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Tulpas => Tulpa Diaries => Topic started by: Kirarin on March 23, 2015, 04:49:17 AM

Title: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on March 23, 2015, 04:49:17 AM
I'm kinda new here, I guess. Visited the IRC yesterday, had some cool discussions, and it was suggested to me that I could make a tulpa diary here. Sure, why not.

Some background first, then. I started on this during August last year, but I did many things wrong and wasn't diligent enough about forcing, so here I am over half a year later with a tulpa that's not even vocal yet. It's time to set things right. Over the past two weeks I've been shaking up a lot of things in order to make myself a more productive host again, which is kinda what led me here. Unless I'm lying on my deathbed, I'll be forcing a lot every single day, but updating every day might get old, so we'll see how that goes.

I've taken to call my poor neglected tulpa Melo. She's based off some of my 2D fantasies, created in the image of a cute and fun companion to brighten up my life. Man, I loved her before I even started forcing her.

Gonna hit the submit button now while I still have a chokehold on my urge to elaborate every sentence in this post into each own paragraph. Don't even try me, I'll do it.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sen on March 23, 2015, 05:12:40 AM
Please do elaborate on what you felt you did wrong before. And what are you doing to change for the better?

Welcome to the community here, at least.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on March 23, 2015, 08:06:17 AM
Shameless self plug, it had to do with what I wrote about doubt.

Anyways, nice to see a diary from you, now keep it updated if you run into new things, be it questions or progress.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on March 23, 2015, 05:09:36 PM
There's a lot of things I feel I did wrong. The biggest blame lies on simply not being diligent enough, but I think some of these minor things might have slowed down my progress, made the process feel less intuitive, or otherwise make me feel less motivated, all contributing to making it harder to stick with it like I should have.

One thing is what Sandman said. I was lured into the blind faith mindset. I later realized I shouldn't believe in absolutely everything, but that just lead me to obsess over distinguishing everything as either definitely being a tulpa response, or definitely not being one. After reading the post about removal of disbelief, I realized that it won't kill my tulpa every time I either don't feel 100% confident whether to attribute something to her or not.

Another thing was that early on, I got some really clear emotional responses. When I think back, I can't really say for sure that those were from my tulpa, but I just assumed they were and was really happy to have some signs of success. Problem is, I stopped getting them, or they were much weaker. First it just felt like I wasn't that focused during those sessions I didn't get any strong response. Then it felt like I was downright regressing. My expectations had been massively inflated, and when they weren't fulfilled, I started doubting everything. Am I doing something wrong? Does my tulpa hate me now? Did I kill her by not forcing enough? Was everything a lie all along? In all, I guess you could chalk that one up to believing too much, but I think at the time I just couldn't help it, because I was so excited by that first sign of progress.

Rest is more down to not understanding the method too well. I never really understood active forcing that well. I feel a lot of guides were really unspecific on what exactly you do while active forcing. They all give you a list of things to do: Personality forcing, visualization, narration. Personality forcing is optional and something you'll graduate from early (maybe a little too early for me, I wanna try doing more of that again), and it doesn't make sense to spend most of your time on visualization, so that left me with narration as the bread and butter of active forcing, and narration never felt very productive to me, at least not enough to spend 90% of 30+ minute forcing sessions on it. So I went around looking for more productive things to do during forcing, which I didn't find because nearly all the "advanced techniques" assume your tulpa has at least achieved vocality.

I'll move on to passive forcing, since it kinda ties in. That was kinda the opposite, people told me all kinds of different things and confused me with the conflicting information. Some said you just have to talk to your tulpa outside of active forcing, but that didn't work because it felt like I was just talking to myself. Some said you just have to focus on your tulpa, which I tried a lot of, but in the end my tulpa felt like a really abstract concept to focus on, so to make sure I was actually focusing on her I ended up just focusing on her traits, kinda ignoring the actual person behind those traits. And with the concentration this required, there wasn't much room for narration as well. After a long time I started thinking hard about why passive forcing wasn't working for me and what I'd need to make it work, and I concluded that I just needed to talk to her while convincing myself that I was talking to someone else. Which meant directing my thoughts to her (but not worrying too much whether I was focusing hard enough for the thoughts to come through), and making sure the thoughts I transmitted were actually full sentences that I'd want her to hear, instead of just directing stray thoughts to her as if I'm talking to myself and pretending someone is listening.

When I got this, it was a lot easier to understand what people meant by narration. And someone reminded me at this point that interacting with a young tulpa is like raising a child, which helped me realize that even narrating about kinda inane stuff, like why something I just read made me smile or how I feel about some random subject, can all be beneficial since it all helps the young tulpa learn about the world. And in the IRC here, I was further educated on how to listen, which is in its own way an important part of narration. What resonated with me was whoever said that a tulpa will try to communicate through any channel they can at first, whether mindvoice, intent, emotion, body language, or probably some other channel I'm forgetting. So you kinda have to watch/listen out for anything, instead of just assuming first communication will come exactly the way you expect it to. So after realizing all this, I finally realized that narration is actually a lot more productive than I thought, and I'm fine with spending really long sessions on that alone now.

See, this is what happens when you ask me to elaborate on a simple sentence like "I did many things wrong". 5 words turn into 5 paragraphs.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Malisavade on March 28, 2015, 03:13:10 AM
Is a very good idea, I want you to read this post again.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Daecher on March 29, 2015, 01:09:43 AM
Nice to have you here. To be honest, I think elaboration is a great way to get thoughts straight. That, and you'll get a more detailed response from people if you're honest with us.

Narrating about daily life and opinions is a pretty good way to encourage responses from a tulpa, whatever the form may be. Narration can also be incorporated into your everyday activities and be a pretty simple form of passive forcing. Like you described before, some people focus really intensely in active sessions and burn themselves out or do it in large gaps. There are also people whose tulpas progress slowly because all they do is casually toss thoughts their way and expect them to pick up the slack. Personally, I believe that passive forcing can have its own positive effects on development and that time spent passively forcing should be balanced with active forcing (then again, you hardly know me and my preaching about the wonders of passive forcing wouldn't mean shit). The key word here, though, is balance. Make an effort to narrate to your tulpa frequently during the day, and set aside some time for just the two of you when you can. If there's something you feel you want to work on, set aside more time. If you're going to be cramped for time for a few days or a week, squeeze in a little attention on-the-go.

For future reference, take shit I say with a grain of salt. I'm still new to things as far as tulpas go, but I'll throw my two cents in when I can whether anyone wants them or not.

Again, it's nice to meet you, and we're looking forward to hearing more from you.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on March 29, 2015, 08:14:20 AM
I still don't know who sends these spammers in our direction...
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on April 09, 2015, 04:12:05 PM
Reporting in to show I haven't given up and/or died.

Been struggling a lot the past few days. Not just forcing issues, but concentration and mood issues in general. Starting to make some lifestyle changes to fix that. For instance, I'm signing up for a gym membership, since I notice that being sedentary isn't doing my brain any favors. At Sandy's recommendation, I'm bringing Melo along for support. In some cute gym clothes.

To bring some progress talk into this, I have actually noticed one thing for a while that I haven't given too much thought. When I visualize her, I sometimes get stuff that I'm not actively trying to visualize, like extra movements. While forcing just now, I was visualizing her in front of me so I could hug her, but instead of staying in my arms it felt like she started climbing me to sit on my neck, and despite my best efforts I couldn't bring her to her original position. Sometimes it's things I consciously expect even though I don't consciously force it, and sometimes it's just completely random and unexpected, but still within the boundaries of what could pop out of me unconsciously. So I don't feel I can take these things as undeniable proof of sentience, which is mostly why I've been disregarding it. But lately I've been told that tulpas might in early stages try to find other channels for communicating than with mindvoice, and it seems like this is another channel worth paying attention to. Whether or not any of those early instances were actually her, I do owe it to her to pay attention to anything that might be her. And somehow it sounds reasonable that she'd have an easier time communicating through a channel that comes naturally to me (that I don't have to consciously imagine in order to feel). As opposed to mindvoice, which doesn't come naturally to me at all.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on April 09, 2015, 04:17:15 PM
Yeah, sounds familiar. Weird shit would happen and you're like, woah. Some people would learn to trust what they see before they trust what they hear.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on April 10, 2015, 06:54:06 AM
Except we want peoples, so we keep trying to get peoples. Your definition is so outdated...
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Daecher on April 10, 2015, 09:33:54 AM
Taking tuppers to the gym can be pretty entertaining. That is, if you like being out-paced and teased while you run. I have also noticed that tuppers (at least mine) are like cats, and enjoy being at the highest point possible, i.e. enjoy sitting on heads/necks.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: MegaBusta on April 10, 2015, 03:27:41 PM
Soon all your tuppers will be taller than you are.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on April 10, 2015, 07:23:30 PM
Someone larger than me sitting on my head or neck isn't REALISTIC, waah...
Title: Re: Moremore Days
Post by: Kirarin on April 10, 2015, 11:30:55 PM
Solution: stop treating imaginary friends as peoples. Fewer repercussions, fewer implications, fewer expectations, less frustration, less disillusion. Treat imagination for what it is, for the sake of simplicity and practicality: as manufactured visuals, sounds, and other sensations, and nothing more. No rules, no roles. Much easier.
I kinda foresaw this kind of post from Fede at some point. It's probably reasonable, but I prefer not being reasonable. I think it's much cooler if I can go all the way with the self delusion to the point where I believe that my imaginary friends are more than just imaginary friends. It's like religion, even if you're not religious, if someone tells you they're happier with Jesus or Allah or Krishna in their lives, you'd need your fedora tipped really steeply to deny them that.

I have also noticed that tuppers (at least mine) are like cats, and enjoy being at the highest point possible, i.e. enjoy sitting on heads/necks.
Like way before I knew about tulpas, I thought a lot about how I wanted to have a fairy as my imaginary friend, who would sit on my shoulder and provide witty commentary throughout the day. Melo is supposed to be human sized, though, so it doesn't really make sense for her to climb me. But I guess anything is possible in wonderland. I still struggle with keeping her size consistent.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on April 18, 2015, 01:28:33 PM
Still forcing every day. Technically. The truth is that lately I've mostly been forcing to be able to tell myself I've done it, and thus not really achieving anything other than making myself feel less guilty than I would if I wasn't forcing at all. Might have to resort to scheduling sessions and following through by turning off all distraction and setting a timer for minimum amount of forcing. I hate doing things like this, because it makes it really seem like an obligation, but tasks that require a lot of concentration as just so hard to get started on and so easy to get distracted from.

One thing I'm really hoping to improve on for my next few days of forcing is visualization. I actually feel I've regressed since last month, which is pretty demotivating. Problem is, her appearance is based on things I have picked up from 2D images, and most of the tips for improving visualization don't seem to apply too well to visualizing 2D characters. I would really like some advice on this from anyone else with a 2D tulpa. The one thing I'm trying that seems to work a little is to stare for some time at an image with the same visual traits, trying to make note of all the features in a geometrical sense (the shape of the eyes, the length of the bangs, etc), and then standing up, closing my eyes and visualizing that she's right in front of me, first judging her general shape in relation to my own body, and then trying to fill in with those traits I just attempted to memorize. I find this works a lot better than just sitting down and trying to visualize her somewhere in my head, but there's still some problems. One is that my focus is extremely limited and doesn't seem to improve over time. I can't focus on all facial features at the same time, so I try to go through them one by one, but even this is really hard, and for things like the eyes, I usually can't focus on both the shape and the position at the same time. Other thing is that there seems to be a difference between being aware of the physical features and the over "impression" that the face gives. The latter is really subtle, and if I focus too much on physical features I lose completely track of it, making her face just a meaningless set of geometrical shapes. But if I focus too much on the latter, it doesn't feel like I'm visualizing at all. I'm getting the feeling that I'm just naturally bad at visualization, to the point where I have to do tons of concentrated effort over a long time just to start to approach mediocre.

