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Implanting Guide


Sophie

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About imposition

 

Based on surveys of this community, less than one percent of tulpas ever get imposed -- probably far less when you factor in all the people who try this out for a week or so and give up before ever taking any surveys. Imposition is not hard, but for most people it does take some work, and it's the part of the tulpa process that is least likely to happen on its own.

 

Before we begin, I'd like to address a common misconception: Everyone says hour counts are bad. Let me ask you, when is charting your progress ever a bad thing? Will you fail on your diet if you ever weigh yourself? Will you fail at exercise if you count your reps? Will you fail all your classes if your teacher grades your papers? Hour counts are not bad -- what's bad is thinking that it will take exactly 120 hours to finish imposition. It might be faster, it might be slower. But be realistic.

 

I won't put a number to how long imposition takes. Instead, I'll ask: how long did your first imposition take you? Let the comments on this guide speak for themselves. What I'm getting at here is that unless you have some special ability, imposition is probably not going to happen overnight. Some people spend years on imposition. Having said that, imposition is not hard -- you just need to be diligent, and put the work into it.

 

I am not going to cover the entire process of imposition here. There are already a number of good imposition guides on this site. But there's one item that most guides leave out, which is what I'm covering here: I call it implanting. It's the step that comes before imposition.

 

What is implanting?

 

To put it most simply, implanting is saving your tulpa in your memory.

 

There are three processes of memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval.

 

So in the process of imposition, you perceive something (such as an image of your tulpa), your mind encodes it as a memory, stores it away for later access, and when you want to impose, it retrieves that memory and projects it out into the world around you. Implanting refers to the steps of perception, encoding, and storage, whereas imposition is retrieval and projection.

 

How is this different from visualization?

 

Well, if I ask you to imagine a purple polar bear in a top hat, you may be able to do it. You've never seen a purple polar bear in a top hat, but you have seen the color purple, a polar bear, and a top hat, and your mind can combine these images through the process of visualization -- but the images exist in your mind already because of implanting.

 

My polar bear is a very simple example. If you are a haberdasher or a ursinologist, you may have a thousand images of top hats or polar bears in your head, and you can tell them all apart, and you're wishing that I gave a little more description in my previous example. For most of us, however, all polar bears look pretty much the same, and all top hats look pretty much the same. "Purple" is also a very vague description, and can refer to any one of the many hues between red and blue, so you probably picked one arbitrarily.

 

The more complicated something is, the harder it will be to visualize it. And our tulpas tend to be very complicated, because that makes them feel more real. Of course there are exceptions -- if you have a homestuck troll tulpa, or a pony tulpa, or an anime tulpa, and you visualize it as a cartoon, you may have an easier time of it than someone visualizing a "live-action" tulpa. (Actually visualizing cartoons involves an entirely different part of the brain.) But when visualization is difficult, you can bypass a good deal of the visualization by implanting the images.

 

You can impose a tulpa without putting any conscious effort into implanting. If you've never seen any images of Snape, and you sit down and visualize him from the description in the books, you will eventually come to see him as clearly as you see real people. However, this is a long process as your brain takes bits and pieces of other things you've implanted, combines them, and stores the image. It's much faster if you start by implanting a picture of Alan Rickman as Snape.

 

How is implanting done?

 

Well, the nice thing about implanting is that it happens automatically. You're pretty much implanting everything that you consciously perceive. The problem is that these things don't always stick in your mind.

 

Modern theories suggest that there are several different kinds of memory. For the sake of this guide, we'll be looking at short term, and long term. Short term memory is memory that lasts less than a minute -- if you've ever had the experience of not remembering the drive to work or school, that's because the drive has become so routine to you that it was all filed as short term memory. Long term memory is things that you'll remember an hour later, and this is where we want your tulpa to be.

 

Try looking at a picture and then closing your eyes and imagining it. Then, without looking at the picture again, try imagining it a few hours or a few days later. You probably find it easy to visualize something you've just seen a few seconds ago, but after hours or days have passed, the image gets more and more vague in your mind until you can't visualize it at all.

