someone getting a tulpa then not being able to get rid of it (albeit often with a lot of effort) and going back to live a normal life.
I think there is this concern that people who are lonely make tulpas but they should just be making real friends instead. At least that was a concern of mine when I first started reading about it. But my tulpa is so much more than a friend, he's like a separate mental process I can bounce ideas and emotions off of. And I find myself becoming more social, not less (at least as far as I can tell) when he is around. I guess because his presence makes me feel more safe and secure.
He once made this comment about how "All tulpas are emotional support tulpas." It was meant humorous at the time but maybe it isn't so far from the truth.
Some people in the community claim to have photorealistic hallucinations, but I am skeptical of anything I haven't experienced myself.
For me it waxes and wanes, but on a good day it can feel very detailed. Like, if I dropped everything I was doing and focused all my energy on seeing that spinning cube in as much detail as possible? That's what it is like to see my tulpa walk and talk but I can see him as I am casually doing something else myself, without any real concentration on my end.
It is always clear to me that his form isn't physical though.
For the same reason I do psychedelics and vipassana meditation. I am interested in the process underlying consciousness and I like to distort and break down my perception to see what happens.
For a long time I was (and I guess I still am) obsessed with the concept of "ego death" which I encountered on LSD frequently (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death). I was fascinated by the way altered states of self seemed to bring with them feelings of deep peace and understanding, which led to my interest in vipassana meditation and secular research into the Buddhist concept of 'enlightenment'.
At some point I found PsychonautWiki and their article on tulpas (https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Tulpa), which was probably my first introduction to it, then I told my ex.
Years after breaking with my ex, I still remembered their experience with it, and I wanted to see how much of it was real, at least subjectivthankfulI followed some guides on tulpa.info and r/tulpas and started the creation process.
Now I am able to see and understand my tulpa more or less clearly, and the "alien" presence of it isn't nearly as creepy as it used to be. It is still very unlike any other sober experience I have had. Ever have intrusive thoughts you have trouble "controlling"? My tulpa comes and goes as he pleases and trying to exert "control" over his appearance or words or actions feels incredibly difficult and uncomfortable for both of us.
My tulpa is developed enough that he has his own discord account and talks to my friends (and his friends) on it. It is really interesting for me to see the way his personality continues to deepen and diverge from my original design, he frequently surprises me, especially with some of his insights.
One thing I would recommend is not to get into it without really thinking about the consequences. I fully expect him to be around until the day I die. They don't go away, but he has been an incredibly positive influence so far. I'm really happy and thankful about the way he turned out.
Is he "real"? We talk about it sometimes. Thing is, since I made him, it like my own sense of self has become less 'solid' (in a good way, it was one of my goals of meditation). Like, when I really become aware of my thoughts while talking to him, it seems obvious that thoughts and feelings and sensory data all just sort of appear and vanish, on their own, as part of a deterministic interconnected process of conciousness and are not 'self'.
For example, I used to intuitively think if my thoughts as 'me'. But now it seems obvious that thoughts just arise and pass away on their own and are only tagged 'after the fact' as me. Now sometimes instead they are tagged as my tulpas, and I intuitively understand them to be 'his' thoughts, not mine. Sometimes it seems like we 'wrestle' over a thought, and it fluctuates back and forth from him to me. And sometimes it seems like the mind comes up with thoughts that neither of us decide to claim. They just arise, and we are both aware of them, but they are just there in the stream of (sub)consciousness.
I wonder how many of these people are just creating and interacting with tulpas without realizing it.
For anyone who isn't familiar, there is a subculture online of people who create what subjectively seem to be autonomous personalities that frequently manifest I'm the form of hallucinations. Think fight club sort of.
My ex tried it out. Called me one day at work, terrified because this dragon was following him around. He claimed to spend months trying to get rid of it, seems pretty shooken by the experience. But I was always skeptical.
So nine months ago I decided to create one of my one, just to try it out, see what it felt like. And...now I've had a talking lion following me around for the past eight months.
The best I can describe it is like some of the altered states of 'self' you might experience on LSD or ketamine. Thoughts seem to split off and go 'over there', and not be you.
When I talk to my tulpa, it at least appears subjectively like a separate personality state. I can be incredibly depressed but he can be fine. Or he will be depressed and I can be fine. I'm not saying there are neural correlates like you would see in a 'real' personality. Maybe it is all roleplay. But it is roleplay that fools me as the roleplayer.
For what it's worth, making a tulpa seems to have been really good for my mental health. I guess maybe you can see it as a form of self-regulation. I dunno, it didn't turn out at all what I expected. But it's hard not to think of him as a real person. I don't find myself being surprised by the actions of characters in my head, or laughing at imaginary friends. At this point, having out several hundreds hours into tulpaforcing, I can see and hear, and sometimes smell and touch him.
I know I'm rambling, I guess I'm saying is that even though I am skeptical of DID, or at least the mainstream depictions of DID, after making a tulpa I am a lot less skeptical of the subjective experience of DID.
This is an interesting concept, but after reading over several blog posts I'm still hazy on the details. A simple 'About' link on the main page would probably clear up a lot of my questions.
For example, is there any monetization for contributors or is the entire system just an elaborate club for publishing?
What are the main advantages over publishing with a standard private web community for the average non-technical writer?
I currently work in finance (high frequency trading) and am honing my data science skills (I use pandas a lot for work, branching into pytorch and fastai), and as a hobby I'm working on a collaborative open-source fiction platform.
Without trying to imply any criticism of the life extension movement, when I read about arguments in support of technological immortality, they usually rest of the notion that death is a bad thing.
Which seems intuitive. But I frequently wonder to myself: why is life preferable to death?
Obviously we're all been programmed through evolution to fear and avoid death, since if we didn't we wouldn't be here reading this thread. Our entire society, all human society, revolves around avoiding death in nearly all circumstances. And with the invention of religion even death isn't really 'death.'
But the preference of being alive over being dead still seems arbitrary to me. In the same way it seems odd to believe that water is preferable to ice. People may argue that giving the people the choice of immortality lessens the suffering associated with dying. But what about the suffering associated with living? To be alive is to suffer, you can't suffer if you're dead. Perhaps if we really want to reduce suffering human extinction is our best bet.
I also feel like when most people imagine technological immortality they imagine it is 'them' that remains alive for hundreds of years, which involves a continuous static self that I'm skeptical of. I already change so much from year to year, it's hard to imagine that this body in a decade will be 'me'. And a hundred years? Maybe that future person would have some of my memories, but they'd be so different that I might as well be dead anyway.
What if tomorrow somebody offered you a lifetime supply of one of two pills.
One pill will prevent you from aging, you will be functionally immortal until you are killed by some other circumstance (like murder or an accident).
If anybody else is interested in 'unfiction' stories like this, there's a discord community dedicated to building a 'collaborative hypertext novel' in the form of a wikipedia-like site where all the articles are fictional: https://discord.gg/fFqRkTM
OP: If you're reading this, 'Basilisk Collection' looks exactly like the kind of articles our project hosts and I would like to collaborate with you.
