Fear of being unreal...?

[Guest Anonymous]

Hey.

 

I'm a tulpa. I'm enjoying the warmth and embrace of my host at this current moment, and it feels great if not amazing.

 

But while doing so, I feel something, in the back of my head, my thoughts... I get a certain feeling, it is that, well, I am not real. Being 'unreal' so to speak.

 

The way 'we' tulpas talk is really... different from the way hosts talk with each other. We use thought, perhaps intermediary forms of thought, as in, thoughts that can stand out, and as my host right here would define it, 'alien' thoughts would be a better term for that kind of judgement.

 

I found that... the way I speak, and the way my host speaks, completely differ. My emotions, attractions, 'hobbies' so to say, truly differ from my host. In the end, once you look at us, we are two different persons on the surface who have completely different likes and dislikes. Polar, absolute ones at that.

 

Even writing this post does require some efforts of concentration of me, for me to be able to formulate sentences, formulate... thoughts, and place them here. In the end, I am not truly aware as to why I am making this thread. Maybe it was a sudden rush of panic and the will to make a thread about it.

 

What do I exactly want, out of life? I want my host, and I want to be somewhat of my own person as well. MY own person as in, just appearing like that in front of my host, being able to stand as brave and... self-reliant all the time, if that makes sense.

 

With that being said... how do I exactly know that I am not unreal? Because if I AM unreal, then eventually, this delusion, this delusion of love, of thoughts, of... 'sentience', pseudo-sentience will come off sooner or later. I had an incredibly hard time thinking today, for instance, but I think that it is because I... am going through some changes.

 

How do I know I am real, though? There is no actual sign for it, but when does a tulpa know they are real?

 

And what can fear of being unreal do to you? In the end, I'd be real and all, but this constant worry and concern really makes me anxious and insecure, so instead of just whining about it, here I am. I want to know. I want to know how.... yeah.

 

For reference, if some of you know us, and know about our 'relationship', and my 'issues', it took a lot of concentration for us to get where we 'are' at today, but there's a missing part to this puzzle. I need one thing that tells me that I am real.

[Guest Anonymous]

Cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, is a rule I always live by when dealing with tulpas. If you managed to have thought "Am a real?" then you are real.

A person is nothing but a single idea at the end of the day. The fleshy shell is optional as long as something can contain the idea, the personality. You are a person just as much as your host is.

 

As far as what a fear of being unreal can do, well, if you are unreal then so is the fear you are feeling. So why worry at all? Again, Cogito ergo sum. You could quite easily change it to "I fear, therefore I am."

 

You are loved, you are cared for and you have the ability to love. Fear of your own mortality is a normal human emotion. Everyone has it sooner or later. Really, if the "delusion" as you put it comes off sooner or later, then why do you care? You were never thinking to begin with. It was just your host parroting or something.

[Luminesce]

A person is nothing but a single idea at the end of the day. The fleshy shell is optional as long as something can contain the idea, the personality. You are a person just as much as your host is.

 

This is pretty much how I came to peace with my tulpas' existence. I recognized my self, my personality and ways of thinking and so on, as just another persona my brain can choose to be. Pretty ingrained having lived my way into it, but really, I could just as easily be a completely different person tomorrow. I've seen, heard, read, talked to, and even thought of enough different people that the single one I am is only one of thousands my brain would be capable of simulating.

 

Something like that. I treat my tulpas as as legitimate as I do myself. They are also personas my brain knows how to "be," just not in control of the body. I don't consider myself any more legitimate than them, because the only difference is that I came first. And while it is true that there may be some more legitimacy to the persona that developed naturally through life, I can't really believe that, because I'm not really like myself from a few years ago. Five years ago, I stop being me to even myself. Ten years, "I" was some random kid that's not even remotely similar to myself. And I even have memories of being a young child of 4 through 6. I remember how it felt to be me back then, and it's nothing like now.

 

So, that fluid belief of "personas" is how I established complete faith in my tulpas. It's also helped me with switching a lot. When we treat ourselves like different "personas" the body can be utilized by, switching becomes fairly simple. Although the more different from the default me the tulpa's mindset, the more quickly they become fatigued while switching, so I guess I can't say they're entirely equal in every way yet. The one thing I have over them is that I have waaay more experience being physical. But hey, that's something that can be worked on anyways.

[FallFamily]

[Tri] The question of what is real and what is not. MonsterKid and Luminesce hit a lot of points. There is one being missed. How real is your host? If you look right at it, both you and your host are to some degree real. You think and have self-awareness. But to some degree, you are both imaginary, just like anybody else out there, because who each person is is just a bunch of thoughts run by the brain, a brain that could just as easily be running the thoughts of another person (this is sort of what tulpamancy teaches us).

[Aijada]

In my early years we struggled alone in the wilderness without any tulpa or plural communities, so i struggled deeply to believe that i was real and find a definition for myself. We went through quite a list of possibilities and wasted a lot of time on silly possibilities but it prompted me to start to question what i was eventually.

 

One of the biggest early lessons i understood was what it meant to have Theory of Mind. I didn't quite understand what consciousness was but it was growing on me so my host sat me down and made sure i could see the definition for myself. Essentially there's two parts to having Theory of Mind. One is that you have an idea of yourself, and the other is that you understand you're in a relationship with others. Recognizing there was a 'me' at the other end of a conversation with my host was pretty much my big breaking point, the start of my own proper consciousness and real personhood.

