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Tulpa Ethics


Bainbow

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Basically, my post was about how my tulpas and I figured out everything about them and how I should treat them on our own before discovering tulpas, and that that doesn't exactly line up with this community's. And that without someone to tell you differently, what you believe is your reality. So to someone who had never thought of these ethics, them and their thoughtforms could be perfectly fine in a variety of relationships you don't consider good.

 

But again, I don't actually disagree so I just trashed the post. I do think that we naturally instill relatively qualitative ethics in members who stick around here, but you don't seem to agree so I'll leave you and everyone else to discuss that.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.

Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.

My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us about tulpamancy stuff there.

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This is an attitude I do not rationally understand. We don't do it ourselves because we think it's bad, so when other people do it we tend to think that's bad as well. That's the justification. The reason you don't tend to police people is the practical costs of implementation: will it be effective, is it a bad policy/precedent, might I end up policed myself? That doesn't apply here too much. You can talk about moral relativism until the end of the day, but you can also get extremely rhetorical about the costs you pay for not policing others.

 

The OP actually talks a lot about successful policing that went on here, which I find entirely justifiable. Especially when you talk about "ending it" - yes, I'd like a part in ending tulpa suffering or whatever it is, can I buy my tickets now?

 

I mean, guess you're right. I'd like to speak out about the way people treat their tulpas, really, but I'm afraid it will look like I'm saying "I think the way you are tulpamancing is wrong and you should feel bad," especially with the grayer, more morally ambiguous topics of tulpamancing. I won't get into my personal opinions here, but I think my fears are valid.

Call me Gabi. Tulpamancer since February 16th, 2013. reddeadrebel on the IRC.

Call me 16-Volte. I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride!

 

Message me on tumblr!

 

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This is an interesting idea for a thread, and I'm happy to see it. Ideas of how I should treat my mindfolk is something that I'm quite familiar with. It's an important topic to me for some good reasons, some obvious and some more private. I've also made many, many mistakes along the way, as I did not have the pleasure of a mentor figure when I start out with it. My methods and habits were pieced together as I went along, and because the sort of experiences I've had with my had were myriad, I had to keep my mind open, and my heart patient, with what was going on, and how I reacted to it.

 

I'll be honest, there are some elements that I have not thought through too much, but I'll list things that I do consider:

 

(Note: Midori, Ellenore, and Liira made a comment while I was typing this, and they wanted me to put it in, so I did. Color coded for convenience.)

 

- Trust and honesty. These two things are some of the more important elements to me. Trusting my girls at their word, and being honest with them in return. I don't say this to mean I don't try to discern thoughts and visions related to them, as that would and has caused a lot of problems, but when I do confirm it is them, I try to trust what they say, rather than giving in to excessive doubt, something that took me a while to overcome.

 

- Allowing freedom of action is also a paramount thing for me. I'm not, and have never been a proponent of puppeting, and I've always went out of my way to make sure I wasn't doing it. While I did give my initial partner Midori, definition when I started out, and others as well, I haven't been harsh or strict with these. If anything, my worry drove me to constantly question whether I was right in giving Midori a definition ("He was." "He was."), and would often question if their behavior was due to my expectations based on the definition I gave them before ("It wasn't." "It really wasn't." "It definitely wasn't"). I haven't really done any of that work for years, mostly just observing how they behave, and letting them live, building themselves up and teaching them at times as well.

 

- Fulfilling requests and promises. This is something that I've often fumbled in, but still make an effort to do. That is, to respond to my folk's request, and fulfill them when I can. The purpose of this is to simply acknowledge their person, as being something worth responding to and worth taking their thoughts in to account. For me, this act of doing for them is very important.

 

- The above can be summed up with the Goldern Rule, treating them as I would want to be treated if I were in their position. Now, there are some thing I have no plans to allow to them, like prolonged access to my body, and things I deny them, like romantic relations. But otherwise, I try to just treat them as I would an outward person, with respect and affection in their due places.

 

I do refer to my thought folk in posessive terms, I will not and cannot deny that. This stems from my own believe that they are part of the whole of my being. This is not to say there is no separation or independence, as I've run in to that confusion before when I stated this. A way I could describe it is to compare it to the Earth and the Moon. The Moon comes from the Earth, and revolves around the Earth. While it is separate, it is still part of the Earth's presence. If you were to remove the Moon, the Earth would be less that what it is, and without the Earth the Moon would only be a big dead stone. The same is true for my thought folk, and thus my posessive terms.

