Okay, This is a mental model that I explained on the IRC about a week ago, but I've been collecting my thoughts on it since. The basic concept. Your mind is like a kingdom, enough alike that we can talk about it using the terms of a kingdom as a metaphor. After I've explained the concept, I'll show how to apply this model to hypnosis and tulpa.
Let us start with your train of thought, inner monologue, or similar. This is you, the king or queen of your domain. In the center of your mind is a massive castle, more complex than any you've ever seen and with seemingly no internal order. You don't spend much time in the castle, however, it is simply where you stay during the night.
Around the castle is a large city, bustling with life. Your court is there as well, a regal building on the center square. The love to spend time there, listening to the reports of the people, settling disputes and deciding important issues. Many different people enter your court, from all across your mind-kingdom. Very important are the runners from the kingdom's edge, who bring you news of the lands outside your borders.
Occasionally, you decide to leave your court and travel the many cities, fiefs, and towns. There, you meet the common folk and learn how they do what they do. Sometimes, you solve local problems, dedicate more people to a project, bring in resources. Other times, you simply observe, watching and learning from their normal life. Eventually you return to your court, more certain of your people and better informed.
Now, let us look at this as a model, by telling the history of the kingdom. The Land itself represents the mind. It is there, but without something constructed on it, it just sits and slowly erodes. However, when first born, a new and inexperienced king or queen lays alone. They are not without some help though. Messengers, representing the sense organs, run from the edge of the land to bring in new senses, represented by Resources. Many of these are not helpful to the baby ruler, so they are burnt, but some are useful and these become the building blocks of the castle. At first the baby ruler has no plan for the castle, and it is built erratically, with dead-ends, useless pieces, and no order. Slowly though, the baby learns how difficult it is to navigate from room to room, if there are rooms at all, and begins to impose order. The castle is the early subconscious, the dream place, where you spend your time sleeping. It does not change quickly after the ruler moves to work with ordered things.
This newly ordered area forms the first city. The city will simply sprawl at first, expanding in all directions and having all manner of shops and houses and the like mixed together even that will slowly separate out, with different portions gaining notoriety for specializations. Messengers will sometimes stay at this point, deciding to try a new life in the city. Their numbers grow and they populate the city. This city is the conscious mind, and it is the best known parts of ourselves. By this point, the baby needs not concentrate on every little thing. The ruler is growing up enough to do some things automatically, without the need to be focused and directing them.
At this point, we learn enough of language to gain something powerful. It is Definition. Previously, things were difficult to order because all definitions were decided by the ruler, but upon learning language the messengers themselves can bring new definitions, new ways of separating and ordering the kingdom. This causes two changes. First, the ruler is forced to begin building walls to separate and differentiate. These walls allow different places to be told apart from each other, and they provide some protection against a new type of messenger, the unwanted messenger. These are the senses we do not want to experience, the ideas we do not want to hear. They will try to get in if blocked, and thus a wall is put up around the city.
Now, towns begin to spring up. The resources from the messengers continues to build up, and they are put to use with expansion. Messengers themselves, and the offspring of others, begin moving to these towns outside the main city. This is the birth of the functional mind. It is also here that our story must become a bit more abstract. You see, by this point the ruler is old enough to make choices. As they are able to do so, they can dedicate resources as they wish, and the kingdoms of two people will be incredibly different.
So, what can we KNOW about all kingdoms. Well... for most, they will have multiple towns with different skill specializations. Many have massive fields which are dedicated to agriculture, or rather to imagination and artistry. Many leave large areas of land uncultivated, and this land grows into forests, some dark and dangerous, others light and wonderful. Roads are common, to aid the ruler's travel to other towns. Eventually, the kingdom acquires so many resources that it becomes primarily urban; a complex of wisdom, but not of imagination.
I could go on about this model. It lacks many details, and is not as general as I might like, but it is very useful for imagery. It can make for a great wonderland if you need to explorer your own mind's working, and it can provide interesting method of explaining how different elements of the mind interact.
Now, let us apply this mental model to Hypnosis. There are two elements to hypnosis we should focus on: trance and suggestion. Trance usually works by drawing the ruler from their court, out onto the roads, and then getting them lost. By taking them away from the towns and city, the hypnosis gives them a chance to build something new. And in order to direct that new construction, it sends in messengers with certain types of resources and abilities. These are the suggestions, which provide the lost and confused rules with tools to build themselves a new town. If it is done well, the hypnosis will create a road (the triggers), to allow easy access to the town once it has been built. If it does not provide such triggers, a repeated use might send the ruler off to build a near identical town elsewhere.
What can this model teach us about making hypnosis easier, though? It shows us that we need to be willing to leave the city that is our expectations. It is built by us, and it is part of who we are, but if we never leave its walls then we will never achieve anything NEW, except by accident. It shows us that we must be willing to be distracted, to be willing to walk off the road into the unknown areas of our own minds. And that we must be willing to be lead by our senses, to build new beliefs and experiences. It is a metaphor, but it can give us advice too.
How about tulpa, you ask. Well, lets see. Tulpa need a few things. They need a consciousness and they need a form. So, they will need their own kingdom. Now, as ruler, you can decide to bequeath part of your kingdom to another. There, they can build their own city. Sometimes you will switch and allow them to receive all the messengers. Often, you will receive messengers from them, and vice versa, so that the two of you are in contact.
What is important is that you do NOT travel into their capital once you have built the fundamentals. You may share the productivity of towns, but the capital is fundamentally theirs and to enter it would be to challenge their right to rule, to be a person separate from you.
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