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Is the Internet Fostering Plurality in People?


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I see what you mean. Yeah, the practice definitely doesn't exist in a vacuum; you need the community around it for people to make earnest attempts at it, I guess. In that sense you're right, the internet is way more than just a medium for dissemination, it supports the existence of the community, which is needed to make this stuff work.

 

Shortening creation times is (or was) a really interesting phenomenon. I think the answer is what you said, yeah: as the community started to grow and more people created tulpas in the context of the community, the feedback loop you mentioned - people reporting experiences with their tulpas, encouraging/priming others to their own - equilibrated, from the point where people had just kind of found out that it was possible at all, down to the actual lower limit of how difficult it is to make a tulpa. And that's where we are now; sure, from 2012 to 2013 creation times shortened a lot, but after that they've been pretty stable. (Albeit, there isn't much lower to go for what we have now, but everyone doesn't have instatulpas popping out of their ears like some people were predicting).

 

I guess my question is whether you think the community still needs to exist for this purpose, or whether, having done the discovery work, the current written record is enough for people to make tulpas without the community.

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Guest Anonymous

I think there is enough written certainly for someone to make a tulpa without ever interacting with other people on the forum. But how boring is that? Kinda would take a lot of the fun out of it. I just wrote a piece about passive forcing and using reminders to keep the tulpa present in your mind throughout the day. Just the act of coming online to check your messages to people about tulpamancy will in theory keep your tulpa present in your mind. Having others inquire how you are doing, writing a PR, discussing things with others, answering questions, all help your mind to think about your tulpa.

 

Perhaps that is why the creation times got shorter. It's like a lot of extra passive forcing and reminders. Once a tulpa is vocal and you are able to proxy, it certainly creates a great social venue for the tulpa to communicate with others outside of his or her host. So that proxy communication becomes a fun and interesting way to passive and active force as well. I think proxy communication is a form of forcing.

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Yes, that's what I wanted to say.

It's definitely possible on your own, people have probably been doing it since the dawn of mankind and spontaneously re- invented the technique countless times. After all it's not that hard. Most children have probably done it at some point, all it takes is a bit of introspection and willpower.

 

But it really would be boring for most of us without a community for support. Not so much in practical but in motivational terms. So without the comunity I guess classical tulpamancy would be greatly reduced. However, as Melian pointed out, I'm highly convinced there are many other phenomena that are basically tulpamancy as well. Most seem to be linked to some kind of community.

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In point of how my system feels like, I think I would have ended up pretty much where I am now, even without the internet.

 

It was mostly my interest in surrealism and dreams that lead me to it, and I would have found some interesting ideas in libraries, I guess. (It would have taken longer, sure...)

However, I spent the years before I found out about this community yearning to talk about my headmates seriously. And after I found it, it took me another two years before I could finally wrap my head around all the different viewpoints and stances and not feel completely lost in anxiety.

 

As of tulpa forcing process becoming faster - I think that has more to do with the plurality of viewpoints, and that certain ideas cancel each other out sometimes. The term "tulpa" as taken from tibetan language suggests something that is only reachable through intense dedication. You immediately get the picture of the buddhist monk, in orange clothing, fully concentrated in meditation, a 24/7 dedicated being.

Contrast that with soulbonds: A plethora of authors, noticing that their characters came to live after they spent time with them, writing their stories, thinking their thoughts for them.

 

Had I encountered the phenomenon only via the term "tulpa", I would not have held myself capable of ever experiencing any of it. But I entered from the perspective of a writer and a lucid dreamer, and I never even came up with the idea that it should take weeks to get a response. Getting a response from a dream character is something that happens in seconds, if it happens. And in writing, of course, I don't wait at all, I just write.

 

Being active in lucid dreaming communities also taught me, that different people's minds can vary a lot. Expecting something to happen the same for everyone never works out.

 

So, I do not know, how much of the idea of slow tulpamancy was built on expectations, and how much was just the personality of the people doing it. I cannot go back in time, and try it another way... and new people now will already see a diversity of methods and varying results. Maybe in some ten, twenty years, people will have figured out what actually works... maybe we never will, because every generation brings their own expectations and biases.

 

 

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Yenu, that's understandable. Still, how long do you think it took to get from having no soulbonds (in the first place) to having some? I'd guess it was a process longer than it would normally take to make a tulpa.

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Still, how long do you think it took to get from having no soulbonds (in the first place) to having some? I'd guess it was a process longer than it would normally take to make a tulpa.

I have no idea what is currently considered a normal timeframe to making a tulpa.^^

 

But I didn't think in terms of "I am trying to do this" and "I am not there yet but soon I will"...

There was no waiting time. So, I'd say, for some of them, it took me an hour. For others, it was something that happened over the course of several years. It's a weird mixture of both...

 

The youngest of my headmates, Nailann, I met in a dream and talked to her immediately after waking up, so she felt very much alive on the first day.

 

I think something that might explain it is this: Sometimes you don't notice it, when an idea is already growing inside, subconsciously. This is very common in creating art, I typically wait for months doing nothing and then suddenly, BAM, the idea is there, and I can retrospectively see that a lot of thoughts of the last months went into it, but it happened without my conscious self.

 

I think a similar thing can happen with soulbonds and tulpas. You don't notice it, but there were already a lot of thoughts going into forming it, until BAM! there is suddenly a very vivid character.

 

 

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Yeah. Well, that's kind of what I'd imagine would happen for soulbonds in general (at least the first time): you don't really notice it slowly happening, right? But I think that distinction between "the first time" and "afterwards" is pretty important, at least for tulpas. After you've made one, it gets much easier, to the point where you saying that it was more or less instant for Nailann, yeah, that sounds about right for someone who's had tulpas for a while. It might be that your expectations change, but I think it's a mental change more than anything.

 

For first-time tulpa making, I guess a normal timeframe is of the order of, I always say, a few days to a few months. There's no particular unreasonable timeframe, for which I'd say, "No, that's not likely". From surveys in the community I can tell you that 2/3 of first tulpas take between 1 week and 2 months to make. A bit under half take less than 1 month. The interesting thing is that this hasn't changed a bit since 2013. But yeah, I'm guess that early on it was probably something that happened slowly, for you.

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