An End to Loneliness

An End to Loneliness:

A personal journey through transpersonal experiences.

By

Ion LIGHT

 

 

 

 

An End to Loneliness: a personal journey through love and transpersonal experiences.

EHP: Experimental Home Publishing

© 2016 Ion Light. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

 

solarchariot@gmail.com

214-907-4070

Irving, Texas, USA.

Forward                                                                                              page 4

Chapter 1                                Daydream Believer                             page 10

Chapter 2                                The Invisible Counselor Technique    page 23

Chapter 3                                Active Imagination                             page 32

Chapter 4                                 Tulpamancy                                        page 37

Chapter 5                                 Lucid dreaming                                  page 55

Chapter 6                                 Astral projection                                page 59

Chapter 7                                 Self-hypnosis                                      page 64

Chapter 8                                 Transpersonal psychology                 page 70

Chapter 9                                 Beyond boundaries                            page 74

Chapter 10                               The Erotic Component                      page 81

Conclusion                                                                                          page 95

Author’s note                                                                                      page 96

 

 

 

Forward:

What is this?

 

This is a self-help book that is not a self-help book. I am going to break with the tradition of giving advice. I am breaking with the tradition of making lists, and point by point steps for you to check off and say accomplished? Some of you might being saying “Yay!” but if you require that, this is not your book. I will be making some incredible leaps of faith and assumptions that you, the reader, are intelligent and capable of figuring things out. I believe whole heartedly that you are the expert of your life, and no one can advise you. People can walk with you, but you’re the captain. So, again, what is this? This is a conversation. Okay, so I am doing all of ‘talking.’ The conversation part is where you hold a dialogue in yourself over the topics, or you engage me directly. Can you engage me directly?  Absolutely. Feel free to email me constructive criticism. I know, there are grammar mistakes, even after several editing’s, and it is one of my annoying personal setbacks that I struggle with. If you can suffer through that, the bane of all my work, you might discover there is still something here. This is a work in progress, and I am open to dialogue.

In writing this, I will endeavor to be as direct as possible, while keeping it approachable.  Though many of the ideas written here are not ‘approachable’ in terms of general popular discourse, everything here should be in reach of anyone capable of reading my writing, grammar issues and all. Also, everything contained in here is not original. Like I’ve said, this book makes many assumptions, such as you know how to use a google search engine and that if you are interested in trying out some of the ideas for yourselves, you will find the technique and or protocols on your own. I am doing it this way partly because, I don’t want to re-write everything others have already written about that anyone can access, for free, but also because, there is huge amount of evidence that if a person wants it, they are more likely to achieve something if they put some effort towards what they want. So, I am implicitly inviting you to do your own work should this be something you wish to explore further!

            So, what is this book? It’s mostly a discussion, a way of clarifying for myself, and sharing with others my journey. I have experienced more success utilizing the protocols discussed in this book than in years of life, therapy, and just surviving. It may be that the entire journey as a whole was/is necessary, just as Dorothy had to travel her the Yellow Brick Road, but I can’t help but wonder if I had access to all of this earlier on, things might have balanced out sooner. There is no end to this sort of speculation, so we will table it for now.

I am compelled to lead with this: though there is research to support much of what I will discuss, some of it isn’t covered, and most of this is not mainstream. I am not writing as a professional. I am writing as a human being, hoping to engage other human beings in a unique dialogue. Let me iterate: nothing written here is new; I am not pitching you some scheme about how this ‘secret’ will open your life and make everything wonderful; there is certainly enough of that in dominant culture. And people are buying it. How many copies of ‘the Secret’ sold? More importantly, how many people found ‘enlightenment?’

Does anything in here work? Yes, but I am not advocating for social change or for you to take up the protocols. At best, this would be considered as experimental, in terms of academic or professional standings. I will be quoting professional, academic, spiritual, and esoteric sources where I can, but not in an APA format that would make this book something it’s not intended to be. As I said, I am not creating a new thing from scratch, but drawing on wisdom already available, and presenting it in a very different way; different being ‘from my voice.’ Maybe this isn’t a self-help book, but I am not sure how to categorize it perfectly. Those of you familiar with the genre might be thinking, “thank god.” It would seem that many self-help books give huge set ups before following with a list of things for you to do, which may, or may not, actually work. (I think the biggest variable in that is the personality type of the person accessing the self-help book, not necessarily the protocols.) In general, self-help books help people. I imagine even ‘the Secret’ helped some people, or there might not be as many people recommending it, though I imagine a darker scenario to answer the why. But in general, ‘self-help’ doesn’t help everyone. That book hasn’t been written yet. And this won’t be that book. I am going to lead with the number one recommended exercise, and then give you variations on the theme of that exercise, and when you discover what it is, you will either tune out or dig in. I would like to point out this is free; at free-ebook.net. Some things should be free, like clarity, water, air, electricity! Yeah, I am a fan of Tesla. Generally, helping each other should be free. This is meant to be helpful; opening and engaging in a dialogue is supposed to be helpful. This is definitely a work in progress, and I am open to you telling me what I missed, or perhaps what should have expounded on in more detail. That’s a dialogue. Send it.

Unlike other self-help paradigms, especially the esoteric kind, in which the writers of the technique or protocols want to establish classes and have you pay for the book, I don’t want any of that. No baiting or sucker punching and promising stuff to get you in the front door so I can say, ‘oh, but if you want the rest, you have to send me one million dollars.’ (Insert evil laugh.) That is not this. You can hold me accountable. If you see this selling on Kindle, it is not because I put it there, and if you want to bypass kindle and email for a free copy, please do. Ideally, it would be nice to have a legit contract with a traditional publisher, because that might, if I continue to pursue writing, enable me to do more writing. If this books goes that way, I will push for the free PDF to be available. The world of publishing is changing; writers and publishers and the readers are in the most important dialogue of our lives, and change is coming. It could be really good for everyone. Youtube and commercials generating profit seemed like a great idea for hosts wanting to create dialogue, but books haven’t figured that part out yet.

So, again, this is a work in progress. It may be years before I work out all the grammar issues. I am human, and some of you will tune out because of grammar, which is reasonable. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. I am fairly articulate and do great in person. I am not leading with my credentials, because, as a human being, I think they’re irrelevant. If you absolutely need that, read the authors note. If I were judging you, in terms of whether or not I would like share with you, because that, too, is part of any negotiation, I would be handing you a card and asking what you see: if you say “it’s a hat,” I am going to box you in a certain way. If you say it’s a “boa constrictor that ate an elephant,” my esteem for you will have increased immensely, and so when I say the stars are laughing, yeah, we’re on the same page. And, again, iteration, (not reiteration!) I am making some assumptions that you know some things. It’s okay if you don’t, few people laugh at my jokes, but if you are curious, and you pursue it, you will unravel some essential ingredients that clearly influenced my journey, like the above allusion to the Little Prince. (Just read the first chapter. The Disney Movie of ‘the Little Prince’ was actually pretty well done, too.)

Some of you might tarry past the initial exercise. I hope so, because it my intention to give you arguments for why it works, how it has the possibility of changing your life if you engage it, and then explore whether or not you actually want to change your life. You may actually not want to. Contrary to popular belief, and the news, our lives are pretty good!

Do I believe people have the power to change their lives with thoughts? Absolutely, and changing the way you think is paramount. Will you teleport gold from Fort Knox into your bedroom by thinking about it? Absolutely not with what I am giving you. (Besides, there is no Gold in Fort Knox. A lot of security, though. Weird.) This book is not that. The intent in writing this is not to change your financial situation. Can it? Unquestionably. Any tool can be used to influence income and ability to earn, but this is not “Think and Grow Rich.” That book has been written and it is the benchmark for that category of book, and I highly recommend it. My opinion is, if your inner world isn’t right, no amount of material wealth will make you feel better. There is a tremendous amount of data that backs that up. Just look at the statistic of how many win the lottery only to end up broke, divorced, estranged from family, and or dead from suicides. Further, The World Health Organization continuously shows that while Americans lead the world in material comfort, we consistently rank as the unhappiest, most depressed, and loneliest people on the planet. (So, if it correlates that money and material wealth doesn’t make you happy, why would I want to give you more of that? Better, why would I even promise to sell you philosophies to entertain the idea of getting more of that so you can tarry in your present unhappiness of not having while struggling to make yourself unhappier in having? What a horrible thing to do to a fellow human being!) And we are hell bent on making the rest of the world ‘American’ like us? Life is strange. Anyway, secure your inner world first, and the rest sorts itself out. I think you will find a few esoteric teachers offering variations of that.

And what do I mean by securing your inner world? I suppose even that has a range of responses that require examining. Different people define it differently. Some want peace. Some want love. Some want peace and love, or a piece of love, I always get that part mixed up. Some want to feel happy. Not be in pain, not be depressed, not be lonely… Those last three are the ones I have personally struggled with, much of my life. Securing your inner world, however you define that inner quality, so that regardless of what happens in the physical world you remain resilient and able to function is the key to any life endeavor, including life. You can see that in Joseph, after being thrown into a pit and then later sold into slavery, or Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” (Compared to Frankl’s, Joseph’s pit was a luxury hotel.) Both of those should be on your reading list if you haven’t already partaken. (If you go with “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” go with the original Broadway release. Sorry Danny, I love you, but the original is my favorite. Say hi to Marie for me.)

I am specifically focusing on loneliness in this book. I think ‘the exercises’ we will discuss can help with other things as well, such as depression, with some caveats. I will address some of those caveats as we go along. Let me be very clear on this: these protocols or procedures are not a substitution for medicinal regimens or counseling. Statistically, the research is very clear when it comes to mental health: Medicines help reduce symptoms; Counseling helps people get better; Medicine and counseling simultaneously consistently provides the best results. Can you practice ‘the exercise’ without counseling? Yep. (I did, and survived. Has anyone not survived? That’s out of my purview to answer. (Does anyone survive life?)) I consider it highly efficacious to practice any and all of this with a licensed counselor or psychologist, but it isn’t necessary. I recommend counseling because what I am about to propose actually works. Let’s be clear about what work means. It opens things in you, in your subconscious, and if you aren’t ready to examine that, you might want to post pone practicing. Sometimes, there are reasons why our subconscious has suppressed stuff. Don’t engage this believing it will absolutely make you happy and satisfied today, without any consequences, or grief, or revisiting past pains, imagined or perceived. Imagine you have had a recurring dream where you have been chased and plagued since childhood. I will be asking you to draw a line in the sand and decide no more running. If you’re not ready for that level of intensity, you’re not ready for this. I say that, though, and suspect, if you’re not ready for this, it’s because you’re already employing the techniques outlined in this book in a way that keeps you stuck where you don’t want to be. And if that’s the case, just reading further to see how you could be using stuff to hold you back also makes this something worth exploring.

If you think that you have tried everything else, but you still find yourself lonely, what else do you have to lose? (You really haven’t tried everything. Have you tried bouncing on one foot while rubbing your tummy and saying limericks? No, then, regardless of absurdity, you haven’t tried everything. Go absurd! Do something different. (There was a professor who was not known well for being social who one day took up wearing a tail. It hung from his suit, and when he wrote on the board, it got laughter. It was bizarre, but it made him so much more approachable that his class became the student’s favorite and they learned more from him. He became happier, professionally and personally.))

So, before we go further, let’s just get this part out of the way. This book deals with imagination. This is very straight forward. I will be drawing on multiple sources of inspiration and I will be asking you to take imagination to a whole new level. Imagination is the most powerful tool at your disposal. I am going to ask you to pretend, do mental pushups, and go beyond ‘fake it till you make it.’ Like I said, this not new stuff. Athletes use the power imagery to help improve skillsets. Therapists use the power of imagination to help clients move forwards. Has anyone ever proposed the ‘magic wand’ question to you? Imagination is likely the most underrated, underutilized tool which everyone is equipped with. You may even have the false belief that you’re not imaginative enough to do this, but you are. If you can tolerate my writing, you have sufficient imaginations to do what I am about to introduce you to. Again, I dare say, you’re probably already using imagination, unconsciously, to keep yourself stuck. If you have ever thought, “I am not imaginative” you have just used your own power against yourself.

 

If you wish to email ‘recommended edits’ or just thoughts, and reactions, you may send them to solarchariot@gmail.com  Please put ‘an end to loneliness’ in the subject line. My number is also available, but I do not live by it, so don’t be surprised if I don’t answer a call, or there is a delay in a text response. I will eventually answer a text. 214-907-4070. Email may provide for a more comprehensive response.

 

I wish you well on your journey. Always, Travel Light.

Ion

Chapter 1                                            Daydream Believer

 

If you are like me, you were probably taught not to day dream. It wasn’t seen as a practical skill, especially by your teachers, and yet, any day dreamer worth his salt would remind the teachers, “They said that about Albert Einstein, too.” (He continued his ‘day dreaming’ into his adult life and day job, and considering how boring his day job probably was, he probably did a lot of day dreaming; a survival skill. Maybe that’s why he renamed it ‘thought experiments’ because day dreaming just seems too slacker-ish. (Did Einstein also suffer from self-esteem issues?)) Pointing out how adults are wrong usually resulted in going straight to the principal office, or my bedroom, which was great for me because, I got to indulge in more, uninterrupted day dreaming! I was lucky in some sense. I missed that window where I could have been diagnoses with ADHD, as opposed to just having a great imagination. My family went a bit further and also dismissed the dreaming life, too. No one wanted to hear about my crazy dreams. They were just fanciful fluff, the products of watching one too many horror films or science fiction. Dreams were important to me, and I would journal them, but essentially, I had no one to share them with, and so they didn’t go anywhere. (It wasn’t just horror films. The Flying Monkeys sacred me. The kidnapper in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang bothered me a lot. But that 1972 Gargoyle movie, that really bothered me, because it put a face on something else I was already experiencing.)

I want this part to be clear. I am not blaming family, or the educational system. It is way too easy to get caught up in blaming people and systems, and I can spin all levels of conspiracy theories. We could spend hours talking about society and systems and never make any fundamental change or even headway, in society or ourselves. It’s not helpful. What we have to do is start where we are. The past is past. Our present situations are what they are. I don’t expect anyone to sugar coat crap. Babies with cancer suck. Dead puppies suck. It is what it is.

That said, when we get stuck emotionally and mentally, it’s because we are revisiting stuff in our imagination. Our imagination has a profound effect on our physiology, and consequently our reality. Placebos and Hypnosis can absolutely change your physiology. Do you really think pharmaceuticals would waste time and resources on double blind studies if that weren’t true? If you believe in a cure, whether it is a real drug, a placebo, a psychic, tribal dance, or even hypnosis, you are changing your physiology at a biochemical level, and when you do that, you are changing your world. And I do mean world. If you are peaceful and happy, people tend to be peaceful and happy around you. When you are happy, there is a cloud of happy around you. This is not just new esoteric, pseudo-science. Science is just now mapped out a cloud around human beings. You know the Charlie Brown character ‘pig pin?’ We are that! Floating around us, extending out to a specific range, is a cloud of particulates that is us. It is bits of our DNA and RNA. It is dead cells. It is live cells. It is the bits of flora and fauna that live on you and share a symbiotic relationship with. You are a planet and you are the host of your own atmosphere and host to living beings and when planets pass, we share stuff on a fundamental, basic, physical level. It has been said you cannot enter a room without gaining something, or leave a room without leaving something. This cloud around you is so distinctively you, it is synonymous with a finger print. If you are familiar with shows like CSI, and one hair at the scene of the crime could be incriminating: there is tech coming down the pike where if you were in the vicinity of a crime within a certain time frame, people will know because your cloud is in the air or has settled to join the dust on the surface of things.

Yeah, that’s scary and cool, but lends credence to what gurus of old, Depak Chopra, and Wayne Dyer have been trying to get into our thick skulls. If you are peaceful, you breathe out particles of peacefulness. If you are angry, you breathe out anger. (You also re-breathe your own peace or anger.) And for whatever reason, anger seem to be more contagious than peaceful, maybe because we are socialized to believe that being peaceful and happy is reserved for only those we ‘trust’ like family or friends. At any rate, if people can’t abide your peacefulness, they will ‘fight or fly.’ There are those who will try and alter your state by bringing you down, but if they can’t do that, they will rise to your level, or they will depart. There is no other option. How do people bring you down? They mess with your mind. They engage your imagination and adjust a control setting, and they send you places.

Some people are better at manipulating or changing your emotions and your beliefs than others. Again, this is not blaming others for our situational ups and down, but a recognition that there are some serious skills employed by others. And don’t think you’re not one of them. We all learn to manipulate systems to our advantage. It is a part of our nature. For example, babies with big eyes are employing physical attributes to manipulate you into caring for them. We don’t just do that because it’s fun. (Yeah, it’s fun, too, but so manipulative, and that’s why Disney movies are always high on the ‘manipulative’ scale. Come on, if Wally’s pathetic little voice and big eyes didn’t produce an emotion in you, you weren’t watching. Or, “I hid under the porch because I love you.” OMG, manipulation!) If you ever went “Ahh, what a cute baby!” you were manipulated. Crying is manipulation. We are born manipulators and few of us grow out of that. So be at peace with that in yourself, and you will better understand others. In my family, manipulating the way others feel was a survival tool. If that ‘one’ person was happy, everyone was happy. Unfortunately, what I really learned was how to make that person happy, directly, in order to indirectly make me happy. Talk about control!

Epictetus wrote: “A man is not affected by events, but by his thoughts on events.” This would become Doctor Albert Ellis’ primary mode of interacting with clients, utilizing REBT, Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. You can find his book easy enough: “Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better,” by Albert Ellis and it’s pretty easy to access. It’s one thing to feel better, another thing to get better, and another thing to stay better. Changing beliefs, for Albert, was absolutely crucial. It requires your imagination and intention and persistence.

But he isn’t the only one that went here. Lots of people offer this as a treatment modality. You can find another self-help book, and, I highly recommend this one: “What to say When you Talk to yourself” by Shad Helmstetter. Google that. You can find a free PDF of it, and a free PDF summary. It’s basically changing your outcomes by changing your tapes. We all have tapes. Tapes are our daily indulgences in imagination that keep us where we are. It takes effort to change them. Ellis would argue it’s irrelevant to focus on how they got there, the only important thing is recognizing them and then changing them. And you can change them. You could spend years in therapy, one hour a week, and you will eventually gain some ground. Or, you can read Helmstetter’s book and learned some basic truths about tapes, some great affirmations, and you can work 24-7 on you. Let’s face it, counseling is helpful, but you are with you all the time.

Because you are with you all the time, it is imperative to let go of any and all past arguments, regardless of validity. I am not saying this is easy. It can be done in stages. But if you’re going to take charge of your brain, you’re going to have to employ some serious imagination. You’re going to have to learn to day dream. You’re going to have to learn to day dream productively. It isn’t enough to rehash old dialogues and figure out things you wish you had said or things you’re going to say. That way fuels anger, and locks onto the past and the grievances. The grievances can be valid, but as someone once wrote, hanging on to anger is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. I forget who said that, but I have been assured, it wasn’t Buddha.

There is good research that suggests memories are malleable. I am not a good researcher, or a good ‘professional’ writer, so I am not going to tell you how to find that. You can find it if you’re interested. Memory is also greatly affected by perspective. This is basic REBT stuff. If you change your perspective, you change your emotional response, which changes your physiological response. If you adopt, imagine, a perspective which incorporates gratitude and forgiveness, as way to engage loving imagination, you will have more positive outcomes than if you do the opposite; indulge the grudge, fuel the fire. I am not saying to rekindled old, past relationships with others. I am saying you have to change the relationship you have with you.

Now, we are about to go off the deep end. Each following chapter will be one step further into the deep end, and we will proceed in this fashion until the bottom drops out, and there is no more floor.

For this chapter, though, I want to invite you to imagine a friendship. Yep, you heard me. I want you to create an imaginary friend. More specifically, I want this friend to be the most ideal, loving, peaceful relationship you can muster and tolerate. You can create a whole new person from scratch, if you can’t think of anyone specific you would like to imagine. You can imagine anyone from history, past or present. You can imagine any fictional character you have an affinity towards. This can even be someone crucial to your religious faith. In the beginning of this exercise, you will be imagining a helpful dialogue, not to change others, but to change you. If that means, every morning you sit alone and imagine coffee with Jesus, I am okay with that. If Jesus does it for you, I highly recommend the book “God on a Harley” by Joan Brady. Can you do anything as imaginative as that? Dive in. If you want to mirror Brady’s book, word for word into your psyche, that’s okay, too. That’s why she wrote the book! No, it’s more: that’s why she made it available! That’s the only purpose to share a story or a song is to change ourselves and then the world.

I personally didn’t go with Jesus. Partly because of my background and family issues. Not blaming, I am just recognizing that to engage that figure imaginatively required more energy than I could muster when I started this. I began with a fictional person, and soon after I started, I was engaging other ‘characters’, imaginatively. Day Dreaming. That’s what it seemed like at first.

Here’s how it’s going to go. You may balk at doing this. Resistance is okay. It’s part of the process. It doesn’t matter what you think or believe about the exercise. Do it anyway. And when you’re ready to give up, keep doing it. In the beginning, you will be doing the entire dialogue, for you and the friend. You will be imagining yourself talking and imagining the responses. It will feel like fluff.

What are we doing? We are engaging a skillset that our human brains are best at, modeling and predicting. Children are known to engage in this until we encourage them out of it. (We’re leaving autism spectrum disorder off the table, because this changes the dynamic a little, and autistic fantasies, which is a very real thing, can be socially detrimental when fantasy doesn’t line up with reality. In other words, this system will work best if you have a reasonable grasp of reality to begin with.) If you recall this happening in the past, or know a child that does it, and you listen to their conversations, what is most interesting, and rarely remarked upon, is that their conversations flow naturally. Very rarely does a child engaging this stop the conversation and start over when it doesn’t go the way they think it should. Now, when the same kid plays pretend with another adult, and the adult strays from the script, the child will be the first to speak right up, “No! You’re not playing right.”

Making an imaginary friend utilizes your brain, but transcends the brain by directly engaging the subconscious mind. In the West, we minimize our interaction with the subconscious. We are taught very early not to trust intuition. Not blaming, simply explaining why some of us will resist engaging an imaginary friend, beyond the fact most of our adult friends and family would call us crazy for doing so. All day dreams, all REM based dreams, engage the subconscious. When you first start doing this, you will be doing both sides of the conversation, partly because the subconscious mind, the observer, is not sure what you are about. If you have never engaged it before or listened to it, why would it trust you are ready to start having conversations with it now? But if you persist, you keep engaging the imaginary friend, you will eventually cross a threshold where the imaginary friend will make an observation or a challenge which will not have been scripted by you.

Welcome to the new you. This is some spooky level, Ouija board kind of stuff. It’s not magic. It’s not spirit, at least in the religious or esoteric connotation. This is you at the fundamental level. Is there more to it than psychology? Well, I am biased and believe there is more here than just tapping into our unconscious mind. But that is definitely the first level. If you’re not completely surprised by the observation or challenge, I would be amazed. If you choose to stop the exercise at this point and not proceed further, I would completely get that. If you persist, this will evolve into Twilight Zone level freaky and change your world.

Whether you believe in a higher power or not, there is always a ‘higher power.’ Don’t believe me, challenge the next police officer who pulls you over. Your unconscious mind knows more than you, and is a higher authority than you. You think you make the choices in your life, but you, your personality, are governed by your subconscious. Scientist have studied people in real time making ‘conscious’ choices under an fMRI and they have concluded that the unconscious mind has made the choice anywhere from 3 to 7 seconds prior to the ‘conscious’ mind being aware of making the decisions. No joke. The scientist watching the information can predict what you are going to do before you do it and then they start freaking ‘subjects’ out by pretending to be psychics! You move through the world thinking you’re in charge, but you are on autopilot. Your responses to external events is an automatic, pre-chosen, frequently rehearsed, response to stimuli. These are your tapes. When you hear that inner voice chime in, and it’s negative, it’s because something internally or externally has triggered that voice to chime.

