Mental emphasis on real life and its effects on tulpa creation

[Guest Anonymous]

In our time here my host and I have noticed a difference between individual tulpamancers on how much they emphasize real life over fictional/make believe things like movies, books and video games. Some greatly emphasize real life and find things that are fictional to be less important while others do not emphasize real life as much and are more willing to immerse themselves into fantasy.

 

To many, real is real and fiction/fantasy is fake. To others, real is real and fiction/fantasy is almost real or might-as-well-be real.

 

For my hostie, he takes things to a ridiculous level and fantasy make believe is just as important and significant as anything real. Trust me on this. It is hard for some to relate to that idea, but it is none-the-less a fact.

 

It is our observation, mainly when it comes to ourselves in relation to other tulpamancers, that these differences in perspective on fiction/fantasy vs. real life affect attitudes concerning the realness of independent sentience of a tulpa. In other words, those who emphasize real life and dismiss fiction/fantasy as fake are more likely to declare tulpa sentience to be REAL or want it to be. Meanwhile those who emphasise fiction/fantasy as important and almost/might-as-well-be real are not as concerned with the actuality of independent sentience.

 

These differences can perhaps even have an affect on things like the ability to visualize tulpas or dream about tulpas.

 

My host and I are not making judgements about whether either perspective is better or worse compared to another, we have just noted these differences as time has gone on and as we interact with others on the forum.

 

What are your thoughts on the effect of attitudes about fiction/fantasy vs. real life on tulpa creation and opinions concerning tulpa sentience? Do you find our observations and conclusions valid? Do you think there is support for this observation in the things you have read on the forum?

 

EDIT: For an example of one attitude or view affected by the difference, some have written on this forum "it is possible to delude yourself into thinking you have a tulpa, when you really don't have a tulpa." To my host and I, who emphasize imaginary things, that statement is makes no sense (in my case). I am supposed to be a delusion.

 

[hidden] EDIT: Furthermore, our emphasis on the might-as-well-be real quality leads my host and I to suspect that there may be in fact two equally valid types of tulpas living in the community simultaneously, illusory/delusion sentience tulpas and truly sentient tulpas. [/hidden]

[SomethingDire]

I'm on the "Fiction might as well be real" boat.

 

You see; fiction, ideas, imagination, fantasy, all of these things are greatly important to me. They are valid, very dear to me, and they have such a big impact on the way people perceive things and some don't even realize it.

 

I explained how I feel about these things before, I don't feel the need to do it again.

 

The only reason I seperate real life from fiction is because they work differently. I can't live a healthy life if I start to merge them together, but I honestly envy people who can.

 

I could further elaborate on why seperating fiction from reality is the right thing for me to do, but in the end, it just all comes down to 2 simple factors:

 

Hedonism: I'm a hedonistic person, and imagination lets me have the kind of joy I get from literally nothing else.

 

Little-to no control over self, especially over imagination: I have a wild and very immersive imagination, and I have poor self-control. Take those two and pour it on hedonism, and boom. No, really. Boom. Mind-orgasms.

 

That's what I have to say.

[Guest Anonymous]

Interesting response!

---

My host David and I can relate to that.

[J.Iscariot]

I used to know a tulpa who would spend a lot of time with her host in the wonderland. Their system consisted of 2 tulpas and the host, one of the tulpas would switch with the host and the host would supposedly spend time in the wonderland. That is the polar opposite of how my tulpa functions; no wonderland, consistent stream of thoughts, sentience, reflection upon reality and whatnot. Both my tulpa and the tulpa I was speaking of developed with time, and communicated with one another with bonds of sympathy. One day, the other tulpa let my tulpa know how 'jealous' she was despite her being, what, a year and a few months old. Because my tulpa had grown in reality, without me blanking off into a wonderland (which was more due to my incapacity to do so in the first place), she was supposedly able to develop cognitive abilities not faster, but in immense ways that made her go from a concept, an ideal in my mind to an actual person with emotions of her own. The other tulpa felt limited to her own wonderland, could not be as consistent in her host's attention span.

 

I don't mean to declare that this is the case for everyone. In the case that someone has a vivid imagination, if that works out for them, that's all good. I once made a small speech on IRC on that exact topic, actually. Basically, how do you know that imagination is better than reality on the level of vividness if all you know is imagination? To grasp the vivacity of reality, you need to be immersed and used to it for a certain while, a durable while that lets you get used to reality. I'm not saying imagination is bad, imagination can be all that people need for that matter, imagination can be vivid, but to me, it's important to try out both wonderland and reality in tulpa-related activities. By 'reality' I mean forcing your tulpa outside of an imaginary land, without interactive imagination and without going with the flow of expectations and interpretations. I tried out wonderlands, that did not work out for me, so here I am.

