sirhinojo wrote:
i find myself confused about how i am supposed to pretend to be my character.  i am a character that lived a long time ago, but i find myself talking as if i lived in modern times.  thus i feel that i am not really pretending much at all.  i feel like i am just giving information and asking questions about things that i would say and ask as myself anyways.

This is the perfect place for such discussion and these thought and wonderings occur to us all when we start PG. It's exactly this sort of thinking that gives us deeper insight into ourselves and our abilities, starts to augment our imagination, and teaches us a lot about the tools for creativity.

Some of what I write here may not make sense yet, so please tell me if it doesn't, so that I can try another way of explaining it (I'm learning better ways to explain things, and I need a lot of practice in this! so your feedback is invaluable.)

One thing is, we're not supposed to pretend at all. I mean I'm not pretending to be Alex this morning, right? I'm just being Alex, 'alexing around', today. We approach our PG characters in the same way. We don't pretend to be them, we be them. We use their inner model instead of our own, and behave as though we are them, we justify our presence in the here and now reality, and when we do that we don't have to work out all the details as responses will be natural.

In other words we make a model of their model. There are only 12 kinds of beneficial model, regardless of the details they take on transiently as personalities. This is the bit that can be hard to grasp, and partly its because I haven't finished the tutorials that deal with these abilities, so we are hitting the ground running here without a map and there are bound to be  more concepts to fill in. This is late-intermediate-to-advanced NH!

I've given a couple of examples below that I hope will help explain the processes going on, so this is a very long mail and I'll answer other bits separately.

Let's say today I want to be an N5 archetype, let's choose Tutankhamun for a laugh. Well I don't know much about that dude so I'm first gonna research him up and immerse myself in his reality, spend time imagining his everyday life and what sorts of things he thought about, what were his concerns, what was his ontology (his view of reality), what was going on in his life just before he died, etc, in other words I empathize with the dude and take on his context. I try to grasp the concepts making up HIS inner model and adopt it as my own. I translate his mental map.

I think of all the associations I already have with Tut (for example the movies I've seen, exhibits at museums, concepts about ancient egypt and what life was like there.)

Up to this point I'm behaving just like an actor who is asked to portray King Tut -I'm doing my homework. It will take a critical mass of information for a strong concept of what Tut is like to form in my unconscious.

Now I have to model it. Play at being that person and see what it is like to be concerned about what the priests are saying and what the people need. I consider my enormous responsibilities and my diplomatic demeanor for communication.

Now I have to transfer my character through time and justify his being here. What could possibly have happened to allow me to communicate with humans in century 21? Some suggestions might be: abducted by aliens and only just returned/ mummification really works and I'm stuck in the museum of Egypian Antiquities (reference is the movie 'night at the museum' with Nicolas Cage) /somehow my 'ghost' survived and is able to use the internet (reference is 'Johnny & The Dead' by Terry Pratchett) /time travel + reincarnation / communication across time/ memory loss or wiping /Stargate /...and so on, and so on...

Now let's say I want to post as him in our PG forum, and reply as a second character. My first post would be something like this:

**********************
example 1
"Great ones, my name is Tutankhamun. If this message works it means that you can read my words and they are in a language you understand.
I appear to be a newcomer; as you say 'a newbie' in this Paradise. I believe I passed on from the mortal life a long time ago and have become something else -I am not sure what yet.
I am only just learning to use 'the internet' to move about. I do not think I have a body, except for  my mummified remains which are not conscious -thank the gods! That would have been very boring for so long, I think.
It is great to be still alive but I have only just recently figured out how to communicate in these wires. The last thing I remember is having malaria, and I could of course be raving in fever and imagining all this, gods help me if this is true! I do not know where I have been and I have no memory of what happened, but I have managed to learn a lot since finding myself here by using this internet including this language which many of you seem to use. I am astonished at your (our?) wonderful paradise and feeling very like a small child again setting out to learn about life.
Am I a late developer, only just arriving among all you wonderful dead people? Or are some of you still in living bodies and this is how we communicate in your marvelous age, across the 'great river' between the quick and the dead?
Are you the gods we were taught of in our youth, and I am rewarded for my good life by being now allowed to be among you? I did not understand in life how my heart could weigh less than a feather but now none of me seems to weigh anything. Forgive my questions if they are foolish to you, I am but a child trying to learn.
Is all the technology I learn about on this internet happening in the 'real world' or does it exist only in this virtual world we inhabit? Can we affect that world or is it forbidden?
Awaiting your reply in great anticipation!
Amen-tut-ankh "
***********************

For my second post I'm gonna be Einstein, an N4 archetype.