 

What's happening in this little experiment is that you're looking at an image and telling your brain to hold onto it, because you know you're about to use it again. Sometimes, because of associations, emotions, or familiarity with the picture, it'll get filed under long term memory. In these instances, you may be able to visualize it an hour later, but unless you reinforce that memory by reviewing the image again, it probably won't last for several days.

 

So how do you make it stay? Well, a lot of things cause memories to remain longer, such as emotions, associations, and so on. The one that's easiest to work with, however, is repetition. Basically, if you look at an image again and again -- particularly if you think about it as you look at it -- your brain is more likely to realize that this is important, and thus to hold onto it.

 

Before we go into a little more depth on this, I'd like to tell you about two shortcuts in this process: sleep and meditation.

 

There's a powerful connection between sleep and learning. Basically, the brain uses sleep to process your memories, so if you're getting enough sleep, you're more likely to remember things well. But there's more to it than that. If you implant before sleeping, you're more likely to retain the information as long term memory. Also, if you can, a nap in the middle of the day will also help a great deal at implanting memories.

 

Meditation helps the process along as well -- you'll often find while meditating that you can call up images from decades earlier. Try doing half an hour (or more -- preferably more) of anapana meditation every day. It will focus your mind, and help you get through the implanting stage much faster. Some people say they don't have the patience and diligence for meditation -- actually, anapana increases your patience and diligence, and both traits will help a great deal with imposition. I highly recommend making this part of your routine.

 

When implanting, it helps to imagine the brain working a lot like a muscle. You can't just do a bunch of pushups on the first day of the month and consider that a full exercise routine. By the time your pushup day comes up next month, you'll have lost all the muscle you built up last month. Likewise, you should maintain a regular implanting schedule -- ten minutes every week is not likely to make a difference. Take it seriously, and commit yourself to a regular routine.

 

Visual implanting

 

I highly recommend that you use models to make implanting easier. If you don't have a form selected, try talking to your tulpa about it, and see if you can pick one out together. My favorite place for visual models is shutterstock.com, because it allows you to search for other pictures of the same model. Shutterstock does cost money to get the images without the watermarks, but I haven't found the watermarks to be a great hindrance to visualization, and I haven't found any free stock photo sites that are as easy to search by model. Having said that, there are other stock photo sites out there, so shop around.

 

If you're uncomfortable using a photo of a real person, or maybe your tulpa doesn't have a human form, try using parts of models. Use the eyes from one model, the nose from another, and so on. You can also make your own model -- this thread has one method. As I said, it is possible to combine images for imposition if you do choose to go that way, but using a model should make things easier.

 

All you really need to do to implant is to look at images of your tulpa as often and as long as possible. Eventually you will find that you can visualize your tulpa, even when you haven't looked at the images recently.

 

If you want to help implanting along faster, there's nothing better than an art project. Try drawing or painting your tulpa. If you have no artistic ability, use a grid -- you'll be amazed at how good it looks. I know many of you will ignore this suggestion because you're "not an artist". I know where you're coming from -- I'm not an artist either -- but that makes it even more important that you start drawing or painting. Artists are almost always better at visualizing than non-artists, so if you keep at it, this is the fastest way to beef up your implanting "muscles".

 

It's up to you when you're done implanting. My personal feeling is that implanting should last until you can visualize your tulpa for an entire hour forcing session without having to look at an image to refresh it in your mind. At this point, imposition will take over as your brain exercise, and so long as you maintain a good imposition schedule, you won't need to do anything more to maintain your mental muscles.

 

Auditory implanting

 

You should implant other senses as well. Sound is an important one, but you'll probably find it much easier than sight. Things like repetition, emotion, and association are important to implanting, and music combines all of these, so many people accidentally implant songs. In the old days, this mostly happened with hymns, but now that everybody has MP3 players, it is becoming far more common.

 

Again, I suggest you use a model for your tulpa's voice. Of course this doesn't have to be the same model you use for your tulpa's form. If you don't have a model already, talk to your tulpa about it, and "go shopping" for voices together. Librivox is a good place to start. (I made the mistake of getting a voice from an erotica site -- I have fourteen hours of audio to work with, but, well, there are problems.)