 

In other words' date=' those who emphasize real life and dismiss fiction/fantasy as fake are more likely to declare tulpa sentience to be REAL or want it to be.[/quote']

 

Not really, no. The way I see it, the mistake lies in declaring a decisive fact in the first place. Declaring that a tulpa is or is not sentient if erroneous to me because it's something you can never be certain of. If you lose yourself in doubting and worrying, though, you are going to miss out on every single great thing your tulpa has to offer, every single moment of happiness that could be spent not thinking about whether the person you are talking to is real or not.

 

Fiction is nice. Fiction is pleasant. It stops being fiction when it becomes 'real' as in when it starts being something we interpret with our five senses in a consistent and non-stop way, when fiction becomes reality, it loses everything that made it a perfect ideal, a perfect concept that is flawless or very limited in flaws, that's what I originally meant. Reality is flawed in subjective ways, but if you come to look at it, reality tends to function in a certain type of balance depending on circumstances. Fiction tends to act as perfect, ideal, because someone is simulating altered version of deformed reality in their minds. I don't know how people treat their tulpas, how they see and interact with them, by that I mean that I'm completely unaware of how people feel towards this, but my tulpa acts like a real person every single second of the day, which is why the 'transition' is something that never existed in the first place, for us. Because we worked very hard to get where we are today, which is no peak, but still something.

 

I go in my imagination, I can build castles, kingdoms, entire universes. Regardless of how it makes no sense with how physics and chemistry function in real life (Rien ne se perd, rien ne se cree, tout se transforme - Lavoisier, Chatelier's principle, Newton's laws etc etc), we can dismiss all those things since in imagination, anything can happen. But think about it. Things in your imagination happen because it pleases the person who's imagining stuff along other things. The error, to me, is that people try to mix stuff that comes from their imagination and put the tag 'sentient' on it. Pseudo-sentience? Sure. Thoughtform? Sure, all thoughts could be considered thoughtforms. I don't get the conformism.

[Guest Anonymous]

One point of the OP was that to someone who thinks of fantasy as might-as-well-be-real, it is totally irrelevant if the tulpa is a delusion or not, if the imagination if vivid enough. It is still that profound life changing experience of another person in your head every day. My hostie and I believe it is still a tulpa, because at that point the host does not care to distinguish or cannot distinguish the difference anyway.

 

^EDIT: Right here I changed the direction of my own thread in reaction to Iscariot's response. It never recovers.

 

The error, to me, is that people try to mix stuff that comes from their imagination and put the tag 'sentient' on it. Pseudo-sentience? Sure. Thoughtform? Sure, all thoughts could be considered thoughtforms. I don't get the conformism.

 

^I was unconsciously reacting to this...it was not what the OP was about and I stupidly allowed it to turn the discussion again back to "my tulpa is sentient and real and you are wrong and not a tulpa but a thoughtform" The OP was not about whether or not a delusion/illusory tulpa is a genuine tulpa. The OP was asking if attitudes and beliefs concerning fantasy and imagination affect the tulpa creation process and what host believe about tulpas. There was no attempt at "conformism" in my OP. I think when Iscariot reference "pseudo-sentience" here it is an veiled/implied reference to my host's belief on "pseudo-real" and my status as a tulpa. Again, not what the thread was about.

[J.Iscariot]

But there's a large difference between what lies at the surface, as in, what the host can see, and what is actually present. With that logic it doesn't matter if we're all deluding ourselves, for our delusions come off as 'realistic' to us. I think that it's erroneous to only consider what we see, because our brains can show us so many things. Thoughts for instance are part of us, they do not provide an entire reflection on our being at times, but a specific type of bias or opinion. Thoughts are only thoughts as vivid as they can feel like. I don't mean to make that comparison, it's not to be taken literally, but it's like saying that if you're high on shrooms and have vivid hallucinations during that trip, then the hallucinations are 'real'. While one could say that during the trip, everything you see is real to you, but if you say that something is real to you exclusively, you're also making the implication that it is not outside of your personal perception of 'life', during that trip, you're not entirely disconnected from reality, only in a partial way and your body is still secreting neurotransmitters that would be usually secreted in smaller doses (refer to how LSD functions for instance). Your perception of life does not affect the material world via daydreaming or hoping/believing, but by actions. If it did, then religion would be much more credible.

