Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
When I was a member of the Girls Friendly Society, our leader instructed us to silently say “I love you” to God, and then listen for his response.
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Yes, he replied, “I love you too” to all of us.
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
How could you experience without God?
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AnalyticalEngine
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Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
There's a long post with references to actual research I've been meaning to make someday about how inner forces can feel like outer forces, and many religious traditions have techniques to encourage the subjective experience of a part of you becoming Other. There is a large overlap here with how the Plotkin subpersonalities work. But I'm not certain such an esoteric topic is relevant to the forum.
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
I'm interested.
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AnalyticalEngine
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Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Alright, here's the full story.
How Learning to Write Brings the Nature of Consciousness into Question: A Memoir or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hear the Voice of God
I started down the path of experiencing imaginary inner experiences as outer forces when I started to write fiction. If you talk to advanced writers, they will all describe the same experience happening at some point. That is, when you get sufficiently good at writing a character, it feels like that character start to write himself or herself.
This can be bizarre if you've never experienced. Most people imagine that fiction characters are either manually piloted by the author like a marionette or all are autobiographical to some degree. Both of these things are true. When you start out writing a character, they will come from conscious choices and your past experiences. But once you master the skill of writing a given character (and each character is different so you do start from scratch each time), the act of writing said character becomes a flow state/slips into your unconscious. And once that happens, because the character is being written by your brain outside of your conscious choices, like riding a bicycle, it starts to feel like the character has come to life and is making its own decisions.
This phenomenon is so wide spread that it's been dubbed the "Illusion of Independent Agency." 92% of published fiction writers report this happening, so learning to do this is basically a writing skill.
Now the bizarre part about this is that because it's just a skill and occurs outside of your conscious awareness, the character's experience can leak into your experience when you're writing them or even in your daily life when you're doing other activities. For example, here's a story of an author talking about how her octopus character took over the running narrative voice in her head and started questioning her daily decisions:
How this can occur outside of writing
This lead me to one particular book called When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God that describes the techniques evangelicals use to "commune" with god and some of their experiences with "talking" to god. One woman in the book is even shown to have such a close relationship with Jesus that she's "dating" him via communing with the experience of Jesus inside of her head.
This might sound like schizophrenia at first, but it isn't at all. I don't have time to get into the full neuroscience of how schizophrenia works in this post, but if you want a summary, this lecture is a good summary. The tl;dr is that schizophrenia basically inhibits your ability to understand cultural norms, so these "bizarre" subjective experiences are "normal" if they exist inside of a cultural context that dubs them normal. So "hearing" god inside of your head is decidedly not schizophrenia because it follows social norms, and someone with schizophrenia would be having external hallucinations (instead of just a vivd internal experience). And those external hallucinations would be culturally inappropriate or include loose associations/other distinct schizophrenia symptoms.
Indeed, what this all feels like internally is just your normal, inner speech manifesting as someone other than you. This is what I mean by "inner experiences appearing to come from outer forces," and once you realize that, you notice that it pops up A TON in unrelated domains.
Servitors, Thoughtforms, and Tulpas
It was then I discovered an entire community dedicated to creating this internal experience. They used a few different names for the experience, including servitor and thoughtform, but the word tulpa is probably the most common. A tulpa is, at its core, just training your brain in the same way as writing a character so that thinking like someone else becomes unconscious and starts to feel like it's not being driven by you. Indeed, this practice has been used independently in many different religious traditions, and it explains how an experience might feel like "god" is talking to you or that you've been "possessed" by a spirit.
Why this works
This all sounds completely ridiculous at first, but the reason it works is very simple. Your consciousness is not a single, smooth experience. Instead, it's more like a chopped up, mangled, intermittent picture your brain manages to piece together from a massive stream of sensory data, both internal and external. Indeed, rather than "you" driving the show, it's more like your brain hacks together reality and informs the little homunculus upstairs that is "you" that something is happening. The amount of bizarre hacks your brain takes to construct reality is immense, and you can find them if you do a bit of research on how visual processing is handled by the brain.
People usually take this implication in two directions. There's the hard materialism perspective, which is what I personally believe, which states that free will is an illusion and you just experience stuff after your unconscious brain decides it for you. Under this paradigm, the illusion of independent agency makes total sense. If you train yourself to think like someone else, then that just happens unconsciously. You can even learn to stop experiencing yourself as "you" and instead experience yourself as "someone else," like changing DVDs in a DVD player.
The second take is the whole "the universe is actually made of consciousness" thing, which I can't personally speak to but I know some people do subscribe to that.
