Merkabah

[Skarekrow]

Hmmmm...it isn’t too often that they run UFO stories in the New York Times.
Soft disclosure?

Enjoy!

‘Wow, What Is That?’
Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects

“These things would be out there all day,” Lt. Ryan Graves said. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.” CreditCredit Tony Luong for The New York Times​

By Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean

• May 26, 2019

WASHINGTON — The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast.

Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress.

“Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed.
Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents.

Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.

Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents.

“There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”

Videos filmed by Navy pilots show two encounters with flying objects.
One was captured by a plane’s camera off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 20, 2015.
That footage, published previously but with little context, shows an object tilting like a spinning top moving against the wind.
A pilot refers to a fleet of objects, but no imagery of a fleet was released.
The second video was taken a few weeks later. CreditCredit U.S. Department of Defense​

The sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior officers from the Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents.”

Navy pilots from the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” squadron aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in 2015. The squadron began noticing strange objects just after the Navy upgraded the radar systems on its F/A-18 fighter planes.CreditAdam Ferguson for The New York Times​

The program, which began in 2007 and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time, was officially shut down in 2012 when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon.

But the Navy recently said it currently investigates military reports of U.F.O.s, and Mr. Elizondo and other participants say the program — parts of it remain classified — has continued in other forms.

The program has also studied video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.”

He added that “there are so many other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”

Lieutenant Graves still cannot explain what he saw.
In the summer of 2014, he and Lt. Danny Accoin, another Super Hornet pilot, were part of a squadron, the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va., that was training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.

Lieutenants Graves and Accoin spoke on the record to The Times about the objects.
Three other pilots in the squadron also spoke to The Times about the objects but declined to be named.

Lieutenants Graves and Accoin, along with former American intelligence officials, appear in a six-part History Channel series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s U.F.O. Investigation,” to air beginning Friday.

The Times conducted separate interviews with key participants.

The pilots began noticing the objects after their 1980s-era radar was upgraded to a more advanced system.
As one fighter jet after another got the new radar, pilots began picking up the objects, but ignoring what they thought were false radar tracks.

“People have seen strange stuff in military aircraft for decades,” Lieutenant Graves said. “We’re doing this very complex mission, to go from 30,000 feet, diving down. It would be a pretty big deal to have something up there.”

But he said the objects persisted, showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet, even sea level.
They could accelerate, slow down and then hit hypersonic speeds.

Lieutenant Accoin said he interacted twice with the objects.
The first time, after picking up the object on his radar, he set his plane to merge with it, flying 1,000 feet below it.

He said he should have been able to see it with his helmet camera, but could not, even though his radar told him it was there.

A few days later, Lieutenant Accoin said a training missile on his jet locked on the object and his infrared camera picked it up as well.
“I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,” he said. But still, “I could not pick it up visually.”

At this point the pilots said they speculated that the objects were part of some classified and extremely advanced drone program.

Lieutenant Graves with Navy flight log books. Credit Tony Luong for The New York Times​

But then pilots began seeing the objects.
In late 2014, Lieutenant Graves said he was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.”

He said he was stunned to hear the pilot’s words. “I almost hit one of those things,” the pilot told Lieutenant Graves.

The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit.

It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.

The incident so spooked the squadron that an aviation flight safety report was filed, Lieutenant Graves said.

The near miss, he and other pilots interviewed said, angered the squadron, and convinced them that the objects were not part of a classified drone program.

Government officials would know fighter pilots were training in the area, they reasoned, and would not send drones to get in the way.

“It turned from a potentially classified drone program to a safety issue,” Lieutenant Graves said. “It was going to be a matter of time before someone had a midair” collision.

What was strange, the pilots said, was that the video showed objects accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns — something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.

“Speed doesn’t kill you,” Lieutenant Graves said. “Stopping does. Or acceleration.”

Asked what they thought the objects were, the pilots refused to speculate.

“We have helicopters that can hover,” Lieutenant Graves said. “We have aircraft that can fly at 30,000 feet and right at the surface.”
But “combine all that in one vehicle of some type with no jet engine, no exhaust plume.”

Lieutenant Accoin said only that “we’re here to do a job, with excellence, not make up myths.”

In March 2015 the Roosevelt left the coast of Florida and headed to the Persian Gulf as part of the American-led mission fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The same pilots who were interacting with the strange objects off the East Coast were soon doing bombing missions over Iraq and Syria.

The incidents tapered off after they left the United States, the pilots said.

Link - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html

 

[Kgal]

Hmmmm...it isn’t too often that they run UFO stories in the New York Times.
Soft disclosure?

‘Wow, What Is That?’
Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects​

It's to build support for their Space Program. You know.... the old newly reinvented Star Wars program Ronnie Reagan wanted to build. This is not the first time the current El Prezo has stolen lines from the Reagan playbook.

On the other hand.... Those that need to see this information will finally see it. This will open up their minds and they'll make decisions based upon this information. Heh heh.... Those who wish to keep this info secret and slowwww to come forth are walking a fine line when they let this stuff leak. They think they're in control....but they have no idea how this information will ripple out into future timelines.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

Very curious....
The hell if I will ever create a Tulpa on purpose though.
(Pretty sure I have on accident once or twice)
Tulpas originally did NOT just live in a persons’ head (as part of the article implies), but rather could act independently and would sometimes even turn on the creator...people have been possessed, physically harmed, etc.
This article does not consider any spiritual aspects of this phenomena which makes it incomplete imho as this is the history and nature of a Tulpa...not an online forum for imaginary friend enthusiasts, lol.
This is a totally materialist scientific viewpoint of the phantasm being created by the mind.
But I find it is good to not just feed my own confirmation bias and keep a well rounded understanding.
No matter what this dude writes about Tulpas though...I will never fuck around “creating” one.

Enjoy!​

Daring to Hear Voices
Why Tulpamancers have a lot to teach us about what we can imagine and experience
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-mind-and-brain/201604/daring-hear-voices

Source: "The Intention to Know" / Theosophical Society​

Making the strange familiar

The new subculture of Tulpamancy has garnered a lot of online attention of late.
Tulpas, a concept borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, are sentient imaginary friends conjured through ‘thoughtform’ visualization.

Tulpamancers are people who conjure Tulpas, and experience their imaginary companions as semi-permanent, non-threatening auditory ‘hallucinations’.

Other sense modalities like touch, emotions, and vision are also recruited in the experience.

Tulpamancers have been called the weirdest culture on the internet.
As a cultural phenomenon, the practice has been described as a strange secularization of the paranormal.

In the blogosphere, people have wondered if Tulpamancers have underlying mental illnesses, and if it is possible to hear voices without being crazy. Others have wondered if they are telling the truth.

How is it possible—is it possible at all?—to create a mental being that lives inside your head?

In this article, the first of two posts on the subject, I address popular myths and questions about Tulpamancy, and show that there is nothing inherently strange about the practice.

I expand on its positive and therapeutic aspects, and argue that studying Tulpamancy can help us move beyond simplistic understandings of mental illness.

I also present this new phenomenon as a fascinating example to understand the influence of culture on inner experiences.
In doing so, I invite readers to consider the limitations that contemporary culture places on imagination, our senses, and what we accept as real, normal, and desirable.

As a cognitive anthropologist who has studied Tulpamancy closely, I have sought to apply the old intellectual recipe of making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange.

This is an approach that was championed by Margaret Mead, a key early figure in my discipline.
In her study of growing up in Samoa in the 1920s, Mead examined the ‘strange’ culture of adolescents in the Western Pacific who did not appear to undergo the ‘normal’ stress and turmoil of what was then (as it still is now) understood to be a difficult hormonally-mediated transition from childhood into adulthood.

The lack of sexual restrictions in ‘adolescent’ lives in Samoa at the time had also seemed strange to Mead.
Returning to the U.S., she now saw what she had taken for granted with fresh eyes.

Could it be, she asked, that the distress experienced by American teenagers and the taboos on youth sexuality in western culture at large were in fact quite strange?

Could it be that what she had assumed to be a universally harrowing human experience was in fact grounded in the specific ways of a particular culture at a particular time?

Why Tulpamancers are not crazy.

In seeking to make the strange familiar, I have found that Tulpamancers, far from being crazy, were simply cultivating fundamentally normal dimensions of human cognition and sociality.

I describe these mechanisms in part 2 of this series.