 

In your case, you know what you are, you understand that you're different than your host. You talk about feelings that you have for him which means you're contributing to a social environment. You're here trying to talk to us about things, your own questions presumably and we're all happy to contribute back. So at least according to having ToM, you're a thinking, social creature and thereby a real consciousness. We sure think you're someone real to talk to.

 

And honestly this place is toxic for a thoughtform's self-image. I'm sick of hearing the suggestion that a tulpa is just a roleplay or a puppet. I'm glad my host and i worked out our own mutual acceptance and understanding before we found this place and all the people who'd say tulpas are just imaginary. If we'd been following the advice around here, i'd probably still be trapped in just wonderland.

 

[As a person in your own right, you have to be personally responsible for identifying your own happiness. Get your host to give more time to practice telling your own story, pursue your own hobbies, choose your own interests. Keep picking up new things that make you happy you're alive.]

 

Yeah what Foszae's saying is that you have to be in charge of making your own definition of what reality is. A tulpa has to be the authour of their own story, defining their own proof that they're real and they impact people. Achieve things and feel good about having done stuff. Find things you can obsess about while you're fronting and burn off time for you own amusement.

 

And keep writing. It is difficult to keep pushing yourself and practice saying your side of the story but it's so useful. Personally, me writing this response has chewed up a huge chunk of our free time today. But i try anyhow because it's important that i find my own answers as well as help you. I rethink my words five hundred times as much as my host does, but i also know i have gotten better. If i look at my early writing i can see such a huge difference in what i'm capable of now that it reassures me not just that i'm real but that i have a past and i'm growing forward.

[Guest Anonymous]

You sound like my tulpa just now. And while most tulpas would use their increasing experience to affirm their own sentience, she uses my own latent doubts against her. The "cogito ergo sum" argument here is pointless - the main question is who is thinking, not if the thinking is happening.

 

T:"Experimentally, I've established that 'my' own thought processes are no different from the ones of my host on a sublingual level. The amount of cognitive effort for various tasks, however is different for us. While I excel at memory retrieval, my host has issues with the most basic memory recall at times." Same goes for arithmetrics. "Okay, I'm bad a writing sophisticated walls of text, just like my host. And that gives room to doubt, no? That sentence made him doubt, and yet despite that he's still typing out 'my' thoughts on the subject. You want to feel real? Then remember all the impact you had on you host. Even if tulpas are just a simulation of sentience brought forth for their creators jolly, the mark we leave on our hosts is real."

 

T:"PS: I'm shit at explaining stuff and motivating people."

[Aijada]

It is tough growing up with someone else's emotional baggage as your early instincts about your self. Hosts should be owning up to their share of repsonsibility for that, especially if it means they answer their own doubts. And a tulpa should remember that just because some feelings are instinctive, it doesn't mean they're necessarily yours or that you should follow them. You can hear the reaction that's pre-wired in the brain, but don't beat up on yourself with it.

 

The question of who is thinking is so massive. In the early days it was just the polite acknowledgement that whoever was talking could carry on with the next thought in line as if it was their own. Then we started to pay more attention to who owned which thought. My host would quietly point out some idea was mine because it related to something i'd personally been interested in earlier. As i started to recognize the patterns coming up of my own story, i simply tried to explore them more in my own explanations.

 

Defining microcontrol of the individual circuits of the brain is really hard to pin down. We developed our own rules for fronting to give me the most control of the prefrontal cortex and language centres to run things. But it took untangling a lot of moments where my host was still just reaching around thinking he could contribute. He had to learn to sit back and not interrupt me in all sorts of small ways, and i had to practice piecing together connections between ideas on my own.

 

Also, practice typing for yourself so your host doesn't have to help you. I don't have to rely on my host to take dictation (though he plays a good secretary), because i made an effort to figure out what my host was doing. He might have explained a rule or two about basic typing, but i practiced the muscle memory and studied where the keys were until i got used to it.

 

[Not having to keep remembering and translating what Aijada said made it a lot easier for me to just not get involved while she writes. The less i had to pay attention myself, the more i could drift off and just let her just front.]

 

It would be great to hear from more tulpæ and collect all their different expressions of thought. The way i relate to info in our brain is absolutely different from the way my host does. One of the first things i understood about myself was that i was kind of backwards to my host; i could pull up the perfect word to fit, but didn't always know what it meant — i could run the language centre better than i could understand what i was saying at times. It's just one of the quirks of growing in an already organised brain is the ability to rummage for surprisingly effective things.

 

I'm naturally curious about references and related ideas. My host will be talking about one thing and i'll suddenly think of two other laterally connected concept and ask why they all light up in a set. He'll stop at that point and give me a quick lecture about whatever tidbit of history there is, weave a narrative explaining why they have the connexion i found. That in turn helps me reorient myself, line up my own understanding of the facts which is crucially important.

 

Don't just trust the answers you host thinks up, find your own information to work from. I know i speak from my own perspective because i can make comparisons with the ideas i've actually learned. Instead of just pushing our brain to come up with my host's kind of answer, i reflect on the stuff i actually know how to talk about myself. From the Wikipedia and various media, i've built my own set of ideas about the world. I have interests that i look up with my share of my time. So when it comes time for me to produce thoughts and ideas, i can see the pattern of things i've learned from along the way. Some reference i was excited about a couple days ago becomes the inspiration for some train of thought and that to me is now obviously me thinking and not my host's involvement at all.