When I'm not controlling the body, I'm often still around talking to my other headmates, with a sense of where my imaginary body would be located in the real world.
Objectively, I can only sense things that the body can. Subjectively, if my imaginary form touches something, I can feel that with varying degrees of realism.
11:40 PM
When that happens, I'm imagining the feeling of touching something, but without needing to actually touch something.
Missed this, but I would say a headmate is a thoughtform. A thoughtform can be any perspective between you; the host, to a lowly construct of empathy like a character in a story or your idea of a family member. These things are all the brain doing the same thing, making identities and thinking from different points of view. By default we dissociate ourselves from identities who are not "us" and they feel "not real", "weaker" and their emotions feel distant.
But this dissociative effect is actually arbitrary, it's a feeling that's put over thoughtforms to make them less powerful when they might not be useful to the brain whereas you, the identity who is based on all your knowledge, are considered inherently more valuable. A headmate, including host-egos, tulpas or DID alters, is one of these thoughtforms - And when you "create" one you are not so much creating something new, as deciding to re-label a thoughtform as "real", which inherently starts to make them feel real (that's a whole other topic that goes into how hypnosis and suggestion work).
I do think so. There doesn't seem to be anything inherently real about the host identity in comparison to any other identity the brain cooks up.
11:52 PM
When we look at the brain the reason we have always struggled to find the "self" is because it's just a feeling overlaid over actions, it's not anything concrete.
If I understand rightly yes; Dev time, and natural easiness of processing in certain ways that ingrains you over time. One of the major struggles with tulpamancy is simply learning to ingrain a tulpa into reflex - remembering to actually think as/by/at them.
11:55 PM
Whereas we do this by ourselves fairly naturally and dominantly. It's something that needs to be trained I think.
In tulpamancy there is also the notion of personality forcing - The idea that you make a personality and give it to your tulpa and for some reason they just seem to accept it. Some would assume this means there's something lesser about them than us, but I would argue that it actually works that way for humans too - We learn our identities first by our parents telling us stuff that isn't true like "OHHH You're so smmaarrt" and testing those ideas on, like clothes, until we have an identity we really attach to.
Zen
In tulpamancy there is also the notion of personality forcing - The idea that you make a personality and give it to your tulpa and for some reason they just seem to accept it. Some would assume this means there's something lesser about them than us, but I would argue that it actually works that way for humans too - We learn our identities first by our parents telling us stuff that isn't true like "OHHH You're so smmaarrt" and testing those ideas on, like clothes, until we have an identity we really attach to.
And yes, they can, though I would say it is more to do with the brain developing one. A tulpa is about attention from the brain, and if you acknowledge that tulpas and hosts are equal you'll realize all it takes to switch is to think as them. You asked what switching was before. If a tulpas thoughts are a character on steroids; then switching is roleplay on steroids. You become them. At least that is my perspective.
11:59 PM
Whoever directs attention at making a new thoughtform can do so easily.
1
1