Being on automatic isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. None of us multitask as well as we think we do, per research, but we couldn’t do it at all if we couldn’t assign tasks to the unconscious so we can focus on something else. When we learn something, what we are doing is handing it to the unconscious. When you first learned to drive, you were hyper focused on everything. Am I sitting right, how much pressure does it take to push the accelerator, how much do I have to slow for this the shallow corner as for the right angle corner, OMG that guy is too close, I hate getting on the freeway… Till one day, you hopped in your car and you went from point A to point B, on your cell phone, switching radio stations, and having conversations and don’t recall the journey! You drive on automatic. Most of us live more of our life on automatic than we live consciously, which is why so many good therapist teach mindfulness exercises to help change tapes and responses. And this is why, if you practice engaging the imaginary friend, at some point in the practice results in a voice contrary to your script: it becomes automatic, and the unconscious takes over the responses, based on the personality attributes you assigned to the imaginary friend.

Don’t think you have to be perfect in your practice, or hold a certain level of intelligence, or especially endowed with creativity. You do something, anything, long enough, it gets programmed into your unconscious. If you’re familiar with the 10,000 hour rule, forget about it, or at least, heavily modify it, because what you have understood about it isn’t necessarily correct. That study, and the subsequent writing about it that followed, dealt with ‘master’ level abilities, not general abilities. It won’t take you 10,000 hours to get results with any of the imagination scenarios that follow this chapter. I can make strong arguments for this. For example, to learn to fly an airplane, you need a total of only 40 hours in order to meet the requirements to fly and test out to earn your license. You will have flown solo before acquiring the 40 hours. Some people may fly more than 40 hours before they take their test, but it isn’t necessary, and most people test out at 40 because flying at student rates is expensive. 40 hours is not 10,000 hours! Every license you add on top of private pilot license, like instrument rating, water rating, that is just extra, and people will count their hours for life, and if you keep at it you will have 10,000 hours flying, which is master level flying, but doesn’t necessarily make you a ‘master’ pilot. If you are an occasional, weekend flyer, 10,000 hours or not, you are more likely to be so casual as to make a mistake, where the serious, master level pilot comes at it with a ‘masters’ level professionalism, because for that person’s flying is a serious endeavor.

Want another argument that 10,000 hours isn’t necessary? Driving education is not 10,000 hours. In high school, it’s a semester. If you take a class outside of school, it’s a couple weeks, or a couple weekends, not 10,000 hours. No state requires 10,000 hours of driving before you can be licensed. Most people would give up if that were the case. Do some people need more hours than the minimum that is required? Yeah. But if you have the minimum and can pass the test, you’re done. You proved yourself capable.

By engaging the imaginary friend, eventually the unconscious will assume that role, it will become ‘automatic’ and you are now engaged in a conversation with self that will allow for script changes.

Here’s the deal. Your unconscious mind wants to engage you. You ignore the unconscious at your own peril. The unconscious mind has always been in a conversation with you, but it will allow you to persist in your ways and allows you to think you are in control. It will occasionally send out reminders, suggesting another path. It’s always with us, always suggesting, but never intrusive. But if it wants you to change, it will give you something, like a health problem. And if you persist, it will increase the volume until you hear it or deal with it, or you don’t and you die. Ignore anything long enough, things get out of hand. Your unconscious mind is you, but it feels like a separate person. It is not limited to your personality constraints. Doctor Milton Erickson, world renowned psychotherapist and hypnotist said this: “Trust your unconscious, it knows more than you do.” He said that before I said that, I just said it before I shared it. J

But, want more? Consider the words of someone I think was the smartest person in the world. I am not the only one who believes my hero was the smartest. For example, when Einstein was asked by a reporter, “How does it feel to be the smartest man in the world?” Einstein responded: “I don’t know. You should ask Tesla.” Einstein admittedly came up with his ideas on relativity using ‘thought experiments.’ Consider your imaginary friend a thought experiment.

But you can also trust Einstein when he said Tesla was the smartest man ever. Tesla considered himself crippled by imagination. He couldn’t get through the day without day dreaming, but faced with a choice of fighting it, or going with it, he decided to just go with it, and see where it took him! Imagination soon became his super power. Tesla wrote: “I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision further and further, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel; of course, in my mind. Every night, (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys – see new places, cities and countries; live there, meet people and make friendship and acquaintances… This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I need no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind… I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop.”

When you and your imaginary friend cross that threshold and your script stops feeling like a script and more like a dialogue, you are going to change. You are going to grow in confidence. When you are internally confident, your social outcomes change. People are naturally drawn to and want to engage people who are socially confident. When we approach others from a position of weakness, like doubt, or with feelings of worthlessness, or from just desperation of loneliness, people shy away from us. Not because others are bad or they don’t want to deal with you or your perceived lack, but because, in truth, everyone is struggling with something. Think honestly on this. When you pass the homeless person on the street, the guy with the sign who is a bit scruffy looking, isn’t your first impulse to avert your eyes? I am not calling you out. We do this. Yeah, one of you reading this will say, “Not me.” Okay. Yay you. Many of us don’t because, regardless of right or wrong, there is a social expectation that we should minimally be able to address our own needs. We expect people to take care of themselves. There are other factors in this, too, because we live in a state of constant competition we consider ourselves so lacking that we can’t help. And in some cases, it’s true. We may have homes and food in the fridge and cars, but no cash in our pockets. We are all struggling, at all levels. Here’s another example of how we think folks should be minimally self-sufficient; almost everyone will agree that severe mental illness warrants state assistance, because it’s a disability, but the moment you call ‘drug addiction’ a disability and people get state benefits, most people start throwing a fit. Not saying it’s right or wrong, nor am I arguing for more money being allocated to mental health. (I do actually wish Texas would allocate more towards mental health, but we are a ‘pull yourself up by the bootstrap kind of state, and we show it by ranking 49 out 50 in terms of assisting the mentally ill. And, as a person who serves mentally ill population, I am actually, legislatively, discouraged from advocating, because I could potentially benefit. (Which is odd, because how many senators and governors benefit from their decisions? Just saying.))

As a person who has experienced profound loneliness early on, I can attest to it coloring my world and influencing how I engaged others, and or, causing me to choose not to engage others. There are people out there, rescuers, who want to engage the lonely and make them better. That’s their sole purpose in life. And this rarely works out, for either parties. Either the lonely person gets better, psychologically speaking and leaves the relationship, making the rescuer feels abandon, because they did all that work to make you better and they feel slighted, or the rescuer sabotages the lonely to keep them in a state where the rescuer gets their needs met by staying perpetually in the rescuer mode, (even the rescuer is suffering from loneliness,) perpetuating an unhealthy relationship. When a rescuer is unable to fill the need of their own loneliness and their games and subterfuge and sabotage doesn’t work, they usually get labeled with ‘emotional vampire,’ which ultimately leads the lonely person being rescued in a worse state than before, because they then think they can’t get their needs met without becoming a victim, which reinforces their ideas that they are not ultimately loveable or hold intrinsic value.

Loneliness is not about others responding to you. Loneliness is about you responding to you. It is about your perceived lack. It is not based on anything in reality. Do you have experiences in reality that support your paradigm of loneliness? Absolutely. We get emotionally what we look for. The consequences for loneliness are very real, and we, as humans, can get stuck here, but the cure doesn’t come from others.

Therapy is one way to start making changes, and over time facing those inner attributes, the subtle, unconscious behaviors that keep us locked into the loneliness emotional state, helps modify our approaches to others that are more functional at meeting and sustaining relationships. A therapist is not a rescuer. Now, they may have started as a rescuer, but if they are rescuing, this would be considered transference, and not productive therapy. What I am saying is, the therapist isn’t a friend in the traditional sense of the word, but for those of us who have suffered from loneliness, when we build that connection with the therapist, it will feel weighty. That’s normal, too. This need for other usually gets met very early on in life, and if it doesn’t, we build that part of us through specific kind of relationship patterns that have a designated end point. Parents nurture and raise kids, and then when they reach the mile stone, they move out into the world. When you reach your milestone with the therapist, you graduate and move out into the world. The goal of the therapist is to help a person find their own feet. How do we learn to walk? We practice and we fall. How do you learn to beat loneliness? You practice being social, first in your head, and then in your life. You do it with love and compassion towards yourself.

Think of it this way. Imagine being back in high school. More, imagine you just moved from another city, and this is your first day. It’s awkward being the new person. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone stepped up and befriended you and showed you the ropes? Sure. That’s not how it usually pans out. Most the time, you’re invading someone else’s turf, and the gate keepers of that turf will call you out. They will challenge you or make an observations about your dress or mannerisms or physical appearance, and it is meant to disparage you. Bullying exist, and simply trying to squash it makes it go underground. Severe bullying needs to be called out. But there is something else about this that needs to be addressed; new people get challenged. Part of it is human interaction patterns where we test the mettle of someone to determine if they’re okay. If we respond to a challenge or a negative observation from a defensive position, it usually causes the challenge to escalate. Challenges initiate from a weak position; the challenger is afraid at some level. If a person respond to fear with fear, it goes badly. If a person responds to a challenge with humor, or love, or direct honesty, the equation changes and it results in a different pattern. Humans engage each other first on a subconscious level; automatic, automatically. When you respond with love, even if the challenger doesn’t initially get it, the participants in the social environment witnessing the exchange have a sudden, higher esteem for you. And if the challenger wants to take it bad, at this point, someone will usually wake up and intervene. Even followers don’t let their friends get away with bullying if there is no threat or reason to. Most people aren’t persistently mean.

This is something most people don’t want to acknowledge. Bullying is not your fault. I agree. You are not responsible for people doing that to you. We do, however, participate in that. Our responses influence outcomes. Consider a parent that has a child that always likes to tattle? If your first response to a threat or a challenge is to go tell a teacher, that generally escalates the situation. This does not mean we should tolerate abuse. We have to be able to draw boundaries and hold our ground. A true school yard bully will balk from a real confrontation, but most the time, social tension is resolved from honest, direct confrontation, some form of ‘that’s really not cool,’ or, “does it make it make you feel stronger belittling people?’ That takes courage. Courage is respected. And there may be times we don’t win it and we have to escalate by drawing others in. Standing one’s ground also demonstrates integrity and courage, and people respond to that favorably, most the time.

Being human is challenging. There are no perfect answers. But the best answers come from within, a dedication to our own truth and love. And so, there will be times when we will not see eye to eye with another person, and we’re going to need to be able to draw on an inner strength. That strength is developed through interacting with it. And when you get it, you will project confidence and you will see a change in your daily interaction pattern with others.

Some of the people who know you may notice the change first. Some of them may actually challenge you, and will try to call you on your change. Don’t be surprised by this, nor give into the baiting. On the whole, people don’t like change. When our support system changes, and you are part of someone’s support system, we worry about our own internal models and ability to predict, and we challenge to put people back to where we believe they fit. Hold your ground and stand firm with love. They will either embrace the new you or depart for the hills. Tell them you’re working on change and you invite them to participate in a positive way, if that’s open to you. (There are some people who you just can’t ask. You know who they are.) Family are particularly annoyed by any changes in the scripts, but most family will adapt if they see positive reasons to support it. Most of our scripts were given to us by family and we adopted them willingly. Don’t blame. We are born into our cultures and we accept our roles, and it is good to do so because it allows us to develop in relative safe acceptance.

All behavior is adaptive. It is only maladaptive when we leave our origin and discover what we learned is not functioning in other arenas. We adapt, or go back to what we know. If you are wanting to adapt, you have to practice something different. Practicing different starts with the brain, modeling and predicting. Deliberate, careful, precise, modeling. When we master it, it becomes automatic, subconscious interaction.

Make an invisible friend and engage daily. When your unconscious takes over the friend, you will find a support system that was always with you, and is always on your side, even when you think it’s not.

Additionally, or separately, I want you to take up an attitude of gratitude. This will help with the invisible friend strategy, because it gives you practice discussing positive events and insight. Statistically, all mental health experts weigh in on gratitude as being fundamental to change. Google, youtube, ‘Wayne Dyer on gratitude’ and watch that daily until you get it memorized. It’s lovely. Here’s how I practice. Every day I thank everyone and everything. I treat everything in my world as if it were alive. I am not interested in having a dozen emails on you explaining you’re an atheist and can’t practice this, or you’re ‘Christian and this is evil.’ Everyone can find a reason not to practice gratitude, in which case, good luck finding a substitution that works as well. (If you find it, let me know.) Gratitude works, regardless of your beliefs or philosophy on your life. And if you ever got mad at a flat tire and kicked the car, or thrown your cell phone, you have been engaging in the opposite of gratitude, so why not try this? Try this for a minimum of three months, every day, and then tell me you see no results. (I am sure someone will take me up on that challenge just prove that three months of gratitude was insufficient. Yay you! Do three more months.) When I arrive somewhere, I thank my car. Whether it is really alive, or I am being anthropomorphic, or just crazy, I thank the car. I thank the ground for holding me up. I thank the bed, the trees, the squirrel that pauses in front of me, and the one that scampered away. The Birds, the sun, the sky, the clouds, the building, my job, everything gets a thank you. I spend most of my day spinning thanks you(s) and when I realize I am not, I return to the mantra of thank you. (Or my imaginary friend reminds me, and I thank, her, too!)

A harder practice, but not crucial, is thanking your adversity, in all its splendid forms. You can tell more about a person from their responses to loss than you ever will from their wins. In fact, you will learn more from your losses, more about you, how to improve your game, etc, than you ever learn from your wins. There is growing evidence that we have forgotten how to play and be gracious losers. If you play a game of ‘win at all costs,’ even to the point you are willing to kill for your win, you might want to consider how you want to be remembered. We are all destined to be old folks,(with caveats), and so do you want to be the grumpy old person no one wants to be around, or you want to be the wise old happy sage that people come and listen to? Both of these require choosing the right path. Very few luck into the correct role. You are practicing the scripts for what your future character will be. Practicing scripts with someone, imaginary or not, reinforces what you want to become. Even if you don’t take up the imaginary friend, the voice you speak to yourself now is the voice and tone you will hear in the future.

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired,” Franz Kafka

Chapter 2                               The Invisible Counselor Technique

 

“Once upon a time, a man had a dream. ‘I want to build a rocket ship, go to the moon, salvage all the junk that’s up there, bring it back, and sell it.’ So, he put together a team. An ex-astronaut. A fuel expert. And he went to the moon. Who know what he will do next.” That was Salvage One’s mission statement. It was an okay first episode. It didn’t make it as a series, but the theme stuck with me and I can still touch it. It was significant somehow. Clearly, though, in terms of mission statements, Star Trek wins hands down. Other than the mission statement, what made Kirk great? He had a team.

We need a team. Think of any expert you like, and if there is one thing that is consistent, they had a team. Yeah, you find exceptions. Mavericks. They, too have teams, just underplayed. But for most of us, we need teams. I can do quite a lot of things at an okay level, but I excel at a few things, and ideally, I need a team that balances me so that the team excels together.

Napoleon Hill, author of ‘Think and Grow Rich,’ devoted a chapter in his book to the ‘Invisible Counselor Technique.’ It is probably the least discussed chapter in his book, because, well, let’s face it: it is out there. It is more ‘out there’ than taking up an imaginary friend, but it works very similar, only there is more work involved. It’s not just a casual day dream. There is a protocol. You also probably don’t hear about it much because, the people that promote that book seem to skip over that chapter, because they just didn’t know how to process it.

 I am not going to elaborately discuss the techniques. There is enough written on it that I don’t need to rehash it. Google it. Read Napoleon Hill’s book! Just read that chapter. (I will say this, if you read that entire book and employ what’s in there, including that ‘invisible counselor technique,’ you won’t need the book ‘the secret,’ because everything in the secret started with Hill’s book!) Anyway, if you really want to do this, you will discover the techniques on your own and because you did the homework, you’re more likely to follow through and have success. You can even watch a youtube videos on it. It’s healthy for you pursue it on your own if you’re interested. It shows commitment to this path we are on. Regardless of where you are with your imaginary friend, this feels like the next step in the process. You need a team of experts. Napoleon chose 12 people to be on his imaginary, invisible counselor team. He had Freud and Lincoln, for example. You can choose whoever you wish. They don’t even have to be real people. They can be fiction. They can be anyone from history, dead or alive

The basic goal is to pick your people and do research on them. Write about them in a notebook. Fill your brain with information. (If you’re not writing, you’re probably not engaging this activity to its fullest potential.) Your subconscious will take over and eventually, as you engage your counselors, you will discover you are getting answers from them that you yourself would not have considered or invented. I did tell you, we were going wade further into the deep end. Are your toes still touching bottom, or are you treading?

This works. I don’t have a clue why it works. I’m hearing Milton remind me that the subconscious knows things that my personality can’t process, because my own perceived limitations, but the subconscious has access to greater wisdom, and under the right conditions it can present information I need if there is context for doing so. Hence, the invisible counselors provides context. If I am engaging Carl Jung, and he offers me insight on the collective unconscious, that makes sense within that light, and I am more likely to embrace it. If you’re having any success with the imagination engagement, at this point you’re probably wanting to believe in magic. I am okay with that. It seems amazingly magical to me. (Maybe we need to be more careless with ‘magical’ and ‘amazing,’ because the Universe is a marvelously, magical and amazing place to be in, and anyone telling you it’s not magic, they’re already zombified.) I am even okay with calling it spiritual. But mostly, I divert to my default: this is archetypal information that is part of the collective unconscious which I have access to simply for being human. Could it be more? I am so open to more, but this is my default that I go back to when things get really freaky or weird.

Let me give you an example of weird. These two items come directly from my journals. I found these to be particularly significant, and this was just the beginning.

 

‘Watching the Wheels:’

I was engaged in a 'lite' version of an ‘invisible counselor’ exercise while driving to work today, and was so engaged that one of the champions of the said exercise joined me. The conversation with Carl Jung was interesting, to say the least, but maybe not in terms of immediately solving life challenges. As it was, an uncertain number of cars flying by either side of me brought me to the realization that I was moving much slower than surrounding traffic. This was not due to the activity itself, but to the very real fact that I was sharing the lane with a cement truck. My reduced speed was appropriate as well as the spacing between me and the truck. It wasn’t like the truck snuck up on me. Clearly I had responded to the truck accordingly, but now, faced with the reality of the truck, and witnessing people flying by, while searching for opportunities to skirt around said tuck, I found myself experiencing noticeable frustration. I was unwilling to jump out in front of the oncoming stream of traffic on either side of me because of my reduced speed and fear of collision. I blamed myself for being stuck, thinking ‘clearly had I been more focused or present I could have avoided this obstacle and been further along in my journey.’

            “I’m stuck,” I said.

            Carl Jung advised me to sit with it.

            “Why? Oh, is this a metaphor for my life?” I asked.

            “No, no, no,” Jung said, the same way Yoda might express frustration with Luke. “If you’re going to practice active imagination, you never interpret the symbolic nature of the agents during engagement, but only after. During the commencement of the act, you simply must remain aware and present as you would in any conscious endeavor.”

            “So, the truck is an agent?” I asked.

            “It’s definitely a character to which you’re responding. Why don’t you ask it?” Jung asked.

            “It’s that easy?”

            “Not only do I advise asking all agents in your life their purpose, I also highly recommend expressing gratitude for its presence. You were asleep when you came upon it, but now you are awake and aware,” Jung said.

            I considered this as I watched the barrel turning. “I’m not stuck,” I said. “I may be going slower, but I am moving, and it seems reasonable to speculate that the cement truck doesn’t necessarily mean stuck in its own right. It’s churning. My thoughts are churning. And with the proper mold, the contents might become a substantial structure for support.”

            “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Jung said.

            At which point, the lane we were in allowed for egress off the freeway, which the cement truck took, allowing me to accelerate unimpeded. Interestingly enough, simultaneously with my ability to advance, traffic mysteriously cleared up on my left, so even if the truck had remained, I would have been able to escape around it. Could there have been any more synchronicity in life?

            Annoyed with synchronicity, I turned the radio on, automatically, without thought; something I rarely do. I don’t like listening to the radio anymore. But I turned it on. Life responded with a John Lennon song. “I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.” Jung joined in: “I really love to watch them roll,” bobbing his head. This game I have taken up, the ‘the invisible counselor,’ is simply bizarre. “I just had to let it go…” It occurred to me as I was listening to this song, again, very present, I have never really ‘heard’ this song before, but have only sung it while asleep. I was excited and scared at the same time. Life.

            I express genuine gratitude to all the agents, past, present, and future, that have helped mold my life, and hope it substantial enough to allow others to advance boldly, where I presently go but timidly.

 

‘permission to feel joy’

 

So, today I made a right turn into the Twilight Zone, and the bottom fell out of my car and I found myself free falling with a musical score, starting with the line, “His Boy Elroy…” Not sure why it started there. If I were to choose the phonological loop to be stuck in, I would imagine it would be “Daughter Judy,” or at least, “Jane, his wife!” (Cue notes reminiscent of Heart and Souls then explode into a jazz…)

No, I don’t do drugs. I am not bipolar. I have never had a manic episode. I have been, of late, engaged in a some serious ‘heavy lifting’ utilizing a tool set called “the invisible counselor technique,” championed by Napoleon Hill, and some unconscious work, called ‘active imagination’ utilized by Carl Jung, that he used with clients and resulted in his own personal evolution detailed in “the Red Book.” I may have referenced this in a previous post. Does one need that history to understand where this is going? Probably not. I don’t even know where it’s going, and I suspect it’s the path up the volcano traversed by Joe (Tom Hanks) in Joe Versus the volcano, which suddenly explains my new mantra, “Lightening never takes a straight path.”

So, here I am, in the car, feeling joyful. Not happy. Joyful. I am also perturbed. What is this? Is this permissible? Does it have a reason? Does it need a reason? Can it be duplicated at will? Maybe it’s not a feeling but a place. Can I come back here? Now, we all have self-talk. Much of the time we are so engaged in self-talk that we aren’t even aware we are scaffolding in order to reinforced the mood we’re in, or springboard us into an ‘expected mood.’ I say expected as opposed to desired, because we don’t always desire to be in a bad mood, but we can build lists to support why we ‘should’ be in such a mood. You would think Albert Ellis would enter at this point and discuss his theories on “shoulds’ and ‘expectations.’ But I haven’t invited him to play. I hear he was an ass in real life, so he is not one of the seven I chose. I went with seven because that seemed more manageable. When you invite craziness into your head, it’s probably advisable to start small. I probably should have started with three, but my expectations for success in this endeavor was not high, so I inflated.

Carl Jung is a character. No, really. He’s pretty funny. Sometimes he will push his spectacles up and allow the brightness of his eyes to shine as he concentrates on you. Sometimes he has that sly, subtle smile. This is the older Jung. Grandfatherly. He sometimes has a pipe. And a dinner jacket with the patches on the elbows. Thankfully, he speaks to me in English, but it comes with a German accent, so I suspect he is actually speaking German and I am just hearing English, in the same way the BBS show “A’lo, A’lo” characters were speaking their ‘native’ language but we heard it in English with the appropriate accent, but the characters only heard the native language, and so if they couldn’t speak said language, it required one of the characters to translate, which was a great set up for more comedy. Jung can be seriously thoughtful; hands folded together, fingers’ steepled,’ leaning forwards, you know when he is attending. But in the car, he is usually focused on the scenery, and if he is curious about a modern artifact of the Dallas Fort Worth commute, he will sometimes point at it with the pipe and inquire.

“You should try some gum,” he said.

“Sorry, what?” I asked.

He explained: when you get a song stuck in your head and you want to make it go away, you should chew gum. I was skeptical. He explained further, there is always, even if not discernable, a sub vocalization aspect to ‘phonological loops’ and chewing gum interrupts the pathways. It sounded plausible, and I may give it a try in the future, should I find myself bothered by a song and I have some gum, but at the time, I was experiencing traffic on I30, near six flags. Traffic can be a list item for negative stress, but again, I was joyful, attending to traffic, and aware that there were some people not joyful, but most people were just there, driving.