As a last little not, the other day when I was taking a really long walk and wanted to use it as an opportunity to force, I realized it's really annoying to be in the physical world but trying to focus on something in my mind. So inspired by recent posts in this thread, I imagined that a shrunk down version of her was sitting on my shoulder. I don't intend to do this as imposition practice, I just found that having this physical, but out of sight, point to focus at helps a lot when I'm trying to force without closing my eyes. So now I do this every time I'm out walking and I start thinking of her.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on April 18, 2015, 01:33:09 PM
Timer is a good addition. Schedules don't work for everyone but if you're serious and are the kind that will easily get distracted/forget, giving yourself one is a good way to get actual results and make sure you actually do some work. Just be sure to make it personal enough that it works for you.

How does a 2D tupper feel like? Visualization is more than just what you see, I think. Do you only limit yourself to that or is there more?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on April 18, 2015, 11:47:40 PM
Feel like? Not sure how to answer that. I don't think it's too different from having a 3D tulpa, just that you get to disregard realism and apply traits that only exist in drawings.

When I talk about visualization, I just mean visual stuff. I honestly haven't thought too much about the rest yet. I've been doing some touch, it's not a big focus for me right now, but feeling her up helps me get a sense of her as a physical presence, which helps me focus on her. I wanna learn auditory hallucination eventually, but it seems a little harder to practice on. Smell is a little tough since I don't have any reference. Any way I can figure out how cute girls smell like without getting myself arrested? And taste... things like that should only happen between two consenting parties!

Beyond purely physical sense, there's another thing I've thought a little about lately: The idea of sensing a presence. Like, if you sit across the room from someone, even if you close your eyes and can't hear them or sense them in any other way, there's usually a very distinct awareness that the person is there. Not a sense in itself, but a feeling you get based on information you've already gathered with your senses. I feel that I used to be more aware of this when forcing, but kinda forgot about it when I became too caught up in more concrete things like being able to see her visually.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on April 19, 2015, 08:20:54 AM
Wow Fodde giving out helpful advice instead of just saying to do things his way...

I always found bringing in other senses to be helpful with visualization. I don't think my sight was my best mental sense, but touch seemed to be. That's why I could usually feel things I couldn't see and by feeling I was able to see. I don't know if you have any sense that is better than the other, but you might and you might be able to use it. And for smell, well, you could really pick any smell you like. Spices, perfume, shampoo, something. Smell can be extremely simple and I have found that it's pretty easy to impose. Might not be the same in your case, but hey. Smell is one of those senses that people don't really think about but it tends to play a big part in our lives and memories.

Be sure to write in the tulpa taste thread when you taste a tupper...
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Bernd on April 21, 2015, 04:35:28 PM
Any way I can figure out how cute girls smell like without getting myself arrested? And taste... things like that should only happen between two consenting parties!
Either you have your lgf or you don't.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on May 06, 2015, 01:55:49 PM
Okay, that was a fucking bad idea. And I can't even say I wasn't warned.

Turning something into an obligation can be beneficial, it allows you to draw on willpower to motivate you rather than just mood. But when you're short on willpower, it falls apart. And you know what will occasionally come along to steal away all your spare willpower? Real life.

So it worked for a little while. I felt that making myself dedicate long stretches of time helped me immerse myself more in the forcing. But then I realized I should really be studying for the upcoming exams (if you think my tulpaforcing habits are bad, you should look at my study habits). So I haven't really been forcing for the past ...2 weeks? Goddamnit time, slow down a little.

The absolutely worst is over, but these are still stressful times, so I have to change something about this if I want to make any progress this month (which I do). When reading about study technique, I read about a concept called interleaved practice, which is basically just a fancy term for mixing shit up, as opposed to doing the same shit for hours on end before moving on. Apparently this boosts learning quite a bit, keeps your mind on edge, I guess. I'm gonna try this out the coming days with studying, but I think it could also apply to forcing. Some visualization here, some narration there, a good sniff when the mood strikes, all hopefully adding together for a day filled with tulpa interaction. I'm not sure if it's more productive, but it sounds a lot easier to do, since I'd be riding short bursts of motivation, rather than trying to summon the willpower to put aside life completely for a long forcing session.

In other words, it would let me tulpaforce for fun. I completely forgot about having fun, and fun is pretty fucking important when you're already spending a good part of your day not having fun. If anyone has any additional advice for how to change my mindset and have more fun, I'll gladly receive it.

Oh, I should point out that that Fede post up there is great. I'll definitely be using that as my visualization method from now on. The top down approach gives me some visual information to focus on even if I can't make out every single detail, which means I don't feel like I "failed" to visualize her unless I got every detail down. It's like remembering to put up your canvas before you start painting.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on May 06, 2015, 02:12:40 PM
Yeah I would always suggest you to try which one works for you better: long forcing sessions or short ones. Some people need the extra time to get in the MOOD, but for some people (especially busy people or people who get distracted easily), shorter ones work the best. It's easier to set aside like 10 minutes right now or something and do it multiple times a day.

Have you had enough cake with your tupper yet? And better yet: what do you think is fun?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on May 07, 2015, 06:07:44 AM
Fun things are fun. In regards to tulpaforcing? It's honestly a little tough to answer. I feel that the truly fun things will come after she gains some vocality. Playing video games together, either working together to beat a single player game or playing against each other hot seat style. Watching, reading or listening to something and discuss it afterwards. Make things together. Sit down with a morning coffee together and discuss the decline of humanity. Go on fantasy adventures in wonderland together. Tulpasex. There's no shortage of fun things to do when I feel I got reliable two way interaction with her. But before that, what is there? Narration can be satisfying, since sometimes I just feel like rambling about something and don't really need a reply, but only in moderation. Wonderland can be a nice place to hang out, but it's not as fun as video games.

I'll bake a tulpacake for her later today.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on May 07, 2015, 07:44:40 AM
Well no, what things do you find fun so we can see if there's something that might work for you here as well. I'm sure you have thought all about what will be fun when you finally have that vocal tupper, that's the entire reason you are forcing, isn't it? But we want to avoid that mentality and find things that are fun to do now.

You could narrate while playing video games as well. Your playing will most likely suffer a bit if you keep your attention on the tupper and you want to watch out that you don't get distracted by the game, but that's a thing.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on May 08, 2015, 05:18:13 AM
Oh, that makes sense. I might have been approaching this with a too future-oriented mindset.

Generally I enjoy stuff like anime, video games, eroge, and music. Things that I've found it hard to incorporate into tulpaforcing without taking away too much focus from it.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on May 08, 2015, 07:53:13 AM
Better start singing duets with tupper.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on June 10, 2015, 06:40:17 AM
Jesus Christ, it's been over a month? I really need to find a way to deal with exam stress without sacrificing on other important things.

With the little forcing I've done since last time, I'd expect to regress a little, but I actually realized something the other day, a very subtle but notable feeling. I'm not alone. No, there's not a constant feeling of presence yet, and I can easily go a long time without remembering I have company if I'm occupied with something. But when I stop and think about it, it's really hard to convince myself I'm alone. When I talk to myself in my head like I've been doing my whole life, I suddenly feel silly for talking to myself when others are around. This might just be belief made into habit after reaffirming it over a long period of time, but even that is an important step, right?

The past few days I've been taking walks for no reason other than to enjoy the sunlight or the fresh night air, and with no immediate distractions around, it's easy to see it as just spending time with her. It's mostly been a spontaneous thing, but I might make it into a habit, since it's enjoyable and I like sharing enjoyable moments with her.

I've also decided to take meditation more seriously. I've known for a long time that I get distracted by little things so easily that I can hardly even live my life properly. Last month I concluded that I could just accept that and live more capriciously, constantly switching between tasks and doing what interests me most at the time. Which seemed pretty reasonable at the time due to that whole interleaved learning principle. But after thinking more about it, there's something seriously wrong when I can get distracted after 2 minutes while doing something I honestly find fun and rewarding, but I can spend hours being lost in some mindless timesink game that I don't even know why I'm playing. And I think meditation is the key to solving this paradox, for reasons that should be obvious enough that I don't need to go into it. With all the potential benefits meditation has for tulpaforcing, I don't think anyone can afford not to do it.

Oh, and I put up post-it notes. All over my apartment. Passive forcing reminders. Not sure how much it helps, since they quickly fade into the background when I start getting used to them, but they certainly can't hurt.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on June 10, 2015, 08:01:39 AM
Wear something on your hand that you constantly feel and are able to see when you look down as a reminder.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Dutch on June 11, 2015, 07:41:22 AM
You'll get used to anything, so the only reasonable solution with a physical reminder is to shake things up very regularly. Maybe get a watch and anchor wearing it to thinking about your tulpa, and every time you get used to it, change the wrist, make it looser or tighter, get a second watch with a different weight and band material. Or do it with any kind of armband.

Or tattoo your tulpa's kawaii anime face on your dick, so you remember her every time you fap.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on June 11, 2015, 12:24:39 PM
Woah, Fede bringing on the heat.

I'm not apathetic, I'm just worthless at anything that requires consistent effort.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on June 12, 2015, 11:41:34 AM
Okay, bear with me while I try to figure this out, because your insistence that my failures are caused by apathy, or any synonym of it, has some pretty far reaching implications for me.

I could just conclude that you're telling me to give up because I don't care enough about this. But if you've been reading my posts, it should be pretty clear that my lack of dedication is not exclusive to tulpaforcing, it applies to everything I set out to achieve. Studying, exercising, clearing my backlog, keeping my apartment tidy, sorting my porn folder, and so on. For some of these, it might be true that I don't really want it enough to ever achieve it, the porn folder being an example where I've just rationally concluded "my desire to achieve this is outweighed by my desire to not spend time on it". But for most goals, it's impossible for me to conclude that I don't really want to achieve them. I know that exercising regularly makes me happy, it's proven by science and I've experienced it myself many, many times. I also know that I want to be happy, I don't see how I can not want that. But despite all rational thought saying that I should do it, sometimes I end up not doing it. Because there's a non-rational part of my brain that doesn't understand the concept of long-term happiness, and instead always tries to seek instant gratification, and sometimes this part of my brain somehow ends up calling the shots. I guess I could just call it the id. My id is being a cunt and won't shut up.

Assuming this all makes sense, there's a few different things I could do to resolve the disagreement.
a) Just conclude that what id wants is what I want and let it have its way, giving up on tulpaforcing, cancelling my gym membership, dropping out of college, and spend the rest of my life fapping, drinking beer and eating pizza. And in case this sounds like a good outcome, keep in mind that id is too stupid to figure out how to obtain the money to buy beer and pizza with.
b) Get better control of my id so I can stop it from making decisions for me. This is essentially what I'm already trying to do by stepping up my meditation game.
c) Brainwash id into thinking that it actually wants the same things I do. I was actually thinking about something like this earlier today, isn't this kinda what you aim to do with your belief implanting?

Would any of these satisfy you?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: waffles on June 12, 2015, 03:09:12 PM
id is too stupid to figure out how to obtain the money to buy beer and pizza with.
Welfare, ideally.


c) Brainwash id into thinking that it actually wants the same things I do. I was actually thinking about something like this earlier today, isn't this kinda what you aim to do with your belief implanting?
I'm not Fede (as far as you know) and I can't speak for belief implanting, but that calls to mind something else, which is habit/reward stuff. I only have this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html) to hand to show you what I mean - it kind of meanders between data collection and habit formation. But yeah, I dunno if you'll have seen some stuff like that before. But worth considering I guess.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on June 12, 2015, 05:00:34 PM
Id? Do we Freud now?

