How do You Define Tulpa Terminology?

[Lucilyn]

Eclipsing isn't a tulpamancy term, and it's way too complicated and weird to try and make one now. the tulpa.io glossary is the glossary for like, all plurality terms, and the tulpa.info glossary is ours. it's not even old either, Tulpa001 and others were working on it in their Discord server a few months ago

 

Some of the Tulpa Wiki definitions are nice, but it's missing stuff like Eclipsing, Fronting, Blending, Co-fronting, Walk-ins, and stuff that seems to fall into that "wishy-washy" category really quickly.

 

yeh 'cus they aren't tulpamancy terms as far as tulpa.info goes anyway. Walk-ins is mostly Soulbonding influence and some other plurality maybe, eclipsing I'm 200% against even trying to define here, co-fronting is not a term that's been used on tulpa.info like ever and it's pretty confusing (just specify if you're switching, possessing or proxying), blending is an okay term to have but it's almost always seen as a bad thing here and never desirable (it would be real confusing if it was desirable..), and... fronting is an undecided term that because of that now refers to switching OR possession as long as the one doing it has the most control over the body at the time

 

Tulpa.info's stance ever since we first saw the tulpa.io glossary was "We don't want those wishy-washy terms", I guess in line with us being the "scientific"/not-wishy-washy site y'know? while some people do use those terms, it's best to leave them off our own glossary since we don't intend to use them..

 

I won't mind if this guide gives three or four sentence definitions for some of these terms to account for completeness. I also envisioned this glossary to contain awareness of general misconceptions and confusion of the terminology and give direct, agreed-upon answers.

 

definitions should be kept concise for sure, what you're thinking of is the "More" link after the actual definitions on the glossary https://wiki.tulpa.info/wiki/Glossary

which would be useful! In fact..

 

can we stop trying to rewrite the definitions (unless you see specific problems with them) and just start expanding the "More" pages? like the awesome Tulpa page they wrote, we should make the other pages more than like one line lol

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

Totally associating isn't just feeling the senses, it's being the senses. When you associate with the body you aren't just a tulpa, you are the body.

Also I'm not quite certain what you mean by "direct control"

Neither of us has any idea what "being" the senses means, and that includes the guy who was born in the body. "Being" sounds like artistic liscense, not a definition. There's seeing things through the eyes and there's being blind. "Feeling" may not have been the greatest choice of words but I meant "experiencing the same sensory input that someone born in the body would". Is there any other kind? I didn't think I implied some kind of imposed/imagined senses.

 

And now i agree with Lance and Vos and Luciyn. If I cant even say feel the bodys senses without confusion, I dunno how we are expected to agree on anything. No offense, Bre.

[Venomous]

Bre, if you change the definition of fronting to actual control and not just feeling what the body feels, how do people whose tulpas AREN'T feeling what the body feels 24/7 express that? I use co-fronting for when both me and Viper are feeling and experiencing the outside world through the body's senses( and paying attention to it), without Viper taking control. And yes, Viper can withdraw, at which point I consider they no longer co-front, and that leads to them no longer receiving input from the outside world, aside from second hand, from my memories, which isn't the same.

 

You experiencing co-fronting from the very beginning shouldn't rewrite the term and definition for everyone. What else could I use to describe Viper being with me and us experiencing the world together when we do so? And how do we describe when they withdraw?

[GrayTheCat]

what you're thinking of is the "More" link after the actual definitions on the glossary https://wiki.tulpa.info/wiki/Glossary

which would be useful! In fact..

 

can we stop trying to rewrite the definitions (unless you see specific problems with them) and just start expanding the "More" pages? like the awesome Tulpa page they wrote, we should make the other pages more than like one line lol

 

I'm sorry for running into this without thinking. I updated the original post too.

[Breloomancer]

Lucilyn, I am mostly in this as an excuse to learn other perspectives and experiences in tulpamancy. The end result is not a big concern to me.

 

Reilyn, I'm not quite certain what you aren't getting. It's the difference between something happening to someone else, and something happening to you. I don't know how to explain it more than that.

 

Venny, you could say something like "feeling the senses", but us who switch also use this word because it works better than any other word for switch in the present tense.

[Ember.Vesper]

Cat, I think your original plan was clever and I appreciate your initiative. People have definitely been using the same term for different things and different terms for the same thing in spaces where clarity would be more useful. But my first thought on seeing this thread was that it would need to balloon to incredible and unwieldy size to be effective at its purpose.

 

Thanks for giving Vesper an opportunity to chime in on sentience. She's been bothered for weeks but was unwilling to "take on the moral burden of having started yet another terminology thread".

 

Lucilyn, I agree that building on the existing wiki is much better than starting from scratch. But I have been seeing "wishy-washy" terms from the tulpa.io and r/Plural glossaries used within this community. And "co-fronting" appears in 63 posts (well, 64 now) going back to 2014 and is the preferred term for the state of at least one currently prominent system.

 

Bre, I agree with you that there isn't a fundamental distinction between a host and a tulpa. I've personally experienced being a disembodied voice, and, at first, a faint, vague, confused disembodied voice at that. I started to gain clarity after Vesper told me I needed to "learn to think like a tulpa". However, the terms themselves seem to me to exist primarily to make an origin-based distinction. There is already a perfectly serviceable word to encompass both hosts and tulpas -- people.