Tulpamancers reported overwhelmingly positive experiences, overall increased happiness, and more confidence in challenging social situations through the assistance of their Tulpa companions.

Many of those who had identified with specific psychopathological labels like depression, anxiety, or ADHD similarly spoke of overall improvement.
When queried independently, Tulpas often described being ‘immune’ to the specific conditions of their hosts.

Autism Spectrum Disorders presented something of an exception.
One Tulpa explained that “having the same brain” as his host, both were necessarily bound to similar limitations.

Others reported greater degrees of freedom from their hosts’ conditions..

One of the first conclusions of my research was that conjuring Tulpas could make one more empathetic.
This is not a surprising finding.

Focusing one’s attention and affect on other people (real or imaginary), as we do when we read fiction or watch movies, has been amply demonstrated to increase empathy—that is, to makes us better at intuitively relating to other people, or being able to imagine what it is like to be somebody else in different situations.

Other findings pointed to further therapeutic possibilities.
A small minority of Tulpamancers, for example, already experienced voices before thinking of them as Tulpas, or turning them into friendly companions.

Some simply thought of them as imaginary friends.
Others had had difficult, or scary experiences with their voices and the characters that lived in their mind, and had come to understand them as a sign of illness.

In these instances, simply getting to know the voices, learning to talk to them as friends, and sharing the experience with other Tulpamaners seemed to lead to very positive results.

This approach, once again, is not new.
The dutch psychiatrist Marius Romme, for example, has developed a successful approach called “living with voices” to help people with psychosis turn their voices into friendly ones.

I want to insist that ‘hallucinations’ and ‘psychosis’ are not a productive terms to think of Tulpa experiences, and voice-hearing experiences at large.
It is both too simplistic and inaccurate to think of voice-hearing as a necessarily pathological experience.

In modern-day psychiatry, the presence of non self-authored thoughts is often, but not always understood as a sign of mental illness.
In practice, one can only speak of pathology when there are clear signs of distress.

If a person describes her inner experiences as being scary, stressful, or as preventing her from functioning well in everyday life, or if others around her report being scared or prevented from functioning by her behaviour, then we can safely speak of pathology.

As we have seen, this is far from being the case with the vast majority of Tulpamancers.

Whether ‘thinking’ is always or ever ‘self-authored’ is too complex a philosophical question to tackle here.
It raises, for one, intractable questions about the nature of Consciousness and the Self, and equally hard questions about the problem of Free Will.

It poses very difficult questions about the nature and role of the body, emotions, moods, and drives.
It also raises hard questions about the nature and role of language and culture, their relationship with behaviour, intuition, and inner-narration, and their variations across social groups.

Tulpamancers, as we will see, show us something fascinating about cultural variations in the positivity and negativity of the voice-hearing experience, and the fuzziness of narrative consciousness in general.

But first, we should appreciate what little we know about what goes on inside people’s heads.

Studying inner experience

Many people want to know if Tulpamancers are telling the truth about the experiences.
Their claims do seem hard to validate.

At face value, however, they are no more or less difficult to study than the claims made by anyone about what goes on in their heads.
While we have every reason to believe that people around us are conscious, have inner experiences, feel pleasure and pain, and have streams of narrative in their head, we have absolutely no way to study these experiences scientifically or to prove that any of this is going on.

In philosophy, this is known as the Problem of Other Minds.

For a while, progress in neuroimaging seemed to carry the promise that the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness would be solved, and that neural underpinnings, or even causes of these processes would be discovered.

But no such breakthrough occurred.
While we can sometimes make good hypotheses about the brain regions associated with different kinds of tasks and behaviours (including thinking about other people) these posited neural “signatures” or “correlates” tell us nothing whatsoever about the content and quality of people’s experiences.

We know, to present an analogy, that people’s heart-rates accelerate when they experience positive (eustress) and negative (stress) arousal.
This is a physiological signature of arousal.

But heart-rate measurements tell us nothing about what the person is feeling.
So it goes with brain imaging.

Verbal reports elicited from individuals or personal introspection, as anecdotal as they seem, are still the best “evidence” we have for any kind of mental and bodily phenomena.

Most people, to make the matter worse, are quite unskilled at noticing, attending to, monitoring, and reporting on minutiae of their experiences, which makes the problem even harder to study.

Working with Tulpamancers, however, like working with meditators, is a treat for phenomenologists (scholars who study inner experience), because they have trained themselves to be more attentive to their experiences than the average population.

When a large group of people report similarly fine-grained experiences that are comparable (in that they differ from average experiences reported by other groups) this is pretty good “evidence” for their veracity.

Relying on first-person reports does not preclude the possibility of quantitative measures.
When I surveyed a group of 160+ Tulpamancers on the quality of their voice-hearing experience, for example, I found that most subjects who reported hearing their Tulpas’ voices “as distinctly as another person’s voice” had been practicing Tulpamancy for two years or more.

Practitioners with less experience, in turn, tended to report voices that were more thought-like, or halfway between their own thoughts and somebody else’s voice.

That tulpamancers in similar stages of the practice describe comparably similar experiences tending toward full-fledged automatized voices adds further validity to these reports.

These findings are consistent with what we are beginning to understand about auditory ‘hallucinations’.
A recent study published in the Lancet, for example, found that against simplistic folk notions of auditory hallucinations heard as actual voices, schizophrenic patients also reported fine-grained distinctions between thought-like and other-voice-like experiences.

Voice-hearing across cultures

Recent work in psychological anthropology has also yielded more myth-busting findings on the content and affective dimensions of voice-hearing across cultures, and the relationship between people, their voices, and the implicit expectations shared by other members of their societies.

In a recent project, Stanford University’s Tanya Luhrmann led a global team of anthropologists and psychiatrists who asked people diagnosed with schizophrenia in India, Ghana, and the United States what their voices were telling them.

Their fascinating results, in classical Margaret Mead fashion, showed that the mean, terrifying, threatening, debilitating character most of us associate with psychosis were much more pronounced with Western patients, and were likely to be rooted in biases inherent to Euro-American culture.

In Ghana and India, patients were more likely to report friendly and guiding voices, and hearing the voices of relatives.
When voices were teasing or mocking, they did so in much less violent ways.

In the Chennai sample, even voices that were actively disliked by patients tended to give commands consistent with family obligations such as “go to the kitchen and prepare food”, or “you need to eat, but not too much”.

In the California sample, patients were much more likely to describe their voices as violent, and spoke of their experience as meaning that they were “crazy”.​

Source: Tanya M. Luhrmann, Padmavati, Hema Tharoor, Akwasi Osei / Topics in Cognitive Science 7 (2015) 646–663, p650​

Cultural Invitations - Cognitive Ideology

This led Luhrmann and colleagues to develop a theory of “social kindling”, or “cultural invitations” in the mediation of psychosis.
What we pay attention to and how we make sense of it, the authors of the study argued, is always subtly influenced by our culture—that is, by how we expect others around us to think the world works.

They explained that implicit “cultural invitations” on how one should behave, how to make sense of and value experience, but also on what counts as a mind, a person, a spirit, a normal experience, and a pathological one can have an immense effect on how we feel.

This is something I have called “cognitive ideology”, or the power of culturally-specific ideas and biases on what counts as a mind, what counts as real, and what counts as “normal”, desirable, or undesirable experience in shaping our most intuitive modes of affect and action.

Responding to latent cultural beliefs

As we will see, positive and negative inner experiences, and “anomalous” experiences of all kinds also occur on a spectrum of implicit to explicit responses to deeply held, but often unconscious cultural assumptions.

The work of the late psychologist Nicholas Spanos, who spent a lifetime studying such “strange” experiences as hypnosis, multiple personalities, false memories, UFO abduction reports, and past-life recall, played an important role in our understanding of the relationship between culture and inner experience.

Through his clinical experiments and reviews of these strange cases, Spanos developed a sociocognitive hypothesis to explain how subjective reality responds to largely implicit, but elaborately “rule-governed” collectively held ideas.

He famously pointed out, for example, that reports of UFO abductions from individuals who appear convinced that they underwent the experience typically involve alien technology that is collectively imaginable, but not yet attainable.

The first reports of sighting and abductions in the pre-modern period, thus involved flying ships with sails.
It was possible to imagine the not-yet-attainable technology of flying ships, but not yet collectively imaginable to think of ships with no sails.