 

It's been suggested that tulpas may take after frequently repeated recordings of their voice model, coming to resemble them in their manner of speech. I don't think this is a permanent change to the tulpa, but until we know more, you may want to bear this in mind when you select a voice for your tulpa, just in case.

 

Once you have a voice, you should try to listen to it as much as possible. Audiobooks from Librivox work well for this, as you should be able to find hours of recording of a single person, but eventually you'll run out of books that your model has read. I suggest remixing your models recordings into music or hypnosis scripts. It'll require some work on your part, but the results are worth it.

 

I haven't tried it yet, but I found today that you can rip up MP3s to make new audio from the voice. The program is made for Japanese song lyrics, but it also works with spoken words (

). Try making some songs or better yet, spoken recordings of your tulpa's voice. Of course you don't need to use actual words -- just having your tulpa's voice speaking or singing gibberish, like
will work great for implanting.

 

Video games can work for implanting audio as well. Many games will allow you to insert your own sounds. They often aren't repetitive enough though, so I think music and hypnosis scripts are more effective.

 

A few final helpful tidbits from other people:

 

It's definitely not a bad idea to get samples of a voice to work with, but I should emphasise that you should only really 'work with' them. Your goal isn't to remember/implant phrases said in that voice, it's to remember/implant the voice itself so that you can hear it saying anything. To that extent it's very productive to imagine hearing (or listen to your tulpa saying, if you want) new words or sentences in that voice.

 

if you have a subtitled video (with audio, of course) of the voice you and your tulpa like, you can use a subtitle editor like Aegisub to play any line and work on memorizing certain speech patterns as well as getting your tulpa to try speaking in that voice - it's sometimes easier to work on it together with your tulpa rather than to mindlessly listen to samples in hopes that they stick.

 

Other senses

 

I won't say as much about the other senses, because they're far easier. Often, all you need for scent is a suggestion.

 

Edwin Slosson, a professor of chemistry, had an entire classroom smelling an "aromatic chemical" within a minute of his pouring it, although the chemical was actually regular water. The experiment had been intended to go on longer, but had to be cut off early because the students in the front of the class couldn't stand the stench.

 

The same things was done on TV at least twice: viewers were told about a new technology called "smellovision", which allowed TV stations to transmit smell to personal television sets. This was all fiction of course, but hundreds of viewers called in to report that they had smelled the scents transmitted.

 

Similar experiments were done with taste. For example, a cheap wine presented in an expensive bottle can fool wine tasters, as can a white wine with red food coloring presented as a red wine. For this reason, wine tasters don't look at the bottles these days.

 

In another experiment, it was shown that 85% of participants preferred the taste of Coke in a cup labeled "Coke" to the same drink in an unlabeled cup.

 

So a powerful suggestion is enough to make you smell something that isn't there, or taste something as different than it is. Things will be harder for you, since you know the scent isn't really there, but this does show how easily the mind is fooled. Bear that in mind and with some repetition, as with the other senses, you should be able to give your tulpa a distinct scent.

 

Well, that's all I have to say on the subject of implanting. Once you're done with the implanting, move on to imposition. There are a number of good guides already for that, so I'll leave off here. Good luck, and work hard!

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I don't think this used to have headers when I first read it. That's a welcome change, but you might want to make them stand out a bit more. Maybe another enter after your chapter ends, maybe slightly bigger font or something, right now they sort of blend in.

 

Speaking of how this is written, it's like... The anti-textwall. As if you were so afraid of creating textwalls you broke almost every sentence into its own paragraph. Unfortunately, while it is slightly easier to read than a textwall, it's still pretty difficult to read and gives this textwall feel to it. While you might have spent a lot of time coming up with the idea of this guide, it feels to me like you didn't spend a lot of time writing it down and editing it, almost as if you just wrote the first sentence that came to your mind and then already went to another one. It seems like there's barely any rhyme or reason to your paragraphs and they don't really flow into each other, so it's a chore to read honestly.

