general rules of thumb...

[solarchariot]

So, Ranger... being able to visualize to a specific degree of perfection isn't compulsory. I think over time, as one practices, 'visualization' improves, but engaging in visualization is not necessarily engaging in 'imagination.' If you ever heard a noise, and thought someone was breaking in, and got your baseball bat and called the police, and it's turns out it was the wind that blew a tree branch against the house, you were engaging in 'imagination.' or, 'imagination' was engaging you. Starting a tulpa with a place holder, like starting with a silhouette or ball of light, is engaging the 'imagination,' using a temporary place holder while you build up muscles of 'engagement endurance' that allows the imagination to fill in details later as it gains confidence that you are serious about participating with it and not just a temporary thing...

 

it's like writing. if you wait for the muse, your muse will be fickle and may or may not engage you because you demonstrate insufficient interest... but if you write everyday, you show discipline and a eagerness to participate, and so the muse comes daily...

 

and thanks to this bit, I have something else pop out, and so I am adding a sub- rule to rule two... If a person first coming to tulpamancy with no prior history of mental health or 'psychic' artifacts, and starts their first tulpa with a primary focus on it being in the physical, they will likely experience frustration and have poor or no results. One must achieve results first on the mental realm, imaginal realm, and then practice imposition. This feels important to me. I remember reading so many frustrated people demanding to 'see' their tulpa now, using this as evidence for validity, but I think its an inner world first, outer world second thing.

[Ranger]

So, Ranger... being able to visualize to a specific degree of perfection isn't compulsory. I think over time, as one practices, 'visualization' improves, but engaging in visualization is not necessarily engaging in 'imagination.' If you ever heard a noise, and thought someone was breaking in, and got your baseball bat and called the police, and it's turns out it was the wind that blew a tree branch against the house, you were engaging in 'imagination.' or, 'imagination' was engaging you. Starting a tulpa with a place holder, like starting with a silhouette or ball of light, is engaging the 'imagination,' using a temporary place holder while you build up muscles of 'engagement endurance' that allows the imagination to fill in details later as it gains confidence that you are serious about participating with it and not just a temporary thing...

 

I assumed that anything in the mind's eye counted as "imagined" since anything in the mind's eye can be explained as just that. Even situations where you imagine your interview or the reactions of people around you.

 

Anticipation is sourced from the mind's eye or assumptions about things. If it's the former, it's obviously "imagination", if it's the latter, it's harder to tell. Would an assumption based on logic count as imagination? What about an assumption of what someone is going to wear every day, even if that thought is simply the word "red" and not a picture?

 

Based on what Lumi was saying, you can "imagine" a voice, hence why I thought the theoretical "imaginationless" Tulpa would have the same mindvoice as their host. Does mindvoice in of itself count as part of the imagination?

 

and thanks to this bit, I have something else pop out, and so I am adding a sub- rule to rule two... If a person first coming to tulpamancy with no prior history of mental health or 'psychic' artifacts, and starts their first tulpa with a primary focus on it being in the physical, they will likely experience frustration and have poor or no results. 

 

"Mental Health" is pretty broad, especially considering that it encompasses things like autism and Alzheimer's disease. It may help to clarify if the person already has something like psychosis or a history with LSD or something.

 

Secondly, I don't know if this is actually true. I bet it's rare, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone had a cutting edge going into Tulpamancy. For example, Bear has fantastic hypnagogic sessions, it's possible some one could have something like that from the start. Another possibility is the person already has the skills for imposition trained elsewhere.

 

One must achieve results first on the mental realm, imaginal realm, and then practice imposition. This feels important to me. I remember reading so many frustrated people demanding to 'see' their tulpa now, using this as evidence for validity, but I think its an inner world first, outer world second thing.

 

Oh, that's some important context I wish I thought about before writing my response to the rule itself. I think it would make sense to assume that, but what if the host is very easy to persuade and seems to master imposition simply by believing they could impose perfectly from the get go? I know that doesn't apply to most people, but it may be that a powerful trust in what is believed to be there will be there is enough for some people. People working inside out is I think a way for more people to achieve that level of belief.

[solarchariot]

 

(everything you wrote)  :)

 

Yay, Ranger. Good points... Bear is special. ::) love Bear. But that's why I had the caveat, which may need to be cleaned up more precise, that folks coming to tulpamancy with previous tulpish like artifact would likely not fit this subtext. it's the singlets, the people with no prior disposition that seem to report the highest rates of difficulties in accomplishing tulpamancy... That is an assumption on my part. I suspect it to be true. If I am understanding Bear's history, he had events prior to learning tulpa... He is in a different rule set or box. I see his interaction with tulpa and tulpa related 'things' to be superior than someone who is coming at this with no past artifacts, and never having engaged inner mind work activity...