In the post-Apollo, post-Star Wars era, on this account, it has become collectively imaginable to think of such currently unattainable technologies as light-speed travel and teleportation.

This points to the importance of appreciating the role of culture in shaping one’s latent ideas, or implicitly held beliefs.
Simply put, these are deeply held expectations about what is true, false, right and wrong that we do not know we hold, but that shape our automatic behaviors.

Most of us are not very reflective about our own biases.
They tend to manifest themselves in our most “personal” tastes, preferences, intuitions, and avoidance or attraction mechanisms.

But these responses are, as Spanos would have put it, rule-governed cultural constructs nonetheless.

Racist and sexist biases are infamous examples of such implicit beliefs picked up from latent cultural ideologies.
They can easily be studied in children through attribution tasks, such as the famous Clark Doll Experiment.

In this experiment, children are asked to express their preference for one of two dolls, depicting a black and white babies.
Worryingly, even black children tend to express preference for the white doll.

How does this happen?

In the past 70 years of research on racial bias, studies have consistently shown that across cultures, children as young as age 4 have already acquired biases about ethnicity and other socially constructed categories of persons that are consistent with the dominant culture of their societies.

In most cases, however, these biases are not consciously held by the children’s caregivers and educators, and they are almost never explicitly taught.
It is as though the biases are literally “picked up” from a fuzzy cultural soup.

How such biases are acquired -- indeed, how broader cultural grammars are acquired -- is still an open question.

Source: Flying Ships / (c) Luigi Prina, Milan​

Individual Psychological Traits

I presented the mystery of how a latent architecture of cultural expectations and behaviours is acquired, and emphasized that this process extends to hallucinations, imagination, embodiment, and inner experiences at large.

But we should be cautious in assuming an “anything-goes” formula, where anyone can mentally improvise from a public language to hallucinate, conjure sentient voices, feel like they are abducted by aliens, or have out of body experiences.

Spanos’ work, we should note, has been criticized for overemphasizing the social, and failing to give appropriate consideration to the individual psychological traits of people who are more prone to anomalous experiences than others.

Hypnotizability, proneness to absorption (the ability to become fully immersed in one’s inner imagery) and proneness to dissociation are examples of traits that are known to occur on a spectrum across populations, and are likely be be innate.

Fantasy-proneness, a hypothesized sub-type of absorption, has also been identified (albeit more controversially) in people who report anomalous experiences.

Another standard explanation for anomalous experiences is that they occur as a response to repressed memories and trauma.

In a response to his critics, Spanos tested for trauma and traits variables in a study that divided subjects who reported UFO experiences into non intense (e.g., seeing lights and shapes in the sky) and intense (e.g., seeing and communicating with aliens or missing time) groups.

He found that subjects in both groups did not score higher than average on psychopathology, hypnotizability, and fantasy proneness, but that experiences in the intense group were more often sleep-related (e.g., sleep paralysis).

Subjects in the intense group also reported much stronger beliefs in the existence of aliens and space visitation.

Learning to Hear Voices: Explicit beliefs and the training of absorption.

Spanos’ findings on the intense UFO experiences group adds further evidence to the claim that culture shapes inner experience.
In this case, we should note the importance of explicit beliefs in the mediation of experience.

People who are consciously involved in believing, expecting, and desiring certain experiences, thus, may also be more prone to achieving these experiences.

This can only occur when expectations are validated by the broader, and more implicit comfort of expecting that other people have similar expectations.

Anthropologists have long documented incidences of trance, dissociation, spirit possessions, and other anomalous experiences that occur in ritual, often spiritual contexts in the absence of trauma and pathology.

In such cases, such as Candomblé spirit possession in Brazil or Madagascar, these experiences are understood as normal and desirable.

Tanya Luhrmann, whose work on voices across cultures we reviewed earlier, also conducted fascinating long-term anthropological and psychological investigations of inner dimensions of prayer among Pentecostal Christians.

Luhrmann’s work demonstrated that, in a process not unlike Tulpamancy, the hard work of prayer could eventually lead to voice-hearing experiences among believers.

She initially hypothesized that learning to hear the voice of God may require a proclivity for absorption.
Her studies showed that those among her informants who reported the most vivid mental imagery, greater focus, and more intense spiritual experiences scored higher on the Tellegen Absorption Scale (TAS).

Beyond the importance of proclivities, however, a key finding of Luhrmann’s research was that absorption could be trained and improved in practice. Luhrmann’s work elegantly showed that spiritual and other unusual sensory experiences can become extraordinarily vivid as a result of attentional learning, particularly when they are sought after and rewarded in a community of people with similar beliefs.

In my own work, I also found that Tulpamancers scored higher than average on the Tellegen Absorption Scale.
Whether this reflects individual proclivities and personal types that are more likely to be interested in Tulpamancy than others is a difficult question.

My research, like Luhrmann’s, suggests that absorption-proneness can improve with practice, and that culture is an important factor in shaping the desirability and rewarding quality of unusual sensory experiences.

To make authoritative claims on Tulpamancy as an absorption-training practice, however, would require training non-Tulpamancers in the art of conjuring voices with longitudinal follow up of high and low absorption trait control groups.

Tulpamancy in popular culture: secular mysticism as resistance

Tulpamancers, as we have seen, are able to achieve highly individualized and unusual experiences that are, however, very similar in terms of their phenomenology.

It is precisely because Tulpamancy has become organized as a formalized culture (that is, a group of people united by shared expectations about the possibility and desirability of certain kinds of beings and states of affairs) that Tulpa experiences are at once possible, successful, and feel so positive to Tulpamancers.

The “fringe” dimension of Tulpamancy, on the one hand, helps foster solidarity among members and increases the experiential rewards of having achieved such hard-to-reach, highly arousing experiences.

The biases of dominant Euro-American culture on unusual experiences, and mental experiences in particular, however, also create a difficult dynamic for Tulpamancers, who are often reluctant to “come out”, even to their closest friends, relatives, and acquaintances.

As news of the culture spreads online, Tulpamancers are likely to keep enduring mockery, ostracizing, and pathologization.
In this sense, the experience of such a fringe group is not unlike that of sufis, early christians, kabbalists, sadhus, and mystics of all kinds who were at once feared, revered, and oppressed in mass societies that demand rigid conformity.

Such “mystics” threaten the very core of what most people accept as real and possible at the deepest and widest levels—their lives make us uncomfortable, because they point to the tragic limits of our imagination and the shallowness of our everyday experiences.

In the globalizing, internet-mediated world of 2016, Tulpamancers have to incur the perverse consequences of a culture in which difference is valorized in principle, but is mostly policed and punished in practice.

Our culture, paradoxically, nominally values individuality, but aggressively imposes a highly standardized framework on behaviour, which can be measured, catalogued, pathologized and punished with terrible precision.

Contemporary Euro- American culture may be the most aggressive of such frameworks ever implicitly ingrained, because it extends far and deep into other people’s thoughts and sensory experiences.

The extent to which other people’s mental lives are considered “transparent” (and hence knowable) or “opaque” (and unknowable) is another important difference found across cultures.

In contemporary Euro- America, in addition to thinking of ourselves in increasingly neurochemical terms, we think and worry excessively about what other people feel and think, and we have slowly incorporated a set of simplified medicalized assumptions and worries about how “normal”, healthy, sick and dangerous other people’s thoughts are.

Add to this a moral panic about a simplified catalogue of psychopathology, an obsession with self-authorship, and pervasive marketing from pharmacological industries, and the system of domination is almost total, because people will police their own selves before policing others.

Any private mental experience that departs from this sanitized norm will tend to be self-interpreted as scary and as the potential marker of mental illness. Given this set of problems, it is important to recognize Tulpamancy as a courageous, creative, and mystical backlash to the covert conservatism of our culture.

To sum up, Tulpamancy presents us with a fascinating case study for the study of the embodied and social nature of consciousness and cognition, and the emergence of new forms of culture and subjectivity.

It also offers an important paradigm for revising our simplistic and limiting understanding of mental illness on the one hand, and mental life and personhood on the other.

What in the Heck? Fascinating, though.

sentient imaginary friends

No that's you guys

 

[Skarekrow]

It's to build support for their Space Program. You know.... the old newly reinvented Star Wars program Ronnie Reagan wanted to build. This is not the first time the current El Prezo has stolen lines from the Reagan playbook.