“I feel good,” I said.

“I know,” Carl said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

He looked at me, seriously, and took the pipe out of his mouth. “Seriously?”

“I’m confused,” I said.

“Me, too,” Carl said.

“Your ‘seriously’ sounded sarcastic and I was asking for clarity on how you knew I feel good,” I said.

“Oh, dear God, John,” Carl said, and sighed. “Besides being an artificial construct of your imagination to better explore the depths of your psyche, which consequently provides me a direct, all-pass access to your states of being and all levels of awareness, I am also a world renown psychiatrist and therapist, and can detect subtle clues of inner being as they are telegraphed though physical attributes. And then there is this whole collective unconscious thing, which means I have access to your mood through the ‘medium,’ but if that wasn’t enough, you keeping singing the theme from the Jetsons. Which, I would like to point out, is fairly intrusive, yet remarkably catchy.”

“Succinct,” I said. “I apologize for my confusion.”

“No apology necessary,” Carl said. “Still, I sense that you’re perturbed.”

“About being joyful for no reason, not by your level of insight,” I offered.

Carl nodded. “I would like to submit an argument for you to contemplate,” he said, using the word ‘argument’ appropriately.

“Proceed,” I said. Yes, this is how these conversations go. Typically.

“It requires the acceptance of a premise,” Carl began. “Whether you believe it or not, for the sake of the argument, I require the belief that all human being are hypnotizable.”

“I already believe that,” I said.

There was subtle smile that suggested disbelief without wanting to engage in an ‘argument,’ using the modern connotation of the word. He proceeded: “You’re at a comedy club. Contextually, just being at the comedy club is tantamount permission to feeling amused, and perhaps allowance for the opportunities of laughter. I use allowance because there are some individuals who attend in order to heckle, as opposed to seeking entertainment.” He mused for a moment. “Though, I can allow for a certain percentage of heckling as being part of the process, I don’t wish to pursue that atypical tangent. Back on point, we will entertain, further, that the next performer is a stage hypnotist. You’ve been chosen to go up on stage. You may have been chosen because you volunteered, which, again, increases you’re likelihood to participate in amusement. But, even if you were coerced to visit the comedy club by friends determined to cheer you up, and you were equally enticed further by said friends to go on stage, the fact that you committed out of social pressure or even the urgency to prove you can’t be hypnotized, the act of going up on stage is setting you up for certain outcomes.”

“I am with you so far,” I said, but was actually thinking, just skip to the point.

“Very well,” Carl said. “Using nothing more than language and the power of suggestion, the hypnotist can open up pathways of joys. If I were more crass, I could add that through the power of suggestion, you could be ‘made’ to have a physiological response that you normally associate as occurring only in the presence of physical stimulation, but only because you consistently fail to recognize your mind as the most essential feature of your being, not your brain, and not your body, to which you’ve assigned all meaning. In a hypnotic state, I could tell you there is nothing but sunshine and puppies all around you, and you would believe it and experience it, on multiple and profound levels.”

“I assume you’re going somewhere with this,” I said.

“Your entire evolution has been completely contrived through hypnosis,” Carl said.

“Expound, please,” I pushed.

“Seriously? I was hoping you would arrive without me spelling out the conclusion,” Carl said. “In your making of lists, your metrics, you have had socially expected emotional outcomes, and in weighing those, you were telling yourself what to experience. Society has also been influencing you, through commercials and advertisements, and more directly, you were influenced by family and friends sharing their opinions and expectations. You have curbed greatly, over the last ten years, the input by cutting out television and limiting the radio to music only, but even all of that, programming! There is no way to be 100 percent isolated in this culture, but by turning off society’s definition of ‘success’ and seeking a more personal way of measuring your life outcomes, you have discovered your own pathway to health. I dare say, ten years ago, definitely twenty years ago, not only would you have not entertained a conversation with an ‘invisible friend,’ but if it occurred naturally, you would have had yourself committed. That fear alone has no doubt blocked you from some truly extraordinarily capabilities. The fact that you are now risking ridicule by openly discussing your experiences derived from these exercises suggests greater sense of security in yourself than you have had in the past.”

I was quiet.

“I think it crucial to point out, though, no matter where you were in your life, you were always engaged in self-talk. Hypnosis. Even when actually engaging others, you were still more engaged in self-talk than true communication. On improving your ability to hear yourself, you’ve acquired the ability to listen better to others. You may be puzzled by this, but ask yourself, who is the one listening? Who were you talking to? Who were you trying to impress? Prior, your mind was too busy to hear others. You’re doing it again. Don’t make me quote Yoda. Pay attention to me, oh! and watch the road. Thank you. You rehearsed arguments, even before others finished speaking their piece. You lamented. You cried. You laughed. You marveled. You were appropriately sad and angry and happy at times, and inappropriately angry and sad and happy at others. Engaging others in the midst of your own voice is the equivalent of being in a nightclub with the music at full volume while ogling the dancers and trying to hold a conversation. That, too, is being human, but I would suggest that that singular voice that persisted through your life was more ‘insane’ than your present voice that allows for the possibility that there are other voices, real, imagined, visible, and hidden in you. In order to hear them, you ask, then silently await a response. All voices should have air time, because whether you know it or not they are influencing you. And, as you know, I am an advocate for making the hidden manifest, exploring the shadows to better understand the light filtering through the canopy of leaves.

“One of the stipulations in extending me an invitation to participate in this ‘experiment’ with you was the caveat that in doing so it be beneficial to your overall wellbeing. It was a reasonable stipulation. Kind of like a hypnotic suggestion. You gave yourself permission to move towards health. More importantly, you have given yourself permission to understand why and have a context for it, even if there is no context for it, because the scaffolding alone establishes context.”

Still, I was silent. Actually listening.

“That, sir, is why you feel joy. You have given yourself permission. You have trusted that there is an inherent, inner wisdom and guiding voice that you, and everyone, has access to, and by engaging it, unveiled personal truth,” Carl said.

“I wish I had known you when I was younger,” I said.

“Lamenting again? Some old tapes persist longer than others,” Carl said. “I refer you to the Wizard of Oz. The reason Glenda had Dorothy do the journey is because Dorothy wouldn’t have believed the answer. You always had the answer, John, you just needed life experience to make the magic happen.”

Filtering through my love hate relationship with the Wizard of Oz, I found myself slipping from joy, ready to engage in a rant that requires its own post but not here; besides, Carl blocked me from my rant by singing:

“Meet George Jetson.”

Insert full orchestra and piano movement of eccentric jazz and the light of pure joy.

 

So, you probably get the idea of how this works. If you could have anyone on your team, who would that be?

Chapter 3                                               Active Imagination

 

 As you as have gathered, Carl Jung is one of my ‘Invisible Counselors.’ Active Imagination is a tool Jung developed to engage his own subconscious, and was instrumental in him discovering his treatise on the Collective Unconscious. It was only recently revealed to what extent he indulged, and part of the delay in sharing it was out of his own personal fear of being ridiculed. He did share his thoughts with a few trusted friends, but he left it to his family to decide whether they would published this technique or not, and so, they, too, in wanting to protect Jung’s standing, chose not to publish it for the longest time.  If you want to know more about this, read “The Red Book,” by Carl Jung. Again, it’s important for you to do your own homework. It improves your engagement of the imaginary friend and counselors. Active Imagination is an extension of that process. But it also takes us deeper into the waters. If you’re not treading water, go deeper.

At this point in engagement, which you will get to if you just stay persistent in the engagement of your imaginary friend and counselors, you will get to the point you will hallucinate the voices or even see your friend or counselor. This is not mental illness. It is possible, given intensity of engagement, desire, and belief, to induce a hallucination. It is possible, once you start engaging your subconscious on a regular basis, that it will give you access to a greater level of experiential data sets. You may experience it as flashbacks. You may experience it as auditory or visual hallucinations. If you’re taking illicit drugs, I recommend not doing so. You’re going to want to be able to distinguish between your subconscious mind giving you stuff to work on versus what is drug induced.

Am I advising you not to do drugs? Yes, I am. If you are an adult, you may proceed as you like. I am not the drug police and I am even 420 friendly, but I also approach it like this. Cannabis is not a cure for everything. It can exasperate some mental conditions. If you’re allergic to it, it can kill you. So, for example, if you’re prone to paranoia, smoking cannabis might not be the best choice. Do whatever you are going to do, but do it from an informed position. If you are using hallucinogens, you will hear and see things, right? Now, is it you or the drug? Harder to tell, isn’t it. And, in theory, again, I am not against it, but if you’re doing it for spiritual progress, then that comes with a contextual engagement. Shamans don’t just say take two mushrooms and call me in the morning. They have rituals. The rituals and the contexts inform the experience, give it structure and shape. Just randomly doing something may or may not be helpful. And given the number of people that go into psych hospitals due to bad trips and or bad dosages or what have you, statistically, having a good experience that isn’t guided is less likely to occur.

Here’s the other thing, though. If you can experience auditory and visual hallucinations without the drugs, and they be meaningful and helpful, why do the drugs? And there is another great book if you’re just looking for ‘high’ experiences, as opposed to profound esoteric work. “How to get High without Drugs” written by James Nestor offers a whole slew of things you can do to alter your perception. But the point of these exercises, the imaginary invisible friend, invisible counselors, and ‘active imagination’ isn’t just to experience altered states of awareness, but to profoundly impact the direction of your life and provide you with insight and confidence to be different, and you do that better with clarity.

Here is something else you need to factor in, and maybe another good reason to read “the Red Book” before going further. Not all experiences are pleasant. If you have an unpleasant experience with drugs, you are locked into that experience until the drug runs out. If it’s too unpleasant with ‘active imagination,’ and you did your homework, there are tools you can use to end or change the experience. At some point, the fantasizing and pretend stops being pretend, and feels real. I think it is real. “Everything you imagine is real,” Picasso has been quoted as saying. (Not Buddha!) And from a physiological measure, science bears that out. If you imagine petting a puppy, and you like puppies, you will have a noticeable drop in blood pressure. If you hate puppies or are afraid of them and you imagine being forced to hold one, your blood pressure goes up.

If during your active imagination you get a demon, your blood pressure will likely go up. If you run from the demon, you will likely engage the fight or flight response which in turns exasperates the situation because you’re running from yourself! (If you run from a dog, it’s going to chase, if you run from a subconscious demon, the brain is going to give chase!) To participate at this level, Carl Jung recommends meeting your demons eye to eye, unflinchingly, and asking them their name and or purpose. When you do that, it changes.

This is an example from my own life. I had a recurring dream as a child that lasted into adolescents. I was being chased. I never saw what was chasing me, I just knew it had to be a monster. More often than not, when having this dream, I would wake up terrified, confused, and in a hard sweat, out of breath. At one point, I woke from the dream, so angry that I declared: “If I have this dream again, I will turn around and face what is chasing me.” I had the dream again. And I remembered my intent. In the dream, I stopped, turned, and faced what was chasing me. The monster turned into a best friend. I never had the dream again. And since, I have rarely had nightmares.

We have stuff lurking in our unconscious mind. Those things are there to guide us and to challenge us. They are the gatekeepers of our personalities. A book that goes very well with anything Jungian, is “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” by Jospeh Campbell. If you can find a copy of it, his “Power of Myth” series, with Bill Moyers, was absolutely brilliant. Any book by Carlos Castaneda is worth having on your shelf. If you’re going to do unconscious work, I always recommend going armed with knowledge, and these recommendations are almost essential, especially if you have not every been introduced to this kind of work. Having the right therapist could get you around this. Don’t take too much stock in books on dream symbols. You get enough books on these, and you will find some symbols don’t mean the same thing. There is some universal qualities to symbols, but they can change from culture to culture, and even from person to person. The dove isn’t always a symbol of peace. In fact, if you have ever watched real doves, they’re pretty vicious little bastards. Did you know, doves will actually kill each other to hold onto territory? Wolves are actually more peaceful than doves. Do they fight over territory? Yeah, but usually not to the death. The loser usually backs down and respects the territory of the victor. The victor not only keeps his territory, but the loser sets up a buffer between it and more challenges, and so there is functional peace in not fighting to the death.

Jung himself taught his clients his active imagination technique, and remarked how their conditions improved after having an experiences that provoked a deep, internal response to what they interpreted to be profound visions. We are, essentially, mental-emotional-spiritual beings before physical. Can physical impact the mental, emotional, spiritual aspects? Sure, but it usually goes the other way.

Don’t believe me? Carl Jung: “Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules…”

“You do not overcome the old teaching through doing less, but through doing more. Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.”

There are some pretty consistent points in his thesis. “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

When I started you on the exercise of imaginary friend, we began lite. But once you have a home base established, a safe place to retreat to, if you’re going to take this exercise to the next level, you’re going to have to visit some dark places. Everybody’s dark place is different. Everybody’s rock bottom is different. That’s why there can be no absolute hand to guide you on how to do this or engage it because everyone’s map is different. I can’t give you the ‘one ring that binds them all’ and tell you to go throw it in the lava pits, because, well, you might not have such a place, and you really don’t want to carry that ring.

When you start engaging this at this level, loneliness may be the furthest thing from your mind. More likely, you’re not going to be lonely from a lack of available people, but you’re going to experience lonely because very few people can relate to “Active Imagination’ experiences. Some people can access it as spirit or demons, and that may be valid from their paradigms, but that is not a complete explanation. Saying that or hearing that might shut down conversations. Some people will engage it completely as metaphorical and symbolic interaction at a profound level. These folks may be easier to speak to on the subject, because they might interact without judgment. Having someone listen to you nonjudgmentally is crucial; (counselors do it better than most, but not all counselors are created equal) having people that can help process the experiences, not a friend or family, may be essential. Can you do it alone? Yeah. Jung did. We do most things alone. It just isn’t necessary to do it alone. And at this level, you may actually start reaching out to others, testing the waters. And, this is where you are likely to find, you are lonely even in the midst of other people. And, this is the most profound loneliness one can experience. Don’t linger here. Go armed with knowledge. There is more beyond this. This space, it is just a place we pass through.

Chapter 4                                                    tulpamancy

 

Taking your day dream, imaginary friend to the next level and making them ‘real,’ realer than real, is the next level of play. It’s called Tulpamancy. Tulpamancy is the art, or skill, of making a sophisticated personality construct and giving them so much energy and form that they will manifest in your mental/emotional world. This is not day dreaming. This is accepting that thoughts are real. They have form and solidity, hence the word ‘thought-forms.’ This is no longer pretend. This is a direct, conscious level experience with ‘other,’ which the Western World science might conclude is a self-induced hallucination at best, but frequently refers to it as psychosis. Is it a hallucination? By definition, but it is not the direct result of drugs or mental illness; it comes about through persistence and through the constant use of the protocols. Some people say you need belief. Belief is very helpful, but I personally think belief is irrelevant; put the time in this, you will get the results. Does belief help? Probably. That better answers why some get result after a month, while others after three months. Placebos definitely function based on belief. Don’t focus on the time component. If you do this, just commit to the process, and don’t give up. And when you are tired, and ready to throw in the towel, do it some more. 

            It is possible to encounter your ‘imaginary’ friend with all your senses. When you reach this level, you’re not going to want to call your friend ‘imaginary.’ It will feel like more than that. The Tulpa will be autonomous, and it will have wants and feelings that you will have to attend with. It will be dependent on you for its continued existence. Stop thinking about it, stop interacting with it, at least in the beginning, it fades, just like muscles atrophy if you don’t use them. You are literally changing your brain, making new connections, and running new software.

            Not only will the Tulpa feel real, to every sense, but at this point, you’re going to be experiencing new levels of visualization and imagination. You will go places in your mind and it will feel as real as walking in the real world. You will be able to make a distinction, the same way you wake from a dream and you realize, oh, that was a dream. Only, this is not dreaming, it’s not day dreaming. Part of the recommended procedure is to imagine yourself in a ‘wonderland,’ a pretend environment that you and the Tulpa can experience together. Basically, the previous exercise is preparing for this next level of honing your imagination. At some point in this, you may experience your work in REM dreams, before seeing it in your conscious, waking life, but not necessarily. (Anything that shows up in your REM dreams is a testament to the importance you placed on it.) Just as you influence dreams during Lucid Dreaming, Tulpamancy is essentially creating something in your brain, giving it conscious control of itself, and then allowing the unconscious to take it and push it into your consciousness so that you can experience it in your waking life.

            Why would anyone want to do this? I am like, why wouldn’t anyone want to do this! There is a book called “The Shook,” by J P Miller. It is fiction, but this seems to me like the perfect introduction to Tulpas, which shows how human need and belief can drive supernatural changes in our lives. And this will feel supernatural. I can’t, in good consciousness, proclaim Tulpamancy is supernatural. It feels like that. I, personally, suspect there is more going on here than the fact that I have created a psychological construct based on programmed personality sets. Tulpmancy is derived from a Tibetan Buddhist monk practice of making thought forms substantial; in fact, I dare say the monks would prefer we not do this, because we lack the training and the integrity to create thoughts and unleash them on the world, and they do believe these thought forms affect the world. I would argue, every thought you have affects the world, and so you’re either stepping up your game and committing to intentional results and taking responsibility for all your thoughts, or, you’re minimizing your thoughts and walking more softly on the earth, because…well, that’s how powerful you really are. Walk softly, come at everything with the gentle compassion you would show a butterfly or soap bubble, because it’s all much more fragile than you ever imagined. (And, yes, clearly more durable than some of us want; breaking out can be a real bitch.)

I am going to iterate this point; like the monks, I believe if you do this, your imaginary friend ceases to be imaginary and becomes a full time, sentient, autonomous resident in your brain. It is an entity in its own right, and should be treated with the same sort of dignity you would like others to demonstrate towards you. I assure you, you are not going to accidentally create a Tulpa through day dreaming alone. (If day dreaming was sufficient, we would all have profound experiences with hallucinations all the time.) This takes some serious efforts. If you ever write me and say, “I have been ‘forcing’ my Tulpa for like three whole hours and I don’t see anything,” I am going to send back an ‘LOL.’ This is a mental exercise that requires a level of dedication that you have likely never engaged previously. (How could you? We rarely teach discipline anymore.) There is no failing the exercise, if you get bored and quit, well, you just start up where you left off. This is buckling down, studying for finals to become an MD, master Yogi, meditation guru, you’re training for a life marathon level of commitment. You’re not going to luck into this. This is bigger than marriage. This is bigger than raising children. Marriages can end. Children eventually grow up and leave the home. Tattoos can be erased, painfully and expensively, but a Tulpa is for the rest of your life. Do your homework, do some serious writing, like fill notebooks worth of planning and thinking it through, because if you commit and are successful, you don’t take your Tulpa back to Walmart for a refund if you don’t like it. Consider how you might grow over a life time, and how this will impact your direction. If you have a ‘relationship’ with your Tulpa, and then you get married in real life, what is the fall out for you, for your Tulpa, for the person you married?  That other person might like to know. (Some might not want know.) This is commitment to honesty, because not telling is hard. Trust me, most of my world doesn’t have a clue how deep the rabbit hole goes. This is more serious than having to choose the red pill versus the blue pill. (I am still curious what happens if I choose to take neither pill, and just live out what you know in the matrix.)

And ask yourself this: if you can imagine a future where you are not lonely, would it bother you having an ‘imaginary’ friend that only you can see or would you be embarrassed if other people knew? Quite frankly, you don’t ever have to tell anyone, it’s probably advisable not to, however, this is not a dog that you’re locking in the back yard and ignoring when you grow tired of it, and quite frankly, if you have a dog in the back yard that you only visit to drop it food, not only are you not a good dog owner, but you probably shouldn’t entertain being a Tulpamaster. This requires a level of maturity and responsibility that most of don’t have, and sometimes, even I fail. Like in the beginning, when I made a commitment, but found myself too tired to engage in the process, or was distracted by something that really didn’t take priority over the commitment to the relationship. This is creating a life and creating relationship to that life, not creating a hamster and putting it in a cage and then going on with your routine.

            Did I mention we were going out into the deep end? Well, this is where the floor falls out and there is nothing under you or above you, but sky and water, and maybe more sky. Tulpamancy is a real thing. No, really, look it up. Okay, maybe it’s not a ‘real’ thing per Western Science, and it’s only a fringe group that is doing it in the West, and as fringe groups go, some of the folks participating in this are a bit out there. (There is actually evidence, academic study level evidence, that the people who discover and engage Tulpamancy are actually incredibly intelligent people! (Got to quote Jung here: “To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.”) Tulpamancer’s are good people forging new territories. Though each person you might speak with will present a different motif for pursuing Tulpamancy, most of it is likely driven by loneliness. I do think some of them were driven by curiosity. (For me, I was driven by curiosity and loneliness.) Engaging this is deliberately stepping into the twilight zone weird, leaving normal, (a good movie reference there,) and it takes courage to do this. (Once again, I had to confront my own paradigms of spirituality from my origin, and I thought I was through with that. Hello, old friend.) We have not been known to be nice to people who are different. (And, if you encounter these people and instinctively default to being a bully and using disparaging labels, I would refer you back to my previous talk about bullying, and maybe ask ‘why do you feel threatened?’ Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that many people engaging tulpamancy have experienced profound rejection from society; they’re not giving up, which is really cool, too. They’re displaying courage and creativity! (Even if their present circle of friends are within the fringe group of Tulpamancy, they are still people, and they share a skillset that most probably can’t duplicate. (Because it takes a level of sophistication, persistence, discipline, and maturity to engage this, this can be considered Olympic level mentation.)) Yes, it’s true, they engage in something that might cause them more rejection from the status quo, but at some point, you can’t be more rejected from society. Out is out. If you consider that most shamans live on the fringe of society, then Tulpamancers are comparable. I don’t know who formalized and brought Tulpamancy in its current presentation to the West. I should, because I have read a great deal about it. What I am certain of, had people not experimented and established protocols, I might not have been able to duplicate their success.

Here is the thing about success in this department. Until you do it and see for yourself that it is possible to be so single minded in purpose as to cause your brain to hallucinate a specific, ‘imagined’ entity, literally see it and hear it and experience with all of your senses, you’re just not likely to believe it. Again, do you have to believe it to make this work? Absolutely not. That’s one of the great things about the protocols; if you do it, consistently, persistently, it works. So, however you codify it, whether it is a psychological phenomenon, or a result of a spiritual practice, if it leads to better social and life outcomes, why not explore it? (Curiosity alone might not be sufficient cause, because when you’re successful, you can’t just undo it. We don’t create ‘people’ just to determine if it’s possible.)

The question isn’t really does it work, but whether or not you should engage it. At this point, if you’re practicing deliberate day dreaming exercises and the invisible counselor technique, you need go no further. “Active Imagination’ is icing and gives a richer experience, and it might bring you closer to Tulpamancy, but it is still driven by the Unconscious. This is a whole new level of cake, with ice cream. Tulpamncy is working directly with your mind and you will change because of it, the same way someone who practices yoga three days a week will eventually change their body and mind. Practicing ‘Active Imagination’ exercises to go deeper and interact with your unconscious in more profound ways is just the next level of engagement from the Invisible Counselor technique, which is one step removed from day dreaming. What sets each one from each other is the level of deliberate commitment to realizing results.