************************
Example 2
"Hello Mr Tutankhamun,
Do not worry; persons like ourselves are in the clinical sense deceased and yes it is possible to talk to the living. They are not gods, and most of them are not like us and still have bodies. Not many people like us seem to make it here. But be careful already my young friend, communicating is not so straightforward as you might think. Here is the problem:

If we use the internet to tell them who we really are, the intelligent among the living cannot by deduction or induction believe us, as there is no way we can prove by argument that we really are who we say we are. We cannot manifest and visit them, and they do not have enough background knowledge to understand the real nature of parallel worlds, although this is coming.

So the intelligent will think we are lying or simply crazy, and the less intelligent will believe that they have psychic powers and can talk to the dead.

There are two ways to communicate safely. One is to find a less-intelligent human and talk to them, but the trouble with that is, they only communicate with other less-intelligent people who do not know much about physics anyway.

The second way is to make your own avatar and use it to present yourself in a psychological gaming context.
First you need to create a false human, let's call you 'Terry Carmen'. Terry opens a free email account and can post anywhere.
Then you find a group doing role playing games, and there you can post as yourself, via your false human*.

You can also keep up to date with your interests, but this can be frustrating. For example in physics nowadays they have got one step before the big bang with membrane theory, but they are missing the point that membranes synchronize or interfere, rather than collide, not to mention the three steps before that...but I apologise already! I find it hard to stop talking about physics, sometimes. You see I discovered that god does play dice with the universe after all -but the dice are loaded.

If you mail me privately I can give you some more tips about communicating with corporeals. And physics.
Welcome aboard your next life  :  )

Sincerely,
Albert Einstein

*I've had mine for many years it's called Alex.
***************************

Hopefully you can see how these dudes are constructed and then embodied, and also the second post is gonna bake your noodle later on.  :  )

It's actually weird jumping in and out of different characters that fast, as I'm now Alex writing this LOL  :  )  and it's hard to stop the flow. I'm gonna have to deliberately remind my brain not to consider things from two other people's pov this afternoon  :  )

Anyways, if examples are useful I can do pretty much anybody you like as long as there's information available about them online. There are of course some persons I would not emulate  :  )  but I trust they're not the kind of models we'd want anyway.

More later,
AR

sakiro wrote:

i think that could be difficult (again for me) to do PG about a character that i don't have enough point of similarity or i don't know enough information about him (like can be the case from people who past long ago)

This needs you to know your archetypes, again stuff we haven't yet covered because it's in tutorial 11. You can see why I'm often frustrated because I can't work faster!  :  )
If you can grasp someone's role in life and how they saw reality, it doesn't take much research to fill in the details.

Yeh, i know that sometimes in the process of playing, i have too "little talks" inside my head telling me "wtf are you doing crazy man?!" LOL, and that hurt the game for sure ..

There is nothing crazy about deliberately using techniques like this. It's like using an exercise bike in your office right? -You are not crazy because you're 'pretending to ride a bike', and you are not crazy because it's not a 'real' bike. It's an exercise bike for doing physical exercise. These are exercise characters for doing mental exercise. The former creates a flexible body and muscular physique, the latter a flexible imagination and 'muscular-mindedness', the key to fast adaptation.

Interesting read: "I am not Spock" AND "I am Spock", 2 separate books both by Leonard Nimoy, discuss this and other similar experiences.

Something that help me however, is getting "little reminders" in form of question like "what my character would behave like in this scenario?" i mean, it must be congruent.

For me the question is more like: "What would I behave like/feel like/believe if I were this character in this context"

One example of this was from a book i read (Psycho-cybernetics) where people with some kind of mind disease (i don't remember exactly well) gave them a test of question, and the rule was, "just answer the question like a healthy people would" and just to do that, the ill people need to "pretend to be" (you need that to know the answers?) and doing that they start feeling like they were more healthy, etc etc, make sense? (sorry bad english)

The trick is to grasp that it's the experience that we have doing the exercise that is the tool that enables the reality. This is a perfect example; exactly the way to do it. The second they start imagining themselves as a healthy person and behaving as that person would behave, they begin to get more healthy. What's more, merely reading examples of questions with healthy responses and then being asked to fill in a questionnaire responding honestly as they normally would will raise the percentage of healthy responses  :  )
From the rest of your mail I think you've "got it". So freeze reality for a moment here and look at where you are on the PG learning cycle: you've got enough basics and filled in some details, now it's practice time: actual real world modeling. Cutting & pasting realities  :  )
Have fun,
AR

Hi dude,

That's exactly how I feel about science in general  :  ) 
Unconscious knowledge is like the picture on the jigsaw puzzle box. Science helps us consciously recognize which bits of reality fit where, in that picture.