Note that the Plotkin subpersonality framework basically works using these methods as well. Actually most of Plotkin just involves intentionally dissociating, either through things like fasting or writing subpersonalities, so that you can get outside of your own head.
The implications
Once you really, actually, truly subjectively experience yourself as something other than you, it can radically alter how you view yourself and reality. The main things it did for me were:
1. Radically decenteralizing the individual. "I" am not as central to even "myself" as I once thought.
2. Realize that you are mostly things outside of you. What I mean is that things like your race, social class, sex, location, etc all MASSIVELY drive your sense of identity but are nothing that you chose nor some sort of concrete "reality" that "you" need to experience. But because these things are so central in driving your life, and can be so decoupled in how you experience yourself, you realize that your internal experience is basically completely disconnected from your external circumstances, and so an external reality that you had no choice over is basically the main drive in everything you do.
How Learning to Write Brings the Nature of Consciousness into Question: A Memoir or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hear the Voice of God
I started down the path of experiencing imaginary inner experiences as outer forces when I started to write fiction. If you talk to advanced writers, they will all describe the same experience happening at some point. That is, when you get sufficiently good at writing a character, it feels like that character start to write himself or herself.
This can be bizarre if you've never experienced. Most people imagine that fiction characters are either manually piloted by the author like a marionette or all are autobiographical to some degree. Both of these things are true. When you start out writing a character, they will come from conscious choices and your past experiences. But once you master the skill of writing a given character (and each character is different so you do start from scratch each time), the act of writing said character becomes a flow state/slips into your unconscious. And once that happens, because the character is being written by your brain outside of your conscious choices, like riding a bicycle, it starts to feel like the character has come to life and is making its own decisions.
This phenomenon is so wide spread that it's been dubbed the "Illusion of Independent Agency." 92% of published fiction writers report this happening, so learning to do this is basically a writing skill.
Now the bizarre part about this is that because it's just a skill and occurs outside of your conscious awareness, the character's experience can leak into your experience when you're writing them or even in your daily life when you're doing other activities. For example, here's a story of an author talking about how her octopus character took over the running narrative voice in her head and started questioning her daily decisions:
This started happening to me when I learned to write, and it was so bizarre that I set out to research it more. I had an experience pretty similar to this octopus and his author of having specific fictional characters I was writing who were equipment to deal with some life problem I had giving me advice in my head about whatever the issue was.Once, in the thick of an impasse over a takeout order, Marcellus slid in to remind me that no matter how weary I was of dealing with dinner, shrugging isn’t helpful communication. If you want tacos instead of pizza, he scolded, then say so.
That one skewered me. Life would be easier if you just said what you meant. Apparently, this wasn’t only about confusing my children with figures of speech.
...
But for me, in mid-2020, I found myself in a state that was not particularly healthy. Having Marcellus gently ruffle me from time to time, almost like a therapist, helped me realize how unlike my former self I’d become.
And, as I came to understand, his missives weren’t always condescending. He lifted me up, too.
When the social media doom-scrolling got out of hand, it was Marcellus who nudged me to delete that particular app.
When I fumed over how others were behaving during lockdown, it was Marcellus who reminded me that my anger would accomplish nothing.
How this can occur outside of writing
This lead me to one particular book called When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God that describes the techniques evangelicals use to "commune" with god and some of their experiences with "talking" to god. One woman in the book is even shown to have such a close relationship with Jesus that she's "dating" him via communing with the experience of Jesus inside of her head.
This might sound like schizophrenia at first, but it isn't at all. I don't have time to get into the full neuroscience of how schizophrenia works in this post, but if you want a summary, this lecture is a good summary. The tl;dr is that schizophrenia basically inhibits your ability to understand cultural norms, so these "bizarre" subjective experiences are "normal" if they exist inside of a cultural context that dubs them normal. So "hearing" god inside of your head is decidedly not schizophrenia because it follows social norms, and someone with schizophrenia would be having external hallucinations (instead of just a vivd internal experience). And those external hallucinations would be culturally inappropriate or include loose associations/other distinct schizophrenia symptoms.
Indeed, what this all feels like internally is just your normal, inner speech manifesting as someone other than you. This is what I mean by "inner experiences appearing to come from outer forces," and once you realize that, you notice that it pops up A TON in unrelated domains.
Servitors, Thoughtforms, and Tulpas
It was then I discovered an entire community dedicated to creating this internal experience. They used a few different names for the experience, including servitor and thoughtform, but the word tulpa is probably the most common. A tulpa is, at its core, just training your brain in the same way as writing a character so that thinking like someone else becomes unconscious and starts to feel like it's not being driven by you. Indeed, this practice has been used independently in many different religious traditions, and it explains how an experience might feel like "god" is talking to you or that you've been "possessed" by a spirit.