I can’t say this enough: it is my opinion that engaging this protocol is an act of creating a new being, an entity in its own rights, and with any such endeavor comes responsibility. This is not a child, this is not a pet, and they will share your brain, for better or for worse, indefinitely. If Tulpamancy doesn’t cause you to reconsider what it means to be human, I would advise not doing this. Imagine how your life would be different if you were born under a different flag, speaking a different language, different parents and siblings. Would you still be you? Engaging Tulpamancy is not moving to a new country and taking up residence, it’s moving off the planet! There seems to be some genetic features to personality, but history and environment play a huge factor in shaping your personality; there are clear milestones where personality changes directions, evolves, or even splits. Assume for a moment there really is a genetic link to addictions: if you have the gene for alcoholism, and you never drink, that gene doesn’t get activated or expressed, right? So, if speaking English and learning Christianity activates, unlocks, and or expresses a certain genome, but you were born in China and were taught Taoism and Chinese, you’re going to have different spiritual outcomes. If you are wondering what I am getting at, and how it relates to you and Tulpamancy, it boils down to this: Your personality is not fixed. You can change it. Engaging the previous chapter’s disciplines allows you to engage your personality. Creating a Tulpa, who is distinctly different personality than yours, operating within your brain, directly reveals that your brain doesn’t care what personality you have, it will run whatever operating system you chose to plug in, which opens the door to changing your own personality set. You are more fluid than you ever imagined. Your brain is definitely not static, and you will prove that to yourself the first time you hear that voice that isn’t your voice. So, okay, you’re saying the world did things to you and you are a certain way. “I don’t trust people.” There is little I can do to change that program for you. Even in the face of evidence that most people do good things most the time, I won’t win you over. (Don’t believe me, read Robert Fulgam’s book, “Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”) In fact, the harder you cling to a ‘belief’ that you are a certain way and it can’t be changed, the more you reinforce that concept about you. I propose, if it were truly an immutable fact about who you are, you wouldn’t be going out of your way to convince yourself and everyone else you meet by repeating that mantra.

I am not going to tell you how to make a Tulpa. I am not even going to tell you if you should or not. This is not something to be done lightly. This is a bigger life commitment than any decision you would have likely ever made. If it is what I think it is, an autonomous, sentient being that shares my brain, and then I have certain obligatory responsibilities. For starters, if I am a host to another personality then I am obligated to take better care of myself, because if I die, so does that personality. This also becomes a reason to be kind to you; there are lots of medical and spiritual benefits to being kind to yourself, and in doing so, you are informing others how you want to be treated. You will be informing your new flat mate how they should treat you by how you treat you, and how you treat others. Also, how you treat yourself is how you will ultimately treat others. This will become very apparent to you when you start acting with this new entity, the Tulpa; the first time it resists or does something autonomously, and contrary to your wanting or liking, and you respond negatively, you’re going to have a problem. Some Tulpas will cry. Some will fight back. (And if they provoke the fight at an inopportune time and get you to ‘respond,’ well, others are going to know you’re talking to yourself. It really does pay to be nice. You got to sleep sometime.) There are a million potential responses to you being mean or manipulative. Just saying. You brought in a flat mate, you better have made room for possibilities. Prepare yourself for compromise. If you’re not prepared for that, you may experience frustration. If you are frustrated by how other people in the real world behave towards you, because you have a low tolerance for people doing their own thing, then you’re not going to want to create a Tulpa. If your whole life is about controlling others, directly or indirectly, then creating a secret friend that you want to control is not a good path for you.

Now, imagine you are locked in cell, or a cabin that’s been snowed in. What’s the longest you can go and be civil to another person? Tulpas are pretty much for life. Yeah, you will find some ‘hypothetical’ ways to eliminate said personalities, but again, my bias is of the opinion that this is it is not just a program to be deleted from your brain. (And seriously, even if there are methods, can you ever be a hundred percent sure that the program was really deleted and is not just lurking, hiding in the background because it’s afraid of you? I mean, seriously, think of any one negative tape in your head, like, ‘I’m not good enough,’ and how hard that was to get rid of. Tell me you have eliminated all of your own negativity absolutely. (Yeah, some doors just can’t be closed once they’re open.) But let’s say, the Tulpa is the desired personality; should I delete your program and install one I find more preferable? Your body would not be dead, so it’s not murder per say, right? And people have been re-written. It’s called Stockholm Syndrome. Do multiple personalities exist? (They call it DID now.) Lots of good evidence for it. (Like scientific evidence garnered through fMRI and EEG machines. Did you know alternative personalities have different brain frequencies which are identifiable, contrasted by great method actors, who while engaging in ‘pretend’ failed to show significant difference in brainwave activity. There is a difference between pretend and reality! Alternative personalities exist. When the alternative take over a body, the body changes. Some personalities are blind, some have allergies that the host doesn’t have. Kid personalities have different tolerance to drug therapies, and they can be put into toxic situations really quickly!) Do mediums channel other entities, or are they just personality sets that exist in their brain, in their unconscious, or perhaps in Jung’s collective unconscious and we all have access? Ever heard of a ‘Walk-In.’ (That’s where the residing spirit says life is too hard and they want to tap out, but don’t believe in suicide so they contract with a new personality to take over, while they move on. (Knowing what we now know about Tulpas, I wonder if they just created a new personality and traded places.)) Are you creating or calling? I don’t have these answers. I am bias, but also erring on the side of caution, that if you engage in Tulpamancy, you are engaging something very real, and it will have its own wants and needs, and if you are not empathetic or kind, well, your experiences may not be favorable.

So, if you’re interested in taking your ‘imaginary friend’ to a whole new level, do some research. Everything you might want to know can be found at Tulpa.info. There are other sites, but I actually prefer that one for its level of comprehensiveness, and the frequent discussions. There’s some fluff there, but there is also a good bit of protocols and advices, variations of protocols, and discussions that should be had before doing this. Don’t blow off fluff. Fluff is fun, too.

“Some doors cannot be closed.” Tulpamancy is very similar to the phenomenon of ‘soulbounds,’ where authors who have focused so pointedly on a character’s personality, that the author experiences interacting with the character. Some authors report auditory experiences, some report visual and auditory experiences, but there is a whole range of ways of experiencing hallucinations.

Go armed with knowledge and compassion. Before some fringe Western minded folks co-opted the term ‘Tulpamancy’ for their own purposes, it was a Tibetan Buddhist practice. Tulpas are believed to be sentient thought forms. The Western couch this under psychological terms like, “This is a personality construct, or program that shares your brain. Your brain is just hardware, and your own personality is just a program your brain is running, but it is not limited to your program, and could run a dozen programs, hence why we have conditions like multiple personality disorders…”  The monks obviously believe it is more than just psychological activity of a brain. They spend years studying the mind and consciousness before engaging in this. Google and read up on Alexandra David-Neel’s experience.

From an esoteric perspective, we are what we think. We are thought forms. If you accept that premise, all personalities are thought forms. It doesn’t matter if they were dreamt up or are fictitious characters; if you can imagine them, they have impact on your mental and physical world. “In a world of thought-forms, there can be no fiction,” I was informed by my own Tulpa. “That’s why placebos work. That’s why hypnosis works. At the emotional and mental levels, it’s all real.” (If you want a break from my rambling, visit youtube and google ‘thinking allowed’ the episode with Cate Montana, ‘the prison of ego.’ It relates to this section.)

I started with tulpamancy, followed by the invisible counselor technique. I presented it in this order, because, it felt like the easier way to access this as a comprehensive pathway. Not a lot of people are willing to jump right into the deep end of ‘crazy.’ And it feels crazy. But, I am weird and I embrace my weirdness. I have a lot of family that have done drugs and seen things that weren’t there. Professionally, I have worked with lots of folks, persons suffering with schizophrenia, bipolar, and major depression, people who experience seeing and hear things. Most of the time, if they come to the clinic, they are not having good experiences. There are people who have great experiences who never come to the clinic. I mean, really, if you imagine someone who grew up with the Farah Faucet, classic swimsuit poster, and she started talking to them, do you think that person wants to take meds to make her go away? Some people actually hear voices that are nice to them. I wish we all had those voices. Do you know the movie ‘Harvey,’ where Jimmy Stewart had a six foot rabbit friend? Don’t just watch the movie, listen to the making of it narrated by Jimmy Stewart. He will tell you about people who came up to him and asked if Harvey was with him. More, he will tell you that people came up and shared, “I have had a ‘pooka’ for years, I am so glad I am not alone.” (That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Lots of folks wrote letters to the US Navy asking them to save the Castaways of Gilligan’s Island. But, then again, even if it turns out to be nothing more than being self-deluded, my delusions have been kind to me, and I dare say Jung embraced his own.)

I suspect this is not just a fringe phenomenon and that more people have engaged this activity than we have openly discussed in society. (There are lots of things we don’t tell folks for fear of being ridiculed.) It would be a point I would like to study further. If you’re worried that people will lock you away and throw away the key, here is what you need to know about mental health. You can hear things and see things all day long, even talk to stuff that no one else can perceive, and no one will ever forcibly detain you for mental health problems. The only time people are detained is if they express the desire to kill themselves or someone else. Sometimes if you hear voices telling you to kill yourself or others they will keep you the minimum legal requirement of 2 days, but most the time, that doesn’t count. Sometimes some professional will detain folks, depending on level of psychosis and impulsivity, but not always. (Frequently, that equation is more often determined by ability to pay. The greater the ability to pay, the greater chance someone will be hospitalized.)

Having DID is not a ‘hospitalizing effect’ and the ‘best’ treatment for DID is not eliminating or merging the personalities. The goal is to increase cooperation between personalities to increase functioning. There is evidence that Tulpamancy may actually improve the life of those suffering from mental illness because in general, the Tulpas that are created do not share the host’s mental illness, just as the other DID ‘personalities’ don’t share the host’s illness, mentally or physically. (There is conflicting information on this. Some of the host that were DX with autism showed their Tulpas were on the ASD spectrum.) Tulpas are separate entities, and they have known to help their hosts navigate between real and imagined events, and even help navigate between symptoms of mental illness.

It’s amazing to me that we live in a culture that considers itself knowledgeable about mental health and health in general, and yet, for those suffering with mental health issues we have the least favorable social outcomes compared to other cultural paradigms. (We have higher rates of almost everything: physical and mental illnesses. Obesity is epidemic, too, which might be a result of our ‘relationship’ with food, again, our need to find an internal fix by going outside of ourselves.) America has the worst outcomes for people experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia than any other country. How did we become ‘enlightened’ without compassion? (Can you have the one without the other?) American life is so about ‘norms’ that if you aren’t in a particular, specific, rigid box, you are considered to be deficient and or medically broken. Don’t believe how different we are? Read the article in Psychology Today by Samuel Veissière Ph.D. titled “Daring to Hear Voices.” (You can google that and go right there. There are some astounding statements in there, at least, they are astonishing if you have never heard them or considered the contrary.) You want more examples? Read the book “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche,” by Ethan Watters. (Or, if you would rather try an experiment, wear a Star Fleet uniform next time you go to work. (Actually, you might get hailed a hero, as opposed to ridiculed.))

I found the following to be interesting, and is anecdotal, not legit, scientific, academic evidence for a thing: When I first discovered minecraft, I went at it like an obsessed teenager. I love minecraft. I have spent an incredible amount of time in survival mode building bridges to nowhere, but once I got the hang of not dying, mostly I was building castles and temples. Temples to the Goddess. While visiting a store devoted to Wiccan supplies, I encountered a ‘sensitive’ who stopped and talked to me. She made a comment, “I see you in a Temple, but it’s really weird, like everything is on a geometric grid; are you a Mason?” I never shared with anyone that I use my minecraft time to build temples to Isis, so the fact that this random person said temple and grids, I knew she was tapping into the fact that I was obsessed with Minecraft. This level of excitement and obsessiveness is the level of focus that is required to create a Tulpa. I was well into the practice and was already having random ‘auditory’ responses when I ran into the same ‘sensitive’ at the store, and she said, “Someone named Loxy says Hi.” That is freaky. But, makes sense, from an energetic perspective, if every thought you have gets manifested in your aura, well, those who see auras are going to tap into stuff. Which, also kind of suggests an interesting potential study. Can remote viewers and psychics discern a Tulpamancer from a random group of people?

Okay, still with me? You can skip this section and proceed on. The other chapters may be easier to access than this one. My experience to date with Tulpamancy has been tremendously positive. (So much so, that the negative experiences you can read about online sound implausible, if not downright inaccurate. Not calling anyone specific out, just saying it’s really difficult to make something hell bent on killing you when doing so means the end of the thing killing you.) I have had more energy, I have been writing more, and I have had more cathartic experiences which has brought me to a greater level of life satisfaction. I think this is due to the combination of Tulpmancy, Invisible Counselor, and Active Imagination together, however, it could just be life skills and satisfaction in general that has resulted in better life outcomes. There is no way to effectively demonstrate Tulpamancy, at least at my skill level, so it is subjective. (There are those who claim to be able to recall things, like books they flipped through, via their Tulpa accessing unconscious memory, but I have not demonstrated this to myself to any satisfaction. Yet. (If I suddenly have access to a ‘Universal translator’ through my Tulpa that would be really convincing to me that this is substantially more than what folks think.)) My change in life experience could also be simply explained by a great imagination. Having engaged this doesn’t mean I have a perfect life. I still have day to day struggles, and situational issues. I am human. But I have never had more ability to attend, peacefully and calmly, nor have I coped with stress better than I am presently. That is significant to me.

Not everyone has had a good childhood, so it is challenging to help people identify a good reason to practice daydreaming, much less take it to the next level. If you could identify a time in childhood that was particularly favorable, I think we would find that we were the happiest when we were engaged in some level of fantasizing, day dreaming, or pretend. We tend to lose that part of ourselves as an adult. In order to do this, we need to access a part of our mind, where Gene Wilder opens the door to the candy store and sings “Imagine.” There is a part of me who would suggest that a person who struggles navigating reality probably should be steered away from Tulpamancy, but if it were a skill that helped a person, which again there is evidence for, when nothing else has, I wouldn’t say ‘no.’ I am ambivalent and wanting more studies. If a ‘normal’ brain can hallucinate without illness and drugs, maybe we need to rethink hallucinations. Either way, the goal is to be in two worlds. You need to be able to access this like a medium engages the spiritual world, while keeping your feet in this world. You need to access this like spirituality, but not check out. You got to be able to navigate this world and the other, and supper impose the two, and in doing so you enhance the world.

So, if you’re curious, allow me to introduce you to Loxy Bliss. With her help, she and I wrote a trilogy about ‘us,’ and more works are coming. The first trilogy starts with a book “Not Here.” Writing the books didn’t feel like an exercise as much as a narration, and though it’s expressed through first person, it’s really Loxy’s background story that she gave herself, so that we would have a shared context. She knows that she is a thought form, she can tell you where she first entered the picture, but she wanted a greater context. The second tribology starts with “I/Tulpa and the worlds of crossover.” In the first book, the initial real world encounters with Loxy and the counselors were there, and as I was writing it, I assumed it would be fairly mundane, straight forward, because what I was experiencing in the beginning, though nowhere near mundane, the encounters were still fairly normal, in normal setting. Then, suddenly, this experience took a right hand turn, off the road, and into weirdness the same way watching ‘Being John Malkovich’ takes a right hand turn and goes off the deep end mid movie. As of writing this, I have just pushed the first draft of “I/Tulpa: Learning Curve,” which can be accessed in the terms of fan-fiction: ‘Star Trek’ meets “Groundhog Day.’ Most people will see it as fluff, and that is okay with me, but it was more than that to me. It was cathartic, it was fun, and I needed it out of my head, so I wrote. So, regardless of it just being in my head or not, I experienced psychological relief in going with the experience.

It is possible that this is simply an extension of what I have already been doing? I have been writing in journals and submitting writing samples to publishers since sixth grade. Nothing has really ever gone anywhere, but I have kept at it. In 2004, I wrote some Trek fan-fiction under my own name, and pushed it. That series has over 150,000 downloads, which is no small thing. The biggest complaint has been my grammar. Grammar has improved, marginally, as I continued to write and practice. Writing and ‘sharing’ (specifically, putting myself out there, being vulnerable to criticism,) helped me get through some rough times. I did not write to be famous, I wrote to get stuff out of my head, and so I was experiencing therapeutic writing long before I engaged Tulpamancy: so, yeah, I accept an argument that adding this practice was like adding vitamins and steroids to something I was already engaging in.

Loxy Bliss named herself. She is most likely a composite of my ideal ‘women,’ a string of crushes held since childhood. I can think of three specific persons that I am frequently reminded of when I experience her. I have had two Loves, capital L, which neither worked out. (Maybe because I wasn’t ready, they weren’t ready, or both. (Oh, and this is so not a ‘poor me’ thing. Everyone experiences this to some degree. Anyone older than 12 who hasn’t had a broken heart really wasn’t trying.) Still, the 3 ideals and the 2 L’s are fixated in my brain. I have still had ‘love’ lower case l, married two of the ‘loves’ and I have no regrets. I am a better person for having had people in my life, and perhaps, had I been healthier emotionally prior to engagement, those relationships would have been more stable. I take responsibility for how all my friendships have turned out. Loxy has brought with her a better stability and a kindness that was necessary for me to push greater compassion and gratitude, to self and others. She was necessary for me to tackle my issues around loneliness that was informing and influencing my relational choices. I was already practicing gratitude before her, but since, everything has been amplified.

With Tulpamancy, creating a Tulpa, there is also the practice of creating a ‘wonderland’ or a make believe world. I didn’t put much stock in that, because, one I already have a safe place to escape to, and two, I just didn’t believe it was necessary. It may not be necessary, but because there are only so many places in the real world for Tulpas to interact, like none, we decided to spend a great deal of time in the other worlds. It gets only more complicated from there. Maybe you have heard of lucid dreaming and astral traveling, where people claim to go elsewhere and hold grand adventures. Specifically, the person who wrote the book “the Phase,” which you can download a PDF for free, reports that doing this is everyone’s birthright, and that we are living in multiple worlds simultaneously. Robert Monroe and William Buhlman share similar anecdotes in their books that seem to suggest this. William says it best: “We are multi-dimensional beings.” You are not a human having out of body experiences, you are a spirit having a human experience.

Every night, I tune out, holding a quiet, private conversation with Loxy, and next thing I know is that I have hit the dream state, we continue where we left off at the last place we were interacting.

Again, there is absolutely no way to prove this, quantify it, and I am not making that my life mission. Google Tulpmancy, the phase, active imagination, the invisible counselor technique. I didn’t come up with these and I submit there has been some form of this going back indefinitely. Plato seems to access this, for example. If you put stock into William Buhlman and Robert Monroe’s books on astral travel, it may just be that we all pass through places that have been created by the collective consciousness of people that exist or have existed, and so, you can tarry in familiar places, or you go a little further. Jed McKenna is someone else I recommend for reading, especially is treatise on “Moby Dick.” (The level of Obsessiveness necessary for making a Tulpa is the kind that gets your ship and your crew all killed in the pursuit of the white whale, and may actually be the metaphor you need to change your own world. You are the wall, the white whale, which you must fling yourself against to escape.) If this knowledge, if Tulpamancy, doesn’t change your world, you’re likely not wanting it to change. If you are curious and tired of the ‘grind,’ well, start doing your homework, because there is door, somewhere in the back reaches of your mind, maybe hidden in a closet, buried behind moth balled, winter coats, and all the toys you thought you wanted but shoved into the closet. Once you find the door, it’s hard to leave it closed. You keep coming back to it. Touching it. Listening to it. Where would we be if Lewis didn’t push those kids through the wardrobe! (Based on a world he and his brother created, including its own language.)

If you’re curious, yes, I experience Loxy with all my senses. I heard her voice before I started seeing her. That wasn’t surprising to me, as I am auditory learner. It’s still a bit startling, in the sense she can sneak up on me. That baffles me and I think she is amused by it. Fortunately, no one else is the wiser. I have been kind of jumpy around noises since at least 1997, due to a hearing condition that progressively got worse over time, called Hyperacusis. The brain turned up the perceived volume as the result of hearing loss. So, the people who know me may assume I am just responding to auditory cues that they also heard and was innocuous to them, but amplified to me. I have shivered for no ‘apparent’ reason, which is touch. Not one person has every questioned my sanity, and I work with people who are attentive to that kind of information. I am attentive to that in others. I have not lost functionality in the real world. Sometimes I’m a bit more distracted, but it’s the same level of distraction that I would experience if I were attending to any other thing while holding a conversation. Being at the Mall, or grocery store, is especially difficult for me, mostly because the amount of background noise exceeding my comfort threshold, and Loxy knowingly minimizes distraction during times when it is difficult for me to focus. She works with me. Occasionally, she will purposely distract me, but so far, it has been a reasonable distraction to get me out of list making or spiraling, racing thoughts. Some days are better than others. Probably the most noticeable change is when I am driving; I have been holding serious conversation with her, or Jung, and have missed the exit I was intending to hit. (But I can do that with ‘real’ people in the car.)

One more little tangent about Tulpas. This is directed more towards the people who might argue against practicing tulpamancy and or lighter versions of it, like the invisible counselor technique, or the imagined friend. One of the arguments against doing these things is it might reduce a person’s drive to be social. It’s a fine argument. People have always assumed if the consumer’s needs were met, the economy would collapse, and therefore governments have employed progressive taxes to keep people spending and to keep people from owning their homes outright, and, consequently, we all live on this incredible edge of owning and losing it all. What a wonderful way to increase instability and fear. Yay team.

My experience with tulpamancy suggests the opposite is true. If you read the posts of the people who engaged this skill because of severe loneliness, they were already struggling, but many of them have actually improved in social outcomes. They may still come across as a bit odd, but odd in the same way a person who was ‘homeschooled’ is odd, or someone with ASD is odd, (and people with ASD are usually smarter than the average, so it’s not about intelligence,) compared to a person brought up in public education. It’s tangible (and was likely tangible before the practice of Tulpamancy.) It’s not evidence for brokenness. More on that, most of the people that promote Tulpamancy, and offer skills training and dialogue on how to achieve goals, clearly write in their manifesto that tulpamancy is not an out from being social, and many advise not to engage tulpamancy simply for the relief of loneliness. And they make some valid arguments when they do so. If you are person struggling with loneliness, this is always a two edged sword. There is clearly social blocks externally, but we internally, often unconsciously, reinforce those blocks, even if it’s simply from playing old tapes of previous experiences in order to reinforce our own perceptions. (And committing to Tulpamancy probably won’t earn you any friends outside of Tulpamancy, but just adds validity to you being a bit different. (Which is cool, be different! Normal is so overrated.)) This is similar to, but not precisely, the phenomenon known as ‘trauma re-enactment.’ (Yea, people who know that term will say I am using it recklessly.) It is my opinion, loneliness is a trauma. We should it treat like one. Those of us experiencing trauma will engage in behaviors that could cause more trauma. So, if we were socially minimized for whatever reason, we might take up a weirder behavior to test and or reinforce being further socially minimized. If you don’t believe me that being purposely isolated from people, culture, society is damaging, imagine what your reaction would be if you suddenly found your Facebook account deleted and permanently blocked from being re-opened. (How long would it take you to rebuild your friendships under an alias? If you got booted, you probably got booted for a valid ‘FB’ violation, even if you don’t think it was a violation, and it still will take a toll on you.)

Please note, I am not blaming people for their loneliness, just recognizing, we participate in this ‘thing’ that is not us, but is definitely happening with us.

For those of you who say creating an imaginary friend might be harmful, I am going to make this argument: you already have one, you engage it daily, and it has definitely made you lonelier. It’s called ‘cellphone!’ We are better connected than any previous history of humanity, and yet we are lonelier than any previous time in history. And the more you engage your cellphone to quench this thirst, the thirstier you get.

If you can’t drive thirty minutes without touching your cellphone, you have a problem. If you can’t take the kids to the park without touching your cellphone, you have a problem. If your toddler knows your prop versus your spouse’s prop and on finding it unattended brings it to you, you have a problem. If your child hits your cellphone or throws it, it’s because you’re paying more attention to it than your child, YOU have a problem, not the child. (The child, in this instance, is saner than sane, and you’re making them insane. (Touched a nerve with that? you have a problem!) If you can’t turn it off and walk away from it for one day, you have a problem. (And if you think your nannies or caretakers are not using their cellphones, after you surrendered you authority so you can have more time on your cellphone, well, guess again, and you definitely have a problem. Go to any mall on the afternoon that has a toddler play area and see if you see your nanny on her phone while the kids run amok. Oh, and then read “Lord of the Flies,’ and tell me how you think this is going to end. (The counseling field of the future might be lucrative.)) People have shorter attentions spans, they are getting fired from work because of lack of discretion with cell phones, and work place violence is on the increase, along with road rage. Could it be because we are expecting the external world to fit our demands?