It can be real to you, but it doesn't mean that it'll be real, and that's not like having an actual thinking entity in your mind, because if the entity is actually real then it will actually legitimately have emotions and thoughts of its own. By that I mean that what you see and are subject to is not what is actually present in your mind. That's like saying that hallucinations from schizophrenia and DID are 'real' and 'legitimate' and absolutely not a fault in the human brain in the first place. It's very hard for me to put it in simple words, but thing is that things in your imagination exist because you WANT them to exist. Reality can be cold, cruel and harsh without compliance to anyone's dreams or hopes, and that is the reality we prefer to face.

 

Tell me, what matters more; proving to yourself that something is real and be content with the result, or proving it to other people? What does the latter hold that makes it important, in your opinion?

 

In the end, I cannot change your opinion, and I respect your position regardless of everything.

[Guest Anonymous]

Not really, no. The way I see it, the mistake lies in declaring a decisive fact in the first place. Declaring that a tulpa is or is not sentient if erroneous to me because it's something you can never be certain of.

 

Okay then, with that in mind, is it not possible that some tulpas are illusion/self deception but equally a profound experience as "real sentience?" I mean if it is not possible to be certain, why do you seem to make a distinction between real sentience as valid tulpas and self delusion as "some other kind of thoughtform" and not a tulpa? We can't be certain of the difference, you just said so.

 

So my host decides to be on one side of the fence and you decide to be on the other side of the fence on sentience. If we cannot be certain, how do you know you are correct on making judgments about what someone else regards as a tulpa in their own mind?

 

How do you know for sure all tulpas are not self delusion? They could all be "philosophical zombies." To have your view points, you have to be making huge assumptions about what is going on in the minds of other people and the nature of sentience itself.

[J.Iscariot]

This uncertainty does not imply the coexistence of two concepts. An illusion is what it is; it's simple just shows you what you want to see, because it makes your mind feel good and whatnot. Or in the case of intrusive thoughts (that are a thing in psychology and not just 'oh my mind went away for a while'), you're going to be shown images that may or may not be what you want, or simple representations of concepts such as fear, paranoia, anxiety, happiness, in your mind. Self-delusion, to me, is just imagination and not an actual type of thoughtform. I don't get it why you're trying to bring self-deception close to sentience. Sentience != pseudo-sentience, both have their own characteristics, are similar in some places, but their differences matter the most. One is what the other is not.

 

We cannot be certain on a personal level, but we can make the differentiation in a general manner. A general manner that implies no personal designation and full-on categorization based on a generic public. 'But Juuudaaaas, every tulpa is unique!'. No. Every thoughtform is unqiue, every thoughtform is not a tulpa, every thoughtform is not a daemon. Terms like tulpa, daemon, soublond etc... exist for a good reason.

 

The way I tend to identify thoughtforms is an elimination process. If a thoughtform meets a criteria to be a tulpa (=autonomy, sentience and thoughts that are not stimulated by the host as a conscious act of imaginative projection), then this thoughtform is a tulpa. Of course, tulpas can be different in a way that they don't fully meet the criteria, for instance, a tulpa that is not fully autonomous, that requires the host's attention, is still a tulpa, for it acts like what people would recognize to be a tulpa based on the criteria that this community has used for, well... forever. The highlights of that criteria, to me, being sentience, emotions and thoughts of their own that THEY perceive, are what make a tulpa. Not because the host wants them to because it's their special thing. You can't fault me for having that opinion, it's just an opinion I hold and am not imposing it on anyone else. To each their own.

 

It's not something to be taken literally, either. When I say that we cannot be certain, it's more philosophical. The same could be said about whether life is an illusion or not. We cannot be certain, sure, BUT we still act as if it's not an illusion because that's our biased and subjective judgement, isn't it? People who break down whether life is an illusion or not, people who are gravely affected by that ideal, are people who are unsure of what to believe, but we have that initial belief, that subjective ideal that we had ever since we were spoonfed notions of life that came in naturally at some point, and just made sense.