On the other hand.... Those that need to see this information will finally see it. This will open up their minds and they'll make decisions based upon this information. Heh heh.... Those who wish to keep this info secret and slowwww to come forth are walking a fine line when they let this stuff leak. They think they're in control....but they have no idea how this information will ripple out into future timelines.

There was one night my ex and I were driving back from the beach in southern California...I think it was highway 43?
It goes winding through Taft and the mountains behind it until you hit the water.
Anyhow...the road itself was very curvy...it was dark and as we came around one corner there was a light in the sky from what I thought must be a low flying plane or helicopter...there was just a bright white light...it’s hard to gauge how close or far away it was, but it seemed to react to my coming around the corner.
At first I thought it was flying toward me...as the light stayed in the same spot momentarily...then it shot off at impossible speeds to the left and was gone.
My ex and I looked at each other and both confirmed that we saw the same thing.
Cannot explain that one...though jumping right to aliens is a bit brash...inter-dimensional travelers are more likely, lol.
Or some kind of experimental military drone...who knows?
The stealth fighter first started flying around 1980...we look at it as if it’s high-tech when it’s 40 years old just about.
I’m sure things have advanced significantly.
Either way...there are definitely odd and unexplainable things taking place in the skies.

What in the Heck? Fascinating, though.


No that's you guys

 

[Skarekrow]

@Deleted member 16771

Creating a Tulpa is like purposefully creating a poltergeist.
The difference being that it is supposed to be under the control of it’s creator.
They are said to take on their own personalities though and some have turned bad and against those who it is supposed to serve.
If you believe that thought forms can take on such physicality that is.

 

[Skarekrow]

​

 

[John K]

Very curious....
The hell if I will ever create a Tulpa on purpose though.
(Pretty sure I have on accident once or twice)
Tulpas originally did NOT just live in a persons’ head (as part of the article implies), but rather could act independently and would sometimes even turn on the creator...people have been possessed, physically harmed, etc.
This article does not consider any spiritual aspects of this phenomena which makes it incomplete imho as this is the history and nature of a Tulpa...not an online forum for imaginary friend enthusiasts, lol.
This is a totally materialist scientific viewpoint of the phantasm being created by the mind.
But I find it is good to not just feed my own confirmation bias and keep a well rounded understanding.
No matter what this dude writes about Tulpas though...I will never fuck around “creating” one.

Enjoy!​

Daring to Hear Voices
Why Tulpamancers have a lot to teach us about what we can imagine and experience
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-mind-and-brain/201604/daring-hear-voices

Source: "The Intention to Know" / Theosophical Society​

Making the strange familiar

The new subculture of Tulpamancy has garnered a lot of online attention of late.
Tulpas, a concept borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, are sentient imaginary friends conjured through ‘thoughtform’ visualization.

Tulpamancers are people who conjure Tulpas, and experience their imaginary companions as semi-permanent, non-threatening auditory ‘hallucinations’.

Other sense modalities like touch, emotions, and vision are also recruited in the experience.

Tulpamancers have been called the weirdest culture on the internet.
As a cultural phenomenon, the practice has been described as a strange secularization of the paranormal.

In the blogosphere, people have wondered if Tulpamancers have underlying mental illnesses, and if it is possible to hear voices without being crazy. Others have wondered if they are telling the truth.

How is it possible—is it possible at all?—to create a mental being that lives inside your head?

In this article, the first of two posts on the subject, I address popular myths and questions about Tulpamancy, and show that there is nothing inherently strange about the practice.

I expand on its positive and therapeutic aspects, and argue that studying Tulpamancy can help us move beyond simplistic understandings of mental illness.

I also present this new phenomenon as a fascinating example to understand the influence of culture on inner experiences.
In doing so, I invite readers to consider the limitations that contemporary culture places on imagination, our senses, and what we accept as real, normal, and desirable.

As a cognitive anthropologist who has studied Tulpamancy closely, I have sought to apply the old intellectual recipe of making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange.

This is an approach that was championed by Margaret Mead, a key early figure in my discipline.
In her study of growing up in Samoa in the 1920s, Mead examined the ‘strange’ culture of adolescents in the Western Pacific who did not appear to undergo the ‘normal’ stress and turmoil of what was then (as it still is now) understood to be a difficult hormonally-mediated transition from childhood into adulthood.

The lack of sexual restrictions in ‘adolescent’ lives in Samoa at the time had also seemed strange to Mead.
Returning to the U.S., she now saw what she had taken for granted with fresh eyes.

Could it be, she asked, that the distress experienced by American teenagers and the taboos on youth sexuality in western culture at large were in fact quite strange?

Could it be that what she had assumed to be a universally harrowing human experience was in fact grounded in the specific ways of a particular culture at a particular time?

Why Tulpamancers are not crazy.

In seeking to make the strange familiar, I have found that Tulpamancers, far from being crazy, were simply cultivating fundamentally normal dimensions of human cognition and sociality.

I describe these mechanisms in part 2 of this series.

Tulpamancers reported overwhelmingly positive experiences, overall increased happiness, and more confidence in challenging social situations through the assistance of their Tulpa companions.

Many of those who had identified with specific psychopathological labels like depression, anxiety, or ADHD similarly spoke of overall improvement.
When queried independently, Tulpas often described being ‘immune’ to the specific conditions of their hosts.

Autism Spectrum Disorders presented something of an exception.
One Tulpa explained that “having the same brain” as his host, both were necessarily bound to similar limitations.

Others reported greater degrees of freedom from their hosts’ conditions..

One of the first conclusions of my research was that conjuring Tulpas could make one more empathetic.
This is not a surprising finding.

Focusing one’s attention and affect on other people (real or imaginary), as we do when we read fiction or watch movies, has been amply demonstrated to increase empathy—that is, to makes us better at intuitively relating to other people, or being able to imagine what it is like to be somebody else in different situations.

Other findings pointed to further therapeutic possibilities.
A small minority of Tulpamancers, for example, already experienced voices before thinking of them as Tulpas, or turning them into friendly companions.

Some simply thought of them as imaginary friends.
Others had had difficult, or scary experiences with their voices and the characters that lived in their mind, and had come to understand them as a sign of illness.

In these instances, simply getting to know the voices, learning to talk to them as friends, and sharing the experience with other Tulpamaners seemed to lead to very positive results.

This approach, once again, is not new.
The dutch psychiatrist Marius Romme, for example, has developed a successful approach called “living with voices” to help people with psychosis turn their voices into friendly ones.

I want to insist that ‘hallucinations’ and ‘psychosis’ are not a productive terms to think of Tulpa experiences, and voice-hearing experiences at large.
It is both too simplistic and inaccurate to think of voice-hearing as a necessarily pathological experience.

In modern-day psychiatry, the presence of non self-authored thoughts is often, but not always understood as a sign of mental illness.
In practice, one can only speak of pathology when there are clear signs of distress.

If a person describes her inner experiences as being scary, stressful, or as preventing her from functioning well in everyday life, or if others around her report being scared or prevented from functioning by her behaviour, then we can safely speak of pathology.

As we have seen, this is far from being the case with the vast majority of Tulpamancers.

Whether ‘thinking’ is always or ever ‘self-authored’ is too complex a philosophical question to tackle here.
It raises, for one, intractable questions about the nature of Consciousness and the Self, and equally hard questions about the problem of Free Will.

It poses very difficult questions about the nature and role of the body, emotions, moods, and drives.
It also raises hard questions about the nature and role of language and culture, their relationship with behaviour, intuition, and inner-narration, and their variations across social groups.

Tulpamancers, as we will see, show us something fascinating about cultural variations in the positivity and negativity of the voice-hearing experience, and the fuzziness of narrative consciousness in general.

But first, we should appreciate what little we know about what goes on inside people’s heads.

Studying inner experience

Many people want to know if Tulpamancers are telling the truth about the experiences.
Their claims do seem hard to validate.

At face value, however, they are no more or less difficult to study than the claims made by anyone about what goes on in their heads.
While we have every reason to believe that people around us are conscious, have inner experiences, feel pleasure and pain, and have streams of narrative in their head, we have absolutely no way to study these experiences scientifically or to prove that any of this is going on.

In philosophy, this is known as the Problem of Other Minds.

For a while, progress in neuroimaging seemed to carry the promise that the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness would be solved, and that neural underpinnings, or even causes of these processes would be discovered.