 

Ideally, I would define tulpa in a way that excludes not only hosts, but alters, highlighting that tulpas are made of largely new material instead of splitting out from older personalities. Vesper would prefer to define it in a way that excludes soulbonds as well, but admits there is no reasonable way of defining tulpa to exclude her without also excluding a huge portion of self-identified tulpas.

 

And even if it introduces a measure of ambiguity, in systems where the original personality is no longer prominent, "host" effectively refers to both an inalienable origin and an exchangeable role. Even systems that have not permanently "changed hosts" could fairly make use of the term "acting host".

 

I understand what you're trying to convey with "being the senses", but it's still a metaphorical use of the phrase.

 

Do you hold that every human being is already a tulpa or that a person becomes a tulpa when they start to try to make one?

 

Everyone, remember that the wiki has discussion pages available for publically building consensus on individual topics. That's how Wikipedia does it, so hopefully it can work for us.

 

********

 

Just for fun, some terms as we use them in-system, some of which, for clarity, we've been trying to not use on the forum:

 

Awake - State of thinking and responding to other system members

 

Asleep/Zoned-out - State of not thinking or responding to other system members

 

Aware - Connected to the physical senses

 

Facing - In control of the body

 

Flops - Active mental processing capacity as a limited shared resource (from Floating Operations Per Second, though RAM might have been a better analogy)

 

Manifest - Visible only in the mind's eye, but overlayed into the physical world (attempted imposition)

 

Switching - Changing who is in primary control of the body, regardless of whether other system members remain awake or aware (so, not inherently requiring dissociation, as we currently are either simultaneously awake and aware, or dissociated because we are asleep)

 

-Ember

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

Bre, all I can tell you is my own experience. I've tried comparing it to Lance's but he has never been able to really disassociate away from the body's senses so he can't tell that there has ever been a difference. I went from receiving no sensory input at all (except his thoughts/mindvoice) to everything and it's never changed since. As soon as we started co-fronting, as far as we know, we have never experienced anything different from each other, with the exception of different personal interpretations naturally affecting perception. So.. When I say "feel" the senses, all I'm aware of is, for example, seeing or being blind. We've never experienced some kind of feeling that we're experiencing things second hand and didn't know that was even possible. As far as we know, neither of us has ever managed to switch, but of course being told mysteriously "you will know when it happens" doesn't help us any there.

 

So do you get what I mean by co-fronting? Both "being" the body at the same time, still two diffident people, with time and practice (and a lot of clumsy attempts) we learned to coordinate our efforts and take turns from certain ques to determine at any given moment which of us should be walking or talking or whatever while the other just sits there passively and stops trying to also exert control. Lance says that it always felt like his body but whenever I'm operating things, not his will directing it. He has the same disconnected experience as someone operating out of muscle memory, going through the motions of a rote activity without thinking about it. Except it's me. I have gotten bored while he was eating before and reached into our pocket, pulled out our phone and browsed the forums at the same time. It wasn't something I'd done before (but it was honestly his fault for picking a favorite place of his and eating the same food again) and he found it a bit unnerving. Only one set of eyes of course, so there was a lot of glancing back and forth and "Really? Is now the best time for that?" going on.

 

There are days where we wake up and have to shake off a blendy feeling of "which one of us am I?" and take a few minutes to get a feel for ourselves again as individuals and get everything strait.

 

So considering those, do you see why we have no idea what you mean by there being some kind of difference between feeling and being senses? Ours is a pretty up-front and shared system tied strongly to the body. I have spend so much time in charge of our actions that I've jokingly called us co-hosts before.

[Breloomancer]

"Person" is not a perfectly serviceable word for tulpas and hosts because it is too ambiguous, some people might say that a dog is a person, or that a whole system makes a person but indevidual members are not whole poeple. Furthermore it is not something that we can give our own definition to because it is a word that is already used by the general public and would just make everything too confusing. Tulpa on the other hand belongs to us.

Also just because there is a focus on origin doesn't mean that there should be.

 

Reilyn, most members of systems don't feel a connection to the body like you report when they aren't switched in, I believe that due to the uniqueness of your system switching may be a difficult concept to explain, like explaining a color that you can't perceive. I am at a loss for how to explain it to you if you don't experience both association and disassociation.

[CM]

"person

/ˈpəːs(ə)n/

noun

1. a human being regarded as an individual."

 

Someone could say a dog is a person but they'd be wrong. Animals aren't people.

 

Some people might think that the whole system makes a person, some that all system members are people, some both, there will always be disagreements no matter what but that's nothing major and for me mostly just describes a system's feelings about itself rather than both sides preaching their views as the only truth. There is no redefining the word as it is if we call tulpas people.

 

Tulpa is a pretty wide spread definition. I'd agree that it belongs to "us" if it was just a handful of people all active the same time on the same site, but there are communities separate from tulpa.info and systems that have long since cut ties to any community, web articles, Wikipedia page, studies, etc, redefining things now would make a mess.

[Breloomancer]

Well it's not like people don't ever call hosts tulpas already, it's just uncommon and usually to make a point. I don't intend for it to become more common than it already is, I just want the definitions to reflect the fundemental similarity.

Also the definition of person that you gave for person means that tulpamancers aren't people because a human being would definitely mean the whole body and not just a small part of the brain, and since we are multiples not indeviduals we aren't technically people.

 

I feel like further arguing on this matter will be futile because everyone is to set in their opinion to sway anyone else