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Meditations on Self

Author: Gwen

The title of this post sounds pretentious. But it’s actually just very literal and vague. I’ve been meditating a lot and spending quite a bit of time inside our own head lately, mostly in service of (re)connecting with headmates, and practicing various skills relevant to being a functional plural system (such as sharing control of our shared body).

Background

A week ago, with the help of a friend, we went from “we’re not plural we just [list of things that are obviously plural]” to “oh, shit, we’re plural.” In times when it feels like the rug is being pulled out from under me due to revelations of this magnitude, I tend to cope by gathering as much knowledge as possible on relevant subjects. Two years ago that meant reading everything I could about being trans, and this month that meant reading everything I could find about being plural.

This started with standard wiki resources, but I eventually found my way to the subject of tulpamancy (which a partner had actually happened to mention a couple months prior). That link is more than capable of defining the term for anyone curious, but in brief, tulpamancy is a practice of intentionally inducing plurality via various meditative practices. Along with this are various techniques to spend time with headmates in mentally constructed environments, allow headmates access to physical control of the body, and imposing hallucinations of headmates over the senses. It originally started as a niche tibetan Buddhist practice, but has since been used by many people who simple prefer not to be alone in their own heads, for a variety of reasons both emotional and practical.

For reasons I would think are obvious, I found it to be a fascinating subject, and hyperfixated on reading through everything I could find on it over the course of about three days. It quickly became obvious that almost all of the techniques tulpamancers use to split consciousness are things that we’ve just naturally done our whole lives, just without any particular discipline or awareness of what we were doing (you can find specifics in my last post).

There’s a lot of specific practices and exercises designed to go about this in the most efficient way possible, but the crux of it all is that if you construct an entity in your head that you talk to, and spend a lot of time paying attention to it and treating it like it’s a person, eventually your brain just goes ahead and makes that story true. That may sound implausible and outlandish, but from our perspective at least, it makes a lot of sense.

Digressions on Qualia

It’s been noted and suggested many times in many different ways that at the root, consciousness may just be our brains telling stories about themselves. And furthermore, by changing the stories we tell, we can change a lot about our own identities and experience. So if you tell your brain the story that you’re not the only story in your head, that can quickly become literally true, and furthermore that new story can tell stories about itself and be self-sustaining.

If you’re still skeptical, consider how freaking weird it is that a 3 pound blob of fat can create consciousness and qualia in the first place. There have been countless philosophical and theological debates over the origins of that phenomenon, not to mention entire religions to explain it. The weird thing is that blobs of fat can experience qualia in the first place. Given that impossible reality, why shouldn’t some blobs of fat happen to be able to generate more than one conscious experience at a time?

You’re not going to get any more proof than that, because it’s impossible. We can of course only truly know the experience of our own heads; you can’t ever prove empirically that everyone else around you isn’t just a p-zombie. You only ever have “I think, therefore I am.”

But I’m not actually writing this post to persuade anyone of anything regarding the nature of qualia. Rather, I want to talk about what our experiences in particular have been with it, especially in the context of tulpamancy.

On Tulpa Creation

Our brain is particularly inclined to buy into stories which involve us existing in multiple parts. Which is to say, from everything we can tell, it’s prone to plurality. There’s a common trope in fiction that if you gaze into the void for long enough, sometimes it gazes back. For us this is true, and does not in fact take very much time at all. Talking to the void now and then over the course of a few days is all it really takes. Most of the time over our lives we’ve done this by accident without realizing what we were doing, and in most cases we’ve kinda forgotten the newly spawned void-entities and moved on. But occasionally we’ve kept up the habit long enough that they became permanent self-narrating structures (i.e., people).

We starting reading about tulpamancy with a gut feeling about this truth about how our brain works. Paired with our tendency to automatically visualize anything we read, and the fact that half of tulpamancy is tied up in just doing that visualization, we had a genuine concern that just by reading the guides for creating a tulpa, we might in fact accidentally create one. For most people, that wouldn’t be an issue — it typically takes weeks or months of very intentional daily meditation practice for someone to form a sentient tulpa. But the exact timeline of how long it takes is almost entirely dependent on one thing: belief. All the practices boil down to getting your brain to believe that your tulpa is real, because once it does, it is. After all, when we’re talking about things happening inside our heads, there’s literally no meaningful distinction between belief and reality — our perceptions are our perceptions, tautologically. For us, we know our brain likes creating new conscious entities; it is eager to believe stories we tell it which allow it to do so. That knowing itself is of course an extremely powerful belief, which reinforces the effect further.