Why this works
This all sounds completely ridiculous at first, but the reason it works is very simple. Your consciousness is not a single, smooth experience. Instead, it's more like a chopped up, mangled, intermittent picture your brain manages to piece together from a massive stream of sensory data, both internal and external. Indeed, rather than "you" driving the show, it's more like your brain hacks together reality and informs the little homunculus upstairs that is "you" that something is happening. The amount of bizarre hacks your brain takes to construct reality is immense, and you can find them if you do a bit of research on how visual processing is handled by the brain.
People usually take this implication in two directions. There's the hard materialism perspective, which is what I personally believe, which states that free will is an illusion and you just experience stuff after your unconscious brain decides it for you. Under this paradigm, the illusion of independent agency makes total sense. If you train yourself to think like someone else, then that just happens unconsciously. You can even learn to stop experiencing yourself as "you" and instead experience yourself as "someone else," like changing DVDs in a DVD player.
The second take is the whole "the universe is actually made of consciousness" thing, which I can't personally speak to but I know some people do subscribe to that.
Note that the Plotkin subpersonality framework basically works using these methods as well. Actually most of Plotkin just involves intentionally dissociating, either through things like fasting or writing subpersonalities, so that you can get outside of your own head.
The implications
Once you really, actually, truly subjectively experience yourself as something other than you, it can radically alter how you view yourself and reality. The main things it did for me were:
1. Radically decenteralizing the individual. "I" am not as central to even "myself" as I once thought.
2. Realize that you are mostly things outside of you. What I mean is that things like your race, social class, sex, location, etc all MASSIVELY drive your sense of identity but are nothing that you chose nor some sort of concrete "reality" that "you" need to experience. But because these things are so central in driving your life, and can be so decoupled in how you experience yourself, you realize that your internal experience is basically completely disconnected from your external circumstances, and so an external reality that you had no choice over is basically the main drive in everything you do.
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Interesting! Aligns well with my experience except that the external/internal distinction is but another boundary that arises from the expansion/contraction of the "one" (which is usually interpreted as the self in the contractive limit and God in the expansive limit). The union of self and God as different "ends" of a limit neutralizing the free will or agency vs determinism debate. Part of agency or choice is in determination and determination is part of agency or choice. Very much relevant to the drawing agency thread and the functional model of personality.
Of course, this is subject further to the unionizing of expansive and contractive limits.. perhaps as a hyperbolic experience of "reality" where the inside and outside are the same side (i.e. a DMT experience).
Of course, this is subject further to the unionizing of expansive and contractive limits.. perhaps as a hyperbolic experience of "reality" where the inside and outside are the same side (i.e. a DMT experience).
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jacob
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Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
@AE - Hot damn! Interesting post indeed for me too!!! (Add: daylen beat me to it, I'm slow and also re-editing a lot)
It sounds like bicameral mind, which some theorize used to be a thing BEFORE the axial age, can be induced by the practice of writing in current times.
Kinda like transpersonal states can be induced by the practice of "staring at a wall" alternatively praying for many years or---alternatively---putting on the God Helmet for five minutes. (For those who haven't heard about the God Helmet, that's an actual thing and personal experience varies according to what framework anyone "comes in with". Google it.)
I think philosophical inquiry and metaphysics---what if anything could anyone possibly ever know about anything from scratch---determines where to take that line of inquiry. I think I still fall in the "turtles all the way down"-construct and that consciousness occupies a very wide range due to the human population being capable of running a wide range of "software and hardware" resulting in anything between "house plant" (well not quite) and "galaxy brain" (well not quite either) and anywhere in between. Yet by construction not being able to grok the universe in terms of how a rock or horse thinks nor how our eventual AI overlords may process our world experiences illustrates just how difficult it is to "take perspective". In terms of seeing patterns using pure g-factor, humanity operates somewhere between 50 and 200. So we can never know what 25 or 400 is like, ever.
I'm still on team "the objective world is real with real world consequences" though. The gravitational consequences of jumping out of the window from the third floor lives beyond being a mere opinion of the hierarchical oppression of whatever *archy that occupies so much of practical postmodernism's attention. Some perspectives remain better or more useful than others. Of course jumpers can deny impacting the ground---turtles all the way down---and make the point that the actual REAL WORLD is just a Platonic world of ideas. I splattered but my ideas live on and that's what the real [Platonic] world is all about.
OTOH, this stuff matters in practice and splattering on impact is maybe not the best way to change people's minds. OTOH, it's inspirational to others. Entire religions have been built on martyrdom.