I have a feeling that it's better to not assume that a part of yourself is not under your own control. You make those choices, not something else, as even your unconscious thoughts are a part of yourself. Just remember to stop and think rationally before continuing so you're not purely following whatever emotional conclusion you have come to.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on June 12, 2015, 06:57:31 PM
I'm not Fede (as far as you know) and I can't speak for belief implanting, but that calls to mind something else, which is habit/reward stuff. I only have this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html) to hand to show you what I mean - it kind of meanders between data collection and habit formation. But yeah, I dunno if you'll have seen some stuff like that before. But worth considering I guess.
I've actually read a whole book about that, called The Power of Habit. That article is like a condensed version of that book.
>By CHARLES DUHIGG
Oh right, that's the author of the book.

Conscious habit forming could be really useful, but I've found it hard to actually implement that habit cycle in anything. It says you need a cue and reward, but coming up with those are hard. I can't exactly give myself a cookie every time I successfully complete a task.

Id? Do we Freud now?
Freud literally predicted Fede. He must have been on to something.

Quote
I have a feeling that it's better to not assume that a part of yourself is not under your own control. You make those choices, not something else, as even your unconscious thoughts are a part of yourself. Just remember to stop and think rationally before continuing so you're not purely following whatever emotional conclusion you have come to.
It's more of a metaphor, I don't mean to imply that these things are out of my control and responsibility. I'm just arguing that sometimes we fuck up, and it's not necessarily because we didn't desire to not fuck up. You should all trust me on this, I'm an authority on fucking up.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on June 13, 2015, 07:31:54 AM
Excuse me young man, are you old enough for fucking?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on June 25, 2015, 03:37:32 AM
When striving for something, we sometimes fail a few times. We might have read our self-help books and know that we're supposed to treat failures as stepping stones towards success, but it's not always that easy. Too many failures and not enough success can get to you, unconsciously creating doubt, tearing at your confidence and lowering your expectations. And what does that set you up for? More failure. This goes twofold with tulpaforcing, since your expectations doesn't just affect your motivation, but also your results. The most obvious way to break the cycle is with success, but that won't be anywhere nearby if you're in deep. So where's plan B? This is where my thoughts have turned to autosuggestion, the only method I know of to make yourself believe something you want to believe. I recall Fede's guide has a section of belief implanting, and I've tried some simplified approximation of that method, but I can't help but wonder if there's anything else I could try. Right now I just love the feeling of allowing myself to believe, since for a while I've been feeling that I should hold it back, that I'll just cause her and myself disappointment if I think that things will be different this time. I really want to build the conviction that I could be seeing results any time, instead of mentally preparing for another month of achieving nothing.

For the past week, I've been really absorbed in video games and haven't been able to active force or meditate much at all. But despite that, I actually feel that things are moving forward. I knew that my attention would be scarce for a while, so I thought of a counter-measure. Instead of post-it notes or a string on my finger, which aren't nearly vivid enough to compete with a video game for my attention, I thought of one thing that could still get my attention: Pictures. So I went and got my hands on various pictures of cute animu girls who would remind me of Melo, and put them on a slideshow on another screen. It works great. Noticing it change every minute usually grabs my attention, and the association is instant. If the image stirs any emotions within me (a lot of the pictures are really cute and heartwarming), I direct more focus on Melo to try to associate it with her. If the character has any of her visual traits, I try to internalize it for later visualization. Now I can't help thinking of her all the time, and it feels like I'm constantly strengthening my idea of her by reinforcing associations and possibly creating some new ones. I'm working on figuring out how to do something similar with music, since that could give me a voice to associate with her, but I'm finding it a little harder. Maybe because I can't quite find the artist with the perfect voice (the best one I could find only has like 4-5 songs). Or maybe simply because I listen to music so often that it doesn't grab my attention anymore. In that case, finding some completely fresh music would probably help. I guess I'll do that now.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on July 04, 2015, 05:21:38 PM
There's one source of doubt that I find hard to get rid of: The feeling of doing it wrong. Lack of results can usually be explained by either not working hard enough, or using the wrong method. If you know it's the former, that's simple to amend, there's only one thing to do: Force more. But if you even suspect that it's the latter, that's a total motivation destroyer. Throw forcing more out the window, because even forcing at all is hard enough if you have the feeling that you might never get any results because you're doing everything wrong. This shit is why you should never put a pathological overthinker on a path that has a lot of time of overthinking things in between milestones.

I have removed one source of this doubt by upgrading my bullshit filter a little. There's this idea that goes around a lot, "if your tulpa isn't saying anything, it's just because you don't know how to listen to her". The part the implies you need practice to communicate with your tulpa seems perfectly reasonable. But it also implies that the only reason you can't hear your tulpa is because you're doing something wrong, not because you simply need to work more and give her more time to develop sentience. This kind of thinking has turned too many forcing sessions into "fuck, I didn't pull it off this time either", and it's about time I got rid of it.

Any advice for overcoming the rest of this doubt? And if one of you cheeky cunts say "force more" I'll smack you on the gabber i swear on me mum

Despite my need to air some of my doubts, things aren't going too shabby. I'm just balancing on the border between eagerness and impatience right now. In a couple of months, I'll be traveling abroad for a while, and I don't get to bring friends. The flight plan I'm filing only lists one of me, but I don't plan to be the only one who gets to stay on the aircraft. All those difficulties of going to a new scary place where you don't know anyone will become a lot less painful if you have someone who's always there for you. So the next step in my "masterplan" is to do everything I can to have a healthy and talkative tulpa before then. Conveniently, I don't have a lot of obligations in the meantime, so it's a perfect opportunity to step my game up. I just hope I can do it.

Oh yeah, back to actual progress report things. I've resumed meditation. I'm slowly getting into wonderland based forcing again, it seems I stopped doing this at some point because it required too much concentration, but I realized that's exactly why I should be doing it, things that require a lot of concentration are usually effective. I've made a subtle change to how I approach concentration challenges: If I can't focus entirely, I keep moving forward. Like, sometimes my visualizations don't feel as vivid as the previous day, because the mind is a moody bitch, and I'd get demotivated and stop after not getting to the same level, telling myself my concentration isn't good enough right now. That's stupid, so now I just go with what I have. Sometimes the concentration comes to me later, and even if it doesn't it's a hell of a lot better than waiting for perfect conditions to force.

I have some more faith in my ability to visualize using all senses after a particular experience where exploring an unexpected part of her body lead to an unexpected physical reaction from me. Wait, that sounds way worse than if I just put it straight. I fingered her bellybutton and got a boner, that's all.

Like I occasionally do, I've been going around rereading various guides in case there's still things I've missed previously. This time I found something interesting in Fede's guide, namely what he says about how a realistic personality needs some context outside of its interaction with you. At first this didn't quite click with me, because I never conceived of Melo as someone who would feel the need to withdraw from me, that would be downright contrary to her personality. But the part about treating your tulpa as a doll that you occasionally bring out to play with kinda struck me, because it really does feel like that sometimes. I thought about it for quite a while, whether I should give her some new hobbies or something that I can imagine her engaging in when I'm not there, but I couldn't find anything that fit. I'd have to completely rethink her personality if I wanted to imagine her willingly going off to do something alone. So what can I imagine her doing when I'm not paying attention to her? Hanging around me, hoping I'll pay attention to her. I'm completely satisfied with this conclusion, it gives her personality context and alleviates the feeling that I'm just bringing her out like a doll. It comes with the consequence of feeling bad about not paying enough attention to her, but that's my burden and I will carry it.

jesus christ how did this post get so long
there's probably even more but let's just stop
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on July 04, 2015, 05:43:17 PM
furs moa

I don't think there's really anything you can do wrong. I'm sure that out there, a person would manage to make a tupper by fapping and humping body pillows. If you do something wrong, I think you'd know it. Like say someone suggested that I pray to a god of their choice so that I can create a tupper. For someone, that would work, but for me? I probably wouldn't believe in this god of theirs in the first place, so there is nothing that would make it work for me because I consider the praying worthless. It would just make me scoff and go "yeah right". That would be a wrong method for me - and I would know that it wouldn't work, so it most likely wouldn't work.

You don't need to imagine your tupper doing everything and they often get their own things out of nowhere. The mindset that a tulpa can't do anything on their own and that you need to do everything for them is a pretty good way of convincing yourself that this is how it is and it will never get better if neither of you break out of that. Suggest things for the tupper to do and who knows, maybe they'll try them when you're not looking.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on July 04, 2015, 06:29:13 PM
a tulpa can't do anything on their own and that you need to do everything for them
That's not quite what I meant. I just can't imagine her completely fucking off to read a book in wonderland or something.

Wait a minute, maybe if it's....... Fuck. So what I meant about her personality is that she prefers company, so I think she'd rather hang around me than go off on adventures on her own. But a big part of it is that most wonderland activities seem like empty activities. Say your tulpa did fuck off to read a book from some cool giant library you set up in your wonderland, and you ask them after "what did you read?". How would that work? What DID they read?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on July 04, 2015, 06:35:10 PM
But do you know what her personality is?

How written things/books in our magical land work is that instead of words, it's intentions. There's kind of a limit to how complex they can be for me, though. Maybe a limit to everyone, unless you're a super special person who could remember an entire book.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on July 04, 2015, 06:40:58 PM
I decided on a personality when I started out, and though I can't really confirm at this point that all of those traits are currently manifested in her, I don't see what else I can do except assume so as long as I don't notice any deviation.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on July 04, 2015, 06:45:34 PM
Well, a person grows through their experiences. Does someone telling you adjectives make you what they say? Maybe you believe it for some time, but often you will learn that you're something else. In these cases, it would definitely be a good idea to tell her to not be what you tell her to be and be what she wants to be - especially because you think that what you have "made" her into wouldn't want to do something you want her to be able to do.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on July 04, 2015, 07:06:34 PM
I actually never told her what she is. Felt too weird to me. Instead, I talked to her about how I wanted her to be. I figured anyway that a tulpa will generally want to meet it's host's expectation, because that's how they get attention (even a host who is completely open to deviation is more likely to notice responses that are in line with their expectations).

So I guess I could tell her some crap about how she doesn't have to meet my expectations, but do I really have to? Is it that important that I allow her to be the kind of tulpa who needs a private life? Will you call the Tulpa Protection Services on me if I don't give her to be the freedom to be whoever she wants to be without even expressing to me that she wants it?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on July 04, 2015, 07:08:51 PM
Well, that's what you want, isn't it. Like you said, a young tupper easily starts doing things they think they host would like to suck up to them. If you want them to do their own things then telling them that they can do their own thing wouldn't really be a bad thing. Sure, they'll probably learn that they can do their own shit later on, but it doesn't really help you now, does it?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on July 04, 2015, 07:28:48 PM
It's not a problem for me now, though. It just means I have to give her plenty of attention to keep her satisfied, which I intend to do anyway.

Unless you mean to say that she'll start to hate me for not giving her anything to do when I'm just too busy to pay attention to her.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on July 04, 2015, 08:10:26 PM
Well, you did just worry about it earlier on. A couple of words will also not hurt anything but could help in the long run.
Title: Re: Meme Days
Post by: Kirarin on July 06, 2015, 04:50:40 AM
You mentioned in an earlier post that you wanted to try a "simplified approximation" of belief implanting... but... what the hell would you remove? Belief implanting is very simplified and direct as it is.
You give a step-by-step guide to it, starting from where you'd try to bring out the positive emotions. I've been skipping that step, since it sounds hard to just make myself feel feel happy emotions. Instead I just jump into it whenever I happen to feel a burst of positive emotion, which has been often thanks to that slideshow and music association experiment.