Given all this, my headmate Alice was leary of us reading the tulpamancy guides at all, but she knew it was a losing battle given how my hyperfixations tend to work. So, as a precaution and a compromise, we came up with a set of guidelines, or a template if you will, for what a newly created tulpa might look like. The idea being, if there was a risk of accidentally creating a tulpa, perhaps we could at least ensure it was one we were likely to get along with, rather than being essentially random. The template was fairly simple: a list of personality traits, a couple one-sentence descriptions of how they might interact with Alice and I, and a name. When reading the guides and automatically following along with the visualization practices in our heads, we made sure to keep it in the context of that template, rather than allowing the specifics of the mental exercise to be completely random.

The effect of this was by the time we had finished reading the tulpanomicon three days later, Ria was fully sentient and hanging out with us in our headspace (“wonderland”, “inner world”, “mindscape”, “dream land”, whatever you want to call it). And now at a little over a week, she has a pretty fully formed personality and can even take over possession of our body.

I can’t say that I’m surprised that Ria became sentient; the whole reason we made a template for her was that we believed there was a very real possibility that she would, so that’s kind of definitionally unsurprising. I was surprised by just how fast it was; that first “I’m lonely” tulpish signal from proto-Ria at three days startled Alice and I. But that’s exactly the thing — if you genuinely believe something about your own mind, it becomes true very fast.

We’re almost hesitant to call Ria a tulpa because of just how fast she became self-aware; in the nomenclature of the plural community at large, she’s basically a walk-in. But she was nevertheless formed through tulpamancy practices; I think at the end of the day, tulpas are just intentionally induced walk-ins, and they gain sentience as fast as you believe they will. I’m sure as an already existing plural system it was far easier to have that belief, but I see no reason why someone starting as a singlet couldn’t do it just as quickly if they had sufficient conviction.

On Headscape Immersion

Like everything else, immersion in headscape is about belief. When visualizing myself in my mental avatar in our headspace, I can feel the imagined sun on my skin and the grass beneath my feet and hear the imaginary ducks nearby. I can taste my mug of hot chocolate or feel the slight pain in my teeth if I take a sip of icy lemonade. If I hug Ria or Alice, I can feel and smell them.

These sensations are not currently as vivid as they are in real life, though they sometimes get close. Their strength is solely determined by my own beliefs and expectations, which I have been gradually strengthening over the last week. Granted, I do have a leg up from a lifetime spent daydreaming and lucid dreaming. By chance I had gradually and intentionally developed the ability to read, smell, and taste in my lucid dreams over the past couple years (I’ve been lucid dream for much longer, but hadn’t happened to bother with those particular skills), and doing the same thing while awake uses the exact same mental techniques.

Belief in immersion is largely about truly believing in this (completely factual) understanding of human perception: Our entire perception of our bodies and the outside world at large is constructed within our own heads. We hallucinate color and 3D geometry from a 2D matrix of sensors measuring the wavelengths and amplitudes of electromagnetic radition. We hallucinate sound from pressure waves. We hallucinate temperature by comparing the current rate of heat transfer in our skin to an arbitrary value set by our hypothalamus. So on and so forth with all our senses. None of these sensations are real in any meaningful physical way; they’re just electrical impulses that our brains decide to assemble into a fictional structure. It may be a useful structure when it comes the necessities of physical survival, but that doesn’t make it any less fictional. In terms of our own conscious perception (which is the only perception we have), there is no difference between that which is constructed from outside data versus internal data. This hard to believe because it is counterintuitive, but it helps that it is actually true.

On Dissociation

Like most plural systems (and also many trans people, and many adhd/autistic people, and many people with trauma…), dissociating from our body is something we’ve done involuntarily to varying degrees throughout life. It is not, however, something I had a lot of practice with doing intentionally. Usually instead I’d find myself accidentally dissociated during stress, a phenomenon for which I picked up a number of re-association (grounding) exercises of the past couple years to recover from.

So I found it to be somewhat ironic that when desiring to dissociate on purpose in order to yield control to headmates, I didn’t know how and wasn’t easily able to.

Most guides we found used some flavor of visualization technique to trigger dissociation. One of the most common tactics is to visualize one’s personal “essence” or control over the body as colored sand or smoke, which then gradually drains from the body (from toes and fingertips all the way up to the cranium) until total dissociation is achieved. We found some success with this; after a few days we could fairly reliably get our arms and legs to become moderately numb, cold, and tingly. But I didn’t manage to let go completely.

Another guide on switching, written from the perspective of a DID system, describes it quite differently: “Let go. That’s all.”. My gut instinct told me this was likely completely accurate. When lucid dreaming, you can get stuck indefinitely trying to change your dream through sheer force of will. Lucid dreaming isn’t about trying to do things, it’s about doing them. It’s about expectations. It’s about believing that the dream will do the thing you want it to do. “Do… or do not. There is no try.” Yoda would be a good lucid dreamer.