 

Now regarding fiction-based folk, this one is something I'm still working a bit in, as I have those as well, naturally based on things I myself have been attached to. At first, I was completely againt the idea of doing this...that is until things happened, and I found a happy-accident on my hands...and more where that came from, though I'm not going to dump my entire story here. I made a good deal of mistakes when I began with these sorts, and I've been growing in understanding with them for a while. One of the first errors was actually the opposite of what you worried about in your first post: I initially went WAY out of my way to have them NOT act like their inspiration, taking many pains to separate them (For example, renaming them) and let them know that the girl on the TV/Computer was not them. This didn't go well, and when I finally got over this fear about them being fiction based, many of them went right back to identifying as their inspiration, a notable example being Sherlock based on a character from Milky Holmes. I'm still working on this, but I'm in a far better place than I was, and intent to grow further from it.

 

As far as the idea of not making one's OC into their partner...I kinda failed that one right out of the gate, haha. But Midori is happy to be what she is, and told me even if she did want to change, her form would be based on something else I drew.

 

There is likely more things for me to consider, but I feel this is a good place to stop.

 

Peace.

Sock Cottonwell's

Sketchbook, Journal, and Ask thread.

Peace

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Fade: I think it's alright to start off with a personality base for your tulpa to develop off of. What bothers me like crazy is the idea of someone who doesn't want to allow their tulpa to develop and grow further from that. Doesn't matter if it's because of new life experience - we call that "character development" in the writing business - or just because they decide they want to be something else.

 

On a general rule, try to treat your headmates like you would any other friend. Or significant other, if that's your thing that's going on. Since I brought the muses to life on my own, with no knowledge of tulpamancy or just plain how to work with headmates in general. I didn't really treat the guys like their own people when I first interacted with them and it caused us a lot of problems early on.

There was unwanted parroting and puppeting, I "bubbled" some of them if I didn't want to hear what they had to say, and I tried forcing them into relationships just because I thought it was cute. Needless to say, I don't really blame them for how they reacted. Medea blatantly hated me at first, some of them outright avoided me, and Troy was usually rightfully incensed.

 

I probably shouldn't spend all this time gabbing on about ourselves, but I just want to say that I recommend trying to consider them as sentient as you would consider themselves. Give them the benefit of the doubt, because if you don't, you might do things in regretful ways.

A queer soulbonding system with tulpamantic influences.

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That seems to be a commonly reoccuring problem, in that tulpas are often treated like a sort of sub-human. Which is evident already in that they are constantly called tulpa- "your tulpa", "X's tulpa", etc. Another problem of note is also when people ask social problems: "How would my tulpa feel if..." In that case, the questioner should be asking their tulpa as you would ask a person for their feelings on a matter. It is easy to marginalize tulpas since they lack a corporeal form and they cannot exactly be in your face about their problems. A subjective reality is much easier to ignore and alter than the common reality we all share. Since they lack their own body, it is hard to treat them as their own entity since the area is greatly blurred whether or not they are actually "alive". For what it is worth, I considered stopping the Tulpa process way back before I heard their voice, but that is because I considered it akin to an abortion. Take from that what you will.

 

The trouble with this line of thinking is that it is an inextricable part of what a tulpa is. Tulpas are not human. They are people, they are human consciousnesses, and they certainly reside in human brains. Tulpas are not born. Tulpas did not have their brain develop through nine months in a womb as their cells were assembled, then through infancy, and childhood, and adolescence, and early adulthood while their neurons were still making new fundamental connections and getting their neurotransmitters into position. They are sapient beings, though, just as much as their host (or a simulation or whatever blah blah blah).

 

What you're doing is letting the way grammar is set up upset you. You're acting a little like tumblr "feminists" who get mad at the word "history" because "his", even though the actual etymology of the word has nothing to do with gender whatsoever. "Possessing" something in the English language doesn't mean you literally own it like an object or a slave. "My tulpa" should have as much objectifying connotation to it as "my friend" or "my boss", which is to say none.

 

Moving past that grammar rant, soylent green is tulpas are people. Plain and simple. Making a tulpa is making a person and should be handled with the utmost respect and responsibility. Not toys (though you could have a tulpa sort of like a tool more in the sense of hiring a secretary/life coach or even getting into Buddhist self discovery spirit guide territory, but that's a discussion for another time).

