AnalyticalEngine wrote: ↑Sat Dec 17, 2022 3:16 pm
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:
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.
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.