Exactly how will you know when your Tulpa is contacting you?

[NitroAgent64]

My question is simple to ask, but most likely has many answers. How will you know when your Tulpa is communicating with you? If they use thoughts and emotions to communicate will I be able to distinguish those from my own thoughts and emotions? If my Tulpa uses auditory speech do I have to concentrate and be calm to be able to hear these messages? Please let me know anything you may know on the subject.

[LaceyJoshua]

A lot of times in the beginning, a tulpa's thoughts WILL sound a lot like the host's. It can be really difficult to tell in that period, but you more or less just have to . . . go with it. Or at least that's the way it is with me.

 

Still . . . there comes a point when you can simply tell. The mindvoice may be different, may be completely unrelated to what you were thinking about . . . you can just tell. Sometimes even that can be difficult, though. One time I heard a girl's voice call my name and it took me about a month to figure out that that was Joshua, before he had a more "set" mindvoice. Whoops.

[IBreakGames]

In my opinion, a good way to tell is to clear your mind and think of nothing. Then, bring your tulpa into your head while still keeping your mind relaxed. Ask your tulpa a question, and see what happens. Maybe you'll get tulpish, maybe you'll get words, maybe you'll get nothing. No matter what the outcome, don't be discouraged, these things take time. But do it with the expectation that something will happen, and if it doesn't, no worries, just keep forcing and try again later. Al didn't start saying words in mindvoice until about a month into his development.

 

When I started creating Al, the first things that I noticed was when I would visualize him. He would do things when visualizing him that I didn't feel I was controlling. Which he wasn't. I used this as a method to grab his attention. In the early stages, it's difficult to get through to the host, simply because they either aren't fully paying attention to the right thing, or the tulpa simply doesn't have the right means of communication. When something feels right though, be happy with that and reinforce that. In my opinion, your developing tulpa will understand you more than you can understand it. As for how you'll know? It's tough to say. You gotta really pay attention and for a good while you'll feel like you're doing something wrong. Sometimes tulpas will try and communicate and it'll come through as a flurry of thoughts, topics jumping from one thing to another. Often times a tulpa's thoughts and feelings can be confused for intrusive thoughts simply because they feel that way.

[River-Fox]

At the beginning their mind voice will sound almost exactly the same as yours and can be hard to distinguish. I saw somewhere that you can ask your tulpa to address you by your name when they talk to you. So when your tulpa will talk to you they will 'tag' their thought with your name. For example, "River,(whatever they have to say)." I tried it and it works pretty good. I only got one response like this but my tulpa is only in the very begging stages and doesn't usually send lengthy thoughts and doesn't feel the need to tag my name to one-worded responses. You can also ask them to make their voice higher or lower from your own so you can tell a difference. Hope this helps.

[J.Iscariot]

You will know when it's your tulpa and not intrusive thoughts.

[Edward]

You can approach this a few ways, as you said, and some are more practiced than others.

 

Many say that the tulpa will be similar/identical in voice-feeling to you in the beginning, and that it will change to be more distinct over time. This one makes the most logical sense from a new person standpoint because there is a clear sense of progression, and many people experienced it this way.

 

Of course, one could argue that those people experienced it this way because they were exposed to the idea early on. I personally was told originally that the tulpa will feel almost foreign from my own thoughts, and that's how I was supposed to know. Unsurprisingly, when I felt my tulpa, she felt alien.

 

The way I'd personally suggest would to just "roll with it." If you accept to yourself that you will know, then you will know. If you psyche yourself out of knowing with thoughts like "I should know by now," etc., you'll have a stressful time.

 

I think tulpa creation goes by a lot easier if you just sort of go through with it without having to immediately and concretely decide on if things are you/your tulpa/etc.

[Linkzelda]

[hidden]Since your question seems to be dependent on how your level of cognition can allow one to overcome the confusion of knowing when your tulpa is contacting you, allow me to just use a simple example.

 

If treating them as sentient implies that you’re willing to consciously fixate on the belief of them being such to you, then clearing out whatever weaknesses that interfere with that would be ideal. But, it may not just be a matter of increasing concentration, or relying on a systematic, metaphorical way of hearing them out, and dampening your thoughts. It could just be a matter of knowing that you can’t really pinpoint somewhere in your mind that will signal to you that you have this genuine, internal and private experience with your tulpa that you would subscribe into thinking isn’t solely based on you consciously fabricating their mode of communication (e.g. parroting).

 

Whether you hold the conviction that they’re sentient from the start, or that the implied sentience needs sustained cultivation over time, in my experience, especially if one is willing to make a life-long commitment, you learn to embrace your own self-progression, and doing whatever it takes to come to an understanding with them. In my experience before finding out about tulpas, I had my dreams that I recalled as an experiential fallback; to try and figure out myself somewhere in my dreams, and to see how my mind structures these experiences that I presume are figments of my imagination.

 

That accumulation (e.g. understanding my experiences, acknowledging my emotions), and I strive to sustain it throughout my life, is what I feel is one of my strongest fallbacks simply because I learned that it’s easy to play the starring roles in our lives, and to never really bother with the minor characters (e.g. dream characters). But when you start to realize the scattered-brain of a mind we truly have, you may see that there’s always something to be distracted in, to revel in, and such. You may think your mind is just waiting for you to consciously calm down to hear your tulpa out, but our cognition is just too complicated to describe succinctly, especially through just anecdotes. But, you always have the chance to explore it either way.[/hidden]

 

If you don’t have a fallback that allows you to embrace your self-progression, then you have to find ways to cultivate this just as much as you’re wanting to treat them as sentient. To want a future where they can communicate with you implies that they, in some way, implied, or stated otherwise, can become a conscious accompaniment with you. And to be a conscious accompaniment, there has to be experiences to experience in the first place. It’s easy to undermine how we go about being sentient ourselves, and being demystified as to what to do in pinpointing when they’re talking to us simply because we didn’t know we could expand our communication through other means (e.g. emotional context, head pressures, imagination, etc.). But that’s alright because putting things into context that can allow them to put things into context over time was what you were going for in the first place, I guess. Getting used to things that we didn't fixate in takes time, but having a dead-end doesn't decrease your integrity with them; it's an inner turmoil you'll learn to take on with them. It's something that would compel both of you to want to put things into context simply to have harmony again.

[AnonymousTheCurious]

My question is simple to ask, but most likely has many answers. How will you know when your Tulpa is communicating with you? If they use thoughts and emotions to communicate will I be able to distinguish those from my own thoughts and emotions? If my Tulpa uses auditory speech do I have to concentrate and be calm to be able to hear these messages? Please let me know anything you may know on the subject.

 

Like you said, this is a question with many answers. No one is alike, especially their minds, but that's what makes it fun, right? Because of that everyone is going to experience their tulpa first communicating with them differently. For me, I could just somehow tell that my tulpa's first thought wasn't me. It took me a while to process it, but there was just some mental indicator for me that said the thought was from my tulpa. That's me though, so I don't think anyone can really give you a for sure answer to this question.