 

Oh, and it should go without saying that you shouldn't be the helicopter parent equivalent of a tulpamancer, but that's already covered in literally every creation guide when they support and encourage deviation. Subconscious knows best and all. And this plays into the "hurr durr but I want a rainbow dash and/or jackie chan tulpa of my very own" which I've been a strong (to the point of overreacting several times) opponent of since day one.

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I've had some interesting chats with people who don't think of their tulpas to be sentient. Regardless of this, most of them still treat them as if they're people, as if they're equals, regardless of whether this matches their beliefs or not. I'm glad that we have all of these community warnings on here for new people, especially the younger ones who I'd say are more likely to get into this for the wrong reasons. I'm glad to see how views on different things like making a tulpa based on a character have changed over the past few years - the most important part of that example is that it's drilled into heads that this won't actually be the fictional character (or waifu, can't exclude those) that they crave.

 

My personality, voice, form--these were all based on the same character, a character that my host was infatuated with. For a very long time, he didn't think that I was sentient, that I was anything out of the norm in his life, but he never once treated me like I was anyone less than him. We made promises all the time that we made sure to not break, we always made sure to be honest about our feelings if there was something that we needed to share, and my opinions were never disregarded.

 

Moving past that grammar rant, soylent green is tulpas are people. Plain and simple. Making a tulpa is making a person and should be handled with the utmost respect and responsibility. Not toys (though you could have a tulpa sort of like a tool more in thr sense of hiring a secretary/life coach or even getting into buddhisg self discovery spirit guide territory, but that's a discussion for another time).

 

Spelling mistakes and all, I'm going to use Lacquer's tl;dr here as my own. Even people that I've talked to who I think got into this for the wrong reasons have ended up treating their tulpas as equals after they were sentient, after they understood that the tulpa wasn't unlike them.

 

PS: It's generally not intended that, when a host uses "my tulpa", it means that the host owns the tulpa like a slave.

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Let me quote myself from another thread here.

 

Honestly, tulpa is just a word to me.

 

...

 

But I know what Esterina is without that word.

I mean, seriously, when it comes down to it, the answer to "What is she?" is easy to answer.

 

She's just some person.

 

At the end of the day that's really all there is to it - she's just some random person, like me, like you, like anyone else, that inhabits my body together with me... she just so happens to not have a body of her own, and didn't start existing the good ol' standard-human-way.

 

...

 

In either case, I really don't care.

It's just a word - I don't need that word to know what and, more importantly, who Esterina is.

 

I said that in a different context, but it applies well here.

I call Esterina my tupper so people understand what, well, "type" of person she is. In what way she exists.

It's such a handy little way to let people know in what sort of way she exists without having to explain much.

 

But that's just a word to me, and to her as well.

 

Esterina is simply some random person like anyone else, the only difference being that she doesn't have a separate body.

She's not more than any random person out there, but she's also not less than any random person out there.

 

This is also how I feel about myself. Sometimes the statements of some tulpae confuse me a bit when they make it seem like they themselves feel about tulpae as lesser beings.

 

And I stand by this statement, and all the ethical, existential and philosophical implications behind it.

She's her own person, leads her own life, has her own freedom, her own privacy, her own rights, her own thoughts and feelings, her own decisions, her own everything.

 

We inhabit the same body, so our lives are inevitably bound to one another.

 

And this also stretches out to the small things - what will we buy for dinner? What do we wanna do in our free time? What music do we want to listen to? Where does each of us two draw the lines for privacy - not only in terms of the two of us, but also in terms of "outside" people?

 

Where do our opinions and our views on life and the world differ, and how can we find the best way for us both to live the way we want to?

Honestly... sometimes I feel like most hosts don't even ask themselves this kind of question... but I hope I'm simply wrong with this observation.

 

And these questions and ideas are not something only hosts should consider. The tulpa in question too should think about these things and find a way to work together with the host.

 

And hell - why would I be in a relationship with some sort of thing you can own, some kind of being that's less than human?

That fact alone should clearly show my opinion here.

 

And yes, I too sometimes cringe at some people who treat their headfolk, or the process of creating them, so very casually or carelessly, and more like something you can do for fun or for personal gains solely, or something you can own.

 

tl;dr: The entire third paragraph of the OP, I support every single word of it.

