I don't know if I have a disorder or anything, but I've always felt since childhood that the actual "me" is a silent observer with little control over anything, and my body and thought processes are largely controlled by a different entity (much smarter than me) coexisting in my head. And that other entity wants me to believe it's all my decisions/actions, not theirs, and I'm in full control. It started with the realization that whenever I look at a problem, for example, a math problem, it just "clicks" with no actual effort on my part, as if someone else works hard solving it and just gives me the final answers, and all I do is take credit for it.

Maybe it's not a disorder per se, but a very peculiar kind of self-perception. If someone knows if it's a known phenomenon in psychology, I'd like to hear more about it.

I think that's could be focusing too much on the "inner voice" and assigning that the "you" label. At least for me I have a normally chatty inner voice, and usually think of that as "me", but if I step back I realize there is a lot more to "me". There's other thoughts/knowledge/processes happening that can bubble up. At least my interpretation is the voice is just the aggregator, but there's really multiple systems coming together.

If I switch tasks and do something very creative, say playing music or drawing, the inner voice goes away and I can enter a "flow" or meditative state where things just happen. It's a very different mode where it's just feelings/emotions/imagery and no language based thoughts.

Also when I get really really tired, but power through it, I have a "recursive observer" where I kind of view myself on a delay and analyse everything I do, it's kind of annoying.

I think people's psyche are less integrated than we realize. We're a bundle of emotions/desires all cohabitating. Some peoples subcomponents have good stable relationships with each other, others are chaotic and dysfunctional.

That sounds familiar - I usually say that I must be an idiot savant or something. But I don't really have the sense of an 'other' - I more think of it as a co-processor.

I had a weird experience relatively recently - I looked at a (coding) problem, and came up with an approximate (albeit buggy) solution, with no conscious involvement.

I looked at my answer, and didn't know what the hell it was meant to be doing - let alone how to debug it.

I went to sleep, and when I woke up fixed the bug with ease.

I have a relatively common occurrence that seems somewhat similar.. often when I've entered a state of flow while building something (coding) and finished my session by being distracted and then not returning to the code until the following day, it appears to me that someone else wrote that code. I have no recollection of most of it - the solutions seem creative to me, novel, like I hadn't thought of them.

That sounds similar in some ways to (non-dual) awakening.

Thank you for sharing. There are philosophical theories of mind that say we are all essentially like this but generally in a much less explicit way. The label “disorder” gets put on a person when the divisions become more explicit and come to the surface or when the darker aspects get control instead of being appropriately moderated by the rest.

I have been close to people who absolutely had a different consciousness take the wheel so to speak during extreme stress and entirely believe this division of mind is real.

Interesting point you bring up on the "disorder" label. I usually tell people that are newly diagnosed and freaked out about it that the label in itself is insignificant. It's only a "disorder" if it's disrupting your life in a negative way.

I have delusions, "magical thoughts", the occasional paranoia, and I prefer being alone. 95% of the time though those things don't cause any disruptions to my otherwise normal life. I have a wife, kids, and work at a FAANG without issue. I've had this "disorder" for over 20 years now and I only took anti-psychotics for maybe 3 months in the beginning. I'm on low-dose (100mg) Welbutrin to manage ADHD and minor depression, that's it. All that said, I've had a pretty successful and fairly normal life, so fixating on the "disorder" part of things is pretty much pointless. Saying I'm schizotypal is more about explaining to people that I think differently and observe my environment differently.

I've had experiences on psychedelics where my consciousness gets peeled back like an onion, with each layer being manifested by the drug as a separate voice. Things that we don't typically associate with an inner voice, like appraising some object or forming a reaction, became very explicit dialogues between influences in my mind. The loud ones were friends that I remember fondly. Some of them were comedians (LSD puts me in a silly mood). Some of them were even characters in books, and they were much quieter, but I could still feel their "grammar".

The eeriest thing is realizing why the voices are there mostly during the come up, and then get magnified to magical characters like gods and aliens as the trip progresses. I'm convinced LSD exposed aspects of my conscious processing to myself, and these voices weren't part of some creative hallucination. That all of us, psychologically, are just amalgams of influences, of which the human sort are usually the most direct, makes a lot of sense. Still, its eerie thinking that those voices are always there, just that in moments of inner cohesion they all work and therefore seem as one.