But no such breakthrough occurred.
While we can sometimes make good hypotheses about the brain regions associated with different kinds of tasks and behaviours (including thinking about other people) these posited neural “signatures” or “correlates” tell us nothing whatsoever about the content and quality of people’s experiences.

We know, to present an analogy, that people’s heart-rates accelerate when they experience positive (eustress) and negative (stress) arousal.
This is a physiological signature of arousal.

But heart-rate measurements tell us nothing about what the person is feeling.
So it goes with brain imaging.

Verbal reports elicited from individuals or personal introspection, as anecdotal as they seem, are still the best “evidence” we have for any kind of mental and bodily phenomena.

Most people, to make the matter worse, are quite unskilled at noticing, attending to, monitoring, and reporting on minutiae of their experiences, which makes the problem even harder to study.

Working with Tulpamancers, however, like working with meditators, is a treat for phenomenologists (scholars who study inner experience), because they have trained themselves to be more attentive to their experiences than the average population.

When a large group of people report similarly fine-grained experiences that are comparable (in that they differ from average experiences reported by other groups) this is pretty good “evidence” for their veracity.

Relying on first-person reports does not preclude the possibility of quantitative measures.
When I surveyed a group of 160+ Tulpamancers on the quality of their voice-hearing experience, for example, I found that most subjects who reported hearing their Tulpas’ voices “as distinctly as another person’s voice” had been practicing Tulpamancy for two years or more.

Practitioners with less experience, in turn, tended to report voices that were more thought-like, or halfway between their own thoughts and somebody else’s voice.

That tulpamancers in similar stages of the practice describe comparably similar experiences tending toward full-fledged automatized voices adds further validity to these reports.

These findings are consistent with what we are beginning to understand about auditory ‘hallucinations’.
A recent study published in the Lancet, for example, found that against simplistic folk notions of auditory hallucinations heard as actual voices, schizophrenic patients also reported fine-grained distinctions between thought-like and other-voice-like experiences.

Voice-hearing across cultures

Recent work in psychological anthropology has also yielded more myth-busting findings on the content and affective dimensions of voice-hearing across cultures, and the relationship between people, their voices, and the implicit expectations shared by other members of their societies.

In a recent project, Stanford University’s Tanya Luhrmann led a global team of anthropologists and psychiatrists who asked people diagnosed with schizophrenia in India, Ghana, and the United States what their voices were telling them.

Their fascinating results, in classical Margaret Mead fashion, showed that the mean, terrifying, threatening, debilitating character most of us associate with psychosis were much more pronounced with Western patients, and were likely to be rooted in biases inherent to Euro-American culture.

In Ghana and India, patients were more likely to report friendly and guiding voices, and hearing the voices of relatives.
When voices were teasing or mocking, they did so in much less violent ways.

In the Chennai sample, even voices that were actively disliked by patients tended to give commands consistent with family obligations such as “go to the kitchen and prepare food”, or “you need to eat, but not too much”.

In the California sample, patients were much more likely to describe their voices as violent, and spoke of their experience as meaning that they were “crazy”.​

Source: Tanya M. Luhrmann, Padmavati, Hema Tharoor, Akwasi Osei / Topics in Cognitive Science 7 (2015) 646–663, p650​

Cultural Invitations - Cognitive Ideology

This led Luhrmann and colleagues to develop a theory of “social kindling”, or “cultural invitations” in the mediation of psychosis.
What we pay attention to and how we make sense of it, the authors of the study argued, is always subtly influenced by our culture—that is, by how we expect others around us to think the world works.

They explained that implicit “cultural invitations” on how one should behave, how to make sense of and value experience, but also on what counts as a mind, a person, a spirit, a normal experience, and a pathological one can have an immense effect on how we feel.

This is something I have called “cognitive ideology”, or the power of culturally-specific ideas and biases on what counts as a mind, what counts as real, and what counts as “normal”, desirable, or undesirable experience in shaping our most intuitive modes of affect and action.

Responding to latent cultural beliefs

As we will see, positive and negative inner experiences, and “anomalous” experiences of all kinds also occur on a spectrum of implicit to explicit responses to deeply held, but often unconscious cultural assumptions.

The work of the late psychologist Nicholas Spanos, who spent a lifetime studying such “strange” experiences as hypnosis, multiple personalities, false memories, UFO abduction reports, and past-life recall, played an important role in our understanding of the relationship between culture and inner experience.

Through his clinical experiments and reviews of these strange cases, Spanos developed a sociocognitive hypothesis to explain how subjective reality responds to largely implicit, but elaborately “rule-governed” collectively held ideas.

He famously pointed out, for example, that reports of UFO abductions from individuals who appear convinced that they underwent the experience typically involve alien technology that is collectively imaginable, but not yet attainable.

The first reports of sighting and abductions in the pre-modern period, thus involved flying ships with sails.
It was possible to imagine the not-yet-attainable technology of flying ships, but not yet collectively imaginable to think of ships with no sails.

In the post-Apollo, post-Star Wars era, on this account, it has become collectively imaginable to think of such currently unattainable technologies as light-speed travel and teleportation.

This points to the importance of appreciating the role of culture in shaping one’s latent ideas, or implicitly held beliefs.
Simply put, these are deeply held expectations about what is true, false, right and wrong that we do not know we hold, but that shape our automatic behaviors.

Most of us are not very reflective about our own biases.
They tend to manifest themselves in our most “personal” tastes, preferences, intuitions, and avoidance or attraction mechanisms.

But these responses are, as Spanos would have put it, rule-governed cultural constructs nonetheless.

Racist and sexist biases are infamous examples of such implicit beliefs picked up from latent cultural ideologies.
They can easily be studied in children through attribution tasks, such as the famous Clark Doll Experiment.

In this experiment, children are asked to express their preference for one of two dolls, depicting a black and white babies.
Worryingly, even black children tend to express preference for the white doll.

How does this happen?

In the past 70 years of research on racial bias, studies have consistently shown that across cultures, children as young as age 4 have already acquired biases about ethnicity and other socially constructed categories of persons that are consistent with the dominant culture of their societies.

In most cases, however, these biases are not consciously held by the children’s caregivers and educators, and they are almost never explicitly taught.
It is as though the biases are literally “picked up” from a fuzzy cultural soup.

How such biases are acquired -- indeed, how broader cultural grammars are acquired -- is still an open question.

Source: Flying Ships / (c) Luigi Prina, Milan​

Individual Psychological Traits

I presented the mystery of how a latent architecture of cultural expectations and behaviours is acquired, and emphasized that this process extends to hallucinations, imagination, embodiment, and inner experiences at large.

But we should be cautious in assuming an “anything-goes” formula, where anyone can mentally improvise from a public language to hallucinate, conjure sentient voices, feel like they are abducted by aliens, or have out of body experiences.

Spanos’ work, we should note, has been criticized for overemphasizing the social, and failing to give appropriate consideration to the individual psychological traits of people who are more prone to anomalous experiences than others.

Hypnotizability, proneness to absorption (the ability to become fully immersed in one’s inner imagery) and proneness to dissociation are examples of traits that are known to occur on a spectrum across populations, and are likely be be innate.

Fantasy-proneness, a hypothesized sub-type of absorption, has also been identified (albeit more controversially) in people who report anomalous experiences.

Another standard explanation for anomalous experiences is that they occur as a response to repressed memories and trauma.

In a response to his critics, Spanos tested for trauma and traits variables in a study that divided subjects who reported UFO experiences into non intense (e.g., seeing lights and shapes in the sky) and intense (e.g., seeing and communicating with aliens or missing time) groups.

He found that subjects in both groups did not score higher than average on psychopathology, hypnotizability, and fantasy proneness, but that experiences in the intense group were more often sleep-related (e.g., sleep paralysis).

Subjects in the intense group also reported much stronger beliefs in the existence of aliens and space visitation.

Learning to Hear Voices: Explicit beliefs and the training of absorption.

Spanos’ findings on the intense UFO experiences group adds further evidence to the claim that culture shapes inner experience.
In this case, we should note the importance of explicit beliefs in the mediation of experience.

People who are consciously involved in believing, expecting, and desiring certain experiences, thus, may also be more prone to achieving these experiences.

This can only occur when expectations are validated by the broader, and more implicit comfort of expecting that other people have similar expectations.

Anthropologists have long documented incidences of trance, dissociation, spirit possessions, and other anomalous experiences that occur in ritual, often spiritual contexts in the absence of trauma and pathology.