At the time I wrote that post I was also thinking of just dropping the positive emotion thing completely, since I've heard about the affirmation thing before without it, but it turns out that doesn't feel potent enough to even bother trying. Without emotion behind it, they're just words no matter how many times you repeat them.

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Now, having said that, you're a narrator. Narration and its typically implied mindset are very incompatible with my method. I don't know you, of course, but I'm willing to bet that most of the stuff I say in my guide isn't very useful in your case, aside from the little techniques here and there.
I might have read too much into it, then. I just like to look everywhere for techniques, guidelines, suggestions, viewpoints, and all that good stuff, instead of sticking to one guide or method. I've never considered myself an exclusive narrator who would never try parroting, it's just that when I've tried it previously, I quickly realized that it's really, really hard to make up lines for a qt animu grill when I can't form a sentence without sounding like a fucking nerd.

But regardless of method, surely it can't hurt to think about context, and just have a little story you tell yourself about how your tulpa werks?


Oh yeah, I knew there something I forgot to mention in the previous post, the music stuff. I thought it didn't work too well at first, but turns out I just needed to give myself some time to create the association. I've been listening almost exclusively to the same artist for the past days to weeks now, and at this point I'd say I can feel her personality from the music, if that makes any kind of sense.

I also said something about hoping to get a voice to associate with her, but that has been largely unsuccessful. There's a barrier here: This artist, along with any other voice I could try to draw inspiration from, is Japanese. I just can't imagine how it would sound like in English. Maybe it will come to me with more practice. I have another thing to test out later this week anyway.
Title: Re: Mame Days
Post by: Kirarin on July 09, 2015, 05:56:01 AM
You expect whatever she'd say outside your "control" to be much better than what you could consciously devise for her character? Your expectations are too big, and you aim too high.
That's actually a really good point. My perfectiautism seems to have set a standard that I can't even properly define before I see it fulfilled. That doesn't sound good even from a narration perspective. I'm gonna have to rethink a few things.

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It's a long story and my hand hurts. I don't really interact with my imagination anymore.
Fede had a tough imaginary life.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on July 09, 2015, 08:15:04 AM
Yes, rip.
Title: Re: Kyunkyun Days
Post by: Kirarin on July 20, 2015, 05:16:23 AM
I feel I should mention something about what happened to me a few days ago, which I think I could say is the strangest thing that has happened to me during this whole thing so far. I was just sitting down, happily listening to some cute music, kinda lazily visualizing her in the corner of my eye, sitting in the chair behind me. And I felt the urge to hug her. Nothing unusual so far. So I went to hug her, and along with the rush of happiness I usually feel from that, I felt this tightening in my chest. This was new and interesting, so I started focusing on it, and it grew stronger, quickly getting to the point where it was actually a little painful, but I still embraced it because I was pretty excited by something so weird happening. Eventually I had to let go, but it didn't seem to stop as long as thought of her. I wasn't even focusing that much on her at this point, I was trying to gain control of my breathing, repeatedly planting my face in my hands as if this position would help somehow, and got up to pace back and forth wondering if something is going right or if I'm just finally losing it. Only when I completely stopped thinking about her did it stop.

I've since felt the same slight sensation maybe once or twice while hugging her, but nothing as intense. Not that I've been trying, I don't think I could handle that stuff regularly.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on July 20, 2015, 07:55:06 AM
Clearly she's using her succubus hands to suppress your heart so it can't work, watch out!
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on August 18, 2015, 05:59:52 AM
Another uneventful month, to finish up an uneventful year. Yeah, 4 days ago it was a year since I started. Instead of being celebratory, like a birthday (no, I didn't make cake, sorry), I've actually been dreading that date for a while, since it's hard to look at a whole year without vocality without kinda feeling like a failure. But life goes on, and I'll keep on doing this even though my expectations are honestly rock-bottom at this point.

I still wanna be a little hopeful that this year will be more successful, and I'm putting some more hope on meditation this time. I realized that when I fall off from daily forcing, it's not so much that I lose motivation, it's that I feel completely incapable of forcing. I seem to lose my ability to focus on things when I'm stressed out about things in my life, which it turns out I'm extremely prone to. In the hopes that it will be the miracle cure for my troubled mind, meditation is now my top priority in life. I even prioritize it over forcing itself, hoping that forcing less with a more focused mind will be more effective than forcing more with an unfocused mind. Let's just hope I don't achieve enlightenment first.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on August 18, 2015, 06:15:55 AM
Human minds are dumb. But if you ask me, you haven't really had very uneventful months when it comes to tulpa stuff, reading this thread.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on August 18, 2015, 07:37:08 AM
It really feels like it to me. While other hosts talk about doing all kinds of fun stuff with their tulpas really early on, most of my posts are just reflecting on my methods and bringing up whatever minor stuff that might maybe be taken as a sign of sentience. And telling myself that I shouldn't compare myself to others doesn't change how I feel about this.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on December 07, 2015, 10:34:56 AM
It's been a while, huh? No progress to report, and I'm running out of new life changing discoveries to give me new hope about this, so I haven't had much to post about.

But if there's one thing that has changed, it's that I've gradually gotten really fucking sick of my own negativity. How I unconsciously let worries and bad conscience seep into everything. My dedication the past few months has been atrocious, there's no way to deny that, but dwelling on that is more likely to make it worse than better. Thinking to myself "oh man, I suck, I need to force more and harder" always leads to the worst forcing sessions, because I surround myself with the mindset of failure before even beginning. Same with the "fuck, this doesn't feel quite right, am I really doing this effectively?" bullshit, which is really just doubt trying to disguise itself as refinement of my methods. As you've all more or less have been trying to tell me since the beginning, the only thing I can trust is fun. Fun is definitely a better motivator than bad conscience, and I have a good feeling it's a better indicator of "doing it right" than my shitty attempts at self-examination.

I'll try to drop by the IRC more, as long as my connection remains stable enough that I don't just piss everyone off with disconnect spam. Being at least somewhat involved in a tulpa community has always helped me in the past.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on December 07, 2015, 08:28:01 PM
Bet you haven't even eaten cake with tulpa.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on December 07, 2015, 11:30:36 PM
How often must I do this to keep you satisfied?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on December 08, 2015, 07:33:02 AM
Until tulpa is satisfied.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on December 08, 2015, 08:36:41 PM
When tulpa says "yes, I'm satisfied".
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on August 23, 2016, 11:05:42 AM
This journal might not be too interesting to read at this point, with how many setbacks I'm reporting compared to progress, but I feel I should keep writing, if only for my own sake.

This past year has been totally shit, the kind of year you can look back at and think "I might as well have been in a coma this whole time". Only slowly starting to pull myself out of this mess now.

I've been struggling a lot with my confidence in tulpaforcing with so many setbacks. Usually I've just told myself "this is what I've been doing wrong all this time, so since I'm not doing that this time, everything will be different", but that's essentially placebo, because upon becoming aware that I'm just using it to convince myself I'll be successful, it doesn't really work anymore. My diminishing confidence needs to be resolved some other way, probably by letting determination decide how much effort I put in, rather than waiting and hoping for something to increase my confidence. And ironically, I've noticed that just putting in effort this way slowly increases my confidence anyway. I imagine more confidence will come naturally as I hit some progress milestones.

I've had to take a hard look at my motivation, since there's clearly a disconnect between how much I claim to care about this and the effort I've been putting in. My answer to that is that I'm just too future-oriented. I don't expect too much from what I do today, but I expect a lot from the future. And since I've been telling myself I don't wanna rush things by setting specific time expectations, that point in the future I'm working towards is really vague. I don't think I can use this as my motivation. It's like walking through the desert and only seeing the horizon, with no goal in sight, walking is indistinguishable from standing still, other than the fact that the former is far more tiresome than the latter. Maybe I can incorporate that AA motto, "one day at a time". Maybe I can focus on how Melo will like it if I spend some time with her right now (even if she won't necessarily communicate it), and realize that this is more important than what I intend to achieve with her in the future. Maybe I can have more fun, except actually doing it this time instead of just thinking it would be great to have more fun. It's probably just about shifting focus.

Kinda related to shifting focus, I started experimenting with meditative forcing. It's kinda awkward, because I just told myself I'd try to focus on Melo's "essence", without really knowing what I mean by that, how I do it, or if it makes any sense at all. So I just sit there, trying to focus on something so vague that there's no way to know whether I'm doing it right or if it would help me at all. And it made me realize, those thoughts that come to me as I try to focus, "am I doing this right?", "is this really going to work?", they're just distractions, the kind of thoughts I'm trying to get better at shifting focus away from by meditating. I've been told so many times to not doubt, thinking it means I have to reaffirm my belief or some shit, but it might be even more powerful to just identify the thoughts of doubt in my mind and realize it's my own choice whether to entertain them.

Got some minor stuff to report too. Few days ago I got an interesting auditory hallucination. Not too sure what to make of it, because I wasn't 100% awake at the time (was lying in bed in the morning, awake enough to be aware of my surroundings, but not awake enough to get out of bed), and upon asking Melo if it was her, I got no response. But it felt so uncannily real, I could clearly make out what kind of person the voice belonged to (was cute and feminine, matching up with Melo) and what it said, and even felt a sort of tickling in my ears from it. The tone of voice was really affectionate, which alone makes me really want to believe it was her, but it's hard due to my skepticism towards things I experience in a not completely awake state. If nothing else, it was a good demonstration of what it will be like when Melo gets her own voice, something I've been struggling to imagine before.

And lastly, not a very big thing, but I've gotten sick of seeing the same boring wonderland not too different from how I started on it 2 years ago (jesus christ it's been 2 years now), so I've resolved to just act on whatever random idea I got for how to change it or just make completely new locations. Yesterday I was sitting with Melo in this hottub on top of a star-shaped platform floating high up in the sky, and I realized, wow this is kinda exciting. I don't think I've felt like that since I first started this journey. I hope that the future still has many more moments like that to offer.

Oh by the way, if anyone didn't know, I've been hanging around in the IRC recently, but someone stole my registered nick, so I'm known as shobon now.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on August 24, 2016, 09:28:20 AM
Remember to celebrate things with cake, though.

Anyway, yeah. You're going to have to put in effort to get anywhere. There's those who are "naturals" (though who knows how quickly they actually get a tulpa and how much of it is them assuming stuff) but even those tend to put a lot of time into forcing and such. Gotta get obsessed yo.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on August 24, 2016, 02:22:18 PM
Of course. When I talk about confidence struggles, a big part of that is the confidence in my ability to actually stick with it this time. The smaller part is the gradually learned experience of "effort leads me nowhere", even though I know that the only reason my effort hasn't born more fruit is that it's so randomly scattered over the course of 2 years. I need more concentrated effort. Maybe like a boot camp or something?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Bernd on August 24, 2016, 07:46:13 PM
Hey, good to see you're still around (https://tulpanetwork.com/network/11/meromero-days/msg3738/#msg3738).

Well I can kinda relate, been suffering from exactly the same problems lately, but at least I know what to do now.
Not that I didn't always know, I was just too lazy.

If effort doesn't lead you anywhere, maybe you need more effort? I mean real effort.
I thought I was doing so much for and together with my tupper, but in the end I realized I only did it for me, barely thinking about her. Yeah, there were those active forcing sessions every now and then but calling that effort would be pathetic. Not only did this routine yield no progress, it actually made her weaker because my attention was completely elsewhere.

Sand is right, you gotta WANT to force, being obsessed with your tupper is the best bet when it comes to progress. Even the tightest schedule is useless if everything feels like a chore. You gotta love what you do. Just like with gittin real gud at any other skill. The only advice I have, though I suck at following it myself quite often, is to involve your tupper into even the most mundane activities. Always. If you want her to get strong she needs to be the center of your life. In good and in bad times. It's like unconditional love. You don't force because you want to see some special progress, you just want to spend time with tupper. Without any expectations. Just for her (http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/509/322/e45.png).