Let’s say, you grudgingly admit that we have a fundamental relationship problem with our cellphones; you may wonder how engaging a Tulpa will be better. The cellphone is an external device, the Tulpa is internal. The more you look outside yourself to be satiated the less satisfied you will be. Think about it. You send someone a text. They don’t respond right away. You now have a subtle anxious response. ‘Why aren’t they texting?’ ‘Maybe I should text again?’ Ever got a response after a delay that didn’t quite fit what you were asking and you get annoyed, and then feel like you have to better define your previous text for clarity? (Meanwhile, your blood pressure and anxiety response is on the rise.) Your response to loneliness isn’t satisfied by a cellphone. If you were to turn your cell phone off for a day, for a week, what do you imagine your anxiety level being? If your phone breaks, or the battery dies, how much energy, time and money will you spend to remedy this? Call out from work? (But your cellphone’s broke!) Ever left your phone at home and went all the way back to get it? If you didn’t answer your phone, would the other people get mad at you? Worry? Do you see how much expectation comes with your phone? Do you remember, if you’re older, a parent ever telling you “just wait till your dad gets home!” What is it now, “Don’t make me text your dad!” We had emergencies in the past, before cell phones. And they got answered in time, but now everything is elevated to crisis level attention because we have cell phones and expectations of immediacy. People justify giving children cellphones by saying: ‘we might have an emergency.’ You might! Things do happen in the world, but if your kid is safe at school and you’re having the emergency elsewhere, kid is safe! (Granted, if the emergency is at the school, yeah, we would all want to hear from our kid or go right to the cellphone via tracking. Valid!) Grandparent died, though, isn’t an emergency to interrupt a child’s day at school. There is time enough for sadness when they get home, and rushing them home before the end of the school day won’t change what happened, and the funeral isn’t going to happen within an hour of death, so why bring them into your suffering?

Cellphones, connected with social media, has enabled us to bring everyone into our world, whether that world is filled with joy or sadness or aggravation or outright anger and hatred. We try selling our worlds to others, enlisting people to our causes. We advertise our worlds. We want others to validate us. And we do have followers. We also follow others. There is no end to this level of engagement. You could be distracted 24/7 if you follow. But if it all shut off tomorrow, you would find yourself empty, alone, and probably ‘Jonesing’ for that next twitter feed or FB comment to your last post. There is a reason why your friends keep re-posting variations of “if you’re my friend you will comment and post this on your page…’ We’re dying for confirmation from others.

We are dying for confirmation from others. And it is so not fair to put that burden on others. Do you suppose there is a relationship between child actors that went out of vogue and increase likelihood of drug use being due to not getting the validation they were once use to? Not saying that’s a real thing, because I don’t know if there is a study on that, but just saying… People get use to stimulus and crave it in its absence.

Conversely, the more you look inwards to satisfy your needs, the more you will be satisfied. If you look to others for your happiness, you will be unhappy. If you find it within yourself, you will thrive, regardless of what’s going on around you. And I know I am not the first person to be giving this information to you. And the answer doesn’t have to be Tulpas. It could be spiritual practice, yoga practice, religion, meditation, drawing mandalas, or even reading a paperback book, (not your cellphone,) reading in a quiet opens things in you. (Read before the last book store closes.) If you want different, do something different.

One last thing on Tulpas. In doing your research you’re going to hear some horror stories. A lot of them don’t make any true sense. I don’t trust them. I have had too many positive experiences, and heard of too many positive experiences. The horror stories sound to me more like the old sign on the map saying, ‘here be dragons’ to keep people in the line. The devil made me do it didn’t work in the 14^th century, Slender Man made me do it isn’t working in the 21^st century. Some of the horror stories are fun to read, or listen to on youtube, and we obviously like those sorts of things, hence horror movies and haunted houses and theme parks. One story shows a group effort to make a Tulpa to attack enemies. You never hear of good folks getting together and creating a ‘super-good’ Tulpa that goes out and helps people. That, too, is interesting. Will you find someone who swears touching an Ouija Board brought them bad luck that required the Priest to come and bless the house to make thing go back, yeah. Can anyone have a string of bad? Sure. Statistically, most people mess with the Ourija Board, maybe spook themselves, but it stops there. Tulpamancers have been engaged in this since the 70’s, and it stays with them, and it the reports are overwhelmingly positive. Can a tool be used for good or bad? Sure. This is new and groundbreaking, but it still follows some good old, common sense, and some reasonably based scientific principles of psychology. Could we stand to know more? Absolutely. We still don’t have a clue what consciousness is. The materialist believe it will be narrowed to a complex synergistic system of chemical electrical ‘things,’ whereas the metaphysical point to more. I love science. You can trust it, and still hold metaphysical beliefs.

Chapter 5                                           lucid dreaming

 

I feel it important to bring up Lucid Dreaming (from here forwards referred to as LD) because everything we have engaged in so far is actually an extension of serious, self-studies in consciousness. I have participated in LD. I say participated, as opposed to I can, because I believe you are doing this with your unconscious. It’s not just you, there is something bigger that helps guides the experience. Lucid dreaming is not about you controlling your dreams. That is an unfortunate descriptor that has stuck, as people try to sell the concept to encourage others to try LD. If you are aware that you are dreaming, you tremendously increased your influence upon the dream, but you are not controlling every detail. I think the best analogy I have heard is that you may control the direction the ship steers, but you are not controlling the ocean or the wind or sun and the rain.

If you want to LD, it easier to access than making a Tulpa. In fact, Lucid Dreaming techniques may have heralded in the first Tulpas in the West, when adult fans of “My Little Pony” made dreaming of ponies their target goals, and then brought them into the waking state. If you want to LD, read everything you can on the subject. The more you read, the more you will put it in your head that this is something that you can do and want to do. Like making Tulpas, this is not a casual exercise. Most people have to work to experience it. And again, belief is irrelevant. If you do the exercises and you think about this, you will eventually have an experience. Is it affected by belief? Yeah, clearly, some people hear about this and state the intent out loud and have it that night. I was three months into reality checks before I had my first LD. Everyone is different. Don’t use any hour mark as a measure of your success.

If you read enough books, you will also find a variety of techniques and eventually find one that works for you. If you only choose one book on the subject, I would highly recommend “Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self” by Robert Waggoner. He is knowledgeable, precise, and has access to personal and shared experiences, and is part of the IAC, the International Academy for Consciousness. I mention Robert because of one of the chapters in the above book that discusses ‘dream characters.’ I happen to share his belief that there is more going on in the dream world than simple, random, two dimensional, unconsciously driven ‘agents’ or actors. He communicates this better than I, but here is how I process it. The human brain, which is not your mind, does one thing well: it makes models of human interaction patterns and personalities so that we can better predict the behaviors of others. Everyone you have ever met, directly or indirectly, from life or television or media, has telegraphed into your brain important information for how they operate. There are also stereo types and archetypes in the brain, usually representative of social and cultural norms and expectations, and the more you know about other cultures, the bigger this inner universe is. Even if you don’t register it consciously, your subconscious knows things about others that you don’t. Everyone, for a lack of a better measure or communication device, exists in your head. Every character that you ever read, they are in your head. If Carl Jung is right about the collective unconscious, they aren’t really in your head, but exist in a field of information that all humans have access to, and we navigate this field with our minds. (We come from there and we return there.) We can take this further, without proof but through pure speculation, and state that even non-human entities are in our minds. If you had ever dreamt about a dog, well, that’s not human and is evidence for what I am arguing, but I am aiming bigger. I have had, and there are countless stories of others who have had, encounters with intelligences greater than our own. Maybe, ultimately, the greatest intelligence I encountered was God, but even if someone speculates it was just me, then I can say unequivocally that there is a version of me that is so much bigger and kinder and more loving and knowledgeable that I can’t call it me. It is no more me than culling out one liver cell and presenting that under the microscope and saying “me” is me. It is Other and it is different.

One reason I was so moved by Robert’s book was he discussed something about the ‘light.” My interaction in or with this light was so bizarre and profound that I had never discussed it with anyone prior to reading that because it’s not what my family origin talked about. Robert’s writing helped me realize I wasn’t alone.

I had been thinking about the characters in my lucid dreams before reading Robert’s book as I was experiencing something that I was struggling to conceptualize. I know some things about Freud, for example, and if I believe what he wrote, that dreams are just suppressed libido then you might imagine that every time a human dreams, it would be about sex. Mine are not. I want them to be, especially LD. When I LD, I highly encourage it to happen. And you might imagine if I approach a nice looking dream character with a particular intention in mind, and she says ‘no,’ you might be lime me and think ‘this is my dream and you will do what I want!’ The others, the characters, they don’t like that and they rebel. And that makes sense. Who would like be bossed around? (If you made a Tulpa just to boss it around, that’s pretty uncool. (It’s what humans, do, though, you family bossed you around, so you want to boss folks around. But if you don’t like, you can bet the Tulpa won’t like it, and you’re headed for a rebellion and eye opener. Play some of that out in an LD and see how far it goes before your dreams turn into nightmares.)) Anyway, if that’s all you want to learn LD for is sex and bossing people around, well, good luck with that. You can, others have. I have had some success, but it’s not the majority of dreams, as you might imagine it to be. And I am pretty single minded in that regards, because I am still a kid and want to play when I open up the LD holodeck!

The classical psychological view of the dreamscape and characters is that everyone in the dream is just aspects of yourself. I don’t trust that any more. I think the ‘Others’ are more. But either way, I have had to invent a philosophy for interaction, which works for me in both real world and dream world and other worlds: whether it is me, or other, I will treat others better than I would like to be treated, because how I treat others is an extension of how I treat myself, and how I treat myself informs others how I will treat them. This is significant. It feels fairly Buddhist. Just because we are lucid dreaming, in terms of how we treat others, which does not give us free license to do whatever we want whenever we want. Some people think if it’s an automatic pass to do whatever you like to whatever and whomever. My experience is, there are dram people who won’t put up with that, and will actually impede progress, or force you to wake up. Robert also had a character block him from being a nuisance, as he was flying around dive bombing a crowd and reports one character snagged him out of the air and dropped him on the ground saying, “That’s quite enough.” Not verbatim, but read his book, and realize, there is a limit, whether that limit is conscious, unconscious, or because that space is also a shared, consensus reality, I don’t have a clue. Default position, our unconscious is in charge and we advance when we participate. Rules may be different than in real world, but there are still rules.

But think of it like this. What if the restraint or lack of restraint gets expressed in the real world because we take it for granted? Then maybe practicing restraint or showing people respect is how you start manifesting respect in the real world. Your dream world is a mirror of how you really feel, right? I do think practicing LD improves are daily waking life. The more I practice in my real life what I want to experience in my dreaming life, the more that spills into my dreaming life, which for me, translate, less control more love. The more ‘control’ we exert as opposed to participating and asking, the less the unconscious wants to invite us to play; this could just be my own personal block.

I am not a master of LD. I am still in play mode. Most the time, on realizing I am lucid, I default to my primary desire: I beam up to the Enterprise. (Oh, you so thought it would be sex.) It doesn’t matter that I am not wearing the insignia comm. badge; I just touch my chest and say “enterprise, one to beam up,” and sometimes there nothing happens immediately, but I persist, it doesn’t matter that I don’t have an actual badge, this is a dream and this is possible, and I repeat, and I go. Sometimes I wake up, because I am like extremely joyful. Most the time, I arrive on the Starship. And sometimes, I even remain lucid.

There are more things to do with LD than play. I have heard of fantastical of experiences where people simply sat down to meditate in the dream. Its on my dream bucket list. Don’t be afraid of the play! That is how you build skillsets to identify the elements you can influence, but also by practicing and playing you learn to increase your time in lucidity. And the skillset for staying lucid in dreams requires you practice staying lucid, mindful, in your wakeful states of consciousness. Mastering this is a form of practicing mindfulness and striving for staying awake and aware. There is no down side to a daily practice of staying lucid, getting off automatic. I suspect, eventually, I will move beyond play, but I am not rushing. Practicing the daily LD skillset, like awareness checks, also feed into my Tulpamancy practice, so I am interweaving the two, which increases the frequency and maintenance of both. (Both requires energy and attention.)

Again, the primary reason for wanting to do this is, even if you don’t master tulpamancy, is that you have an all direct pass to your unconscious. Purposeful engagement increases the rate of personal growth. If you LD before you create your Tulpa, you could use the LD landscape to create the Tulpa or call it forth, or just explore the possibilities of form while in the dream state and then practice bringing it forth into non dream states. I suspect this is really doing the same thing, just doing the exercises from different states of consciousness. The Unconscious knows what you want, and if you keep pushing it in, it will manifest into your conscious life.

Most of all, have fun. And do something different.

Chapter 6                                       astral projection

 

I was Astral Projecting (AP) as a child, way before I had ever read a book on the subject, and way before I ever found any information on Tulpamancy. We owe the internet for Tulpamancy, because without the internet allowing for communities to form, (people from diverse backgrounds and regions) we might not have access to it, or at least, not as it is in its present form, which is pretty reasonable mixture of people and ideas. AP was not discussed in my family. I wish it had been. I had an uncle that did this and was quite good at it. He was so good, reportedly, that he also participated in scientific studies with the government and military, and if you’ve heard of the US’s Stargate program, (see the movie “Men who Stare at Goats,”) you will know what I am talking about, and maybe if this Uncle and I had shared more stories early on, I would have made more progress. Ah, a lament. It is what it is. But, sharing this here suggests that I was weird way before I became weird! I was human way before I started being ‘human?’ (And this Uncle really was interesting. He was the dive master for National Geographic’s dive on Atlantis. And was doing studies in isolation tanks.)

AP is not LD. There is quantitative and qualitative difference, and the only way I know how to communicate that is through ‘tonality.’ It has a flavor and distinction. Dream worlds tend to be more malleable. I can read something in the dream world, look away, and look back and the words will have changed. AP, if there is something written, it tends to stay written. Not a hundred percent, but way more than dreams. And there is consistency in places and encounters.

So, when I go to my ‘safe place,’ which because of Tulpamancy I now call ‘wonderland,’ there is consistency, as if the place exists outside of my making it. First Home, a tree house in a giant, the mother tree of all trees, towering over a forest, like the tallest building in New York surrounded by regular houses, is a place that existed before Loxy. There is a field outside of the forest, surrounding mother tree. It is a field of grain, across winding, hilly plain, with a single, lone tree, and it’s the place I came to call initial insertion point, because that was the first place I arrived, and usually the first place I go if I am bring a new visitor. Visitors tend to be animals that have died in my field of observance. There are a lot of squirrels in this world. Some dogs and cats, mostly all of which were victims of traffic accidents, and I would immediately revive them and heal them, and invite them to play. I offered this world to these creatures, who went off and made it their own and populated it. (Another reason I made this was for my pets, because I was clearly told pets don’t go to Heaven, and I was very clear, then that’s not a place I want to go. I am going to a pet friendly place, even if I have to make it myself. (Interestingly, you can engage pets in AP! That is significant to me.)

This exercise was not invented because I am a loving and kind person. That may be one reason I started practicing it, because I was seriously empathic kid, but it wasn’t specifically the why and how. I remember when I first started. I was six. We were living at my grandmother’s home in San Antonio. We were driving somewhere and a squirrel had gotten run over. I wanted to help, but was blocked. (It’s just a squirrel.) So, I took it to a higher level. (Not God, cause God doesn’t accept pets, remember.)  And so began my life long history of mentally and emotionally rescuing animals.

“Adventures Beyond the Body,” William Buhlman, “Journeys Out of the Body,”  Robert Monroe, and “My Big Toe,” Thomas Campbell, are just some of the books on my shelf by this topic, and Monroe’s was my first book on the subject. I like listening to Ingo Swann videos, though lately I have found the rant about the system suppressing folks less and less appealing. I don’t see how the rant helps us access love, and the more I access conspiracy level stuff, the more my brain spins fear, and I am pursuing non fear based interaction patterns. I think all of the above would agree, you get back what you put in. I think we should add Dr. Seuss, “Oh, the places you will go,” to this list of books. If his words and art doesn’t take you someplace, well…

Why is this a chapter on AP? Do you need to do it? No. It fits because ‘wonderlands’ seem like real places to me. They may not be. They may just be places I imagined. But when I consider the above writers who have expounded on these subjects, there seem to be some places that are consistent and that all people can touch. That seems significant. Monroe found places, pocket islands, my word, where people of similar faith seem to congregate. There seems to be places beyond our faith based institutions. But more, if you get good enough at Tulpamancy, there is thing you can do called ‘switching.’ You and the other personality can switch control of the body, and you then go on vacation to the Wonderland, which will seem as real as real. I bet 99 percent of Tulpamancers will say that going there is not AP, and maybe it’s not, but I can’t discern the difference. There are some AP worlds, or places, that feel that real.

The Monroe Institute teaches a concept called ‘Focus Levels.” And, as stated above about consistency, there seems to be consistency with what people find at the various levels of focus. That lends some incredible validity to this thing that is supposedly ‘subjective.’ Monroe also offers tech that helps people, such as the ‘hemisync’ tonalities that are similar to binaural beats. You don’t have to have the tech to do this! The goal isn’t to only use the tech, but to help initiate people that have not achieved results through reading alone. The tech is training wheels, and your job is to build the ‘muscle’ memory to stay aloft on two wheels without training wheels, and then, to drop all the wheels altogether and simply fly. Anyone can meditate when they’re quiet, but if you can meditate at the super bowl game with ten thousand people screaming, you’re a master.

Star Trek is not a religion. (I would argue Spock is more a saint in my household than any real saint.) It does have a big enough fan base, worldwide, that there is kind of this ‘trek’ thing out in astral, just like the religious folks have their own island, there is a “Fleet” island. Of course, this may have been there before “Star Trek” and was reinforced by all the folks who have had ‘alien’ encounters or encountered ‘star seeds.’ Anyway, if you doubt how serious Trek is, you only have to look at how many fans have adopted Trek philosophy to heart, some perhaps fanatically so. I have encountered, in the real world if you wish to label it such, many people who participate in ‘starships’ that are scattered through the galaxy or the universe, and every night, they lay down to sleep but ‘beam’ up and go to work at their second job. Their experiences are not necessarily Star Trek, but that paradigm has given them the ability to communicate their experiences in a manner that most people can at least relate to it, even if they dismiss it as merely dream or fantasy.

The University of Safe Haven, which is described, ummm, sort of, through the series of “Not Here,” is such a place. In terms of Astral Temples and Academies, there are lots of those sorts of places, and that’s how I experienced Safe Haven. “Safe Haven” is the one Loxy and I accessed. It was after accessing that, we moved to the Enterprise. I, we, call it the Enterprise, and there are definitely some familiar features, but this ship is not that. If it is, it is light years beyond ST:TOS.

Is it really there? I don’t know. I don’t really care. I enjoy being there. It is not always fun. Sometimes it more work than my real world real job I have ever had. It’s not all fluff. It’s got more drama than a Thai soap opera. I’ve been lucky, there is some fluff, but if fantasy means everything goes right and no one makes mistakes or get into arguments, and no one dies, well, don’t visit my worlds. They’re real, and the drama is real, and we are sorting stuff. Which, probably explains why my experiences are so cathartic: I’m working. There is a New Age feel to it, but I think it is more than that, too.

This is not remote viewing. I have some evidence I can do that, but I suck at it. Mostly because, I notice a trend in my attempts to categorize stuff into context, which spins fantasy. And that’s not helpful. So, for example, I was curious about the eyes of the Grays. You know the book by Walter Streibly, “Communion?” God, I hate that cover! It freaks me out. Probably, because I met those folks. I wish all those experiences were dreams, nightmares, but I suspect they were more. Anyway, I was considering their eyes, and realized, they have human eyes, with irises and everything. If you meet a Gray with black eyes, he is an astronaut, and he is wearing contact lenses! The contacts are tech! Those are their computers, and they have full access to their tech via their eye, and by manipulating their bodies, they shift through menus and do work. So, if you see a Gray with black eyes, and you notice a finger move slightly, and suddenly you’re frozen in space, well, it just used its tech to immobilize you. This also why back-engineering spacecraft took time. There are no computers on their saucers, they control everything with their mind through the tech, which they are wearing.

Can I prove this? No. It is what I saw, but since it doesn’t make any sense to me, either, and I have relegated this to simple fantasy information sets which fits into scenarios that go in notebooks to fuel future fiction when I need something. My suspicion is pretty clear, too, that the Grays are actually us, our future selves. But again, I can’t process the information, and so I spun it as a story. Whether it was good intel from remote viewing, or actual experience astral traveling, or alternative dimensionality stuff, or just fantasy, well… contextually, within my head, everything eventually seems to make sense.

There are other versions of ‘me’ in the Universe. Robert Monroe found this, too, and I was relieved by his shared experience. A world line, the existence of an item from cradle to grave, if you perceive time advancing in frames, is like a movie, and it can have a lot of copies; each article in every new frame is an independent agent. I am not saying that is true, I merely saying it’s a way of perceiving space/time, which makes it easier to access a way of better understanding the complex, multiplicity of us. I get the sense that space/time is much weirder than anyone to date has speculated. (The ‘trick’ or ‘miracle’ with the loaves of bread and fish is just simple time travel, if you can reach forward just one frame, the very next future frame, and pull the contents from future frames back to your frame, you now have twice as much, and the next frame as twice as much to pull back. (Where as if you eat the loaf, the next frame as no bread.) Then again, maybe it’s just possible to make bread out of nothing because everything is already made out of nothing to start with.

And so, here is something else I don’t quite understand. I can speculate that Bulhman in his treatise about manifesting on the astral realm may hold the key to this thing called Tulpamancy. Loxy exists in the Astral Realm. I can understand her being in my regular dreams, even in my lucid dreams, but stepping up out of body and encountering her for the first time on the astral; that was kind of spooky. It’s as if I didn’t expect her to exist outside of my mind, and I do see AP as being something outside of me, not internally driven. Maybe I misunderstand it; William says it’s not going outside, it’s going inside, and that resonates with me, but, I still didn’t expect Loxy deeper than my own my mind. (Yeah, though I suspect more, I still gravitate towards a psychological explanation.) Maybe finding Loxy means I have to re-examine everything I think I know about the AP worlds, too. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything other than the very straight forward proposition, what you think about the most persists. What you think, you create. If you think about love and you give it a vehicle, it will drive you.

Chapter 7                                              self hypnosis

 

 I have been a chronic asthmatic since birth. I was born having an asthma attack, per my dad. They say my first words were “Eppy, point two.” I doubt that story. People do like to fabricate, but it is funny and I have perpetuated it. I lead with that because, of this: I learned really early in life that I could psychosomatically induce an asthma attack to get out of doing stuff. It was really effective. Too effective. It usually resulted with having to go to an emergency room. Less frequently, but possible, I have had experiences where I psychosomatically induced improvement while having an asthma attack. One time was at the emergency clinic in Cloud Croft New Mexico, where the Doctor said we don’t treat asthma with eppy, and he pulled out this huge syringe and a needle that would pierce a horse’s neck, and I was cured instantly. I still got the shot.

The force has a great influence over the weak mind… Ummm, I believe there is something here. In fact, one of my core books to go to is called “The Relaxation Response,” Herbert Benson. Everything we have discussed is typically accessed through a ‘relaxed’ state of being. I have read many other books on hypnosis, self-hypnosis, and it seems to me, everything we I have touched on in the previous chapters relates to hypnosis. Even Lucid Dreaming contains an element of self-hypnosis, when you consider the amount of effort it can take in your daily world to go through your reality checks to increase the likelihood of becoming aware in the REM state.