 

I suggest you sit down and work on this some more. This is the first draft, work on your paragraphs a bit more and make this more coherent. And I do have to ask... Right now when I read this, all I get is "learn to visualize well to be able to impose!" which isn't that new of an idea. Perhaps your rewrite would help me see what this all really is about, but right now it's a bit difficult to follow due to how scrambled everything is. In every way.

 

Not approved for now, but you have plenty of time to change it, yeah? Oh and...

 

Many people with imposed tulpas report developing eidetic memory.

 

[Citation needed], hopefully from somewhere that isn't Reddit or IRC.

The THE SUBCONCIOUS ochinchin occultists frt.sys (except Roswell because he doesn't want to be a part of it)

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[Citation needed], hopefully from somewhere that isn't Reddit or IRC.

 

Or the empirically-filled-with-research tumblr, we can't forget that.

 

I had the same generalization as Sands on the "learn to visualize well to be able to impose!" except for me, I had a subtle difference in interpretation in it being:

 

"If you can become proficient in mind's eye visualization and retain it long enough, you can probably shift that into what you see in your reality."

 

Things like Fede's blink-till-you're-crazy-and-see-your-tulpa-for-a-bit came to mind reading this as well, along with the photo thing as well. I saw you were navigating through most of the imposition guide, and intended to give underlying concepts, and added a new twist to things.

 

Though mostly what seems to be a new twist is offering anecdotal cases, events in history, and concepts that literally beg for a few sources for others to go into further research. This isn't undermining that you actually went into research on these concepts beforehand, it's just that like Sands stated, those things you learned and read went automatic, and it would definitely be better if there was another take at this.

 

Even though these are general concepts that can be derived at some point, that's a good thing since in a newcomer's perspective, this may give them more assurance that they can worry less on what they militantly have to follow. So taking off the automatic generalization lens for a bit, and putting on the newcomer perspective lens, this guide submission definitely has potential in being better.

 

I get the concepts you're trying to portray, but some things to keep in mind are what Sands mentioned. Another thing, maybe you could make a small title, since you jump from one subject to the other. This way, making a small title (bolding it, indenting, however you feel is practical for your submission) can help a lot for readers to get the central idea, and it can help you tie things together as well without them thinking you're rambling on. I know you made a few titles for certain concepts, but some ideas seem to mix around a bit, and could be separated a bit with sub-headings or something.

 

So instead of something like this:

 

Research has showed, "blah blah blah" and then this rabbit I wanted to talk about with my tulpa one time made me realize the value of doing this technique once I saw the process of it.

 

You could format it into something like (for the sake of example):

 

Theories On Consciousness

 

Research has showed, "blah blah blah"......-insert paragraph, or a few here-

 

What Those Theories May Help Support

 

And then this rabbit I wanted to talk about with my tulpa one time made me realize the value of doing this technique once I saw the process of it....blah blah blah.

 

Auditory Implanting

 

-concepts here

 

What This Suggests

 

_____

 

 

 

It may also settle the concern Sands addressed on the paradoxical anti-text wall, and text-wall-esque feeling as well (though I didn't really think of it as a wall of text, guess it's a matter of disposition at this point). Of course, not really something I think you should really follow like crazy though, since I'm sure the suggestions Sands made, and maybe when waffles responds can be a loophole for this.

 

And I say that from personal experience where I would want to write something on the fly, barely do any editing, and then think it's okay, only to find I can make it much better from the criticisms and critiques from others. It may feel intimidating when it comes to taking the responses, but I guess that's just a necessary evil we have to endure in seeing criticism and critiques as a means to improve, even if we may imply certain opinions are negative (not stating the critique so far has been negative).

 

Disapproved, but it's really an approval on standby to be honest with you. I look forward to future edits.

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Thanks for your advice. I'll be away from my computer for a week and a half, so I don't know if I'll be updating this anytime soon on my phone, but I'll definitely make some edits when I get back home.

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We'll be waiting for that. Be sure to write back here when you have done the edits so we can take another look.

The THE SUBCONCIOUS ochinchin occultists frt.sys (except Roswell because he doesn't want to be a part of it)

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Blank vote for now.

"Assert the supremacy of your Imaginal acts over facts and put all things in subjection to them... Nothing can take it from but your failure to persist in imagining the ideal realized."