I managed to keep that up the first half year and progress was stellar. That's where I want to get back to.

And I think the boot camp is actually a good idea. Try one or two weeks of daily updates here, it really helped me. Plus it will make the forum at least a little bit less dead.

Now start by filling out the image for us, we still don't know what Melo looks like!
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on August 25, 2016, 03:39:24 PM
If effort doesn't lead you anywhere, maybe you need more effort? I mean real effort.
I thought I was doing so much for and together with my tupper, but in the end I realized I only did it for me, barely thinking about her. Yeah, there were those active forcing sessions every now and then but calling that effort would be pathetic. Not only did this routine yield no progress, it actually made her weaker because my attention was completely elsewhere.
Good point. I gave it some thought, and it's definitely true that I don't do it that much for her as much as I do it for me. And when I do it for me, it's not so much doing it because I want to do it, but because I want to be able to tell myself I've put in the effort, that I did what I could (fuck, why does it so often sound like I'm talking about my life in general when I talk about forcing).

Doing it for her sounds like great motivation, but I've actually been kinda avoiding using it as motivation, because I'm afraid of the bad conscience that would come with failing to follow through. It's kinda stupid when I put it into words like that, but I haven't thought too much about it until now. All I need to do is focus on how it would make her happy if I talked to her more, not how it would make her sad if I didn't (while both might be true, thinking too much on the latter gets me too focused on how shit I am as a host, making it even harder to force more).

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Sand is right, you gotta WANT to force, being obsessed with your tupper is the best bet when it comes to progress.
I remember being kinda obsessed when I started out, but I felt that being too obsessed would put too much pressure on tulpa, so I started mellowing out. But again, that's only a problem when all the obsession is focused on progress. Being obsessed with forcing, with your tulpa, with experimenting, with spending time in wonderland, those are all healthy obsessions. I definitely want to kindle that.

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I managed to keep that up the first half year and progress was stellar. That's where I want to get back to.
I hope you manage to do that. I'm motivated to do my best now, so maybe we can fire each other up.

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And I think the boot camp is actually a good idea. Try one or two weeks of daily updates here, it really helped me. Plus it will make the forum at least a little bit less dead.
I think I will! I thought a little about how I could schedule a bunch of exercises to make the most out of my time, but all I really need to do is shower her with attention and try out many different things with her. And reporting back daily could probably help me keep my mind on track, as long as I can keep myself from just rambling every day about some new thing I realized about the nature of motivation and tulpaforcing.

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Now start by filling out the image for us, we still don't know what Melo looks like!
I don't have any single picture that completely shows what she looks like. I've just collected tons of different images, which I kinda randomly look through when I need to figure out how to manifest my vague list of visual traits. So I might look at one image (http://puu.sh/qOd2o/dbe0dadd73.jpg) to get an idea about the puffiness of her twintails, and a completely different image (http://puu.sh/qOdbP/4b4fe8ba39.png) for the shape of her eyes. It complicates things a lot, but it's the only way to get her form how I want it. Maybe if I learn to draw someday, I can show you what she really looks like!


I also experienced some neat things today. I was doing that meditative forcing thing again (trying to make it a routine), and while I'm mainly doing it to increase my focus, it turns out it's also great for examining the distractions that come up from a somewhat detached state. I was once again hit with the thought that this vague approach doesn't really do anything and I'm just pulling the wool over my eyes by not listening to the "voice of reason" telling me that I'm wasting my time, which made me think of the distinction between ignoring doubts and confronting them, and that I'm trying to do the latter. I also got these minor foreign feelings that didn't really match my state of mind, making me jump to thinking about how I'd describe these feelings to a third party and downplay them as maybe just random emotional hallucinations. This made it really clear that I have an extremely shitty attitude when it comes to sharing my experience, always trying to downplay whatever happened to me so I don't seem foolishly excited over minor things, but secretly hoping someone will tell me "dude, that was definitely your tulpa!", to which I'll respond "naaahhh, I'm not too sure", hoping they'll convince me harder. I read that post by Sands a long time ago about absence of doubt, and I think I half misunderstood and/or corrupted the meaning over time. I took out of it that whenever I see something that might be a sign, I don't have to instantly conclude whether it really was her, which made me want to always be rational and neutral and never jump to conclusions, which just lead me to introducing doubt to balance out belief whenever something exciting happens. Which isn't right at all. Sands' point, I believe, was simply about not using blind belief as a tool to drown out doubt. So what I really want to do is acknowledge doubt as a distraction, but one that I can overcome, instead of ignoring or drowning out. And when something happens that genuinely excites me and makes me want to believe it was actually her, there's no need to do anything about it, I can just allow myself to be excited ....r-right?

Speaking of things I want to believe was her, I got one today. When I said in the first paragraph that I thought about who I'm really forcing for, what I actually did was narrate it to her. I was kinda rambling back and forth, not sure what to make of my thoughts at first and taking a moment to comment that the semantics are fucking me up, when I felt a head pressure. For context, I've been having occasional head pressures pretty much since I started forcing, always in the exact same spot. For a long time I haven't been sure what to make of them, since those techniques for using head pressures for communication never worked for me. At first I only got them while forcing, but later they've been happening at random times. Then they've stopped completely as I've gone a long time without forcing, only to come back again at random times after something triggers me to think I should get back to forcing again. This correlation between being aware of Melo and getting head pressures convinced me that they have to be related to her even if she can't seem to use them to communicate, so I just started interpreting them as poking. Now whenever I get head pressures, I direct my attention to her and ask her if there was anything she wanted, and when that doesn't get me any response, I just spend some time telling her I haven't forgotten about her. So back to earlier today. I was going through that examination of my motivations for forcing, when I got that head pressure, and I stop and direct my attention to her, asking her what it is (more out of habit than because I expected a response). And I instantly get this new feeling washing over me, a really comforting feeling, as if she was telling me without words "it's okay, you don't have to worry so much". Or maybe she did use words actually, I'm realizing as I'm writing this that I did have that exact thought in my head, and I just ascribed it to being a description of the emotion I felt without giving it too much thought. This is where I'll allow myself to just accept it without drawing out any skepticism. Nor do I need anyone to confirm anything. I both want to believe and find it hard to even question that it was her.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on August 25, 2016, 03:52:38 PM
How can it be absence of disbelief when you add disbelief, homo.

Anyway, it looks like you indeed managed to use headpressure as a form of communication, just like that. It's like you're a big boy now...
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on August 25, 2016, 03:56:23 PM
How can it be absence of disbelief when you add disbelief, homo.
By being an idiot who gets hung up in a single detail and forgets the main point.

Quote
It's like you're a big boy now...
doushio
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Bernd on August 31, 2016, 08:15:21 PM
Where's them daily updates?

I know the pain of having no matching image for tupper. It certainly makes visualizing a lot harder. Can't draw shit either. So you're not alone.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 08, 2016, 01:01:49 AM
Last few posts made me feel like I had said enough for a month, so I kinda put off the idea.

Something has been on my mind the past day that I feel I need to resolve with myself. I've been visiting this clinic to investigate whether I might have autism (shouldn't be a big surprise for someone in this community), but yesterday one of the doctors brought up that they might need to investigate if I also have ADHD. I've always had various issues with focusing, but throughout my whole childhood no one ever told me I might have ADD/ADHD, so I figured I was just a little undisciplined and restless by nature. Now that someone has finally said that it's a possibility, all the implications suddenly come crashing down on me. Particularly, it would explain so much of my issues with forcing. While I try not to compare myself to others that much, I've been wondering for a while why some people just read a single guide and manage to achieve vocality in a few weeks, while I've been reading everything I can get my hands on and debating every intricacy of tulpaforcing with myself for years without managing to find out what they know that I don't. I've chalked it up to having a tendency to overthink things, but why do I have this tendency in the first place? Why can't I seem to control it even after acknowledging it's causing more problems than it's solving? ADHD might explain all that.

So while it's not an official diagnosis yet, I can't get the idea out of my head now, and I've been thinking about what I should do about it if it's really the case. Decided to search through the .info forums to see if there were any hosts with ADD/ADHD who had found ways around it. Found this one post that resonated with me:
Quote
I actually made an account just to reply to this thread, because, Quenz, I really feel for your description of "laziness" that prevents you from spending time with Sky. I had a very similar experience for my entire academic career. In adulthood I discovered that what I was experiencing as an inexplicable "laziness" was actually executive dysfunction, which is a symptom of a number of mental disorders including autism and ADHD, both of which I have, both of which I was not diagnosed with for the whole span of my childhood and teen years. I was confused and frustrated with myself for years. I didn't understand why I couldn't tear myself away from aimlessly browsing the internet, playing video games, or any of the other pointless pursuits that occupied my time in favor of things that were more edifying and enjoyable, not to mention productive.
Particularly that last sentence is literally me, in all parts of my life for the past decade.

But in the end, all I've really learned is that my problems might be related to an actual medical conditions rather than me just being a lazy piece of shit, and that things might get better if I get some medications prescribed. I wanted something more, some stories about people overcoming the same challenges as me through means I can copy, not people lamenting over how hard it is. Particularly this thread (https://community.tulpa.info/thread-the-sushi-thing) got my attention for seeming to address the challenges, but it only makes it seem gloomier, since the poor guy doesn't seem to be getting anywhere.

Only idea I got is meditation. Some quick googling suggests that meditation does in fact help against the symptoms of ADD/ADHD. But I've known for a long time now that meditation helps with forcing and I still can't keep a good routine on it, so not sure what will make it different this time. Incidentally, I dropped the essence focusing meditation since I felt it wasn't that productive after all, promising myself I'd just go back to the more familiar focus-on-your-breathing meditation, but I haven't fulfilled that promise yet.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 08, 2016, 07:28:33 AM
But then again, some people don't have any diagnosed/suspected medical issues and are still slow, while others do have those and are fast. It's pretty personal.

Don't try to get an excuse you can tell yourself while slacking off. Because man, you've done nothing this far? Are you even trying?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 08, 2016, 08:57:34 AM
Why would I be looking for an excuse? I think you know as well as me that both wallowing in guilt and trying to fight guilt are a waste of mental resources compared to simply forcing more. I just feel that ADHD could explain a lot about the particular challenges I've been facing, and maybe give some answers about how to deal with them. The diagnosis has implications for how you approach studying and working, so why wouldn't it have implications for tulpaforcing?

And it's not like I haven't done anything since last post, just didn't feel I had much to report on. Had some active forcing sessions I got pretty absorbed in by just jumping into it as soon as I felt any trace of an impulse to force, but haven't been able to turn it into a regular thing. On the other hand, I've been doing way more passive forcing than normal, but the fact that the only responses I get are when I'm deeply concentrated, makes the usefulness of passive forcing feel really questionable.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 09, 2016, 05:04:17 AM
Well, ADHD and autism/Asperger's are the kind of disorders diagnoses that are handed out like candy. If candy is handed out a lot I dunno. There's lots of side effects with the meds too, so abandon the ones that make you a zombie.

While learning to focus is all fine and dandy, the end result you want is responses from tupper's without focusing. I'm not sure what would make you better at that, but more passive forcing might help and not be as useless as you think.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 09, 2016, 04:52:26 PM
Well, maybe. I thought a lot about it, made that post, and then it suddenly stopped bothering me that much. I guess even if I found some advice specifically tailored for people with ADHD, it wouldn't be as useful as "do whatever helps YOU feel helps YOU focus". So in the end, nothing really changes.