The thing is, even after we've done all the tutorials, that feeling remains; we still want to know how some other bits fit in...and so on, and so on... one becomes hooked on constantly learning more (and I suspect that's our natural healthy state). Reality is the most fantastic interactive game of all!
Onward...
AR

Wow, your intuition serves you well young Skywalker  LOL  :  )   I was writing a section of T9 right before reading this; here's a sneaky peek:

"It takes a certain critical mass of network-building AND environmental input to furnish us with effective experiential tools for dealing with and adapting to stressors, and without these tools stressful situations without relaxation will lead to chronic anxiety. The whole point is, when these networks are mature the same experiences will NOT cause anxiety!

This is why we don't have to show you how to dodge bullets (for 'bullets' read 'problems') -when you are ready, you won't have to. They won't BE bullets anymore, and you'll wonder how you ever perceived them as bullets in the first place. You'll see 'problems' for what they really are -changes in circumstances that you can apprehend in midflow, interact with as you please for learning purposes, or discard as you move past.  "

Best,
AR

sakiro wrote:
Do you have any "estimate" time of the release?

There is about a week's work to do but its a matter of when I can fit that week in between all the other weeks  :  )
Onward...
AR

sirhinojo Wrote:
Dudes, I am so sorry that I dropped the corresspondence here.

Hey dude I sometimes find mails in here I haven't replied to from years ago LOL  :  )

Re: PG,  I can see the 'busman's holiday' issue  :  )  I would expect the exercise to be maybe different working with people deliberately aiming their play at intelligence-improvement and working with core conditions, although I can see how the 'play' aspect could come through regardless of the subject matter, in which case you might have some very useful tips for students!

-For example, if you are asked to play a character in a production who is an asshole, obviously you don't allow yourself to empathize with and 'personify' that character in real life because you're smart and you know you don't want to end up actually manifesting asshole-tendencies. So if you can explain your methods for blocking that, for not identifying with it, that could be very useful to anyone who has trouble with input control and being over-influenced by others. This can be a big problem for the shy and timid, so any advice would be great.

...Or would you just refuse to portray unbalanced characters except in comedy? (I have met actors with this rule).

I'm still trying to imagine Spock singing the blues... "Ohhh, I woke up this morning...err, ...because I'm not nocturnal...." LOL  :  )

Best,
AR
PS have you seen Stelarc?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqQugiChBsU

Sirhinojo wrote:
For me it is a game, never torturous. Do you think that, despite this, the unconscious is negatively affected? I would guess no? I mean, I am laughing like crazy inside.

No this is not in any way dangerous. In fact this 'objective view' is a great explanation of what we should be doing when having to deal with idiots in real life  -learning to 'put on the polite face' and act the diplomat on the outside whilst giggling away on the inside and making excuses to leave.
You point out that its much harder in real life, and what I'm saying is that many people can't do it at all. So even your description here in itself is 'good tips for students'  :  )

A lot of people feel creepy about method acting because it's a subversion of modeling, maybe we sense that something is wrong about method-acting dodgy characters.

When we're modeling in order to learn, its really important to use that 'method acting' embodiment right from the start for stuff like talking or walking, but it's all unconscious at that stage. Later some of us can learn to use it consciously to pick up more abstract skills. But method acting on purpose is only safe if we know what we're doing consciously, and many people don't (which leads to the ills you mention above).

The difficulty for a lot of people is twofold, (a) they can't turn modeling off; everyone they pay any attention to, they HAVE to copy, method-acting style and (b) it's still not conscious -eg, they don't know they're doing it.

Using method acting to learn to play tennis with a coach or video is augmenting intelligence. We WANT to experience exactly how it feels. Using the same method to portray a schizo is the sort of thing that really gets people into trouble (we really DON'T want to experience how it feels! But here I'm talking about everyday people who never go on stage and have no experience for achieving objectivity or free will, with no idea how to separate their mind from what their body is doing and the words coming out of their mouth.

NH students who do know about this problem include some who have to fight daily to achieve the sort of objectivity that creative actors & many long-term NHers know how to employ as a matter of course.
I first figured out how to be objective in real life by modeling some bits of Mr. Spock; that is to say I understood that objectivity involved emotional control, reason, and clarity about reality. But only later did I understand how it involves a kind of 'deep creative play' (which is how I would describe the attitude now).

When something is familiar to us it's sometimes difficult to imagine someone having no clue how to do it  :  )  But if they have no experience of it, stuff like your description of the state above is really helpful.
Best,
AR