I was just looking through some stuff on multiplicity and the phrase caught my eye, "Note this has nothing to do with soulbonding." I went to the soulbonding page, half expecting to find some creepy cultish mystical wiccan thing. (For the record, very few wicca I know are creepy, cultish or overly mystical) Instead, it talked about a group of writers who got together and discovered they all shared a close connection with their characters. As in the characters talk to them.
Well, thought I, what a coincidence! My characters talk to me all the time. As I read on, I found many of the things I've dealt with alone were mentioned as aspects of soulbonding. I have a soulscape, I have had some characters controlling the body (very reluctantly though). They speak independently of my conscious train of thought. Of course we're all sharing one brain I think, so there are limitations, but I can definitely say I've experienced a textbook case of soulbonding.
The question you might ask is, why would a site on multiple personality order deny its involvement with soulbonding? Alternate personalities, alternate characters, it's the same thing right? Well that explains something else about me. The selves the make up 'me' exist on an isolated 'tier' of awareness. We don't have full independence of thought, rather existing as different aspects of a council of thoughts. But at the same time we have privileged access to the most private areas of the mind. My soul bonded characters on the other hand, are held separate, less able to directly influence my thoughts. On the other hand, this separation has allowed them an independence my aspects cannot achieve. I can happily argue with a soulbond over some issue or another, but when my aspects argue it manifests as indecision, even paralysis until an agreement can be made.
It's almost like the Linux operating system. The kernel of the operating system delegates all of the programs. It has privileged access to the most intimate sections of the memory, and a direct connection to the hardware. Some (most) kernels are separated into modules, each performing a separate task like a program, but each lacking the ability to be a program by itself. Regular userspace programs can run without knowledge of what the kernel is doing, or the layers beneath the kernel, acting as independent entities in a virtual machine.
SO, they're right. Soulbonds are different than multiple personalities. Soul bonds, like programs, can argue with me the operating system, and the entire computer, my body, won't freeze up. But a kernel module must behave much more carefully and dependently than a userspace program, and in the same manner my aspects cannot exist as independently as my characters.
I have a theory about free will and independence. I can imagine a deity, supremely powerful and omnipotent, yet unable to do anything simply because they are the sum of everything possible. Then it discovers what POSIX users know as the 'fork,' becoming a multitasking system. Subprocesses to the overbeing might include pantheons, archetypes, avatars. I'll use Elephant as an example. There was a story of Elephant, who having gotten in a pinch with an alligator got their nose stretched out long, and that's why elephants have long noses. Now why would every single elephant get a long nose as a consequence of the actions of one? Well the archetypes themselves spawned subprocesses, which would be the mortal creatures of the world. Because you can't have a world with only Coyote, instead the world has many coyotes, and many elephants. Changing one of the higher archetypes has consequences for every member of that archetype.
I don't know any of that stuff, I just made it up in my imagination. But it would explain a lot of things in our world, with some far ranging implications I'm not going to tell you about because I'll do that in my current magnum opus story. To say we're all schizophrenic multiple personalities of God isn't unreasonable, it's even comprehensible. Our awareness of this is limited because it must be limited for us to have independence. To connect things together, maybe we're soulbonds of the Author, who can't give us access to the secrets of the universe because then we'd be multiple personalities, and would lack the ability to argue, an ability often coined as 'free will.'
The writer's community I mentioned, who discovered soulbonding, closed down a while ago. It's kind of sad, I was hoping to find some people to talk to who also had a deep and intimate connection with their characters. Oh well, I'll keep looking. "Imaginary friend" just turns up a bunch of children's books, psychology texts and religious sites.
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