 

-Neville Goddard

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I fixed it up a bit. Let me know how it looks. I'm not sure I understood the anti-textwall comment, but I rewrote paragraphs, supplied references, and changed the headers.

 

I've found many mentions in this community of eidetic memory (search for eidetic, photographic, memory, perfect, and recall), but much of it looks like rumor, so I just removed that part. I know I first read about that in this community, but it was almost a year ago, and I can't seem to find the thread.

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About anti-textwalling, see this picture for the "too many paragraphs" comment. Your paragraphs are so short that they're pretty much all one or two lines, which defeats the point of using paragraph breaks - to break up your text. Also on spacing you should leave space under your headers if you ask me but that's just preference really.

 

 

Okay, a few real points.

 

Sands did mention this but it seems a bit weirdly positioned. You've put this step in between imposition and visualisation where the two normally would have joined. Many visualisation guides will tell you to practice visualisation until you can do what you've described as the goal of 'implanting', and many imposition guides will ask (or otherwise suggest implicitly) for it as a prerequisite.

 

It's not like what's written here isn't going to be useful, but perhaps - and I say this in the nicest possible way - making up your own term for a step that is usually included in other steps isn't the best way of presenting it. On the other hand, I'm not really sure what I'd do with it in this state now. Maybe you have more to add on the imposition side?

 

 

What is implanting?

 

By Zeus, you start off with two metaphors and by the end of the section I'm not a whole lot further towards understanding what 'implanting' is. It's visualising things, I think, or visualising things in real space, or remembering what things look like. In any case you do need to clean up this section, and maybe start the "What is implanting" section with a nice sentence like "Implanting is...". I'd probably suspect that the metaphors are redundant at best, but I can't really say at this point for the above reason.

 

 

How is implanting done?

[...]

There are two ways to make them stick: emotion, and repetition.

 

This seems a bit odd to me. Aren't some things memorable for other reasons, like being associated with other memorable things, or being notable in some ways, or some other such thing? I know you're talking specifically about visual memory but I think that's still true.

 

 

Auditory implanting

[...]

Repetition and emotion are the keys to implanting, and music combines both repetition and emotion, so many people accidentally implant songs.

[...]

I think music and hypnosis scripts are more effective

 

I think so but at least in my experience hallucinating music is quite different to hallucinating more controlled sounds, specifically voices. I'm not sure what kind of experiences you have with this but instinctively I feel as though 'implanting' using music would lead to inflexibility - you'd be able to hear the voice singing the lyrics but not doing much else. Mind you, you might be able to tell me wrong, or maybe add some supplementary information there.

 

 

 

Still, I like most of what you have said. I think if you make some revisions this'll be an insightful guide, and I'll approve it then.

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Thank you for that, waffles. I can see that this still needs some work. But I would like a little clarification. You talk like visualization is the step before imposition. I've always seen visualization as a method by which imposition is conducted. Could you explain the way you see it, so I can make this a bit more clear?

 

I'm trying to write this as a pre-visualization step, which in my mind made it pre-imposition (or pre-wonderland).

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Well, it can be both really. Traditional creation guides will have separated the two, because they'd advocate closed-eye visualisation as a means to create and familiarise yourself with your tulpa's form (in discrete sessions rather than continuously, to boot), and imposition methods that weren't just that or other visualisation.

 

A lot of people visualise without the intent to impose (although probably the majority will see it as an end goal), and might use closed-eye visualisation methods like I said above. Visualisation with the intent to impose is a bit more intensive than that, and I think always open-eye. It'll also often be supplemented by other things like suggestion, or staring at walls for hours, or some other such thing.

 

It's true that the steps overlap a lot, and it's probably not a good idea to place too much faith in their distinctions. What I really mean is that a 'visualisation step' - with the intent of practicing visualisation skills, and creating and familiarising yourself with your tulpa's form - typically segues into an 'imposition step' - with the intent of hallucinating your tulpa's form - while covering the ground you talk about here.

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A lot of good GAT suggestions were lost with the server migration, but I reworked this based on everything we still have, and what I remember reading before. Let me know how it looks.

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