In such cases, such as Candomblé spirit possession in Brazil or Madagascar, these experiences are understood as normal and desirable.

Tanya Luhrmann, whose work on voices across cultures we reviewed earlier, also conducted fascinating long-term anthropological and psychological investigations of inner dimensions of prayer among Pentecostal Christians.

Luhrmann’s work demonstrated that, in a process not unlike Tulpamancy, the hard work of prayer could eventually lead to voice-hearing experiences among believers.

She initially hypothesized that learning to hear the voice of God may require a proclivity for absorption.
Her studies showed that those among her informants who reported the most vivid mental imagery, greater focus, and more intense spiritual experiences scored higher on the Tellegen Absorption Scale (TAS).

Beyond the importance of proclivities, however, a key finding of Luhrmann’s research was that absorption could be trained and improved in practice. Luhrmann’s work elegantly showed that spiritual and other unusual sensory experiences can become extraordinarily vivid as a result of attentional learning, particularly when they are sought after and rewarded in a community of people with similar beliefs.

In my own work, I also found that Tulpamancers scored higher than average on the Tellegen Absorption Scale.
Whether this reflects individual proclivities and personal types that are more likely to be interested in Tulpamancy than others is a difficult question.

My research, like Luhrmann’s, suggests that absorption-proneness can improve with practice, and that culture is an important factor in shaping the desirability and rewarding quality of unusual sensory experiences.

To make authoritative claims on Tulpamancy as an absorption-training practice, however, would require training non-Tulpamancers in the art of conjuring voices with longitudinal follow up of high and low absorption trait control groups.

Tulpamancy in popular culture: secular mysticism as resistance

Tulpamancers, as we have seen, are able to achieve highly individualized and unusual experiences that are, however, very similar in terms of their phenomenology.

It is precisely because Tulpamancy has become organized as a formalized culture (that is, a group of people united by shared expectations about the possibility and desirability of certain kinds of beings and states of affairs) that Tulpa experiences are at once possible, successful, and feel so positive to Tulpamancers.

The “fringe” dimension of Tulpamancy, on the one hand, helps foster solidarity among members and increases the experiential rewards of having achieved such hard-to-reach, highly arousing experiences.

The biases of dominant Euro-American culture on unusual experiences, and mental experiences in particular, however, also create a difficult dynamic for Tulpamancers, who are often reluctant to “come out”, even to their closest friends, relatives, and acquaintances.

As news of the culture spreads online, Tulpamancers are likely to keep enduring mockery, ostracizing, and pathologization.
In this sense, the experience of such a fringe group is not unlike that of sufis, early christians, kabbalists, sadhus, and mystics of all kinds who were at once feared, revered, and oppressed in mass societies that demand rigid conformity.

Such “mystics” threaten the very core of what most people accept as real and possible at the deepest and widest levels—their lives make us uncomfortable, because they point to the tragic limits of our imagination and the shallowness of our everyday experiences.

In the globalizing, internet-mediated world of 2016, Tulpamancers have to incur the perverse consequences of a culture in which difference is valorized in principle, but is mostly policed and punished in practice.

Our culture, paradoxically, nominally values individuality, but aggressively imposes a highly standardized framework on behaviour, which can be measured, catalogued, pathologized and punished with terrible precision.

Contemporary Euro- American culture may be the most aggressive of such frameworks ever implicitly ingrained, because it extends far and deep into other people’s thoughts and sensory experiences.

The extent to which other people’s mental lives are considered “transparent” (and hence knowable) or “opaque” (and unknowable) is another important difference found across cultures.

In contemporary Euro- America, in addition to thinking of ourselves in increasingly neurochemical terms, we think and worry excessively about what other people feel and think, and we have slowly incorporated a set of simplified medicalized assumptions and worries about how “normal”, healthy, sick and dangerous other people’s thoughts are.

Add to this a moral panic about a simplified catalogue of psychopathology, an obsession with self-authorship, and pervasive marketing from pharmacological industries, and the system of domination is almost total, because people will police their own selves before policing others.

Any private mental experience that departs from this sanitized norm will tend to be self-interpreted as scary and as the potential marker of mental illness. Given this set of problems, it is important to recognize Tulpamancy as a courageous, creative, and mystical backlash to the covert conservatism of our culture.

To sum up, Tulpamancy presents us with a fascinating case study for the study of the embodied and social nature of consciousness and cognition, and the emergence of new forms of culture and subjectivity.

It also offers an important paradigm for revising our simplistic and limiting understanding of mental illness on the one hand, and mental life and personhood on the other.

Do you know this old expressionist film:

Not a tulpa of the sort talked about here, but ......

 

[Skarekrow]

Do you know this old expressionist film:

Not a tulpa of the sort talked about here, but ......

No...I will have to watch it!!
Thanks John!!

 

[John K]

No...I will have to watch it!!
Thanks John!!

This trailer is from the restored version. I can only find grotty unrestored copies of the whole film on YT, but it seems to be available restored on Amazon and elsewhere.

 

[Skarekrow]

Just gonna link this one since it has a video I cannot share attached.
Fascinating stuff!!

Enjoy!!

Physicists have discovered that rotating
black holes might serve as portals for hyperspace travel
​

• Scientists once thought that traveling into a black hole would kill you.​
• But now, physicists have run computer simulations to show that certain types of black holes — large, rotating ones — could serve as portals for hyperspace travel.​
• Some physicists believe that you'd arrive at a remote part of the Milky Way or perhaps in another galaxy altogether.​
• One of the safest passageways might be the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*.​

Video and transcript: https://www.businessinsider.com/bla...ltZvXoaE_zfbQr9l2aJIa38MEKQcCQwrd_NAX0mBrIw58​

 

[Ginny]

Do you know this old expressionist film:

Not a tulpa of the sort talked about here, but ......

Lol, that trailer seems to be from a German channel (well, Bavarian), Bayerischer Rundfunk.

 

[Skarekrow]

This has been on my mind a lot lately...
The article below is called “When people call you ‘selfish” for how you manage your pain”...though it should read - “When people, or your ego call you ‘selfish’ for how you manage your pain.”
lol
The very idea of chronic pain trapping you further within yourself as it can very easily start to blur the outside world into something that you no longer pay attention to.
I know for sure that there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about the “pain” as it’s impossible not to when it is present all the time.
The problem that arises mentally then is the feeling(s) of self-centeredness that this can create...then the subsequent guilt for feeling/realizing how self-centered you are being in any given moment.
Supposedly we INxJs already have a difficult time getting out of our heads to begin with...so that seems to make the challenge all the more difficult.
I try to stay present as much as possible...but honestly there are times that I cannot be present because it just hurts too bad.
Again - guilt.
Is it misplaced...yes, I can see that.
Feelings of missing out on things...missing out on times the pain significantly effects my mood to the point I find myself somewhere else in a conversation.
More guilt from that shit.
The very idea that I am talking about it now is almost an oxymoronic thing in itself when also talking about self-centeredness arising from it, lol.
No sympathy in response please...I’m not complaining or feeling down about it...just solving the puzzle.
In many ways the pain has sharpened my focus when I am able to give something my full attention.
My meditative practices have skyrocketed past any expectations I had...I would say because of the pain or with a push from.
It’s a hell of an incentive.
Anyhow...this was a rough week physically for me...and I was contemplating this a lot.
Just been meditating and trying to send love to my body.
I know it will pass...if it doesn’t then I will adjust.
Of course this whole concept I am speaking of is termed - rumination...I am quite aware it exists and I am constantly breaking the cycle again and again...every day.
And at the very end of it all is the fact that this illness is not of my own choosing, just the hand dealt.

Found a couple articles that help clarify what I’m thinking about...
Anyone relate?
Thoughts??

(Again...I don’t need any soothing words...thank you though...what she also writes about her experience with pain acceptance is also my own experience...it is very liberating and the only way to get out of the maze really...it just takes time...sometimes I’m not so patient, lol.)


Enjoy!!

When People Call You 'Selfish' For How You Manage Your Pain
By Jessica Martin

​

For people with chronic pain, self-care is not selfish or irresponsible: it’s survival.

I have spent about two-thirds of my life feeling somewhat selfish because of my invisible illness: chronic pain.
During the time in which I was searching for a cure to my pain, I was consumed by anger, depression, anxiety, loss and pain so severe I could not even will myself to read a book – something I had always loved.