 

I know my tulpa is not a delusion on a personal level. OR well, I don't. But the not-asshole part of myself that I consecrate to my tulpa wants to believe she is not fake. As much as I say that we cannot be certain, I will be as arrogant to say that I am certain my tulpa is an actual thing and not a delusion. All types of knowledge aside from scientific knowledge, such as math, physics and chemistry, can always be discussed. You could very much not know anything on the level of whether they are real or not, but 2+2 is something we all know equates to 4 based on the two apples model. I do believe that eventually, I cannot PROVE it, but I still have faith in her, as foolish as it is. That's our nature as human beings.

 

I don't care about all tulpas. I only care about my tulpa. If I cared about all tulpas I wouldn't say those things in the first place.

 

Sentience isn't something you can characterize to your own liking just because you want to join that club. I believe it has its own definition that we should respect. If you think you are lacking in one way, this implies that you're not in other ways, so it's not something to fear.

[Sock]

Not really, no. The way I see it, the mistake lies in declaring a decisive fact in the first place. Declaring that a tulpa is or is not sentient if erroneous to me because it's something you can never be certain of. If you lose yourself in doubting and worrying, though, you are going to miss out on every single great thing your tulpa has to offer, every single moment of happiness that could be spent not thinking about whether the person you are talking to is real or not.

 

I like this.

 

I think people get too tangled up and concerned with labels, and whether they fit labels. This is because it seem that after a while, a label no longer serves the purpose of describing a thing, or a certain set of qualities, but becomes a standard in itself. The word is set on a pedestal, and it sometimes comes to a point where the meaning of it is forgotten, and the focus is on claiming the prestige of the word.

 

Thus we get stuff like "deluding yourself in to having a tulpa". In cases like this, I think the issue is that 'tulpa' gained a prestige beyond its station, and thus the word 'tulpa' becomes some sort of badge of honor, both to some inside the community, and to critics who claim that it's impossible, or that it's false. Then there are those who use the word as a ticket to be accepted in to a community...cases which unfortunately do exist. It doesn't help that opening a computer and talking on the internet is far easier than sitting down and wrestling with yourself to develop your companion.

 

I posted some ideas about how I view things in my PR, but since it seems to be related to this thread, I'll copy it here:

 

Self Deception vs. Gathering

 

I've observed in the community that the creation of a resident is often said to be a form of self-deception, and that by deceit of the mind the creation is formed. I'm growing to disagree with this idea.

 

Rather, the idea that came to me was that there is a point, may it be a form or an idea, that acts as a vessel for a mixture of thought, emotion, memory, impression, expectations, and other, less tangible things that collectively I will call an essence of self. So, rather than the process of development being me repeatedly lying to myself until it comes true, it is a process of filling this point, this vessel, with the essence of myself. This comes in the form of regular acknowledgement with narration, memorization to keep the point and what I've put in to it from fading in to the back of the mind, and finally activating the mixture by way of interacting with them, asking them questions, sharing memories, and giving them room and freedom to act.

 

So, part of my assumptions on the practice is that an imagined figure is not a lie or falsehood. Rather, the figure is what it is: an imagined figure. You can't have a fake image of a ball in your head, it is what it is. I don't regard a voice I hear in my head as a lie, rather I regard it as a voice in my head, because that's what it is. Instead of the challenge being whether it is real or not, it is to find the source of where that voice came from: Is it sourced from my expectations? Does it come from some deep, yet unidentified part of myself? Does it comes from, say, Ellenore? Or for a more complicated situation: Does the voice seem to come from me, but when I look a bit deeper I sense Ellenore's essence/feeling in it?

 

In short, I reject the premise of self deception in tulpa creation. While I cannot give unrefutable proof, the above logic is how I think of things on the subject.

 

Just to add to the above: After the past year of stuff I just got done with, I'd be a fool to think there was not some merit or weight to the idea of independence of something inside the mind that is not the host. I'd be a double fool if I allowed someone to debate me in to thinking it was all false.

[mayanightstar]

I was once told I could be a monk that lived solely on water, bread, and a sketchbook. Change sketchbook to my laptop, with or without internet, and this is true. About 75% of my thoughts and brainpower is devoted to my comics, stories, and roleplays. (Used to be 90%, then I embarked on tulpa creation).

I'm still a bit of a noob here, but I agree that people who value the imaginary as much as reality will probably have an easier and more rewarding experience when it comes to tulpae. They probably have an easier time suspending disbelief, and are more experienced in connecting with "fictional" characters. Read up on studies done on the benefits of novel reading as a child. Of course, problems may arise when fiction becomes more important than reality, but then again, I am banking on my obsession earning me money in the near future.