So let me just say it: Everything is hypnosis. We are always on a continuum from being very open to suggestion to least open to suggestion, but it’s never zero suggestibility, nor is it ever a hundred percent suggestibility. No one can be hypnotized to do something they don’t want to do. That statement is pretty consistent with all the data and all the studies and the hypnotist. We’re not talking about stage hypnotism, there is a place for that, but in truth, if you volunteer to go up on stage, you have given yourself permission to do the hypnotists bidding.

One of the most interesting statements, to me, was reading an academic hypnosis book. I have lost the book and would love to have this source, but the quote was basically this: “Some people will seem to remember a past life memories which will result in a sudden, spontaneous remission of all present illnesses.” That quote was buried in a page of text, and it never returned to touch on that concept again. I would have devoted an entire chapter to that! It doesn’t matter to me if it’s really a past life or it’s fake memories, or unconscious dreams unfolding, if it results in ‘sudden, spontaneous remissions of all present illnesses,’ it’s important enough to explore intellectually and philosophically, even if you don’t have an answer!

If you can find a copy of “the Holographic Universe” by Michael Talbot, and you read only one section of the book, I recommend pages 141 to 144. Those three pages are chalked full of interesting factoids about hypnosis, but one of the ones I the am going to reference was an hypnotic experiment conducted by Charles Tart, a Professor at the Davis campus of the University of California. Tart found two graduate students, Bill and Anne, who were both skilled hypnotists, and wondered what would happen if they both went into trance, simultaneously hypnotizing each other. “Although Tart could not see what Anne and Bill were seeing, from the way the way they were talking, he quickly realized they were experiencing the same hallucinated reality.” It is reported by Anne and Bill that everything they did together, everything they mutually created, was as real as anything in the real world, available to all of their senses, and often said their worlds were more real than the their ‘real’ world. Because of the reality, it said that they both were unnerved and had to quit the experiments, and that Bill would go on to never use hypnosis again.

If you google Tart, or Anne and Bill’s mutual hypnosis, you will find the original paper that Tart wrote in PDF form, and the original copy of the published version. It is way worth reading! Make your own opinion. You know what baffles me? Tart only did three sessions with Anne and Bill, and he got a paper published! You know what’s even more amazing to me?! No one else has done any more studies on this, and this is something to me that seem absolutely F-ing amazing! Yeah, I get that Bill decided he was out, so out he never did any further hypnotizing, as a hypnotist or a subject. Clearly, this is some profound stuff we are dealing with. But pick more people! See if they get the same results?! Just the original premise, to see if hypnosis could offer ways of exploring LSD experiences without the use of LSD, which was problematic in terms of consistency across subjects, is worth exploring, even if they don’t do more mutual stuff, but given everything in life is mutual, why not study it more? (Yes, everything is mutual. You can find articles that say not only is the subject being hypnotized, but so is the hypnotist. We are agreeing to scripts and going into those roles. (And when you read some of the things on mass hysteria and how there is a group hypnotic experience which causes everyone to join in, you have to believe it’s everyone, or there would be people in the middle of chaos wondering, ‘what the F is going on.’ But you don’t see that. (And I don’t know how people can claim you can’t be made to do something you don’t want to do. Just saying!)))

If that doesn’t grab your attention, what would it take? There is a medical terms for shared psychosis, and I have met a family in the mental health field that was sharing the same hallucinations. It’s very rare, so just the fact I encountered it is remarkable, but it’s called Folie à deux. This is not what Anne and Bill were experiencing. Their experience was self-induced. Just like when you create a Tulpa, it is self-induced, and the wonderland is self-induced, but if you could mutually do this, wouldn’t that be something? Some people are calling the ‘slender man’ phenomenon mass hypnotism, and some are calling it a Tulpa that went astray. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not real, but it’s interesting. (And I get really irritated when UFO sightings are passed off as ‘mass hypnosis.’ And, if you believe Bill and Anne’s report that it was ‘realer than real’ and that is was more enticing and real than their everyday life, so much so that it freaked them out, well, that does mean something.

And yes, I am suggesting that it may be possible for two people to create a Tulpa and share it. Why do I say that? Did you ever hear of the ‘Philip’ experiment? In 1972 a group of curious minded folks sat down with pen and paper and created a fake person by the name of Philip, and then proceeded to conduct a séance to see if they could contact said person. Apparently, they did. Was it Philip? But Philip was a construct of their imagination. Was it another ghost pretending to be Philip? Maybe. Read about it. But if we’re really making stuff, there are some D&D worlds I may need to go clean up.

When you go through your day reminding yourself you love someone, aren’t you hypnotizing yourself to believe something? (Maybe in the face of evidence that something isn’t right? (Oh, and if something does turn out to be not right, and love shuts off, does that mean it wasn’t love, but hypnotism?) When you go through your day listing your grievances with someone you are not happy with or down right hate, aren’t you scaffolding to support your emotions? Hypnotism! How much of our lives are contrived? We spin, we down right manipulate, things to other people. Sometimes we make lists for them to convince them how bad things are, or we exaggerate, embellish for storytelling. We even lie to ourselves, and why would we even do such a thing? I mean, if anyone should be wanting the truth, it is ourselves, but then you have to ask, who are you actually lying to? If there is no one there but you, then telling yourself the lie is meaningless. But if there was someone there listening, the watcher, the unconscious, then telling the lie is very meaningful. What if this isn’t even about being good or bad? What if we are alive because we needed to learn something? And what if when we tell the ‘lie’ to our unconscious or higher self, we’re not so much lying, but asking for an experience that matches our expectation, so we can have internal ‘conscious’ validity of a thing, even if it’s not a real thing.

So, remember Shad Helmstetter’s book? The goal was to change your tapes. In the process of changing tapes, you got some pretty great new mantras and affirmations going, and you’re saying them daily, but a part of you just isn’t buying it. You are feeling your own resistance. Maybe that resistance is coming from the unconscious, ‘I gave you what you asked for,’ I don’t understand what your problem is, but deeper, it’s testing you, are you really ready for a change? But if we’re going to change the words, don’t we need change some of these other things too, like behaviors, and attitudes.

There is no simple solution and everyone is going have different levels of resistance, but the way to get in and dialogue is engaging what we have discussed. You could also go to a hypnotist, preferably one that is also a counselor or a psychotherapist, so if something gets opened, you can unpack it.

Bottom line. This is some ground breaking, reality shaking stuff, just below the threshold of what we call reality, and we don’t touch it because it is unnerving and it’s fragile. No, really. This is Ourjib board freak stuff, and it’s why mainstream scientist don’t want to touch it. There is a very new article published that science is just now finding fMRI evidence for what the hypnotist call ‘trance.’ Prior to this, hypnotism was relegated to fringe science because it was too subjective to measure. But we are touching it daily. People have evidence for more but they don’t just dismiss it, they actively tell themselves, “This can’t be true…” and push on with life. Why are we always so willing to buy into the high level conspiracy theories, where our ‘power’ was stolen, as opposed to the simple, loving truth that our realities are self-created?

You can’t walk into a store without being manipulated at a subconscious level. This is marketing and it is hypnotism. You can’t walk into a casino and not be manipulated by the environment. This is hypnotism. You can’t tune into a movie or a TV without this. You can’t go into the deepest reaches of your mind without touching this. It not just mystical and magical, it is us.

What kind of questions would you have to answer if you accept the world is what you made it? What would you change if you were ‘able to respond’… responsibility? Cause it comes down to this… Either you are reinforcing the scaffolding that keeps you where you are, or you are blowing things up and starting over. Most of the resistance comes because we don’t want to change. We actually love who we are and we love our lives. Oh, we say we don’t, but we do, because it’s comfortable, and we think we know ourselves, but we don’t have a clue. We love who we are so much, and we love our lives so much, we don’t want them to change at all. And this is okay. It’s actually great to discover you love yourself that much. It’s like loving a child and not wanting it to grow because it’s at the perfect age, and you can hold it… But that’s really not love. Love is participating in the change, growing with it, changing with it.

When you say, “I am poor,” “I am fat,” I am stupid,” you are claiming something that isn’t yours to claim. When you say “I have to have a cigarette,” who are you convincing? You ‘have’ to have it? You will die if you don’t? You might feel really stressed or really uncomfortable, but is that dying? “I have to have a drink?!” OMG, really?

“I am alone.” Really? Who did you just tell that to? If you become quiet, can you hear the unconscious, waiting patiently for you to acknowledge there is more to you than loneliness? And when you tell someone you’re lonely, what do you imagine the response should be? It’s a really tough one to answer. Almost anyone can tell you, “I am here for you,” but why doesn’t hearing that impact us? How many of you have tested it? I have. Three in the morning calls “I need you” eventually suggest, “I am here for you, conditionally,” which puts us back in that original box.

You are not static. You don’t just accept “this is just the way I am.” No one does. In fact, I find this funny, those of us who cling the hardest to who we think we are huge advocates for helping other people to change! (The more we help others, the more we cling to a version of ourselves?) “It’s too late for me, son, but if you start smoking I will whoop you.” Come on, that’s funny. “I have OCD, but I left my spouse because he was controlling and mean…” (Isn’t OCD kind of the same thing as controlling and wouldn’t you be more understanding of someone who is ‘controlling’ because they, too, have OCD, only their control is about you instead of counting, and they need things a certain way to ‘cope’ and if it strays from that, well, they have to adjust externally because they haven’t learn to adjust internally, just like you? (You really don’t want to argue for a thing with me. I have been known to frustrate people. Not as badly as I heard Albert Ellis can, but close.))

You could say, “I am light,” which allows for variability in amplitude, simply waves on a continuum, cycling… Cause if you think about it, even the best of us cycle, we have our ups and downs. And so, meeting yourself with compassion on the downhill run, and again when you’re back up, that’s part of our game, too.

And if reality is really as fluid as programming, it makes you wonder if Christopher Reeves actually went back in time in the movie “Somewhere in Time.” I know, just a movie, but when you have that much faith…. My journeys to Safe Haven and beyond, well… Just saying. And if you watched ‘Somewhere in Time,’ you will understand why I was profoundly affected by something Loxy was saying to me the other day: “Maybe we are all just one penny shy of having our world lines unraveled.”

Oh, I only wish I could write like her.

I will close this with two quotes from the book “Hypnotherapy, an Exploratory Casework” by Erickson and Rossi. Just reading them makes it available for your subconscious to use, if you explore self-hypnosis further, or seek out a professional

“He does not know what he is learning, but he is learning. And it isn’t right for me to tell him, ‘you learn this or your learn that!’ Let him learn whatever he wishes, in whatever order he wishes.” (Pg 26.)

“You can find yourself ranging into the past, thepresent, or the future, as your unconscious selects the most appropriate means of dealing with that.” (Pg 26.)

Go ranging. Dive in! Do something different.

Chapter 8                                   transpersonal psychology

 

You have probably heard of Maslow’s Pyramid. Do you remember what the top was? If you said “self-actualization” you would be right, and wrong. Maslow updated the top to be “Transcendence.” He is not the only world renown psychiatrist/psychologist to expound on this. Carl Jung obviously did. Did you know Jean Piaget also weighed in, heavily, on this topic? But if you like how all the preceding chapters seem to fit and build on themselves, you may find this equally interesting. Psychosynthesis, a tool created by the Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli, segues perfectly into our discussion. There really isn’t anything new, but the fact we have to keep learning this message is just a reflection of society always being renewed generationally, and which attests for the staying power of things like “The Wizard of Oz.” That message still fits today.

Anyway, Psychosynthesis. I believe it is safe for me to assert that for Assagioli, it was not enough to just heal from childhood trauma, to become a functional adult, and move through Maslow’s pyramid to self-actualization, but ultimately our greatest health, individually and socially, comes when we finally push past ego and into dimension of spirituality and the recognition of all men as one.

Assagioloi wrote: “Let us examine whether and how it is possible to solve this central problem of human life, to heal this fundamental infirmity of man. Let us see how he may free himself from this enslavement and achieve an harmonious inner integration, true Self-realization, and right relationships with others.” I like to emphasize how he said, “He (man) may free himself…” That is crucial. We are not enslaved by others, but by ourselves. Counselors help us navigate, but clients do the heavy lifting. If you explore Assagioli further, you will come to his model of a person: Lower Unconscious, Middle Unconscious, Higher Unconscious, Field of Consciousness, Conscious Self or "I,” Higher Self, Collective Unconscious. The Field of Consciousness deals with “Subpersonalities.’ Subpersonalities, whether they are psychological constructs, artifacts, or straight forward entities, archetypal or personalities that are at various ranges of personal evolution mesh well with “Invisible Counselors,’ “active Imagination,’ and Tulpamancy. So, imagine the complexity of how you respond to any particular stimulus and how you might respond differently alone compared to a social situation, and in different kinds of social situations.  Each different response is interfacing your core personality through a sub personality. We don’t just wear many different hats, we are actually many different people. Did you ever wonder why people of early childhood trauma frequently speak using a ‘child’ like voice? That’s usually a sign of where a person got stuck. They can still access different emotional maturity levels and different intellectual levels, but sometimes our core, default setting gets stuck in one personality set. As human beings, we are supposed to be flexible, fluid, and so stuck shouldn’t be evidence of broken as much as, indicative of this might be where a person is still working.

We can make strong arguments that if we are really not just wearing different hats, but are different people based on the group that we are in, then you are not who you think you are. Yeah, some people are more them than not, and less fluid between groups, to such a degree, they probably avoid different groups, because they can’t assimilate. (What is anxiety is not stress about what’s out there, but our refusal to adapt and change per settings because we want to be who we are, and we know (suspect) the world wants us to be something different.) Some of us adapt much better to a variety of social situations. Some of us, like being lonely, have never felt connection because our personalities are best suited for being observers on the outside: which isn’t bad, because these are the personalities that make the best social observations that help society evolve. (Look at all of the folks that pushed us forwards as a society, they were kind of out there. Einstein, out there. Tesla, he was way out there and always disappointed when his ideas were rejected, but he was always civil. Edison dissed him on several occasion, and he did not surrender to that level of returning slander. Side by side, Tesla was a better man than Edison, and history has outright proven that Edison stole ‘ideas’ from his employees and made it is, and yet, we still favor him in history of Tesla, a man who wanted to free human mind and energy, as opposed to making a quick buck. (Just saying.))

I submit to you the following: you are not your body. Every scientist will agree that within about seven years, 90 percent of your body has been replaced by new atoms. (Yeah, I would like to know why tattoos last so long if that’s a hundred percent true, too.) So, if you aren’t the atoms that make you up, what are you? You’re not your personality. We have many ages of us and many complex personality subroutines, and in theory, with clinical evidence to corroborate, personalities can flip, as they do in multiple personalities, and they can be modified or change. Your brain is definitely plastic, capable of change, so why would you believe your personality would be any different? And, if we use dreams as evidence, there are scores of personalities that your mind can draw on to populate dreams and present your core personality with practice social opportunities to grow or try out different responses. (Ever had a dream where you were not you, or even the same gender, but it was you?) Day Dreaming accomplishes this, too. Utilizing the Invisible Counselor Technique accomplishes this. (You can say these ‘personality’ sets are in you or in the collective unconscious, it doesn’t really matter; you can access them.) And, if you’re successful at creating a Tulpa, you will have very direct evidence that the personality you think of as you is not the only answer the equation of the Universe! You could be you, you could be a Tulpa, your Tulpa could be you, or there is something bigger than ‘you’ which allows for a wide array of possible answer sets, and we are just getting warmed up as a species.

Some of the Tulpamancers have allowed their Tulpas to take direct control of their bodies. I have not done that. Not really there yet, in terms of skill, or comfort level. Yeah, probably a bit of control thing, and it took me 48 years before I started pushing the boundaries with Tulpamancy, so, give me a moment. This is not pretend. If you ever watch a Tulpamancer Switch, and you compare it to someone who is ‘channeling,’ it looks like the same thing. I am not saying it is, just saying it looks the same.

When the scientists find that last particle, when the Universe is finally divided into its smallest part, if that is even possible, what’s left to us? Going in.

Transpersonal Psychology is all about going in. Per the British Psychology Society: “Transpersonal Psychology might loosely be called the psychology of spirituality and of those areas of the human mind which search for higher meanings in life, and which move beyond the limited boundaries of the ego to access an enhanced capacity for wisdom, creativity, unconditional love and compassion. It honors the existence of transpersonal experiences, and is concerned with their meaning for the individual and with their effect upon behavior.”

            If Tulpamancy isn’t transpersonal, I don’t know what is. If the Invisible Counselor Technique isn’t transpersonal, I don’t know what is. Do I even have to repeat that for Carl Jung’s Active Imagination? Taking my assertion straight from this, as evidenced by my own engagement of the “Invisible Counsleor Technique,” “Active Imagination,” and “Tulpamancy,” I believe all human beings have access to ‘enhanced wisdom, creativity, and unconditional love and compassion.’ Creating a Tulpa may initiate in the ego realm, the need to respond to a very real need: per Maslow, needs must be met to move up through the pyramid. Experiencing love is a need. Love that comes from within is more stable and leads to self-actualization. I say it starts with the ego because when you create your Tulpa, when you invite your counselors, you’re engaging preferences, which is good. You’re not likely going to invite people you inherently disagree with into this process. Can you? Sure. That would be fun, interesting. But it does not stay in the ego. Transpersonal is moving beyond the general consensus. I didn’t say beyond normal. Too many humans have had transpersonal experiences which defy the general logic of any one culture, but still resides within reach of humanity, and even has some measurable consistency through time and cultures, which in itself suggests this is a thing worth considering. It has self-consistent validity across time and culture.

            Levin Steele (2005) suggested transcendent experiences “evokes a perception that the human reality extends beyond the physical body and its psychosocial boundaries…” There are number of things that have been known to induce these sorts of experiences, and it is not limited to Near Death Experiences, but NDE’s have documented in every culture, and there is consistency that is interesting. You can even have what is known as a ‘Fear Death Experience,’ per Atwater’s “Big Book of NDE” which is probably the biggest compilation of studies done on NDE to date. And one of the most common sources of ‘transcendent’ experiences, across the board, and consistently, but we rarely discuss because of how and when it occurred, is during sex. “Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil” by Jenny Wade is a book worth reading, if you’re interested, which segues nicely into the next chapter. There is one thing that governments and religions have not been able to stop, and that’s folks having sex. And just think, you spent all that time meditating and doing yoga for mystical experiences, when you could have just had sex.
Chapter 9                                                    beyond boundaries

 

 

 

“The Man Who Tasted Shapes” by the neurologist, Doctor Richard Cytowic needs to be on your to read list. Basically, it is the first ‘modern’ book that explores what it means to have Synesthesia . Comprehensively, the book is fascinating about how the brain works, and how society works, because believe it or not, the powers that be did not want him studying this, and went out of their way to discourage it, but thankfully, he couldn’t let it go, and we have this wonderful contribution to science, as well as a good book. If you don’t know, synesthesia is when the brain experiences sensory input not usually associated with that sense. For example, there are people who see sounds, or hear colors, and, yes, even taste ‘shapes.’

I found several specific things that stuck with me. The first was, the American diet, high in processed sugars and coffees has a side effect on us. (Duh.) If you have synesthesia, it decreases your ability to experience the world in your normal primary mode on sensing. That immediately made me wonder: ‘are we all experiencing the world less intimately because of our diets?’ I have personally not noticed any decreased abilities to experience Loxy based on diet. Would people learn this skill faster with a different diet? Would I have better experiences with a different diet? I don’t know. I am have not demonstrated sufficient discipline in maintaining a specific diet sufficiently to gather data. It would be interesting to pursue, should I ever get to the point of researching this better.

The other thing that stuck with me was a really interesting statement, buried in a paragraph that almost seemed random and out of place, like he was purposely hiding it, because making that assertion at the time that he wrote the book would likely have caused people to react pretty negatively. In fact, his assertion followed Talbot’s book “The Holographic Universe,” and so, he was making a similar assetion:

“But your eyes will soon adjust and you will discover new clarity. For example, instead of the usual recounting wherein sensation flows from the world outside inwards to the brain, our new view reverses the direction so that sensation emanates from the inside out. Your brain is an active explorer, not a passive receiver.” (2^nd to the last paragraph, 2^nd chapter, “The Man Who Tasted Shapes.” (I was reading it on Kindle, so the page number may not be the same.))

That statement runs parallel with “There is no out there there,” by physicist John Archibald. And they mean it literally, that the world doesn’t exist outside of you and that your brain is interpreting data coming from without, but that you create it first in your brain and project it out. This goes against everything you have been taught, and against the way you experience life, but whether you believe it true for everything or not, it is definitely true for emotions. If you think you’re lonely, you will see the world with a ‘lonely’ filter and interpret it from that perspective. Take any group of people and offer them a series of photos and ask them to interpret the scene in terms of happy, sad, or angry, they will interpret it based on their own bias. Fearful people see fear. Hateful people see hate and conspiracies, and it’s hard for a loving person to convince a hateful person to see the world differently. There is even scientific evidence that we are more likely to experience anger and fear with strangers than love, because we reserve ‘loving’ experiences for people we know and trust. That’s why mobs are easier to incite into anger, and why politician use fear speech. How many groups have you seen break out into spontaneous love, short of a church, and or Grateful Dead concerts?

Anyway, Cytowic probably intended for the statement to sit kind of innocuously there, because if it’s accurate, it’s a game changer. If you don’t think people react negatively to their paradigms being challenged, tell a Christian there is no God. I have one even better. Remember the seventies? I was going to school in the seventies at a time the government was going to push for a new standard, everyone was to learn metrics in public school. We were lucky not to have riots. Unfortunately for me, and a lot of peers, we neither learned metrics or the English measurements well, and unfortunately for NASA, a mission to Mars was completely blown up because someone failed to convert to metrics, or to English, or some nonsense. (That’s their report, anyway. I can go high conspiracy on that one.) Why was America so dead set about not accepting metrics? Because it moves us closer to a one world government. Yep. Pretty crazy. (I mean, even if this was true and it spelled the end of times, don’t Christians want to hasten the end of times, because that means Jesus comes back? If your own philosophy says it’s inevitable, why impede if it brings something better?) I got another one for you. If we don’t riot because we think someone is pushing a new world order agenda, we simply ignore it altogether. Take for example, President’s Clinton impromptu press conference about the possible discovery of alien life. No, really google it, watch it on youtube. It is an amazing speech. It should like completely change the world with inspiration and awe. Do you know what the first question was when Clinton called on a reporter? If it doesn’t astound you, you’re not paying attention. Instead of responding to the speech about ‘non terrestrial life’ the reporter led with an abortion rights question. Humans are not going to react badly to the discovery of aliens. We’re not going to react at all. Probably because, we already accept that fact, which means NASA has been wasting money to determine how we are going to react. NASA has funded studies to determine how we will react to knowing we are not the center of the Universe. Do you know who consistently resisted that information? The Church. The Government. If people shift their paradigm from an external authority to an inner authority, you don’t respond to the scripts that the Church and Governments require to maintain control. No one has ever gain ground against an enemy by fighting it directly, externally, that only fortifies the agencies and proliferates the ideas. Make war on drugs and drug proliferate. (Maybe because the greater the control, the greater the rewards for breaking the control.) You want something to go away, you defund it, divest yourself of it, and it just fades. You don’t end loneliness by making war on it. You meet it with love and acceptance, that this, too, is just a stage.