I'm probably just being a little too hard on myself on passive forcing. It feels unproductive because I don't seem to be getting any better at it or getting any responses out of it, but it's really the sort of thing you get better at without noticing, and not getting any immediate responses doesn't mean it doesn't work at all. I still feel active forcing is the bread and butter, but as long as I don't use passive as an excuse to not bother with active, there's no reason I shouldn't try to passive force whenever I remember to.

Also, I noticed that Bernd has started on another week of daily updates, so I guess this would be a good time to accept his challenge.

Today I experimented with a new forcing schedule: Setting up computer notifications every hour reminding me to go force for 5 minutes. 5 minutes feels like the sweet spot where just fucking doing it is easier than putting it off. And 5 minutes is just the minimum, if I feel like doing more I just keep going. Got a lot of forcing done this way. Did a bunch of random wonderland stuff. Built a merry-go-round for no particular reason, which I later removed out of frustration after realizing how hard it is to visualize your surroundings when being moved around. Fucked around a bunch with parroting just to see how well I can imagine a voice (not very well so far). Made Melo cosplay to spice things up a little while visualizing her. Visualization is still fucking hard to me, but turning it into a thing to play around with makes me far less likely to fry my brain and burn out. Made a creepy basement with a portal to make it easier to visualize visiting completely new places. Made a treehouse, but didn't have any ideas for what to put in it, so I asked Melo, and after a few seconds of nothing, the word "aquarium" popped up in my head, which made no fucking sense to me, but now I have an aquarium inside house on top of a really fucking tall tree. Lost count of the hugs, but also a did a few headpats, and kissed her on the forehead at one point when it seemed like she was expecting something like that. Got headpressures during most of the sessions, but asking her what she means by it didn't lead anywhere this time. Assuming it's not just some kind of strain from focusing hard, maybe it's just a way to poke me. Sometimes people poke even if they don't have anything to say. Other than that, the signs of autonomy mostly come in the form of seeing her randomly move around. Sometimes it seems like that I just attributed a movement to her, other times I'm more willing to believe I had nothing to do with it. Lots of grey area cases, like when I asked her what she thought about her new outfit and she returned a thumbs up, which could have just been me unintentionally brainstorming for what a positive response might look like. Should probably investigate more into that, since being able to clearly make out yes or no would be a helpful start for communication.

Overall, I feel today was pretty productive and enjoyable. Not sure how long I can keep up this kind of schedule, but I definitely want to keep trying for a while. Beyond being productive, I feel it's also conditioning me to be willing to just impulsively jump into forcing instead of putting it off all day.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 10, 2016, 06:47:35 AM
Definitely should always do active forcing as well, yeah. That's good to get some work really done, but passive's all about introducing the tupper to your daily life, I guess.

About motion, you could try to look at your environment slowly at first, going through the same path as you would. With something like a merry-go-round, it's easy because of a very small, set path. Once you can see it at your own speed, you'll have an easier time seeing it when you're going faster. Maybe literally easier as if you go fast enough, everything's actually a blur.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 10, 2016, 05:27:21 PM
Read something a while ago about how passive forcing helps create associations between your tulpa and the world around you, thus making them feel more real. Kinda made sense to me.

So day 2 of daily updates.

Kept up the schedule as best as I could, but didn't quite have the drive from yesterday, not pushing past the minimum 5 minutes for most sessions. Gotta turn up my experimentation another notch to not run out of interesting stuff to do.

Resurrected the merry-go-round with the above suggestion to make it slower. Worked a little better, but still hard, ended up just going off and watching her ride it alone. I think my mind just has a harder time accepting that I'm moving around when I'm not actively moving myself. Much easier to visualize taking my own steps.

Tried making her do various poses, which felt kinda silly, but probably helped a little with visualization. Then I tried to focus more on just visualization by moving into a void and letting myself just view her from any angle without regarding my own position in relation to her. I really made my work harder by deciding on a 2D form, instead of imagining real shapes, I gotta think like an artist and reduce everything to lines and shading, something I have no previous experience with. Either I'll have to find some kind of game that does a good job of representing the 2D aesthetic in 3D and use that for inspiration, or I'm gonna spend a lot of time staring at drawings trying to figure out how the fuck that combination of lines makes the face look cute.

Been observing her movements a lot. She does a bunch of stuff that doesn't seem like something I puppeted her to do, but whenever I try to ask her something and tell her to answer with body language, I find my mind too clouded with expectations and genuinely can't tell if they're dictating what I see. Did experience something pretty unexpected, though. I was touching her back and noticed her tail wrapping around my wrist, as if it to arrest it. Wouldn't be the first time this has happened, but this time it was extra interesting, because I totally forgot she has a tail, I gave her one ages ago, along with some other devilish features, but at some point I just forgot to actively visualize her with it. To me this implies that she has some kind of idea of what her form is regardless of how I'm trying to visualize her, combating the idea that I'm just visualizing her from scratch every single time.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Bernd on September 10, 2016, 07:45:23 PM
Quote from: Kirarin
I guess even if I found some advice specifically tailored for people with ADHD, it wouldn't be as useful as "do whatever helps YOU feel helps YOU focus". So in the end, nothing really changes.
This.
I agree with Colonel, all these 'disorders' are a huge business and a lot of people are over-diagnosed and -treated, often with questionable results and severe side-effects. I mean we're living in times in which it's almost required to have some sort of mental disorder, food intolerance or exotic gender role to belong to the cool kids, along with a flock of associated 'therapists'.
First world problems.

In the end you've gotta find your own way.
And I think that's not just a sort of handicap, it's a gift. Because it's YOUR personal way and the only thing that matters is that YOU feel alright with it. And tupper of course.
Just try a couple of things and stay with the ones that work for you. Just don't make my mistake and try something completely different every time. I know it's hard to focus on a particular forcing goal but without the proper routine, progress will slow down to a crawl. Like with training any skill. But then again, it's different for everyone.

Quote from: Kirarin
Also, I noticed that Bernd has started on another week of daily updates, so I guess this would be a good time to accept his challenge.
(http://hnng.moe/f/HMB)

Just remember to have fun together and form a bond, at least to me that's more important than staring at details.

Also I'm curious what Melo's tail looks like.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 11, 2016, 08:16:06 PM
Just don't make my mistake and try something completely different every time.
I've learned that there's a line somewhere between both extremes of always trying new things hoping for a miraculous breakthrough, and settling into a boring routine while stagnating.

Quote
Also I'm curious what Melo's tail looks like.
It's this black spaded tail with a rubbery texture that you often see on cute devils. I imagine that if I licked it, it would taste like licorice, but I fear that at the moment that would count as unsolicited sexual contact.


For day 3, I did a little more of the same. Added an observation deck to this really big tower I made earlier. I realized that while spiral staircases are really practical when building tall buildings, they're really hard to visualize going through. I think it's something about not being able to perceive exactly how you move through space.

Did some experiments on other senses. Basic tastes are really easy to imagine. Sounds are kinda tricky. Tried to imagine playing on a xylophone, and I could hear a basic scale and an arpeggio, but not much more. Tried to get Melo to try, and she appeared to just repeatedly hit one of the lower keys, which somehow produced a high pitched note.

Revisited an old experiment I did with using the real world as reference when visualizing Melo, specifically to get an idea of her height in relation to me. Basically just finding a spot that's as tall as the top of her head and using it as reference. Still seems to be a nice little trick, since I'm working with a bit of a size difference that is sometimes hard to wrap my head around.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Bernd on September 11, 2016, 09:21:25 PM
Quote from: Kirarin
It's this black spaded tail with a rubbery texture that you often see on cute devils. I imagine that if I licked it, it would taste like licorice, but I fear that at the moment that would count as unsolicited sexual contact.
Just don't chew on it.

Quote from: Kirarin
Tried to imagine playing on a xylophone, and I could hear a basic scale and an arpeggio, but not much more. Tried to get Melo to try, and she appeared to just repeatedly hit one of the lower keys, which somehow produced a high pitched note.
That's what I love about tuppering. Might as well have been an elephant's trumpet. You never know what's gonna happen.

How tall is Melo supposed to be?
My tupper is about 140cm which is also some height difference though I am no giant.  In familiar surroundings I have enough reference spots to get her height about right but at least for me it's way more difficult if she is moving from or towards me in a greater distance. I've found that using people of similar height is a great help. I let tupper follow them as they move around to get an idea how sizes change with distance.
Just don't stare at little girls for too long and get yourself arrested
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 12, 2016, 06:43:18 PM
She's 130cm. Don't judge. For the longest time, I really struggled to visualize her even a meter away from me. She'd just suck up to me like a magnet when I tried to move away. As romantic as that sounds, it made it kinda hard to visualize her properly. Anyway, I think this was because my only reference point at the time was my own body, I just imagined her reaching up to my chest, which is easy to imagine when she's right next to me, but hard to imagine when she's further away. Pretty sure this got better last time I made some reference points in my apartment and just imagined Melo standing next to them while walking around her. But just because she's not a magnet anymore doesn't mean I can't use more training.

Day 4 was kinda lazy. Woke up late, so I missed a few potential forcing timeslots just to that. Didn't have a lot of ideas for things to do either, but I remembered this set of drawings showing some weird futuristic world that's completely flooded and has catgirls. Always seemed like a cool place to explore, so I put that portal to use and took her there. Then I spent a lot of time thinking about how those platforms in the water works. They can't be floating on the water, because that wouldn't be stable enough. But does that mean they just have a structure underneath connecting them to the seabed? How would such a structure work anyway? Do they require less or more stability than structures built on land? But if the height is fixed, what happens during tide? Would a planet covered in water even have tide? World building is hard. And not really what I set out to do. But it's hard for me to not think about how things work before trying to figure out how it would look. Without resolving all of that, I figured that the first step in such a world would be to get into a boat. I got in just fine, but when Melo went it, the whole thing just toppled over. Weird stuff. I've lifted her before and she's not that heavy. I think my physics engine is bugged.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Bernd on September 12, 2016, 08:55:27 PM
Quote from: Kirarin
She's 130cm. Don't judge.
Who, me? (https://tulpanetwork.com/network/11/timethief-descends-into-hell-for-a-bottle-of-milk/msg4689/#msg4689)

Just an advice from a perfectionist:
Don't overthink stuff, just go with the flow. Even if odd things happen.
Of course you can try to emulate the real world as closely as possible but I think that doesn't do the endless possibilities a wonderland has to offer justice. I started like that but in the end it turned out completely different anyway. Don't let the idea that everything has to make sense restrict your or tupper's creativity.
And don't forget to let Melo create more parts of your world. I'm sure she'll come up with some neat stuff.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 13, 2016, 08:20:32 AM
Your mind's pretty good at filling in the blanks. Might not stand up to scrutiny, but indeed if you just go with the flow, you might not notice the strange things that are off and it just looks normal to you.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 13, 2016, 08:43:11 PM
Having a wonderland that can operate free of real world logic does sound kinda nice. I guess I'll try to liberate myself a little from Newtonian physics.

And we're at day 5 already. Mostly just narrated today. Had a lot to think about regarding what I want for myself out of tulpaforcing. I've had this vague idea for a while that I want a tupper who is also my muse, supporting and inspiring me in creative pursuits and believing in me when I can't believe in myself, and I feel that being more concrete about that would add a lot to my drive to force. But ultimately, this would end up concerning Melo so much that I can't just decide on it without hearing what she has to say after becoming fully vocal. For now, I think the best I can do is teach her the joy of expression. Which is another vague idea, but maybe I'll come up with something.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 14, 2016, 06:37:36 AM
Muses remind me of this (http://oglaf.com/blank-page/) (nsfw warning there's like, a bare breast also don't look anywhere else).
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 14, 2016, 09:30:46 PM
Yes, that would be quite effect, if not as charming as I had imagined it. Also, thanks for reminding to catch up on oglaf.