And I will say, being in that state of such explicit awareness of self was beneficial. I could say "no, don’t say that" to the voice that was saying "[morbid thing] was funny", for example. If someone thought like that all the time, I think it would be a disorder only to the degree that they wouldn't be able to communicate with others or whatever neurological overhead it incurs (maybe the brain needs some sort of central clock?).

Do "you" identify with one entity, as is often reported among tulpamancers, or do "you" stand apart from them all? When you hear one or another of your internal voices, or become aware of an entity's thoughts, is it from the perspective of another, perhaps depersonalized agent observing the rest? Do "you" have equal access to all entities or is it more accurate to think of yourself as one among them with a privileged perspective?

Thanks in advance for any insight you might be willing to provide. I hope these questions are not too invasive, your comment is of great interest to me.

Good questions and no they're not invasive, so no worries. Each day (and sometimes each interaction) the person acting as "me" is just one of the entities taking over, so effectively there's no central "me" at all if that makes sense. Today it's introverted family-man, but if we attend an event in the evening for example, the more social personality takes over and listens in on the conversations from family-man and others. Let's say the social one is currently active and sitting at the bar with friends having a great time, the family-man will say "we should text our wife and let her know we'll be home late" to which the social one may respond with "nah, we'll do it later" or "yeah that's a good idea, we'll do it now".

EDIT: to answer your last question about "equal access", we share thoughts and deliberate, but one can't exert control over the others nor forcefully take over. The active person at any given moment depends on the outside environment and what we decide is best for the situation, so it's kind of a democratic process; not sure if that can be defined as equal access or not.

Did you do training to have your parts communicate with each other? I tried imaginative meditation with the goal of for example bringing my collective to sit around a cosy campfire, become friends and ask for each other’s advice. But in my case I always had a strong sense of a single me and only recently discovered that due to stress or an overwhelming feeling of happiness one part of that whole becomes very dominant. In that regard, what you describe as an entity taking over sounds very familiar to me.

I want to get better at integrating my personas and am wondering if meditation is the only way forward. Any tips?

Meditation can help ... or it can make you psychotic. Tread carefully. Might be best to speak with a therapist on this before you experiment.

What finally brought peace is acceptance and the idea that it may even have advantages in some situations where things might be too stressful for one personality to handle, but another one can take the reins and steer us through the situation more gracefully.

This is interesting. So is the person writing here is one of these personalities? Or are "you" watching one of these personalities writing?

If the former, are there any personalities that are not aware they are one of many?

The person writing here is one of the entities/personalities yes. We're all aware of each other, so that's what makes this different from DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) or at least it was different back during the initial diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder in 2001.

This indicates DID, the schizotypal stuff is orthogonal to DID, you can be both.

Most people choose and have chosen all their lives to group all their thoughts into one unitary personality. Others haven't. It's all an illusion anyway in my humble opinion. There are only chains of thoughts/feelings and we associate with those chains a feeling of "I" or "other", but the reality is it's just a meandering walk.

> This indicates DID, the schizotypal stuff is orthogonal to DID, you can be both.

You know what, you might be right... got curious because of your post and went searching, then found out about OSDD-1b which is a sub-type of DID: https://did-research.org/comorbid/dd/osdd_udd/did_osdd

> In some cases, OSDD-1 parts can be highly distinct and have strong independent senses of self. What separates these individuals from those with DID is that they do not black out or lose time. They may or may not have dissociative amnesia for aspects of their trauma history, and they may occasionally experience episodes of amnesia due to extreme stress or reminders of trauma. However, they do not experience memory disruptions between parts during their normal daily life. An individual with OSDD-1b has a subjectively continuous memory; different alters do not have different versions of their history for daily life because all relevant information is accessible to all alters.

Thank you!

Out of curiosity, do you believe souls exist? I have asked myself if it is possible that all living beings do not technically have been "assembled" before "shipments." A person is really just a conglomerate of low level functions (souls) that assembled based on genetics and environments. The soul disperses and recycled after death. Low level programs remain, data (memory) most likely not.

That's an interesting philosophy. One of the personalities is spiritual and believes in souls yes. You should read "The Holographic Universe" if you haven't yet. It kind of dives into some of these concepts.

Cool, I will check it out.

Having Borderline personality disorder is nothing like that.

What did you think of Jane from Doom Patrol?

Not familiar with it, sorry.

Crazy Jane from Doom Patrol