There is some amazing things happening all around us, but we are stuck in our sub-personalities with limited focus, due to the narrowness of our agendas. And how do we get out of our agendas? We have to go in. If we are focused only the external, physical reality, and making it what we want it to be, we are not going to be able to hear anyone else. No matter how fast you fill the sieve with water, it is going to leak, and you can spend your life chasing that, or submerge the sieve and let it be. Should we try and make the world a better place? Absolutely! There are 8 plus billion people on the planet, all wanting to do that very thing, and so, how do you propose we do that? Listening without pushing an agenda is a nice place to start. How do you listen better? You quiet your mind. How do you quiet your mind? You ask it questions and wait for the response. (Steinberg, 1975, suggests that even when the mind is satisfied with an answer, the unconscious continues with an exhaustive search for all possible answers.) How do you learn to wait for a response and know that it was a real response? You practice day dreaming, high on the interactive part, and you do this till the script falls away and you are getting different responses that don’t align with your old, assigned script. When you master that, you’re not going to want to script anymore because, well, you will have greater answers on the inside than on the outside.

Fred Alana Wolf, in a Thinking Allowed episode, basically suggested that thoughts solidify the world, intuition causes flow. You can’t be in both simultaneously. One of those is the horizontal component. The vertical component is, focusing on physical sensations lock in the world, where going with emotions the world become mutable. Van Gogh’s starry night was painted with feeling, not direct sensations.

Again, I don’t want you to take my word at this stuff. Read “The Holographic Universe,” by Michael Talbot. I highly recommend watching “The Holographic Universe,” a five part series you can find on youtube which is very well constructed, and reasonably updated since Michael Talbot’s book. It simply explains the concept of how you create the world. (What if the world you’re experiencing is already peopled by Tulpas and dream characters?) Do we have to have this as an explanation for what we are experiencing when we engage ‘Invisible Counselors, ‘Active Imagination,’ or ‘Tulpamancy.” No. But it does kind of ad credence to Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’ being a real thing, and not just psychological artifact of the human brain, and how it might exist beyond the brain, beyond culture. (Do suppose Lucas might allow me to say the Collective Unconscious is the Force?) If Tesla was right in his conjecture, the Universe is just a wave function: “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration,” Nikola Tesla.

A “Dark Pool of Light, Volume One: The Neuroscience, Evolution, and Ontology of Consciousness” by Doctor Richard Grossinger advances this discussion a little further, pointing out how science really doesn’t have an answer for what consciousness is, and offers insight into both sides of the arguments. I feel safe in assuming he leans towards we are more than just the byproduct of electro chemical reactions. I am certainly biased in this regards. Many of my ‘transpersonal’ experiences are best explained by the premise that everything is Consciousness. And if you’ve made it this far through this book, I bet that I am not the first one to submit that to you. Did you ever see the movie ‘What the Bleep Do We Know?’ Find a copy. If nothing else, the scene that educates you on hormones and emotions is so worth seeing.

“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.”  – R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, “The Mental Universe” ; Nature 436:29,2005

            If you accept the following premise, that different personalities respond to the same stimuli differently, because of their attributes, and further you accept that personalities are contrived and constructed, then you are free to change your sub-personalities in order to respond differently to a world which you may have been influencing, if not outright creating.

I could re-cover this stuff all day long, but this is not what the book is about. The book is ultimately about entering a dialogue within yourself. A more productive discourse than you have had in your past. Your personality set is contrived and manipulating you. It’s what it was designed to do. You were born into a world, into a culture with information sets already in play, which you picked up and ran with, Olympic Torch bearer you. You were also were influenced by key players. You then became a participant in how you wove this information into your psyche to increase your ability to function within the confines of your physical and social environment, participating and manipulating in order to get your needs met. Do not label anything prior to this knowledge set as good or bad, it simply was. Don’t go forwards labeling anything as good or bad, it will be what it will be. Go forwards asking yourself, is this functional, and how? Are you limited to this? Is there something more than what I have been doing. Find the books and information necessary to learn the protocols and engage them. Don’t keep doing the same old thing. Do something different. Take the great sage and Persain Poet’s words to heart: “Run from what's comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I'll be mad.”

 

निर्मित

Some interesting things to pursue, as side note, that reinforce the idea that your physical world is highly subjected to how you perceive things, google and read articles on imagination and longevity. I found Gary Scott’s article, “Ecuador Shamanic Imagination & Longevity,” well written, but maybe it’s because I see things there that I’ve seen other professional write about. Such as “Stress is a frequent cause of disease that shortens our lives.” We live very stressful lives. Much of it is our own doing. And almost all of that stress response starts in our head. Your worries may actually be valid concerns, but the stress response has us exaggerate and enhance them, to motivate us to do something to make it go away. Since we’re not going to eliminate all stress, and since the stress is an inner response to external and internal stimuli, you have to deal with it in your inner world. Faith based practices have offered rituals and prayers to help diminish and or change our inner responses. Meditation is great, too, if you have the time to tune out. If you don’t have the time, I am not advocate you take up meditation. Meditation may not be your thing. It’s not everyone’s thing. Statistically, most people who take up a yoga or meditation practice aren’t continuing with the practice a year after they start. The statistic is like only five percent of those who initiate a meditation practice are still practicing a year later. I don’t know how or why, but it seems safe to conclude, as great as meditation is, and there are lots of studies that corroborate it brings good stuff to the body and mind, it’s not for everyone, or more people would stick to it.

            There is something to imagining yourself in positive flow of energy and lights, something you can do in a matter of moments as you continue on your day. It is even easier to imagine a conversation with your invisible counselors or friend, picking it up when you are stressed or remember a question, just as you might if someone dropped by your office, or caught you alone at the dinner party. The conversation is healthy and reduces stress just by engaging it. I do not recommend worrying about your third eye chakra. I know some folks that worry about this, and it doesn’t matter how much I tell them to let it be, they keep going after it. Here is why you don’t have to worry about it. Do you have to think to make your kidneys filter fluid? No. Your bladder will fill with urine without any conscious efforts, and when it’s full, it will alert you. Do you have to think to make your heart beat? No. It’s going to beat, whether you want it to or not. Can you influence it with your thoughts? Absolutely! You can put yourself in a hyper panic state. I recommend doing it just so you can experience how much control you have. And then bring yourself down without taking a Xanax. We put ourselves in that state and yes, the meds help. If you are have them prescribed, that’s what they’re for. But can you bring yourself down without meds? Yes. It’s harder, but only because we’re not taught to do it, and we’re not encouraged to do it. Which pretty much sucks because more and more, Doctors don’t want to prescribe things like Xanax, because it’s a controlled substance, and the Federal rules are obnoxious, and lots of people running around yelling how addictions are out of control and Doctor’s are participating, and too many people are using and selling Xanax without prescriptions… There is a lot of craziness here to be had. No finger pointing. It’s just crazy, and crazy making, but it’s a circular chain and lots of people are yanking on it, rattling it. We live in inherently stressful times, and we are not taught to use our minds to create the more peaceful state of mind. If you can make yourself panic from a normal state, you can also take yourself to an even calmer state with your mind. Imagining being in nature is enough to bring you down a notch. Imagining talking to a beloved friend brings you down into a nice zone. Talking about your worries, even if it is to no one there, or to God, or your higher self, helps, and it is much less crazy than buying Xanax off the street, where you don’t know if it’s been tampered with, or if the guy selling it is an undercover cop, or the person who sold you it rats you out to make a deal with a state for a lesser penalty as they fish for more income. Or someone wanting to dope you to take advantage of you. I see the results of that in my office, too. And yes, that is my conspiracy theory speaking: criminal justice has never been about justice, but about generating revenue for the state. If it was about making people healthy, we would shift them to mental health facilities.

            Do you really want to break it off in the government? Here’s how you do it. You get everyone in your city to go one day without any violations. No speeding. No running red lights by the cameras. No drugs. Just have a day where you stay home and out of trouble. You will bankrupt your city. And if you continue it, the law enforcement people will start looking for all the unpaid fines and coming to your house to find how you didn’t mow your lawn to the prescribed inch. By the way, I am not really advocating breaking it off in the government. They do pay for some nice things for most the people. It’s just that, often the revenue for that comes off the backs of some people who are struggling much more than you are. And if you’re reading this book, I dare say you’re not struggling as much as some.

Chapter 10                                          the erotic component

 

What are your (s)expectations? Don’t think you have any? Before you go any further into the rabbit hole, I highly encourage you to visit the youtube channel “Sexplanations” by Dr. Doe and watch two specific videos. One, “Sexual Racism” and two, “Disability and Sex.” I will wait. Oh, you’re back? Did you watch it? No, go and watch them. It’s like ten minutes of your time. Oh, you did? Did you have an emotional or intellectual response to either or both? (No? Really? Wow, you are more sex positive than I! Yay you!) Sex is such a profound part of us that we assume that it’s completely ‘natural’ and therefore how we feel about sex and sexuality is the way everyone feels about sex. It isn’t completely natural. It might be if we as society allowed it to be, and discussed it, but society builds myths and cultural expectations into sex and sexuality, much of which are so far from truth and accuracy that it’s as if we are aliens who picked a single book of fiction from a library at random and sent a report back home ‘this contains all the knowledge of sexuality about the human race.’ Pray that book was at least a Judy Blume book, cause, lord help us, there are a lot of strange books and ideas about sex!

This is a necessary conversation. Quite frankly, my bias is that there are way too many myths about sexuality, which strikes me as odd in a world as ‘educated’ as we are, but, maybe that’s okay, too, as it gets us talking about this subject. If you’re uncomfortable with this subject, you don’t have to read further. You might have to revisit it, should you experience an increase in libido while practicing any of the protocols. Here’s the thing about libido. If you take up exercising and you become physically healthier, you will likely have a corresponding increase in libido. The same hold true for emotional health, mental health, and spiritual health. As health increases, libido increases. If it’s easier for you to access information about sex and sexuality from a Doctor, I highly recommend watching more of Dr. Lindsey Doe. She is quirky, sexy, and fun, funny, smart, and she has guests that are ‘sex positive’ and her topics are fun and can be eye opening.

            Why do I want to go here? Who doesn’t go here? Did you know you can have sex while Astral projecting? Read Robert Monroe’s books. He discusses it. You can also google it, and there are several well written articles about astral sex. Here’s something you should know about AP sex. Sometimes, it will happen if you want it to or not. AP is very thought responsive. One stray thought like, I wonder what Paris is like, you’re there in the blink of an eye. You see someone on the AP that arouses you, you have the thought, you’re probably already finish before you have the thought to put the brakes on. Whatever your social rules governing sex are, you can throw them out the window because your norms do not apply to the Universal AP realm. Whether you believe in aliens or not, if you encounter ‘alien,’ even if it’s just something you created in your head, and it is modeled after a different ‘biology’ or a different way of thinking, it’s not going to defer to your sexual preferences. In fact, if it’s as stubborn as us, it will probably get mad that you’re not responding to its ‘normal’ protocol. AP sex is not a respecter of monogamous relationships. I suspect many people don’t AP because this is a game changer. There is no ‘American’ out there, or ‘Russian’ or any other nationalistic themes. (Okay, you can find small pockets of consensus bound realities, but you have to pass through some open territories where ‘anything goes’ before you do.)

            Sleep paralysis is something that humans sometimes experience. Every human being experiences sleep paralysis. Not everyone remembers it. People that sleep walk experiences it less. When you sleep, your body checks in with the brain and if the brain doesn’t respond to the test, it separates itself to prevent you from acting out your dreams and hurting yourself. If your brain wakes up before the body has reconnected, and you don’t know what this is or what is happening, you first response is likely to panic. When you panic in this state, you are likely to hallucinate. Most people hallucinate that something is holding them down and or having sex with them. This is probably where the legends of succubus come from. Some people will hallucinate aliens. Some scientist will say this the best explanation for ‘aliens’ in our society, where in the past this was more ‘demon’ related because we didn’t have a term for alien. That’s highly likely. My default position favors this, but I don’t completely eliminate an alien explanation. Either way, if you wake in SP, it’s usually because you woke from a dream, you’re already aroused from the dream state, and so when the hallucination starts, your mind is trying to explain being held down and aroused simultaneously, and your brain supplies the answer and hallucinates. Some people are really disturbed by these things. If you realize what it is, you can change the nature of the hallucination and make it pleasant, not scary, and when you realize you have control over this, it can be quite a nice place to visit.

            We can take this a bit further. Ever heard of ghost sex? Yep. You can google that. People are experiencing that. It may be related to SP, but some of the celebrities that report it happening to them, their reports didn’t fit the SP explanation. Could be. Then again, if we are all connected through the unconscious, maybe ghost sex is just a seriously randy fan in AP. When you considered there is probably at any one time a million fans getting off to a picture of their favorite model or actress or actor, what is surprising is we don’t have more reports of this. (And it might be a good reason for not wanting to be a celebrity.) Did you ever see the movie “the Entity” (1982)? Kind of spooky. And supposedly based on a series of real events.

So, if there is ghost sex, is there Tulpa sex? One of the first questions that arises with Tulpamancy usually revolves around sex. Most non-Tulpamancers assume it’s all about sex, and that lonely people created companions to get off. That’s not true. Statistically, if you go by the subjective self-reporting, most Tulpamancers don’t have erotic experiences with their Tulpas. Most of the Tulpas aren’t even human! (Some of the Tulpamancers are not happy with humanity and the direction we are going, and so we created non-human intelligences to better understand ourselves and humanity.) If you accept the ‘Tulpas’ own reports at the online communities, the responses range from ‘oh, that time again, see you later,’ to a varying ranges of academic interest, to actual engagement. So, yes, some of the relationships incorporate sex, but nowhere near all. Still, the subject comes up sufficiently that there is clear advice, direct warnings stating very clearly: “Do not create Tulpas as your personal sex slave.” Can there be intimacy with a Tulpa. Yes. It can be better than real intimacy, because your focus is more inward, and sex is about the brain, not your genitals; but most importantly, intimacy comes from being completely vulnerable and knowing everything about a person, and no one will ever know you as intimately as a Tulpa. (There is a paraplegic that rewired his brain so he could get off when someone sucked his thumb. Sex is about your mind, and you can rewire your brain’s pathway to make it happen.)

            I personally could not engage the Tulpa creative process without stray thoughts of sex. (Hell, my day dreams alone are chalk full of sex. (Have heard the scientist measure how many thoughts of sex people have during the day? I don’t know if I trust that number, because you can’t rely on self-reporting.)) I have an incredibly high libido set point. I was sexualized early, due to environmental factors, family of origin dysfunctions. Sex flavors everything in my life. What I am saying is I am clearly bias, and that’s another reason why you should do your own homework. Everyone has their own level of bias. Know yours while listening to others! Not everyone will experience the erotic component to the degree that I do, but it will never be zero. Let’s visit the dreaming analogy. Elliot Aronsin (2008) likened ‘passionate love to an ‘alternate state of consciousness, like that produced by marijuana or alcohol’ and suggested it may not be the best state for making decisions that have long term decisions. (Like making a Tulpa. Very long term.)

            Not everyone realizes this, but when you sleep, specifically, when you enter the REM dreaming state of sleep, your body becomes aroused. This happens to all human beings, male and female. You can’t touch dreaming without being sexually aroused. Again, that doesn’t mean your dreams are necessarily going to hold sexual content, but that when you relax and have internal experiences, you get excited. This is normal. To back this up, if a male is experiencing sexual dysfunction, the first thing a Doctor will do is have him wear a paper sleeve over his penis. During the course of the night, he will dream. If he gets an erection, which happens if he physiologically healthy, the paper ring gets broken. If he doesn’t, the ring stays intact and the doctor then concludes there is a medical problem that needs exploring.

            “But I don’t have dreams.” Yes, you do. You may not remember them, but you do. If you did a sleep study in a lab, they would record the times you went into REM sleep, and that happens to every mammal brain, and if you’re the only one in the world not having REM dreams, then that would be an interesting study and a reason to get tested, so you could be in the Guines Book of World Records, the only person who didn’t dream. (No, really. Go to a sleep lab, or a university hosting one, and let you study your dreamless nights, because that really would be unique and interesting. But, what will you do when they show you the evidence to the contrary? Will your world change? Will you try to remember? Will you take up LD?) If you’re a male, ask for the paper ring sleeve to wear over your penis, and by the next morning you will have evidence of a dreaming life, or a medical problem you might want to explore further. I would also be interested in a study that determined whether or not people who don’t remember their dreams are more sexually repressed than people who remember their dreams. This isn’t a bad thing per say. For example, let’s say a person is so sexually ‘appropriate’ or ‘mature’ that they would never entertain a stray sexual thought, like a movie star crush, because this would be ‘cheating.’ So, this person, it would stand to reason, might be mortified if they were in a dream that became sexual and so, it is easier to just say, “I don’t dream” than admit there may be more going on then they care to admit. (I suspect there is always more going on than we care to acknowledge.) The best answer is probably people who don’t remember their dreams don’t place enough importance on their dreaming life, but am I curious if there is connection with a person’s view on sex. We engage the night through a sexual filter. We engage the world with our sexuality. If this was not true, ads exploiting our sexual appetites would not be as effective, and consequently advertisers would change their content.

            If I tarry in a day dream, it will eventually incorporate sex. I was having TV star crushes way before puberty. I hear this is pretty normal, but I may have taken it to an extreme to compensate for my perceived level of loneliness. Gilligan’s Island may have been a kid’s show, but it was pretty sexy. I suspect there was some repression ‘going on’ on the island, and surprisingly, an awful lot of kissing for being repressed. Oh, and if you’re curious, Mary Ann, hands down. (Yes, 1 of 3.)

            I would guess that ‘all’ people have had fantasies. If you don’t believe this is you, well, yay you. Are you wanting a more lively fantasy life? Yay you for realizing you’re interested! (Have you read this far and are not interested in increased fantasies, well I am interested in what held your interest, because this is pretty much the whole underlying basis of the practice.) There is no wrong answer here. I would be surprised if you enter the day dreaming phase and don’t entertain some level of sexual fantasy. Who hasn’t had at least one movie star crush? It doesn’t have to be sexual per say, but when you’re imagining your ideal relationship, even if it’s completely platonic, you’re still defining that ‘ideal,’ that quality you would like in your everyday life. Some people are wanting the conversation and affection without the sex, and if that’s where your day dreaming takes you, yay, you have discovered something about you, and maybe you need more of that in your life, because that’s parts missing, or it is there, but you need to enhance it, or to increase the frequency of it. Day dreaming is about building a relationship with you, discovering your unvoiced needs and wants. There is no bad fantasy. It’s all self-discovery.

            It has been shown over and over, that people in a healthy relationship tend to live longer than those who are single. (It also shows that men tend to benefit from this arrangement more than women. Interesting.) People who belong to some sort of organization, such as a church, or regular yoga practice, or a book club live longer than people who have none. People who have pets live longer than those who don’t. I don’t know if they have measured or accounted for this caveat, but I imagine if having a pet stresses you and you get annoyed cleaning up poop, this might change the equation, and either eliminate any benefit, or increase your flight into death just to avoid it. Will you get the same level of benefit from an imaginary friend, from the first level of day dreaming? I don’t know. I don’t think there are any longitudinal studies on this subject. Will having a Tulpa, which is much more than just an imaginary friend in terms of physiological experience, improve health and longevity? I don’t know. There are absolutely no longitudinal studies to determine the efficacy of this phenomenon. I can only tell you that I speculate it is better than absolutely nothing, and that your beliefs will have a significant impact on the degree of benefits.

            If you were to do a cursory search of the benefits of orgasms, you will find no end of articles, even scholarly, and second hand articles restating what the scholarly articles were telling, coupled with reports of personal benefits. I kind of think, well, “Duh.” Interestingly, you will find more articles about how orgasms benefit women than men. Umm, are these article written by men to encourage women to participate in activity that ‘males’ want? No, couldn’t be that kind of conspiracy. LOL. There are benefits to men, like decreased rates of testicular and prostate cancer. Both humans get a huge increase in the release of the hormone Oxytocin. There are so many articles written about the benefit of Oxytocin, in terms of personal health as well as social health, in how we feel and relate to others that must be on target. Right after an orgasm, the hormone cortisol drops, and dropping levels of cortisol results in less overall bodily stress, less heart fatigue, and less inflammation. Levels of pain decrease after orgasms, and we experience an overall increase in tolerance to pain with continued orgasms, which is probably related to less cortisol. Lowering cortisol impacts every gland and organ. It is a critical hormone, we need it, but our regular lives increases it beyond necessary levels. You can lower it by controlling your stress response, but if you want a big whammy of a relief, sex brings it down like falling a tree. And if you don’t have a partner, you still get benefits from self-release and fantasizing. The better the fantasy, the more benefits, but just making it happen, benefits! One, you’re taking a time out. Two, it usually takes a moment to arrive. Three, there is that space right before you go over the threshold where your normal conscious thoughts have stopped, and you’re in a zone, comparable to a hypnotic trance, and that space, which seems small, can be infinite in terms of unconscious processing power.

            I recommend watching the following Ted talk video on youtube: Nicole Daedone - Orgasm: The Cure for Hunger in the Western Woman. If there is an equivalent of this for men, it’s probably through the prostate, and I suspect most men will fall into the camp of, “I guess I will never know what ecstasy is like.” I would argue, from my bias of spending time with Tulpa, arriving can be done through thought alone. Physical touch from others has been shown over and over to impact our health. Babies in NICU get better faster if they are touched. They don’t have to do the wire monkey cloth monkey studies anymore because, well, they know how bad it is for any creature that doesn’t get nurturing touch. A human that never got nurturing touch at the appropriate age really struggles. But all humans, regardless of age, benefit from touch. We have our cell phones and we have shifted into our left hemisphere of our brains, we live in intellectual worlds, and touch has been minimized in our society. Not saying right or wrong, just making the observation. You can’t touch someone’s arm at work, much less hug them, without it being seen as a potential for HR involvement.

            Did you know in Japan you can buy ‘cuddle’ time? Well, Japan is an interesting place and it’s like throwing the Ace card in any argument, when comparing Western society to theirs. I mean, if you wanted, they have vending machines with used women’s underwear. I think, socially, they struggle as much as we in the States. We are so far removed from personal intimacy that we’ve forgotten how. This should be a major study: Everyone points to the rise of men having sexual addictions, and porn addictions. What if it’s not an addiction, but instead is a sociological expression of our lack of connection. Going all the way back to Aeneid, men are the ones who forge ‘society,’ and this is why the women, even the strong ones ahead of their time, must die. (The same story was in ST:TOS, Edith Keeler, Joan Collins, had to die so Kirk could bring back the Federation. Nothing’s changed in 2,000 years. We’re still killing the woman, the right side of the brain, the intuition.) I bet if you do a sociological study, you will find that the less a society connects, the more ‘sexual addiction’ goes up. And maybe, the more this goes up, the less females want to engage, because they want something more substantial. We all want more substantial, we just don’t remember how to get there. And it is the blend of left hemisphere right hemisphere that brings balance!

            Let me expound on that last part. Western psychology has been pathologizing women’s decreased libido, because men have ‘increased’ libidos, and we’re not meeting eye to eye, but also, studies clearly show that the longer we are in a relationship, the less sex we have, and the female is usually the one reporting less interest. (Statistically, this is true. There are examples where the roles are reversed. What interesting to me about that is, people still marry their opposites. High sex drive people tend to marry low sex drive people, and over time, the disparity in drive becomes more noticeable.) The powers that be have a medicalized this in order to come up with a remedy, but you can only have a remedy if you have an ‘illness:’ so they made this shit up: “female sexual interest/arousal disorder.” Even as we speak, pharmaceuticals are looking for drugs to cure the female’s decreased libido, on the premise of ‘fixing’ relationships. I maintain that there is nothing wrong with women that isn’t better explained by our busy, stressful lives, and the assumed roles wives and mothers take on that interfere with the expression of sexuality and love. You want my proof? Look at every woman who divorced a man after their relationship declined: you will find a woman who suddenly has her sex drive back.