Anyhoo, this is definitely still stuck in a closed loop at a certain level but getting interesting nevertheless. Philosophy creates enormous freedom in terms of perspectives. Chopping wood and carrying water brings it back to reality. Convergence and divergence.
BTW was this a useful comment to you?
It sounds like bicameral mind, which some theorize used to be a thing BEFORE the axial age, can be induced by the practice of writing in current times.
Kinda like transpersonal states can be induced by the practice of "staring at a wall" alternatively praying for many years or---alternatively---putting on the God Helmet for five minutes. (For those who haven't heard about the God Helmet, that's an actual thing and personal experience varies according to what framework anyone "comes in with". Google it.)
I think philosophical inquiry and metaphysics---what if anything could anyone possibly ever know about anything from scratch---determines where to take that line of inquiry. I think I still fall in the "turtles all the way down"-construct and that consciousness occupies a very wide range due to the human population being capable of running a wide range of "software and hardware" resulting in anything between "house plant" (well not quite) and "galaxy brain" (well not quite either) and anywhere in between. Yet by construction not being able to grok the universe in terms of how a rock or horse thinks nor how our eventual AI overlords may process our world experiences illustrates just how difficult it is to "take perspective". In terms of seeing patterns using pure g-factor, humanity operates somewhere between 50 and 200. So we can never know what 25 or 400 is like, ever.
I'm still on team "the objective world is real with real world consequences" though. The gravitational consequences of jumping out of the window from the third floor lives beyond being a mere opinion of the hierarchical oppression of whatever *archy that occupies so much of practical postmodernism's attention. Some perspectives remain better or more useful than others. Of course jumpers can deny impacting the ground---turtles all the way down---and make the point that the actual REAL WORLD is just a Platonic world of ideas. I splattered but my ideas live on and that's what the real [Platonic] world is all about.
OTOH, this stuff matters in practice and splattering on impact is maybe not the best way to change people's minds. OTOH, it's inspirational to others. Entire religions have been built on martyrdom.
Anyhoo, this is definitely still stuck in a closed loop at a certain level but getting interesting nevertheless. Philosophy creates enormous freedom in terms of perspectives. Chopping wood and carrying water brings it back to reality. Convergence and divergence.
BTW was this a useful comment to you?
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
I'm not a regular church-goer (although I would like to be), although I have been becoming more and more convinced of Christianity over the past few years (I would say I'm a Christian now). At times, at the few worship services I have attended, I have been moved to actual tears by a powerful presence/emotion of love that I think would count for what you're asking about.
I'm a mid-30s male who was raised in several generations of atheists, so this was not a 'raised up to fake it' situation for sure.
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Oh wow, derealization from (trying to) have lucid dreams. I feel so recognized. I had the same experience and also stopped trying to influence my dreams because that's when it started.Salathor wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:46 pmI spent several months practicing mindfulness and lucid dreaming a few years back. Became passably okay at it, in my opinion. However, I feel like it had significant negative effects and I don't do it anymore. I realized that I had a hard time noticing that I was 'real' at certain periods. Like, I'd be driving and have to remind myself "I'm in this car, looking at this traffic. Stay present!" in ways that I did not have to do before and don't have to do as much since. Hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it, but I think the best way to describe it would be to say that it impacted my sense of "concreteness".
I also met someone who was told by a psychologist to not focus on her breathing when she was not feeling so well, but instead to find distractions. For some people a panic attack can be cured by focusing on breathing or on other feelings in the body, but for others apparently it only makes matters worse.
I guess there's no universal manual for the human being.
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Very interesting. 'God is love' has become a cliché probably because its true. I like to visit old churches when there is no one else there. Its mostly for the historic interest, although there can be a nice atmosphere inside.Salathor wrote: ↑Sat Dec 17, 2022 5:39 pmI'm not a regular church-goer (although I would like to be), although I have been becoming more and more convinced of Christianity over the past few years (I would say I'm a Christian now). At times, at the few worship services I have attended, I have been moved to actual tears by a powerful presence/emotion of love that I think would count for what you're asking about
@Dutchgirl - Yes I am very much in the distraction camp. Mindfulness and meditation are definitely not good for me, they make me unstable. Its concerning how they are often promoted as universally good when there are many studies showing it can be harmful for some people. Hitting a punchbag is one of the best things I did for my mental health.
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
While I'm not a buddhist, I have felt similar when visiting temples / monasteries, of the type you often encounter in Asia where the temple is at some sort of high place and you climb stairs etc. to reach it, often with intermediate "stations" / subtemples symbolizing a particular step in one's spiritual journey.
