[misc] On Tulpas—an essay about plurality in general and tulpamancy in particular

[Ranger]

I’m not sure what your thesis is. There are several topics introduced in your essay that lack transitions from topic to topic. I found the following topics in your essay:

 

• Tulpas and tulpamancers are questionable and mysterious
  
• Are some people more likely to become plural than others?
  
• Are you your thoughts?
  
• Are you unconscious when you are not aware of your own thoughts?
  
• How do you know you are you and how that relates to plurality
  
• Developing a personality and genetics
  
• Multiplicity outside of the tulpa community
  
• Tulpas and hosts are equal
  
• How do switching systems share experiences and abilities?
  
• How switching and the unconscious mind relate to each other
  
• Tulpa independence and the effects of tulpa creation
  
• Plurality as a double-edged sword and accidental tulpa creation
  

“On Tulpas” is too broad of a topic, and as a result you connected ideas that don’t relate to each other or loosely relate to each other, sometimes having this problem within a single paragraph. Each topic I listed can be its own essay. I broke down your essay topic-by-topic here.

 

All of these topics are interesting and what you have for some of them is a good start, but unfortunately you will have to re-build your essay from the ground up. There is not enough written for each topic to make up the core of an essay. On average, each topic had a couple paragraphs dedicated to it. I don't recommend picking multiple topics and writing a 20 page essay to cover the entire subject or breaking down a 10 page article into numerous short or incomplete essays.

 

I recommend using what you wrote on self-awareness and how that relates to plurality because you wrote the most on that topic. In the Google Doc, I labeled the topic [E] and highlighted the related paragraphs in green.

 

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Some of these problems come from cramming topics together and not having a solid structure or thesis. Others came from unresolved logic.

 

Specific feedback:

 

[hidden]

A community with questionable ideas and goals, united by a mystical word.

 

Given that your core readers are most likely other tulpamancers, making fun of them them is a poor choice for an opening.

 

This also makes me wonder if your target audience is people who never heard of tulpas before. If so, you can build curiosity in your audience without painting tulpamancers in a negative light.

 

Some other reviewers got the impression your target audience was beginners, but I did not. Most of the time it felt like you expected your reader to know what tulpas were already because you used terms like forcing and switching without stopping to explain what those terms meant.

 

Humanity tries to figure how consciousness works for a long time, creating and disproving hundreds of theories. Are some people more suited to be ‘multiples’, to house more than a single consciousness in their mind? Are others bound to be singlets?

 

The first sentence has nothing to do with the following ones. However, it makes it sound like multiplicity is a well studied and established concept when it is not. While there are various studies done on DID, there are almost no studies done on tulpamancy and other plural communities.

 

Some psychologists consider consciousness to be interruptible and not a process that starts with your birth and ends with your death. It’s simple to agree with that – you’re unconscious when you’re asleep. You can come up with dozens of common reasons why you can temporarily lose your consciousness.

 

The last sentence doesn't make sense with the rest of your paragraph and the statement itself does not make sense. Without the context of the debate over if you are conscious all the time or not, it sounds like you're asking your audience to come up with dozens of reasons for why they could black out. The lack of a topic sentence and smooth transition makes the last sentence feel out of place.

 

But what if I’d tell you that you’re unconscious even more often?

 

This is a heavily debated subject, so it may be worth mentioning that this is debated and not fact to prevent confusion.

 

Multiples are common outside of the tulpa community. Writers think like their characters. Actors get so into their roles that their mannerisms change even after shooting.

 

These assumptions are not founded on any solid evidence and not all writers and actors will create tulpas accidentally. To say that multiples are common is also an assumption.

 

The key to plurality is teaching the brain to address self-awareness to different personalities. As we discussed earlier, the brain does it by relying on the memories and experiences. For some, the alter-switching happens because of the traumatic events that one of the personalities forced itself to forget. The memories stay, but now the brain had to readdress them to someone else; so the alter is born. For others, simple thoughts of movie characters and their past are so vast, deep, and personal, that they are enough to flip them into a different stream of ‘who-I-am’.

 

The sentences related to alters do not belong. Alters can exist without universal self-awareness due to the effects of amnesia.

 

Eventually, the brain stops needing a host-induced push to make tulpas react – tulpas become self-aware, and the brain learns the distinct set of thoughts that should belong to tulpas.

 

This transition sentence has potential to introduce your next topic on hosts being equal to tulpas, but the next sentence and the following sentence that follows don't work for a complete transition.

 

This brings us to what tulpas are.