I was called selfish many times.
I was the queen of cancelling plans at the last minute and missing classes because I was experiencing so much physical pain and subsequent depression that I could not get out of bed.

I missed important family events because I could not imagine being around the people who thought I was this amazing girl headed for college and risk them seeing the pain even my smile could not hide.

I was embarrassed, ashamed, confused and in so much physical and emotional pain over being “selfish.”

However, I was not being selfish because I was doing whatever I wanted to do and not caring about letting people down.
I wanted to be with my friends.

I wanted to be in class studying.
I wanted to be around the people I loved more than anything in the world.

Instead I was balled up in bed alone either crying until the tears could no longer fall or just staring at the wall.
Some may call that selfish; however, I truly was just surviving and, over the years, hanging on by a thread.

So not only did I feel guilty for an invisible illness that had yet to be diagnosed as chronic pain, but I felt hated because everyone thought I was just a selfish person who ditched the people she claimed she loved.

Hell on earth.
There are no other words to describe those 10+ years of my life: pure and utter hell, every second of every day of every year.

I no longer look back and see myself as being selfish.
I was surviving alone with a pain no one could see and a pain I could not fathom.

Fast forward to when I finally accepted my chronic pain and learned how to manage this disease naturally.

The first amazing thing to enter my existence once I came to a place of acceptance was hope.
Then the work began.

I began managing pain naturally when I was 22; I am now 35 and it is still part of my daily routine so I can manage pain without pain managing me.
I still have chronic pain.

I still have difficult hours and sometimes difficult days, but the good days far outweigh the bad.
Is there a coincidence that how I now manage pain works, whereas how I used to manage pain (by searching for a cure) didn’t?

I truly do not believe so.
Is my life perfect?

Hell no.
However, I am in a place I never thought I would be in after my bike accident and the subsequent pain.

My dreams have come true, and more of my dreams will come true.
There is no exact destination for me, and the journey does have its ups and downs, but I am finally the Jessica I was meant to be.

With that said, I do find that people still call me selfish at times.
I would be lying if I said that term did not hurt, but I am working on not allowing other people’s views on how I live or manage pain to interfere with my happiness.

Like the saying goes: “Never mock a pain you have not endured.”
I have to set some limitations in my life in order to control my pain naturally.

I cannot do everything a person without chronic pain can do.
Let me rephrase that: I can do everything a person without chronic pain can do, but if I did so, I would be right back in the first paragraph of this article – hell on earth.

I have to take care of myself – body, mind and spirit – and know and respect my limitations in order to take care of the people I love and be the person I was meant to be.

I say no to invitations and people think that is very selfish of me.
Do I say no to all invites or requests to spend time with me?

No.
However, I do say no when I know a certain day is already busy and going to one extra thing will truly intensify my pain.

I listen to my inner wisdom and say no.

I have an odd sleeping schedule.
I go to sleep early – between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on most nights.

There are the occasional nights I stay awake later to spend time with the people I love, but on average I fall asleep with a book in my hand around 9:00 p.m. – and yes, on the weekends as well.

I am a morning person and part of my chronic pain management is a good amount of sleep, exercise and meditation.
I am a mother.

I like to wake up before my 4-year-old so I can exercise and practice a small meditation without her angelic toddler voice saying, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy” over 50 times.

I have been called selfish for my sleep schedule.

Those are just two small examples of why I am called selfish at this point and time in my life.
If I could turn back time I would never have fallen off my bike and I would never have had chronic pain.

I cannot do so.
I understand why people may see me as selfish at times, but what they do not realize is that I still struggle with the fact that I do have chronic pain.

Although I am thrilled I am living a happy life despite chronic pain, it still saddens me that I am unable to do everything I would be able to do had it not been for my invisible illness.

I beg all of you not to allow (or at least try not to allow) what others say to you regarding how you choose to live your life affect you – and this goes for everyone.

I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t, so to speak.
If I do not manage pain in a healthy manner I will be a miserable mess and people will call me selfish because I cannot really do anything.

But if I manage pain naturally I am also called selfish because I have to set my own limitations.
So what is the lesson in that?

You have to do what you know intuitively is right for you.

If you are not taking care of yourself as only you know how to do, then you are not helping anyone, especially yourself.
People will always talk and have an opinion.

Tune that crap out.
None of you are selfish people.

I know you are all doing the best you can and if you had a choice, you would not have chronic pain.
You are not selfish people; you are survivors.

 

[Skarekrow]

I am very excited about this...but also very weary of it too!
Disney sure did mess the whole thing up royally with “The Golden Compass”.
I don’t know how they expected to create and tell the whole story without pissing off huge amounts of religious conservatives.
It certainly was not meant as a children’s book(s)...it is a very violent series actually.
Here’s hoping that they tell the actual story this time!!!

 

[John K]

This has been on my mind a lot lately...
The article below is called “When people call you ‘selfish” for how you manage your pain”...though it should read - “When people, or your ego call you ‘selfish’ for how you manage your pain.”
lol
The very idea of chronic pain trapping you further within yourself as it can very easily start to blur the outside world into something that you no longer pay attention to.
I know for sure that there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about the “pain” as it’s impossible not to when it is present all the time.
The problem that arises mentally then is the feeling(s) of self-centeredness that this can create...then the subsequent guilt for feeling/realizing how self-centered you are being in any given moment.
Supposedly we INxJs already have a difficult time getting out of our heads to begin with...so that seems to make the challenge all the more difficult.
I try to stay present as much as possible...but honestly there are times that I cannot be present because it just hurts too bad.
Again - guilt.
Is it misplaced...yes, I can see that.
Feelings of missing out on things...missing out on times the pain significantly effects my mood to the point I find myself somewhere else in a conversation.
More guilt from that shit.
The very idea that I am talking about it now is almost an oxymoronic thing in itself when also talking about self-centeredness arising from it, lol.
No sympathy in response please...I’m not complaining or feeling down about it...just solving the puzzle.
In many ways the pain has sharpened my focus when I am able to give something my full attention.
My meditative practices have skyrocketed past any expectations I had...I would say because of the pain or with a push from.
It’s a hell of an incentive.
Anyhow...this was a rough week physically for me...and I was contemplating this a lot.
Just been meditating and trying to send love to my body.
I know it will pass...if it doesn’t then I will adjust.
Of course this whole concept I am speaking of is termed - rumination...I am quite aware it exists and I am constantly breaking the cycle again and again...every day.
And at the very end of it all is the fact that this illness is not of my own choosing, just the hand dealt.

Found a couple articles that help clarify what I’m thinking about...
Anyone relate?
Thoughts??

(Again...I don’t need any soothing words...thank you though...what she also writes about her experience with pain acceptance is also my own experience...it is very liberating and the only way to get out of the maze really...it just takes time...sometimes I’m not so patient, lol.)


Enjoy!!

When People Call You 'Selfish' For How You Manage Your Pain
By Jessica Martin

​

For people with chronic pain, self-care is not selfish or irresponsible: it’s survival.

I have spent about two-thirds of my life feeling somewhat selfish because of my invisible illness: chronic pain.
During the time in which I was searching for a cure to my pain, I was consumed by anger, depression, anxiety, loss and pain so severe I could not even will myself to read a book – something I had always loved.

I was called selfish many times.
I was the queen of cancelling plans at the last minute and missing classes because I was experiencing so much physical pain and subsequent depression that I could not get out of bed.

I missed important family events because I could not imagine being around the people who thought I was this amazing girl headed for college and risk them seeing the pain even my smile could not hide.

I was embarrassed, ashamed, confused and in so much physical and emotional pain over being “selfish.”

However, I was not being selfish because I was doing whatever I wanted to do and not caring about letting people down.
I wanted to be with my friends.

I wanted to be in class studying.
I wanted to be around the people I loved more than anything in the world.

Instead I was balled up in bed alone either crying until the tears could no longer fall or just staring at the wall.
Some may call that selfish; however, I truly was just surviving and, over the years, hanging on by a thread.

So not only did I feel guilty for an invisible illness that had yet to be diagnosed as chronic pain, but I felt hated because everyone thought I was just a selfish person who ditched the people she claimed she loved.

Hell on earth.
There are no other words to describe those 10+ years of my life: pure and utter hell, every second of every day of every year.

I no longer look back and see myself as being selfish.
I was surviving alone with a pain no one could see and a pain I could not fathom.