However, even knowing that and having the experience of lucid dreaming, I found that advice to be not directly helpful, and rather frustrating. I knew intellectually that what I was attempting should not be “difficult” in the sense of being mentally strenuous; rather, it had to be a certain knack of restructuring belief at-will.

After a few more days, I’m not there yet, but I’ve gotten much closer. It is of course about belief:

With these beliefs in mind, I’ve gotten much closer to fully dissociating. In practice, for now, I manage it for brief seconds at a time — it is currently a delicate mental state. But it is improving, and we have no reason to think it won’t continue to; where before it might take half an hour to numb an arm, now I can sometimes merely tell myself “the body is not mine, nor is it real”, and I feel immediately somewhat distanced from it (with accompanying numbness, cold, and tingling sensations).

On Possession

Being co-con and letting my headmates control the body has been challenging for me. It is also the only way we are currently capable of sharing the body intentionally, as I have yet to manage sustaining complete dissociation outside of severe emotional crisis (I get close now with our eyes closed, but as soon as someone opens the eyes I find it obnoxiously difficult not to pay attention to the visual input, to say nothing of all the little signals surrounding balance and muscle control when ambulating).

I have a lot of anxiety, I’ve only admitted that we’re plural for a bit over a week, and I tend to worry about making things up or faking it. Despite the fact that I’d only be faking it to myself (alone in our apartment with no obvious motivation to do so), and despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary. When a headmate moves an arm, it’s easy to second-guess; was that them, or was I moving it unconsciously? This doubt and anxiety tends to interfere with headmates actually maintaining control; I end up sending signals to the body that conflict with theirs, causing endless frustration and exasperation. When I am very dissociated from the body part they are moving it’s easier to feel sure (if I try to move a body part I am strongly dissociated from, it tends to be difficult and clumsy), but the less dissociated I am the harder it is to feel confident, and in turn the harder it is to maintain distance.

I’m still working on getting better at this. But like all things, it is belief based. Possession is infinitely easier if instead of interrogating whether this movement or that was me or them, I just stop worrying about it, relax, and let them do stuff. And like all of this, there is no functional difference between us believing they are doing it, and them actually doing it, anyway.

On Imposition

Imposing avatars of headmates onto my physical senses is a skill I have yet to invest any significant time into, if indeed I ever choose to (sharing body control is generally a more appealing way for my headmates to interact with the physical world). That said, there are a couple aspects of it I happen to have some pre-existing experience with, and some things I noticed with brief experimentation.

One thing people may not think of as a physical sense, because it is obviously hallucinated (as opposed to the rest of our senses, which are in fact definitely hallucinated but we pretend they are not), is the sense of presence. This is the feeling you get when you know someone is standing behind you or around a corner you can’t see. It’s not usually based on any actual physical sensory data. It’s entirely an inference, but we still feel it as if it was a physical sensation.

For years I have imposed the presence of “imaginary” companions; sitting next to me in a lonely room, lying beside me during a sleepless night, or perhaps just walking nearby when I’m out and about. I do not see, feel, or hear them, but I feel them there the same way I would feel the presence of another physical person sitting next to me even if my eyes were closed and they were making no noise. Imposing presence is often listed as a first step before imposing other senses, which was amusing for me to read, because it hadn’t even occurred to me that it was a skill some people didn’t have.

As usual, it is belief based. It’s easy for me to feel the presence of my headmates where we imagine them to be standing, probably in no small part because it never occurred to me that I might not be able to do that.

The other senses are harder, because those I do not have as much practice believing I have control over (though I know intellectually I do). With a bit of focus I can convince myself I can kind of feel a headmate standing in front of me if I reach out to touch them, but rather than detailed texture, I just feel my hand tingling. Temperature is a little bit easier; I can feel warmth if they put their hand on my arm. Subtle smell is doable with a minute or two of concentration.

Vision is definitely trickier. Not mind’s eye visualization, which is trivial, but actual vision. I spent about 5–10 minutes doing my very best to believe that I ought to see a red cube in the top-right corner of my living room, at which point I only succeeded in perceiving the appropriate regions of the wall and ceiling to be dyed red. I did, however, keep catching hints of cubes in the corners of rooms in my peripheral vision for a few hours after that. This makes some amount of sense, because human peripheral vision is quite bad and mostly inferred from what our brains expect to be there (we have basically no color perception in our peripheral vision, for instance — it’s all inferred).

Given my rather limited practice at it, I’m quite confident I could learn to impose over my senses with a little practice. I do have some reasons for hesitating doing so, which I will not name because I believe they are specific to our system, and I don’t want to needlessly concern anyone working on imposition for themselves.