 

You should define what tulpas are in your introduction or immediately after your introduction. Your audience probably spent the last couple pages very confused assuming they don't know what tulpas are. If you do not intend on defining what tulpas are, take it out.

 

(remember – that one dies and gets re-created a thousand times a day too)

 

This doesn't make sense and it doesn't have anything to do with the topic of the paragraph it was in.

 

Tulpas are mechanically induced consciousnesses, that, for all means and purposes, have same capabilities than the original body-born consciousness (remember – that one dies and gets re-created a thousand times a day too). The only thing that set tulpas apart is that they are created artificially via the tulpamancy practice.

 

Based on your previous sentences, the last sentence does not make sense in this paragraph. A tulpa is set apart from being mechanically made because they are mechanically made does not make sense.

 

Describing tulpas as "mechanically induced consciousnesses" and "created artificially" makes it sound like tulpas are alien compared to their hosts, contradicting your point.

 

How does the bond to experiences form? Why can some systems switch and use each other’s skills easier than others? I’d think that has its roots in the memory separation, although the mechanisms that isolate entire experiences are not clear.

 

The first sentence is unrelated to the rest of the paragraph, and it's odd you never answer your first question.

[/hidden]

 

Grammar errors:

 

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Dozens of people practising forcing, hypnosis, altering their consciousness, meditating, and trying to cope with their disorders.

 

, and

 

They are united by a goal to create what Wikipedia calls ‘an imaginary friend’.

 

"the goal" not "a goal"

 

Humanity tries to figure how consciousness works for a long time, [...]

 

has tried not tries

 

You walk down the street, and your thoughts jump to something else- to the shopping list, then to the class assignment for tomorrow, to the game, you watched yesterday.

 

Add a hyphen after else, replace the second to last comma with ", and then", and remove the last comma

 

But when you try to remember what you were thinking of while you were walking, nothing

 

Add a comma there

 

Tulpas are mechanically induced consciousnesses, that, for all means and purposes, have same capabilities than the original body-born consciousness

 

[...] have the same capabilities of the [...]

 

[...] tulpa to be a perfect hiker. , e Even though they can relate [...]

 

Replace the comma with a period.

 

After all, few, if any, tulpas had to learn how to keep the balance while walking, [...]

 

their not the

[/hidden]

 

Regardless of which topic you choose, you will essentially be starting from scratch. Hopefully you can salvage what you already wrote for the next draft and save those other topics for future essays.

 

I know this is an older article, and your writing skills have improved a lot since then. I’m confident that you revisiting this work will lead to a much stronger submission and an interesting read.

 

I cannot approve this draft as is, but I look forward to your future submissions.

[Jamie]

Review here (Google Docs link)

 

Opening and conclusion paragraphs: 

 

Hello! Gavin here. I love to see general essays about tulpamancy written by those within the community: stuff like this is often the first introduction people have to tulpamancy. That being said, this one needs some revising in order to do the topic justice. With some revising, I think this will make a very solid general piece on tulpas.

 

I’m going to be commenting for each paragraph or so saying what I felt the main point was. You might find benefit looking at the list in Ranger’s review, and deciding which points you want to convey.

 

Overall, a nice piece, but it isn’t going in a clear direction yet. Find a stronger central point (it can be pretty general, still) and have at it with a new draft or a revision, and I think this piece will end up as something really great. I didn’t go into grammar because I think so much of this could be changed around, it’s not worth going into nit-pick level for paragraphs that might wind up slashed. As is, I can’t approve it, but once it’s revised to have a clearer point and some of the other issues are addressed (confusing definitions, apparent contradictions, lack of sources), I’ll be willing to do so.

[Breloomancer]

It is incorrect to see tulpas as lesser beings only based on them not being able to control the physical body, or preferring wonderland to the physical world. You must consider the tulpa’s personal age and the amount of experience that the brain accumulated before they came to be. It would be unreasonable to ask a two-year-old tulpa to be a perfect hiker, even though they can relate to twenty years of previous host’s hiking experience – personal experiences are stronger and more efficient than ones of your systemmates

 

many tulpas can control the phisical body, and many systems are able to use the experiences of their systemmates just as well as their own. sometimes a tulpa is also just natrually really good at something despite no one in the system having had experience with that thing.

 

other than that paragraph all of the general ideas were good, though in a few cases the phrasing was odd. I won't go over the phrasing though because my biggest problem with it is that none of your different ideas fit together into a coherent essay, it's all just throwing an idea out there then immediately moving on to something else. to fix this would require rewriting almost the whole article, so for that reason any phrasing corrections would be rather pointless.

 

I'll approve once you have an actual thesis that the article is built around