Fast forward to when I finally accepted my chronic pain and learned how to manage this disease naturally.

The first amazing thing to enter my existence once I came to a place of acceptance was hope.
Then the work began.

I began managing pain naturally when I was 22; I am now 35 and it is still part of my daily routine so I can manage pain without pain managing me.
I still have chronic pain.

I still have difficult hours and sometimes difficult days, but the good days far outweigh the bad.
Is there a coincidence that how I now manage pain works, whereas how I used to manage pain (by searching for a cure) didn’t?

I truly do not believe so.
Is my life perfect?

Hell no.
However, I am in a place I never thought I would be in after my bike accident and the subsequent pain.

My dreams have come true, and more of my dreams will come true.
There is no exact destination for me, and the journey does have its ups and downs, but I am finally the Jessica I was meant to be.

With that said, I do find that people still call me selfish at times.
I would be lying if I said that term did not hurt, but I am working on not allowing other people’s views on how I live or manage pain to interfere with my happiness.

Like the saying goes: “Never mock a pain you have not endured.”
I have to set some limitations in my life in order to control my pain naturally.

I cannot do everything a person without chronic pain can do.
Let me rephrase that: I can do everything a person without chronic pain can do, but if I did so, I would be right back in the first paragraph of this article – hell on earth.

I have to take care of myself – body, mind and spirit – and know and respect my limitations in order to take care of the people I love and be the person I was meant to be.

I say no to invitations and people think that is very selfish of me.
Do I say no to all invites or requests to spend time with me?

No.
However, I do say no when I know a certain day is already busy and going to one extra thing will truly intensify my pain.

I listen to my inner wisdom and say no.

I have an odd sleeping schedule.
I go to sleep early – between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on most nights.

There are the occasional nights I stay awake later to spend time with the people I love, but on average I fall asleep with a book in my hand around 9:00 p.m. – and yes, on the weekends as well.

I am a morning person and part of my chronic pain management is a good amount of sleep, exercise and meditation.
I am a mother.

I like to wake up before my 4-year-old so I can exercise and practice a small meditation without her angelic toddler voice saying, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy” over 50 times.

I have been called selfish for my sleep schedule.

Those are just two small examples of why I am called selfish at this point and time in my life.
If I could turn back time I would never have fallen off my bike and I would never have had chronic pain.

I cannot do so.
I understand why people may see me as selfish at times, but what they do not realize is that I still struggle with the fact that I do have chronic pain.

Although I am thrilled I am living a happy life despite chronic pain, it still saddens me that I am unable to do everything I would be able to do had it not been for my invisible illness.

I beg all of you not to allow (or at least try not to allow) what others say to you regarding how you choose to live your life affect you – and this goes for everyone.

I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t, so to speak.
If I do not manage pain in a healthy manner I will be a miserable mess and people will call me selfish because I cannot really do anything.

But if I manage pain naturally I am also called selfish because I have to set my own limitations.
So what is the lesson in that?

You have to do what you know intuitively is right for you.

If you are not taking care of yourself as only you know how to do, then you are not helping anyone, especially yourself.
People will always talk and have an opinion.

Tune that crap out.
None of you are selfish people.

I know you are all doing the best you can and if you had a choice, you would not have chronic pain.
You are not selfish people; you are survivors.

Some thoughts ....
It’s almost impossible for many of us to judge this. How can anyone who hasn’t suffered chronic pain, or shared their life with a sufferer, see clearly enough. At the same time long term suffering can strip bare someone’s personality and leave them exposed - for example sometimes there seems to me to be a core of selfishness and self pity, sometimes it is a shining light of sainthood, and sometimes it’s a core of fear, confusion and world weariness. I feel that these are not always a consequence of suffering but may actually be good, bad and indifferent personality roots that are normally concealed from easy view in most non-suffering people. I wonder too if the judgement of others is actually a symptom of the projection of their fear and discomfort onto the sufferer, together with the echos of their own flaws, which we all have buried in our cores. If I judge you in your pain, then I risk that judgement coming back and pointing its finger at my own soul. Someone with chronic pain may possibly have a deep root of selfishness which would be there without the pain anyway, because that is a common human fault, but I doubt if many ‘muggles’ have the gift to discern this justly.

It isn’t selfishness though to take necessary time to manage pain. To think this is the same as telling a kidney patient that it’s selfish to spend many hours on dialysis each week. The muggles can’t see the two things the same way because one is far less tangible than the other.

 

[JennyDaniella]

​

Just gonna link this one since it has a video I cannot share attached.
Fascinating stuff!!

Enjoy!!

Physicists have discovered that rotating
black holes might serve as portals for hyperspace travel
​

• Scientists once thought that traveling into a black hole would kill you.​
• But now, physicists have run computer simulations to show that certain types of black holes — large, rotating ones — could serve as portals for hyperspace travel.​
• Some physicists believe that you'd arrive at a remote part of the Milky Way or perhaps in another galaxy altogether.​
• One of the safest passageways might be the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*.​

Video and transcript: https://www.businessinsider.com/bla...ltZvXoaE_zfbQr9l2aJIa38MEKQcCQwrd_NAX0mBrIw58​

Seriously one of my favorite blogs on this forum! Always have such cool and insightful things to share, and always up around my alley of deep interests! Thank you for sharing Skare!

Will be watching the video later today. Hope all is well with ya! <3

 

[Ginny]

I am very excited about this...but also very weary of it too!
Disney sure did mess the whole thing up royally with “The Golden Compass”.
I don’t know how they expected to create and tell the whole story without pissing off huge amounts of religious conservatives.
It certainly was not meant as a children’s book(s)...it is a very violent series actually.
Here’s hoping that they tell the actual story this time!!!

An incentive to read the third book, finally

 

[Skarekrow]

Some thoughts ....
It’s almost impossible for many of us to judge this. How can anyone who hasn’t suffered chronic pain, or shared their life with a sufferer, see clearly enough. At the same time long term suffering can strip bare someone’s personality and leave them exposed - for example sometimes there seems to me to be a core of selfishness and self pity, sometimes it is a shining light of sainthood, and sometimes it’s a core of fear, confusion and world weariness. I feel that these are not always a consequence of suffering but may actually be good, bad and indifferent personality roots that are normally concealed from easy view in most non-suffering people. I wonder too if the judgement of others is actually a symptom of the projection of their fear and discomfort onto the sufferer, together with the echos of their own flaws, which we all have buried in our cores. If I judge you in your pain, then I risk that judgement coming back and pointing its finger at my own soul. Someone with chronic pain may possibly have a deep root of selfishness which would be there without the pain anyway, because that is a common human fault, but I doubt if many ‘muggles’ have the gift to discern this justly.

It isn’t selfishness though to take necessary time to manage pain. To think this is the same as telling a kidney patient that it’s selfish to spend many hours on dialysis each week. The muggles can’t see the two things the same way because one is far less tangible than the other.

Thanks John.
Yes...it is an experiential emotion.
But like you said far more eloquently...it can strip away a lot of the BS (did I read that right? lol).
I have found deep changes in my empathy toward people...it is much more forgiving and all encompassing than it was previously.
Not that wasn’t already a very empathetic person...being INFJ.
It hasn’t all been bad.

Take care and much love!

 

[Skarekrow]

Seriously one of my favorite blogs on this forum! Always have such cool and insightful things to share, and always up around my alley of deep interests! Thank you for sharing Skare!

Will be watching the video later today. Hope all is well with ya! <3

Lots of thanks and gratitude Jenny!
Glad you find it fun and interesting to read...I will try to keep it going for as long as I can, lol.
(Or until Deathjam tells me it’s taking up too much space on the server!)

An incentive to read the third book, finally

Oh man...you should read them!
I really enjoyed to whole series!
But it definitely deals with theological ideas (killing God) that don’t make for a Disney movie.
Hopefully they give it the proper treatment it deserves this time!

 

[Ginny]

Oh man...you should read them!
I really enjoyed to whole series!
But it definitely deals with theological ideas (killing God) that don’t make for a Disney movie.
Hopefully they give it the proper treatment it deserves this time!

I did, at least the first two. But there is just so much to read!!!

 

[Skarekrow]

I did, at least the first two. But there is just so much to read!!!

It is a rather thick set of books...I have it all in one and it’s like 5” thick hahaha.
Book on tape?
It has a very epic ending...not sure how that is going to be captured by HBO...but we shall see!