Day 6. Almost there. Been slipping on the forcing schedule, though. Nothing unexpected, it's really easy to skip a session if it's inconvenient, and it's often inconvenient when it's every hour. 10 minutes every 2 hours might work out better, but I'll keep trying at least another day with this schedule, because never going more than an hour without giving the tup some kind of attention feels like a really nice principle to have.

First session today I didn't use the timer, figuring I'd just go a little longer to make up for putting it off. But it actually made it harder. Lacking the commitment of the timer, I found myself much more distracted by all the things I could be doing if I stopped forcing right away. Obviously I don't want to depend on a timer forever, especially since it can sometimes completely pull me out of a session, but for now I think it's helping me more than it's obstructing me.

Following some of the thoughts I had yesterday, I've been reading a little about the creative process of great composers and writers. Wouldn't surprise me if there were people throughout history who used something similar a tulpa in their creative process, but hard to find any concrete examples. Maybe Dante's Beatrice existed within him as more than just the woman he met, considering he spent his whole life obsessing over her and dedicating his writing to her despite only meeting her twice? Who knows. What ultimately interested me more was reading about how Shostakovitch would compose all of his works in his head, not needing to play it out along the way, just writing it down after finishing it in his head. That's exactly the kinda thing I wanna train myself to be able to do. I honestly have no clue if it's something I can learn, or if it's just a freak talent of savant composers, but surely only good can come out of gradually training myself to reproduce different timbers and tones in my head and trying to turn them into melodies and harmonies. Even if it doesn't turn into a useful skill, it should help with musical memory. Gotta teach Melo to sing one of these days too. Had this short session today where I tried to make up a new instrument consisting of bells with various pitches, and pedals to operate them. Wanted to play a chord on it, but can't do that with only 2 feet, so I got her to help me out. You could say we're in harmony now.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 15, 2016, 07:28:42 AM
Seeing these constant distractions and such and you being disappointed with your sessions, you should go for another week.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 15, 2016, 08:21:40 PM
I'm not that distracted! I'm just having my monthly existential crisis on the side and trying to figure out how I can channel it into forcing harder. But yeah, I could do another week. Better than risking falling off completely again.

Day 7. Had one of those days where visualization just failed me completely. Couldn't get myself to see her form at all. Tried to zoom in and do one part at a time, but it fell apart when focusing on more than one part. Tried to zoom out and just see her silhouette, but couldn't add any detail to it. Ended up spending a lot of time on it, but felt like I was beating my head against a wall. Not particularly worried, I figure it's just something that happens some days, but it's pretty frustrating to get worse instead of better, even if it's just momentarily. I got a few ideas for things to try if it persists tomorrow.

Otherwise I've just been keeping Melo's silhouette with me while seeing what weird stuff my imagination can come up with in wonderland. Like a landscape made up of hexagon cylinders, shifting in height to make up hills and mountains. In a bit of a nostalgic mood, I suddenly remembered this tower I built very shortly after I started forcing, but later demolished in favor of a bigger and more impressive tower. I went to the second floor, the one with the bed, and I remembered how I used to visualize cuddling with Melo there when going to sleep at night. That's ages ago now, might as well never have happened, but somehow visiting that place brings it right back, like visiting a childhood home. Really fascinating. Put that tower right back where it used to be, mostly for my own nostalgia, but maybe, just maybe, some of Melo's first memories are tied to that place.

Forcing schedule worked somewhat better today. Partly because I reminded myself that the reason I set 5 minutes is that there's no excuse for putting off something that will just take 5 minutes. And partly because I realized how retarded it is to declare myself too tired to force at 21:00 when I've started going to bed at 4:00.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 16, 2016, 09:40:38 PM
Day 8. Had another hypnagognic hallucination when going to sleep last night, imagining myself in that bed, hugging tulpa. Was a voice declaring its love for me. Though this time it was a male voice. Kinda awkward. I'm no homo, bro. I'm gonna assume that tups with no clearly established mindvoice sometimes just end up hijacking voices from recent memories.

Didn't feel as stuck on visualization today, fortunately. It's still not easy by any means, but I can work with it.Gonna dedicate a little more time looking at reference images to recreate in my mind, and trying to visualize close to real life objects I know are the same height as her, since I know those two things help.

My go-to strategy now when I'm forcing and can't think of what to do is to try to make some sounds. For instance, I tried parroting Melo humming Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which turned out to be one of my better experiences with imagining sound. Melodies like that are supposed to be memorable and easy to hum, so they're good to practice with. Definitely something I wanna do more of.

Passive forcing has felt like a bit of a struggle the past few days, but I think a part of that is me focusing so much on forming cohesive thoughts that I forget that I'm actually supposed to direct those thoughts somewhere. So 10 minutes into a philosophical monologue, I suddenly remember that I just wanted to tell Melo that the weather today is nice. Gonna practice more on shutting up and just focusing on her until I got something worth telling her.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 17, 2016, 07:08:20 AM
Well doesn't really have to be something worth telling anyone. Tuppers just sometimes have to deal with boring stuff too?!
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Bernd on September 17, 2016, 05:58:02 PM
Hypnagogic hallucinations can bring up extremely weird stuff. At least for me they are nearly impossible to control or shape into something useful and I assume it's even more difficult for tuppers. After all your brain is half asleep. So I wouldn't concern myself too much with their meaning.

Quote from: Kirarin
So 10 minutes into a philosophical monologue, I suddenly remember that I just wanted to tell Melo that the weather today is nice. Gonna practice more on shutting up and just focusing on her until I got something worth telling her.
Happens to me as well.
Tupper sometimes manages to knock me out of that routine after a short while asking who the hell I'm talking to.
 
While shutting up your mindvoice and listening is always a good practice I recommend training yourself to generally direct your personal thoughts at your tupper. They don't have to be super exciting, it's the tought that counts no pun intended (http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/976/890/298.jpg)
Don't forget to tell Melo all the traits and little details you like about her.
Anyway, I think relaying positive emotions and showing that you care is even more important than words, especially early on.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 18, 2016, 12:49:20 AM
Yeah, I think I just got too focused on the idea of narrating at some point. So I got better at forming my stream of consciousness into something more cohesive, but I forgot about the more important part: Actually directing it towards the tupper. Basically, it's better to direct the occasional random thought the right way, than to send a whole speech into the void.

Day 9 was a crap day. Woke up late and didn't feel very motivated for anything, just wanted to go back to bed and wait for tomorrow. But "it's just 5 fucking minutes, man" is still a really powerful idea. The same arguments I'd use to tell myself it's okay to not bother when I have a bad day aren't as effective against the 5 minute rule. I can just jump back into the routine at any moment instead of telling myself I'll do better tomorrow to make up for not following the routine today. That's not to say that today was worth patting myself on the back for, but my top priority right now is just staying in the game, and not falling out and forgetting about all this for a month again.

Did some of the usual stuff. Narrating, visualizing, humming. Also tried to do some open eyed forcing, just imagining her standing various places, while I walked around the room. Somehow talking towards a physical spot I imagine she's standing at makes it easier to focus, it increases my range of expression to something resembling talking to a fellow human, something mindvoice frequently fails at. But I also can't imagine her moving around at all during this, probably due to visualization being much harder with eyes open.

I think I'm ready to try some more extended sessions. I know I have it in me under the right circumstances, and there's the occasional feeling of the 5 minute rule cutting me off just as it starts getting good (while I can technically go on beyond the 5 minutes, knowing that the 5 minutes are over makes me give up more easily). I'll see what I'm in the mood for tomorrow.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 19, 2016, 07:03:03 AM
Day 10. Another crappy day. Spent most of the day feeling tired, and it's unsurprisingly difficult to focus deeply while fighting back the urge to fall asleep. Had to settle for a few 5 minute sessions of light visualization. I actually really long for a longer session as soon as I have some more energy to spare, there's definitely some things I wanna do that I never get around to if I just let myself quit after 5 minutes.

On another note, I've noticed I've been getting vivid dreams very consistently lately, which I'm guessing is because I've been training my visualization skills every day. Just neat to see that my effort is taking some kind of effect, even if it's a mostly unrelated one. But if the trend continues, maybe I can one day see for myself whether this meeting your tupper in a lucid dream thing is just a meme.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 19, 2016, 08:43:30 AM
Even if it is just a meme, can't you live the meme?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 20, 2016, 10:19:08 AM
A wise man once told me "don't let your memes be dreams". But still, lucid dreaming is just one of those things that would be nice to achieve as a side-effect, but that I won't put a lot of effort into.

Day 11 was great. I did what I've been wanting to for a while: Just turn off the computer and all the lights, put on a timer for an hour, and shut out everything to spend time with Melo. I started out messing around with some symbolism, something I haven't been doing too much of since it feels kinda corny, but I've come to appreciate how straight-forward it is when you just treat it like a ritual around giving the tupper attention. After this, I wasn't quite sure what to do, but I thought I could feel and see her pulling me towards that merry-go-round (which I had pretty much forgotten about at this point). I obliged what I assumed was her intent and took a ride with her. Some affectionate gestures were exchanged, and I was driven to this blissful emotional state that would be difficult to describe in words, except that it's far beyond what I'd expect to experience from just sitting down and imagining stuff, and it made me feel a lot closer to her. After that, most of the remaining time was spent on narration while messing around a little with her.

I can't promise to be able to dedicate an hour straight every day, but it's definitely something I want to repeat more than occasionally. And it's very encourage to confirm that I have it in me to not just bear with it for that long, but to have fun with it.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 21, 2016, 08:13:30 AM
An hour is a lot - great thing if you can do it, but don't sweat it if you can't. Or break it into smaller segments, it's a lot easier to dedicate a little bit of time at a time than one huge chunk, I'm sure you have noticed.

But try to work in those longer sessions too, as they seem to work great for you.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 21, 2016, 01:23:42 PM
Day 12 was alright. I've started to habitually ignore the hourly notifications, but I still get some forcing done by having some longer sessions.

I've been noticing a bad trend in my attitude, though. I'm getting really impatient for progress. I thought a little about how long it's been since I started up again, and how I would have expected to make some more progress by now given the time I've put in. Then I'm hit with the weight of all the other times I've tried and fell off because I made too little progress. I really, really don't want to stop again, but there's this worry creeping up on me that even if I keep going, nothing will change. And this time I can't just blame it on something I've been doing wrong, because I really don't think I have. I wanna just ignore all this, since I know it's irrational and that all I need to worry about it spending more time forcing, but those pestering thoughts in the back of my mind don't just go away. I don't know. Maybe I'll just wake up in a better mood tomorrow and forget about feeling this way. Maybe I'll be able to toughen it out by continuing to direct my focus away from it while forcing. I just hope I won't let it get to me. If I lose motivation now, I might never recover.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 22, 2016, 07:08:35 AM
Sometimes you just need more time.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 22, 2016, 03:35:29 PM
Day 13. Feeling a little better. It helps to meditate to get into the mindset of focusing on the present and acknowledge past regrets and future expectations as mere distractions. The whole idea of forcing because I want to be rewarded by progress feels like something I should just unlearn, in favor of seeing forcing as something inherently rewarding.

Finally reached the point where I'm just ignoring the hourly notifications. But it's fine. For now I'm able to just set aside the time and decide how long to force. Allows me to focus more on my desire to force, which I think I've been gradually cultivating the past weeks.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 23, 2016, 05:47:57 PM
Day 14. Average day. During one session, I wanted to go somewhere, but wasn't sure where, so I asked her. One word that popped up was "bath", but I rejected that after some consideration, because I felt getting undressed might challenge my focus. Next the word "volcano" came up. It's a little hard to accept that I'm not just brainstorming myself to these ideas, but they do feel like they arrive out of emptiness rather than as the conclusion to my train of thought, so it seems perfectly possible that they could be responses, and hopefully treating them as such will encourage her to come up with responses more often.