 

Access stuff in the mind is not necessarily engaging the 'imagination.' If you access a memory, that's not imagination. You're accessing something else... That doesn't mean imagination isn't activated. In fact, almost everything on memory suggests it malleable and not only do we remember things wrong, we add things. In this, some people access memories better than others, and are more likely to report accurately, because they filter out imagination components. An 'assumption' isn't necessarily imagination. That could just be math. I come home and find a dent on the car. I know my friend used the car. I know my friend sucks at driving. I assume my friend did that. That's math. We all engage in math. Some of us engage in collecting more information before doing math. Some of us go right to, 'what happened to the car,' 'I don't know,' and next assumption, they're honest and someone hit the car while they were not attending it, or they're lying... again, that's math, not necessarily imagination. Imagination could be a part of it. If I go off in a story seeing my friend being chased by police and there was shoot out and they escape... that's probably imagination. If I stop myself and realize the probability of that isn't likely, well, I am doing math again. When interviewing clients, I am information gathering. I ask lots of questions. I eventually have sufficient information that I start to predict which way its going, lining up symptoms with known things... that's not imagination. I could miss information and get it wrong, but that's not because I was imagining something, it was because I failed to do the math or I did bad math based on wrong or insufficient information... So, for example, I assume most of the people that talk to me aren't lying. I am not a lie detector. I will base my 'assumptions,' or 'professional opinion,' based on the information I get from person. Do I catch people lying. Sure. For all kinds of reasons. I don't chase the reasons. I simply note suspicions. Sometimes I will asked more specific and detailed questions and the story I have been getting unravels... I then start over...

 

so, for this particular subset of rule 2, I was hoping to weed out people that had past DID, or DID like that allows them to access the part of the brain where making a tulpa is likely easier, or where someone might have had an accidental tulpa or tulpa like 'situation.' I 'assume' it needs more tweaking. :)

[Ember.Vesper]

If a person first coming to tulpamancy with no prior history of mental health or 'psychic' artifacts, and starts their first tulpa with a primary focus on it being in the physical, they will likely experience frustration and have poor or no results.

 

Experienced writers, actors, roleplayers, artists, meditators, and hypnotic subjects probably all have significant advantages in picking up various tulpamantic disciplines, even the ones with the least mental health issues. If someone comes into tulpamancy with first class visualization, an early focus on the physical will probably be much less discouraging than it would be for someone coming into tulpamancy with no history of training visualization.

 

-Ember

[solarchariot]

 

Experienced writers, actors, roleplayers, artists, meditators, and hypnotic subjects probably all have significant advantages in picking up various tulpamantic disciplines, even the ones with the least mental health issues. If someone comes into tulpamancy with first class visualization, an early focus on the physical will probably be much less discouraging than it would be for someone coming into tulpamancy with no history of training visualization.

 

-Ember

 

This is a good list of potential exceptions. I'd probably drop actors. I know too many. Writers, well, they're a special group unto them. I know quite a few of them, too.

 

Do we have a poll that address what age people were when they first began exploring tulpas? THough age isn't necessarily a factor, I wonder if there is a correlation...

[Ember.Vesper]

Sort of:

 

https://i.imgur.com/Vr961hF.png[/img]

 

From the 2018 tulpa census

 

Most respondents hadn't been practicing tulpamancy very long, so take only a little off. We can't go straight from these results to, "Being young seems to help a lot with tulpamancy", due to the competing principle, "Young people seem to have a much greater interest in (and awareness of) tulpamancy".

 

I include actors not only because of being a roleplayer myself, but because of Leonard Nimoy's relationship with Spock. I don't know how common plurality is among actors, but the one study I know about its prevalence among writers showed 46 of 50 studied reporting at least one character having developed independent agency:

 

https://pages.uoregon.edu/hodgeslab/files/Download/Taylor%20Hodges%20Kohanyi_2003.pdf

 

And while we're examinining advantages, I have a post on the subject:

https://community.tulpa.info/thread-tulpa-creation-times-and-beliefs?pid=221330#pid221330

 

-Ember

 

EDIT: In addition to the other age information in several community censuses, I did find an old poll on the forum in a strange offcolor thread:

 

https://community.tulpa.info/polls.php?action=showresults&pid=219

[solarchariot]

OMG, the Spock Argument! Check and Mate... I read both of Nimoy's book. "I am not Spock" and "I am Spock." (Loxy is now saying, "I am Spock," but it has a flavor of 'I am Spartacus.')

 

I guess age is going to be hard thing to find correlates... There is a likelihood that any who finds and stays in the tulpa community is already predisposed towards having an easier time accessing it... My internal bias wants to predict that those high on the science end of things, or more specifically 'materialists' will have harder time than the 'metaphysicalists.' I know that's a bias, and I don't even have subjective information to back to support an argument for it. And this is why I am say, I am a bad scientist. Hence, why I want to dialogue about rule sets, because the validity of thing teased a part and dissected by many might increase.

 

Excellent paper! I must re-read it in slow motion...