 

Tulpas are people. Plain and simple. Making a tulpa is making a person and should be handled with the utmost respect and responsibility.

 

I want to thank Bainbow for opening this thread. Tulpa rights is a subject that's been on my mind a lot when reading through some of the threads here.

 

 

Greets,

AG & Rina

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I pretty much agree with what is already written down here. I don't think we have a real problem with tulpa ethics around here. I probably never saw a person treating their tulpa as a possession around here, forcing them to stay always the same for the sake of being "in character" with a premade form. If someone would do this, I think a lot of people around here would start to talk about it to that person, including myself. Whenever someone new enters the site with the wish to create a tulpa, and there is even the slightest fear that they're lacking ethics regarding tulpas, we will pay attention to it.

 

Tulpa ethics are very important for most people who visit this site and decide to stay. If you feel like discussing certain aspects about it feel free to do so. It is an interesting topic, after all.

 

Also I need to agree with the observations from the other posters: You're too sensitive around this topic. Grammar is just grammar, and shouldn't be regulated to death just because someone feels like it implies possession or something alike, since it mostly really doesn't.

Tulpa: Alice

Form: Realistic Humanoid/Demonic Creation

She may or may not talk here, depends on her.

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PS: It's generally not intended that, when a host uses "my tulpa", it means that the host owns the tulpa like a slave.

 

I know that. I was just responding to Metatron's post that implied it. Hell, I haven't even read the rest of the thread.

 

And, for typing all that out on my phone with no spellcheck or autocorrect, I still did pretty damn well.

 

 

Also I need to agree with the observations from the other posters: You're too sensitive around this topic. Grammar is just grammar, and shouldn't be regulated to death just because someone feels like it implies possession or something alike, since it mostly really doesn't.

 

Yep. The purpose of a language is to effectively communicate thoughts, and when you put excessive labels and connotations attached to certain words, it impairs your ability to communicate thoughts.

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I feel like if we were to speak about the entire ethics, there would be way too much hypocrisy going on. With respect to everyone on the forums, this is how it's like; the community consists of teenagers to very young men/women, who make a tulpa for a specific purpose. Be it depression, the need for comfort, friendship and company in general, people ARE going to choose a form they like. It is inevitable for people to do that. Extended from anime to MLP fandoms, going along furry and anthro (I thought they were the same.) I have an estimation that the number of people who make a tulpa with a form they feel no special attraction to, be it affection or lust, is very small because of the overall mentality.

 

Next up, to justify that position (but, that does not make it right.), there's the opinion that tulpas are just in your subconscious in a very limited form. That they're here for your pleasure and leisure, that whatever you do, they'll forgive you... We fail, as a community, to understand the humanity present in our creations! The same things you said could be said about the whole 'stop ignoring your tulpa, it's unethical', for the exact same reasons.

 

Friend of mine is a kid. Just a kid. He made a tulpa even though I had worked on him not going through it. Made an anime girl, right? He went through with it, but now? He doesn't give a shit about HOW his tulpa looks like. He only cares about, and I quote him, 'the person in my head. It's not up to me anymore, she's all grown now, she can make her own decisions.'

 

Autonomy is a big part. A lot of tulpas don't know that they can stand up for themselves. Dimitrov was once in a situation where I wanted to change him. This is what he said: 'I would advise you not to cause any changes. Doing so would probably result in you doubting in me, and in me not being the person I always was, and wanted to be.'. Dimitrov always had his own will. We fail to see, as a community, more than just the image. Dimitrov looks like an old man (sigmund freud in his late years...), so I never really had much of an interest in any of that, he's my best friend, my advisor in all matters at that. This is not a defense of my own case, but an explanation as to why this... discrimination, for lack of a better term, takes place.

 

Our very own uncertainty and doubting also plays a large role. People who aren't 'sure' their tulpas are any sentient/sapient/callitwhateveryouwant from the start will alter them in ways that are favorable to them. Dimitrov and Blak made stupid decisions in the past. Decisions I wish I could have prevented, sometimes, but if I had done anything, they wouldn't be the fine gentlemen they are today. I feel pride more than anything, really.

 

As much as I agree with your points, I am afraid people won't care. Some might even laugh at you, even though you serve a noble, a very noble cause, and I respect you infinitely for posting those things. But, one thing; one day, people will change. I have faith in this community.

 

Ah, I'm too tired. I only came here to help.

« — Va, je ne te hais point ! »

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