It's a sense of, "may the people who come here be happy, may they find peace." It's non-verbal, just a very strong intention leaving you with the sense that you are indeed somehow "blessed." A powerful presence/emotion is exactly how I'd term it. Instead of "love," it's the loving-kindness practiced in metta meditation.
tl;dr this is likely less to do with the institutional religion or some bearded dude in the sky and more to do with the layering of intention
Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Meditation is a very broad term, but the "get enlightened", "experience God", "feel loved" etc. (sometimes articles go for clicks on the other end and dig up stories about meditating person committing suicide etc.) never appealed to me. On the contrary, I feel that meditation should be good for nothing.
If you feel elated, that's just your mind playing tricks on you. If you feel depressed, that's just your mind playing tricks on you. If you feel x, that's just your mind playing tricks on you. You feel bored, so your mind digs up stuff, sometimes it digs up exciting stuff and you think you saw God, or it dig stuff from under the bed along with the boogie man.
It's hard to grasp for the achievement-badge gathering people, also for people that come from psy-drug-embracing environments (they are excited because they think they found a replacement) and the idea that you suggest to a depressed person that they should meditate is the same as to suggest to an extreme spender to go ask for advice to some celebrity how they can spend better to resolve their habit.
Of course meditation sometimes gets you depressed or induces a panic attack, because if your mind launched a wrong movie, you get to replay your fears or worse, see that what you did or said to some other person is wrong and you cannot go back. It's a tough practice.
If you feel elated, that's just your mind playing tricks on you. If you feel depressed, that's just your mind playing tricks on you. If you feel x, that's just your mind playing tricks on you. You feel bored, so your mind digs up stuff, sometimes it digs up exciting stuff and you think you saw God, or it dig stuff from under the bed along with the boogie man.
It's hard to grasp for the achievement-badge gathering people, also for people that come from psy-drug-embracing environments (they are excited because they think they found a replacement) and the idea that you suggest to a depressed person that they should meditate is the same as to suggest to an extreme spender to go ask for advice to some celebrity how they can spend better to resolve their habit.
Of course meditation sometimes gets you depressed or induces a panic attack, because if your mind launched a wrong movie, you get to replay your fears or worse, see that what you did or said to some other person is wrong and you cannot go back. It's a tough practice.
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LookingInward
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Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
@kane, just wanted to say that I found your comment to be very close to how I see things.
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AnalyticalEngine
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Re: Is there a name for this phenomenon?
I've dug into some more research on the topic of the dangers of meditation, and I wanted to share some interesting resources.
Cheetah House is a non-profit which has published some information about the dangers of meditation. There are two videos worth watching that really get into the neuroscience of it, which are the Mechanisms of Meditation-Induced Hyperarousal and Mechanisms of Meditation-Induced Dissociation.
In a later podcast, the founder of Cheetah House also talks about how the nervous system can be viewed as a sound board and different meditation practices can induce specific outcomes. She talks about how meditation has been divorced from its original, cultural context and that a lot of religious meditation teachers are more aware of the dangers and can suggest counter practices to help with difficulties, but this is often lost in translation with meditation apps.
One thing I found particularly interesting was her discussion on how mindfulness-based practices tend to down regulate the limbic system and can cause emotional numbness and dissociation even in practitioners with no prior psychiatric history. On the other hand, other practices, such as metta meditation, can up regulate the limbic system and cause anxiety and panic. She suggests that you have a clear idea of your goals and do more significant research into what different practices can do for you before you get into it. For example, if you struggle with dissociation, metta meditation may be a better fit. On the other hand, if you are too overstimulated, mindfulness may be a good approach.
Cheetah House is a non-profit which has published some information about the dangers of meditation. There are two videos worth watching that really get into the neuroscience of it, which are the Mechanisms of Meditation-Induced Hyperarousal and Mechanisms of Meditation-Induced Dissociation.
In a later podcast, the founder of Cheetah House also talks about how the nervous system can be viewed as a sound board and different meditation practices can induce specific outcomes. She talks about how meditation has been divorced from its original, cultural context and that a lot of religious meditation teachers are more aware of the dangers and can suggest counter practices to help with difficulties, but this is often lost in translation with meditation apps.
One thing I found particularly interesting was her discussion on how mindfulness-based practices tend to down regulate the limbic system and can cause emotional numbness and dissociation even in practitioners with no prior psychiatric history. On the other hand, other practices, such as metta meditation, can up regulate the limbic system and cause anxiety and panic. She suggests that you have a clear idea of your goals and do more significant research into what different practices can do for you before you get into it. For example, if you struggle with dissociation, metta meditation may be a better fit. On the other hand, if you are too overstimulated, mindfulness may be a good approach.