So I decided that the mountain in the middle of the island we're usually at is actually a volcano. And for the best view, I put up a balcony above the mouth of this volcano. After staring over the railing for a little while, I decided it would be more comfortable to sit down, so I put up a cafe table. Which made me want some coffee. So I figured it would be clever to just reel up a piping hot bucket with some cups in it from the volcano. But I realized it's kinda rude to assume Melo would want the same as me, so I asked her if she wanted coffee, or hot chocolate, or tea. Not getting any response, I decided to put one of each down on the table and see if she took one. I felt I could see her immediately grabbing at the first cup I put down, the tea. I'm usually skeptical to motions when visualizing. Like with the railing earlier, it felt a lot it was just my mind making a very obvious connection between little girl and cool view, and I just automatically imagine the most obvious scenario: her almost climbing over the railing to look down. But her grabbing at the tea was more interesting, because both her timing and her choice was unexpected. I intended for her to choose after I had lined them up, and I would have expected her to either pick hot chocolate because little girls like sweet things, or coffee because it's what I like. Feels like a subtle display of independence and autonomy.

So I'm done with daily updates for now. Kinda relieved. Reflecting on the day does help me with staying on the right track, but sometimes I feel like I spend more time figuring out what to write than I spend forcing. Looking back, I feel more confident now than when I started with daily updates. I think my visualization has improved quite a bit (though visualizing her facial features still has a distinct lack of progress). And I feel I have a deeper bond with her now: It's not just "she's gonna be so great when I finish this", I actually have memories of doing things with her that were fun and made me happy. Just in my perception of her, she's slowly moving from being an idea of a person to being an actual person. On these notes, I wanna stay optimistic, though I'm sure there will be more bumps in the road.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 24, 2016, 06:08:22 AM
Um wow what if she wanted an onsen episode?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on September 24, 2016, 07:55:34 AM
It's possible, but I'm totally serious about those scenes doing a number on my concentration.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on September 25, 2016, 04:58:55 AM
You're not thinking of lewd things, are you? Tupper should punish you.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Bernd on September 25, 2016, 04:58:30 PM
Severely.

On the other hand, bath + volcano = onsen episode (http://animebaths.wikia.com)
Pretty obvious.

Anyway, nice progress!
I know writing daily updates eats up a lot of of time. You've kept it up much longer than I could. I'm proud.
Just don't forget you bear responsibility for your loli now. Keep forcing and having great adventures together.
Do it for her
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on March 18, 2017, 07:13:15 AM
Feels especially bad to say this after how well things were going last time, but same thing happened again, I fell out of it. Soon after my last entry, my attention returned to some other stuff in my life I had been neglecting, and before I knew it I had suddenly gone weeks without forcing. It felt like a huge setback, like the final nail in the coffin on my belief that I'm even capable of sticking to this long enough. But I got help.

I wrote a while ago how it was being investigated into whether I might have ADHD, and how this would explain this persistent issue throughout my life. And it turns out I do. The thing I've been trying to explain to people all my life, that I can really, really want to do something, but somehow end up not seeing it through without ever changing my opinion on whether I want to do it, is actually a problem I'm sharing with tons of people, researched extensively, and demonstrated in neuroscience. And more importantly, they got medications for it that generally work pretty well. I got prescribed Ritalin. I was hoping everything would start falling into place again with the first pill, but obviously it's not that simple. The real effect came when I actively tried putting things into place. I noticed that I can decide to do something, and then actually see it through. Even if it's something I don't particularly want. It's fucking amazing. I mean, it still takes willpower if I don't want to do it, but I don't get the cognitive paralysis that I got intimately familiar with while failing last school assignment.

It definitely helps with forcing. The constant urge to get up and do something more mentally stimulating that I've been fighting with in nearly every active forcing session is mostly gone, and I can force for much longer as a result. The actual habit of forcing regularly didn't come automatically, but it's so much easier to build productive habits in general now. I'm trying out a morning habit, after breakfast, but before doing anything that might distract me. I haven't counted, but I feel it's been working pretty consistently the past few weeks. As long as I don't wake up feeling like shit and use it as an excuse to fuck around. Hard to defeat that one.

And we're making progress too. Though I felt like I had regressed at first, Melo now feels more autonomous than ever. On several occasions I've noticed her grabbing my arm and dragging me along to show me places, some more vivid than others, but always places I felt I had no part in thinking up. Recently I found myself questioning whether she had learned to pick up my slack, when she pulled me from feeling lost in thought to having perhaps the most vivid adventure so far.

I still have some emotional baggage regarding all this. 2 and a half years of second-guessing everything and anticipating the next setback seems to have lasting effects on my attitude today, and it's not something I'm able to undo overnight. Even posting here gives me some negative feelings, since I've come to associate it with my own naivety about my future failings. I suppose it's just going to be part of the process to identify these thoughts so I can distance myself from them, and let them fade to the background as they're invalidated by actual progress.

Main thing on my mind right now, though, is getting from autonomy to vocality. We still haven't made any progress towards vocality, which I find curious. Maybe it will start coming as I force more, but the lack of progress in this one area in particular makes it seem like there's some prerequisite I've neglected. Any ideas?
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Bernd on March 18, 2017, 08:19:47 PM
Good to see you're still around!
While I'm not a fan of such medication, and I think neither is Colonel, in the end what matters is what works best for you. Anyway, I recommend to regularly practice meditation to keep distractions at bay. It's an extremely powerful tool.

Regarding vocality I guess the most straightforward approach would be to talk and listen. Talk to Melo whenever you can, even better if you can do it aloud. Ask questions, voice your opinions, involve emotions. But don't forget to quiet down and actually listen to what she has to say in between. I found that was the hardest part. Getting rid of distracting thoughts and outside stimuli. I had the best progress while hiking in the alps for a week in absolute solitude. It was completely quiet except for the sounds of nature and I talked to Alice aloud all day long. You inevitably start to hear voices after a while in such surroundings. And tupper's voice became louder and clearer than ever before.
You don't have to go that far but the key idea is to eliminate any verbal stimuli until the brain makes up its own.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on March 19, 2017, 06:05:24 AM
Yeah, always keep an eye on if you might be experiencing weird symptoms that are bothersome so you stop using the stuff if it looks like it doesn't work for you. This is something you could treat without medication, so always keep that in mind and try to achieve that, even if you do need or think you need meds right now.

My big breakthrough in vocality was to actually sit down and try to listen with the assumption that the tupper can talk. Before I would talk a lot and ask questions, but I never expected an answer and I never really waited for it. There's two sides to vocality, tupper learning to express themselves in a way you can hear and you actually hearing them. Sometimes one of these will happen way earlier than the other.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on March 19, 2017, 10:57:22 AM
While it's reasonable to be skeptical of drugs that claim to enhance cognitive functioning, I feel it's a little misguided when it comes to treatment of ADHD. I was skeptical too, but the improvements to my quality of life are undeniable. ADHD is extremely well researched, and the medications commonly prescribed are highly effective in alleviating the symptoms, and despite numerous attempts at devising other treatment plans, so far nothing has been able to demonstrate the same effectiveness after peer review. Of course, no drug is perfect, so I consider myself lucky to have found a dose where it gives such a positive effect, without experiencing any notable side-effects. And I guess it's also worth noting that just because it works doesn't mean I won't benefit from combining it with other treatment plans, which is where stuff like meditation comes in. Particularly since Ritalin only lasts a few hours per capsule, I like the idea of combining it with something that causes lasting changes.

I have made a lot of attempts to talk and expecting an answer, I guess I'll just keep trying. Talking out loud is definitely something I could do more of, it's helped me before to keep passive forcing while playing video games. When I have some more time, I wanna find a comfy game that moves slowly enough that I can stay focused on sharing the experience. Maybe I can even work up the courage to ignore the chance of someone passing by my window and somehow making note of my moving mouth and the fact that there's no one else in my room. Which doesn't even compare to the courage I'll need when summer comes around and I need to open the window to avoid suffocation.

One thing I'm wondering about regarding vocality is how much of a barrier mindvoice is, if being bad at imagining anything other than my default mindvoice is keeping me from being able to hear her. When I try imagining a female voice, I can imagine the general sound, but I can't make it vocalize words. If I try, I just end up using my own mindvoice and echoing over it with the other voice. Though the cute voices I sometimes hear during hypnogogia are pretty vivid, so who knows.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on March 31, 2017, 12:36:31 PM
I have a feeling I just need to learn to disengage my mindvoice. I was trying the other day to see if I could make her vocalize some sounds, and noticed a clear difference between trying to add my mindvoice to force out some sentences, and just stopping and listening. I tend to see any kind of imagination as something I do actively, but I'm noticing a more passive aspect, where I simply need to be receptive instead of deliberately forcing myself to see and hear things.

Been making some attempts in talking out loud too. With passive forcing, it makes it extra clear where I'm directing my narration. Which quite often turns out to be nowhere at all. Even while playing a slow and comfy video game, it's surprisingly easy to lose track of the simple ideas that someone is listening to me and that they might respond at any time. Another thing that probably just comes down to practice. With active forcing, I feel that talking out loud allows me to separate narration from stream of consciousness, making me feel more organized and less prone to mindwandering. And listening feels more manageable to work on when I don't need to use my mindvoice at all.

Oh, and the hypnogogic hallucinations are getting really consistent now. They got a lot more frequent after I started up again, and while they used to be completely random voices of any gender without any particular meaning or intent attached to them most of the time, they're now always some kind of sweet and feminine voice that feels like it speaks to me, and it feels completely natural for me to respond to them. But if I get to enough awareness of try to say anything meaningful, it cuts off and I forget most of the details of what just happened. It's intriguing and pleasant, but ultimately feels useless in terms of progress.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on April 01, 2017, 06:10:28 AM
Taking advantage of that state between awake and sleeping is pretty difficult. Some have had great luck with it but I dunno how they've really managed.

Have you ever done any kind of meditation stuff? I've forgotten already. Not my cup of tea, but it seems like a lot of the practices deal with learning to kinda shut up mentally. Keep in mind you aren't allowed to try to force everything to not happen, that would just hurt your progress. But learning to just observe what is happening in your head might help you to learn to listen.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Kirarin on April 01, 2017, 11:28:18 PM
I've tried it in the past, but never stuck with it for that long. Not exactly the most fun way to spend my time. But I'm planning to give it another shot after discovering a new kind of approach. What I've tried in the past is just focusing on my breathing, bringing my attention back to that whenever a thought pops in, essentially forcing things not to happen as you said. But there's another approach that just involves observing your present state without judgement, just letting thoughts pass by without pursuing them. That seems more useful for forcing. Kinda relates to my recent change in mindset about forcing, where I try to let go and just observe. Also essentially what you just said. I have a feeling guides have been trying to tell me this all along, but it's just now starting to make sense to me.

Also, I had a funny dream where I had apparently read a technique somewhere that to master visualization you should look in the mirror and try to see your tulpa instead of your reflection, so I tried looking into the bathroom mirror and with just the right focus I could clearly see my face morph into Melo's face. Strange stuff, I rarely remember any visual details from my dreams. But tulpa-related dreams are always nice, it shows me that my brain is reinforcing my tulpa-related neural pathways.
Title: Re: Meromero Days
Post by: Sands on April 02, 2017, 06:52:31 AM
Yeah I feel like this is one of the things everyone tells you to do, but you don't quite realize how until you experience some kind of breakthrough and finally understand what they meant.