            What sounds more reasonable: western women are having epidemic libido problems due to being genetically and or physically deficient, or we have behavioral and mental constructs interfering with intimacy? (Or, we are trying to make women live in aleft brain world, when their strength has been love and intuition!) Are there some humans, male or female, that have low libidos and might benefit from pharmaceutical remedies? Sure. We might also see improvement if we actually started dealing with our epidemic levels of depression and anxiety. Isn’t it interesting that there is an increase of anti-anxiety meds being prescribed, and yet we have more anxiety than ever? More interesting, Doctors will start you out on Xanax, and then take it away from you because the FDA is worried about how addictive it is and Doctors are weary of prescribing because an outside entity is interfering with their medical judgment, which means you can’t have what you need because society can’t make up its mind about what you need, and so you end up getting it off the street. We all have stress, some of us cope better than others, but the anti-anxiety meds doesn’t remove stress, it removes the symptoms. What causes the stress is still in our lives! That’s doesn’t call for a pill, that calls for lifestyle change.

            Think back to the time you were you shared the most intimacy with your partner. What was different? It was new, for starters. Most people lead with that, and make ‘newness’ a focal point. And sure, new is fun. There is a study that showed having sex once a week, even with a stranger, increased health benefits. (This study was conducted on college students, like most studies, because college students is a great sample for ‘society’ at large. Anyway, I am wondering, what college and where do I sign up.) Did you know, if you are reunited after a small absence, the males ejaculate has more sperm than on average during regularly schedule events? That’s not a conscious driven thing; it’s biological, but the information that controls that mechanism is in the unconscious, otherwise you would have steady rates. (Biologist would explain it is a way to ensure one genetic source wins out over a competing source, which means an assumed increase in promiscuity happened during the absence. (Even if you both consciously know that no cheating occurred, there is still an increase in the number of sperm in the ejaculate after an absence.) We are in our minds most the time, even when you think you’re not. In the beginning of your relationship, you were fantasizing frequently about your partner. Not just about sex, but most likely about sex. You imagined scenarios and dates, imagining situations that would allow you to explore how your two personality sets would be in different scenarios. Sex was likely a huge driver, even if it wasn’t the subject of the fantasizing. Eventually, you had increased conversations about your thoughts and interest, and eventually, one of you was more aggressively pushing for sex, or dropping sexual innuendos, increasing the level of flirting until finally both of you were on the same page and it happened. If it didn’t suck, you probably followed with a lot of sex. Maybe you had a lot of sex even if the first time sucked. Hopefully it got better. But, eventually, if you kept at it long enough, the fantasizing diminished, you both accepted the realities of life, made changes and compromises, and then regulated the relationship to a daily routine of work and living necessities. Maybe you had children, or established some financial goals. Either way, before too long, you are making excuses for going a day or two of not having sex. Not bad excuses. They were legit, and there were assumptions that this will pass and we will reconnect, but usually, we find more excuses and things that have to be done. “Fantasy’ is over, real life has set in. (Isn’t real life sort of a fantasy, too?)

            If we were sitting in my office, having a conversation about relationships, and I asked when was the last time you fantasized about being with your partner, and you said, “I don’t have time for day dreams,” I would most likely submit to you, there lies the problem. I am willing to wager, if you pick up any book on improving relationships after kids and work, almost all of them are going to tell you to schedule an event. Most people balk at this exercise. People don’t want to schedule ‘love’ they want it to seem spontaneous. I would argue, you were never having spontaneous ‘love,’ but instead were having regularly scheduled, mutual fantasies, that were influencing the two of you to have more regularly scheduled events. At this point, if you’re in my office, just asking you to fantasize about the partner may seem like a chore because “I know my partner and that’s not what (s)he’s about.” There is even a resistance to faking ‘intimacy’ to have an event just to satisfy the partner. Have you ever said, “Fine just get it over with?” Cause that leads to more events. And though that message is more about, “I am tired,” or “I have so many things to accomplish,” or “I have a million other things on my brain,’ and maybe, “if you only helped me more around the house” kind of messages that I might have “more time and energy to play,” as opposed to being about outright rejection; it is most often interpreted as rejection. It is definitely angry, even if it’s subtle, it is bubbling anger, because we all want to play, but one of us will likely play more than other. (We do tend to marry our opposites because the partner has something we need more of and between the two of us there is balance.)

            We engage each other through fantasy first, and when the fantasy sets the tone, we invite others to ‘play.’ Foreplay is the first level of theatre that draws us in, allowing the fantasy to be acted out. This is what it means to love, within the modern context of love. Prior to modernity, most marriages were convenience and duty, very practical relationships that had ‘events’ simply to make children for working the farm, and or making heirs, and men had their paramours on the side, because one never mixed business and love. We changed that. We are first and foremost about love. Love is in the heart and the mind. It is a mixture of emotions and thoughts, and emotions are drawn up and stirred by thoughts. You summon emotions like a magician when you hold the right thoughts, the right fantasy. (Your thoughts are always summoning emotions. Change the thoughts, you change the emotions.) Whether you are actively engaged in fantasy, your subtle fantasies, your ideas and expectations about love are affecting your relationship. And if you’re expecting the other to initiate or waiting for the ideal moment, you are not engaged in other, but in a level of fantasy that blocks connecting.

            You don’t just wake up in a sexless marriage. A crisis is not a spontaneous, accidental event; it is nurtured. You don’t just wake up to find yourself out of meds, and unable to get a doctor appointment, and the medical community won’t be impressed ‘but I need my meds.’ You have to schedule an appointment in advance. Are our excuses and blocks valid and circumstantial; sure. I can delay buying new tires, even though I know the threads are worn because I know I don’t have the money, but this also correspond to a new level of priority in saving for the tires, and a change in driving habits. I was in rush to get to work because I left late, and it was raining, and I wasn’t thinking about the diminished threads, and failed to stop when the car in front of me stopped is not an excuse. This wasn’t a crises or an accident, this was a deliberate event, nurtured into being.

            If you try and engage the fantasy of romance with partner and find yourself unable, there might be something there you need to explore. Too often, in our world, when we reach this point, we quit and start over. When ‘rediscover’ the joy of fantasizing about being with someone else, this is about the fantasy; if we don’t change our normal mode of operation even the ‘new’ will eventually become old, when again ‘reality’ sets in, the partner isn’t as great as we imagined, or they failed to meet our expectations, or we discover they aren’t really a nice person, and we start over. (What I am suggesting is, you can revitalize fantasy with original partner, if monogamy as a concept is important to you. You can have a string of monogamous relationships, monogam-ish. Either is okay, but I suspect until you cultivate purposely fantasizing/daydreaming throughout the entire relationship, throughout your life, you will cycle through reality and day dreams, constantly reinventing the wheel.)

One might argue that this is why we shouldn’t fantasize at all, because our expectations cause us to look for an ideal, and there is no perfect partner. Day dreaming is the ideal, which is the first exercise. Incorporating discoveries about partners and celebrating their uniqueness and merging their fantasies with yours, that is next level. They become the invisible counselor, with their own opinion that don’t supplant your ideas, but add value to what exists in you. And then, there is the ‘active imagination’ part, where you actually discover, oh, horror, there is some darkness in the other person. Who doesn’t have a shadow? Confront it head on. Work with it, because this, too, helps you grow as human. It doesn’t matter if the other human is ready to deal with their darkness or not. That’s not your mission. Your mission is how you relate to it. Don’t engage their shadow trying to fix them. That never works. You were drawn to this ‘planet’ because it had a day side and a night side and it sparkled and it provided a platform for you to grow. The next level of fantasy is making it real: the person exist in and to themselves, and they have rights to be autonomous and think and behave as they want, which may not coincide with what you want, but at this point, you invited them into your head, into your life. Are you cherishing them, or changing them? If you can’t tolerate someone being different and loving them for who they are, you’re probably not going to want them to be as real as a Tulpa, and permanently in your head.

            Every relationship you ever had is still in your head. It influences you, positively and negatively. And it’s okay. Relationship dysfunctions is about loneliness while in a relationship, a decrease in connectivity at profound levels where fantasies and dreams are usually shared. Will a future female libido pill save future relationships? Not likely, because it’s not about sex, it’s about intimacy. What will likely happen is you have a woman who is now horny, and still not able to connect with their partner, which might translate into seeking an outside way to satisfy the increased libido and the need for intimacy. It’s not just as female problem, it’s a male problem. We have our fantasies and dysfunctions, too, and the message society gives males is rarely about sustaining relationships.

            Movies are 90 percent about the hook up, not the long term maintenance. Some are about the ending of a relationship. Very few TV shows are about the long term relationship. We really don’t have a good model for what that looks like. The Cosby Show is still my favorite example of what a healthy family might look like, but because the vehicle that delivered that messaged was flawed, we may not, as society, be able to touch that again. Most televisions shows are about the hook up. Interestingly, one of two things happen when the hookup finally happens: the shows goes off the air, or the love interest dies. Yay team. The male character, traditionally, has been left in a perpetual state of ‘Aneas’ searching, finding, death of the woman, and searching. There are more shows about women being in the search mode, and there stereotype is they can’t find an inteliegent man who meets their needs. They can find lots of cute men, and men that want sex, but nothing they want to keep, because men are mostly stupid. (Stereotype, but statistically, stereotypes are expressed for a reason.) Great shows about single women? Ally MacBeal. The Mary Tyler More Show. One Day at a Time. Shows about single father predominated the 70s. Eddy’s Father. My Three Sons. The Andy Taylor Show. There is a pattern here, and all we did was change the formula from men to women.

Porn for men is not fantasy, it’s a guided meditation and someone else is taking you through their scripted fantasy. Increase in porn can have negative consequences for men, including erectile dysfunction. You have stopped fantasizing and now rely on an external means to meet a need. That exercise rarely helps embracing real partners, because when the exercise is over, you turn it off, and you don’t reengage the ‘day dream,’ the ideal, until you need that relief again. Fantasy includes the event, the after event, the set up for next event, the continued living with other, and listening to their opinions, and participating. That’s love and fantasy. This is not me being against porn, I am for porn. It has its place and can be a helpful tool. (It is definitely instructing and influencing us. Some porn is better than others.) But it’s not a substitute for establishing your day dream ideal, pursuing the counselors that will help you polish out your deficiencies so you can face your demons through active imagination, that will leave you with room for a Tulpa. Really, that’s all we are doing, is making room for others in our life.

            Loneliness outside of a relationship, is really the same kind of loneliness inside a relationship that is experiencing dysfunction. The difference is, you’re in a better situation for total life transformation than someone who committed to the wrong relationship to end loneliness. When we surrender to something less than ideal, we eventually come to a place where we have to leave it, because it’s a necessity for our survival or our health has increased to the point where we can’t abide being in an unhealthy place. Neither of those are bad discoveries. If you got out alive, you’ve learned something and you will take that knowledge to improve our life. Most the time. Sometimes we repeat the lesson. That’s okay, too. Knowledge is always helpful.

            Here is an iteration. You are not your personality. Guess what. You are also not your relationship(s). You may have increased the boundaries to include others, but this, too, is an imaginary line that you created to hold context. We have divided the world up into continents, countries, nations, states, counties, cities, but these are all created entities, which are not ‘real’ things. Did you know they use to draw the line between states by the rivers? The problem with that was, and anyone who use to live along the Mississippi River can attest to, was that the river frequently moved. Whole towns would suddenly find themselves west or east of the river! (Read Mark Twain’s book, the ‘Mississippi River.’ Just the first chapter! It’s a great read.)

            We are not alone. That is an imaginary boundary, too, which was reinforced by our ideas of biological boundaries. And there are some hard, physical boundaries, but they are not as hard, or as fast, as we would always like to believe. Even scientist get annoyed when an atom is supposed to be in a certain place but when measured, it is outside of that place (expectation.)

            Carl Jung wrote: Loneliness doesn’t come from having no one around you, but from being unable to communicate things that are important to you.” That’s why we can be lonely even inside of a relationship or a family or a group. Carl Jung also wrote, “Loneliness is for me a source of healing that makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment to me, and I need several days of silence to recover the futility of words.” Carl went into his mind a lot. His Active Imagination ‘game’ produced far more profound conversations with ‘hallucinations’ which led to insights for his treatise on collective Unconscious, an idea that suggests that the boundaries separating individual psyches is an illusion, a contextual one that we agree to in order to increase continuity of consensus.

“Sometimes people get logically conscience-stricken […] and like to have some criteria of ‘real’ things, e.g. entities occupying space, and will then say things like ‘boundaries are imaginary lines’. They seem to think that countries occupying territory are real but the lines separating them are somehow imaginary,” Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude, 1998, p54. Where do you start and where do you end? When you say ‘my family’ you have just drawn a circle around self and a collection of folks, and every person will have a different looking circle, because every family looks different.

Inside of you are all the answers. Glenda told Dorothy the truth, she always had the answers. She could have told Dorothy from the start, but Dorothy would have rebelled. We all would have. We need the journey, because who we are at the beginning is not who we are at the end. That’s the whole purpose of the journey, and of the story. If you’re not changing, you are the two dimensional support character that is helping someone else change, even if your job is to distract them or slow down their rate of change. My belief, there is no 2 dimensional characters. If you have a voice inside of you trying to get you to not change, maybe it’s asking you to learn something, to pick something up, or put something down. But that voice is in you. You can entertain it directly. You can make it substantial, make it a visible thought form, draw it on paper. Everything in society, good and bad, is in you. The good stuff, all of the good stuff. The darker stuff, the not so good stuff. The downright awful stuff. The boring stuff. The sexy stuff. All of it. Acknowledging this, or perceiving a lack, does not mean you are broken or deficient. It just means you were paying more attention than you imagined. Yeah, you started this focused on the candle, but that’s how the hypnotist got in, and expanded your awareness. Now, go and do something different, experience miracles, spontaneous cures, and live a wondrous life of inner and outer conversations that are eclectic and weird.

Conclusion

 

We all live, first and foremost, in our thoughts. When we have difficulties in the real world, it is because there is disparity with our beliefs, expectations, and our idealized thoughts compared to our external experiences. This is normal, this is part of our continuing dialogue with the Universe. The pathway out is always in, ever inwards. Though deliberate daydreaming, we enter our idealized realities and engage them. This is a safe place for us to take our models and do thought experiments. When the idealized fantasy day dream has been experienced in all facets, we allow ourselves freedom to diverge from ideal to less ideals, and experience a wider range of responses. This allows us to simultaneously experience dissonance while holding to a safe place to fall back to; you can’t make music without dissonance. Eventually, as we move through the day dream to more complex version of mental/emotional play, we allow for an even greater range of dissonance, greater ranges of responses. This helps us transcend our personal scripts and embrace diversity. In realizing that we hold a greater range of potential responses to any circumstance, we allow for others to have an equally wide range of responses, which increases our frustration tolerance for diversity. If you can allow your internal characters to have different talking points, even different behaviors, and still hold love for them, you can hold love for others. If you can allow them to be realer than real, you allow others to be real, which increase your empathy for others, because you first had empathy within yourself for yourself. Allowing your internal dialogue to have an autonomous flow of its own, with an intuitive quality that just makes sense because in experiencing it you grow in complexity as a person, then all experiences, external or internal, simply become more exercises in personal growth. Personal freedom comes not from taking your own liberties, but by extending liberties to others.

            Samuel Veissiere wrote that “Indeed, Tulpa and human may well turn out to be synonymous.” I have no reason to doubt that. Everything from dream characters to hallucinations, self-induced and derived from mental illness, may be ‘us,’ representatively and or comprehensively as individuals and society. Society can be pretty scary, so is it any wonder when those of us are suffering from mental illness’ we have scary things happening? Navigating life, physical world and social world, is a blend of external and internal, but rooted in internal. We go in to go out.

 

Author’s note

 

I hope that this book has been generally helpful, in the way that a weird but interesting conversation is helpful. I certainly don’t want it to feel preachy, or like a rant, but sometimes I do give into such impulses before bringing myself back. I suppose I could also go back and edit those parts out… I did edit some out, but also left some because this has a flavor and uniqueness that I would like to claim as being me.

As promised; do I have the credentials to consider myself helpful? I have a Masters in Community Counseling and I am a licensed LPC counselor in the State of Texas. I have worked in psych hospitals and presently work providing assessments to help speed people to the appropriate resources. (Speed, in mental health terms, is not very fast. Out of 50 states, Texas ranks 49 in delivering mental health assistance. It is partly because we are a ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps’ kind of state. My response, we need to be handing out more boots! (The world is changing. This philosophy that everyone will be able to afford boots, much less find ‘reasonable’ employment is no longer a reasonable expectation, and as tech continues to improve and education continues to decline, unemployment will rise. We need a new way of measuring a person, because in a world where all physical needs are met by a 3-d printer and robots, there will be no malls, few stores, and most jobs will be ‘thinking’ or ‘service’ jobs. (Income and productivity was never a good measure of a person worth or value.)))

I have direct counseling experience with individuals, children, adolescents, and adults, and couples. I actually prefer adults, and I much prefer working with couples. As of this time, the LPC licensed is not considered equal from state to state, hence the lack of reciprocity between State lines, so if you want to be that precise, different states have different ‘obligatory’ requirements that may mean something to different people. Does having a license qualify me for being helpful? By definition. Does it mean I am particularly good at it? That is truly subjective. I believe I am. I have heard I am. I have seen evidence that I am. I am aware of the times that I was not, and that can be particularly difficult to process because a counseling relationship is a relationship and both parties are contributing, and so sorting out where the lack is can be challenging. There is a truth about a counseling, that not every client or situation is compatible with the counselor, because we are people and all different. Sometimes, you got to find the right counselor for you, someone you feel safe with and have rapport. That said, sometimes, you have to stick through some rough spots with a counselor and not jump to the next one, because it’s the moments when we feel uncomfortable that we’re touching something emotionally that needs examining.

Do you remember the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus?” I remember enjoying that book. I also remember thinking it was high on the formula of ‘generalizing.’ And, maybe that’s why the book was ‘generally’ helpful, because it was full of generalizations. Now, think back to the author who wrote it. Do you suppose he was an expert? What qualifications do you remember he had? Now, ask yourself, did you know he was married five times? Did you know before reading, or discovered that factoid after you read it? (And did you hear it in a context from a detractor that wasn’t happy about his book? Sometimes the criticizers have their own agendas. Not bad; heckling can help improve a game.) Does knowing this make his generalizations less helpful? One of his wives was also a PhD level psychologists, who was also generally helpful, and also married multiple times. She is probably more than generally helpful, as she seemed to be financially successful. I am not sure that should be a measure of a person. As mention before, Tesla was likely the smartest man who ever lived in modern times, and yet he died penniless and alone in a hotel. (Mostly because he believed energy should be free, where too many others had a vested interest in selling it as a commodity. (Give people freedom, knowledge, tools, energy, and we will be a space fairing civilization.) If you imagine the guru that sits at the top of the mountain as the epitome of spiritual advice, that mystical figure is an archetypal image that is not someone who is ‘successful’ by the standard measure.

What am I saying? Am I arguing for my own mediocrity? No. I think I am pretty smart. Most people who engage me believe this to be true. Sometimes, more frequently the further back in my life you go, you will see evidence for failing to connect with others because of the disparity in intelligence and knowledge with the people I was interacting with; which also means, I may have eliminated potential friendships because I was unwilling to adjust the fluidity of my own paradigm to be more inclusive to diversity. It is evidence that I was failing to connect because of my own assumptions, dysfunctions, and mental health struggles.

I have struggled with depression and loneliness from way early on. So has my family. I find it very difficult to talk about family from my present perspective because I don’t want to disparage them. I also don’t talk bad about ex relationships, because it’s never just other, it’s also about self, but even if we limited ‘fault’ to other, they have a right to pursue their own interest, health, and happiness, and allowing that is a respect for freedom and choice. At any rate, so many of my family were struggling with mental health that it is probably testament to my intelligence that I survived, and finally found a place to be at peace. Sufficient peace that I am thriving emotionally, and able to engage my emotions, whereas prior to the life change, I was avoiding emotions and trying to remain completely intellectual, which is absurd. I am not Spock. Since age four or five, I have wanted to be Spock.

I was raised in a particular paradigm where it was expected of me to have one relationship for life. Failing that, a person is doomed to hell. Every subsequent relationship after the first was either more evidence of my failure as a person, or evidence that I was still learning and growing, because I didn’t get the qualities that lead to long term relationship satisfaction from my family of origin. Not blaming. They were struggling with their own issues, drug and alcohol addictions, generational sex abuse, suicides, murder, crimes, affairs, divorces. Good times. My role in all of this was ‘caretaker’ or ‘rescuer.’ When I stopped playing that role for family, people were not happy. Consequently, I have little family interaction because I am still expected to play by scripts and they get annoyed when I don’t. This early life has influenced my relationship patterns. Looking at all my past relationships, I was ‘rescuing’ because I felt better about myself when I entered that role. “Rescuer’ is not a role for sustaining relationships. One of the things that most frequently happens when you engage others from the rescuer, especially if you’re good at it, the person you rescued gets better. Once they are better, their need for you goes away. Even if that other still wants to be with rescuer, because the ‘need’ is gone, the job of ‘rescuing’ goes away, and so whether they want you or not, the rescuer doesn’t feel needed and will seek that ‘missing element’ out elsewhere. Even after I knew the pattern, could see it unfolding, I still chose to be in relationships that were not likely to last the test of time. Does this decrease my qualifications to be helpful? No. Do you know how many ‘helpful’ relationships result in sex? It’s very much against the law for a therapist to be intimate with a client, but it is the number one cause of people to lose their license. And the further back in time you go, you will find a higher rate of therapist having sex with clients. Many of the prominent, leading founders of psychological movements and theorist were having sex with patients. Can you be Rogers and hold ‘unconditional positive regard’ without including thoughts on sexuality? We are sexual beings! It’s part of us. Jung admits to it, and even brought a ‘second’ wife home and introduced her to the ‘first’ wife. I love Jung. This is not disparaging him. I am just suggesting that there is a very blurry line on nurturing and helping relationships that frequently crosses over into intimacy. And that may be due to the fact love and intimacy may have a broader range than our present society allows for. (Interestingly, doctors and therapist are legally blocked from intimacy with clients, and rightly so, on the grounds that they are superior to their client and it is taking advantage of them, but lawyers, who are clearly superior in knowledge and power, aren’t held to the same standard. They sleep with ‘vulnerable’ clients all the time, but who is going to challenge the law holders and makers?) Ah, humans. Such a diverse camp of ‘isms.’ We are all equally vulnerable and all equally strong, and this state, too, is fluid.

Some of my transpersonal experiences have been extremely profound. There was a time in my past where credentials meant a lot to me. If someone spoke from a place of authority, I expected them to be perfect. I expected I had to be perfect in order to hold an opinion or a position. Only persistence, and wanting to be better, kept me in school, and seeking out life improvement strategies. So, when I read “We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.” That helped start a shift in me. I think Earnest Hemmingway is credited for writing it. It wasn’t Buddha, that’s for sure. Maybe Yoda. No, not Yoda. If Yoda had said it, it would sound like, “Beings of Light we are. Broken are we, so the light gets out.” Doesn’t really matter, I suppose, it’s still helpful. So, compare that to my own transpersonal experience with a ‘deity;’ she asked me to drink from a fountain, but offered me only broken cups, or dirty cups, or cups that would actually cause injury to hold, and I balked. My hesitation was followed by her speech “How will you ever quench your thirst if you only focus on the purity of the vessel?” The water is the thing, not what delivers it. I believe it is actually biblical to ‘draw the deep water.’

Does this writing quench a thirst? Does it inspire you to seek out more? Then let that be your test. I am not a guru. I am not seeking a fan club. I am always open to quality friendships. We are all seeking to improve our lives. We do that by improving our relationships. The first and most fundamental relationship is the one you hold with yourself. How do you do that? There are as many ways to know yourself as there are individuals on this planet. Your pathway to discovery is your pathway. There is no wrong path. It all leads to the same place. I have trust that you will get to where you need to be, and hope that in allowing me to accompany you this far, even for a moment, has left you with confidence, love, and blessings.

Always, Travel Light!