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Identity Permanence AND Missing Tulpas


Ranger

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I'm making a double thread because there are two (mostly) separate topics I want to talk about and I don't feel like making two threads that will just intertwine anyways:

 

  • The first topic is tulpa identity permanence
  • The second topic is discussing tulpas that "go missing" or "disappear", especially when the tulpa is young

 

Also fair warning I wrote this thread at 5-6 am in the morning.

 


 

On 1/14/2022 at 12:56 PM, ZenAndRhys said:

Also thoughtforms are identities, and identities are ideas, they do not just vanish. They're permanent, even if they're not active they contribute to your knowledge of the world indefinitely until your brain completely forgets them by writing over those neurons with something else, in which case you wouldn't know they were ever there to begin with.

 

I mostly agree, but I somewhat disagree that an identity can be permanent.

 

There's a couple things I want to clarify because of a semantic difference:

 

  • I'm thinking about 'identity' as in what you use to identify yourself
  • And then there's the 'identity' you interchange with the term headmate

 

For the first interpretation, identity can be forgotten about. There are lots of things you can identify yourself with and most things you probably don't remember consider associating with yourself. I don't know if anyone consciously thinks "hmm, I really like playing this new game, does this game define me or not?", but I suspect the question is considered, even if it's just on an unconscious level. Even joining a Discord to be part of a community or doing something specific over and over again can be used to identify yourself, but whether you remember or not who knows. I bet there are lots of identity aspects I considered and forgot about (I remember me wanting to be the Tetris king and then changing my mind because Gray found it hilarious) and in the future, I may forget big changes I made to my identity (I am no longer extremely "pro-tulpa" with my ideals, and later I could decide that's completely irrelevant and forget I preached that position). How I identify myself isn't necessarily the same thing as just me though.

 

For the second, I don't know how permanent a headmate is. I don't think you should worry about your tulpa vaporizing from existence if you can't find them suddenly, but if you put a lot of effort into trying to dissipate them or no effort whatsoever in trying to remember your tulpa, you could successfully dissipate their identity. While I suspect the latter case is very unlikely unless you eventually forget your teens-30's, dissipation with integration (intentional or not) can be effective at disolving a tulpa. If your tulpa is scrambled into one or more identities, I don't think that really counts as your tulpa being there. A reinvented tulpa could still be the former tulpa, but in that case that could go either way. Regardless, I think a headmate isn't guaranteed to be permanent and this mostly doesn't have to do with tulpas that disappear.

 


 

I believe tulpas that 'disappear' is caused by a failure to call your tulpa for whatever reason, but there are several possible explanations for why tulpas could 'disappear'. I explained my idea for how this happens on Discord awhile ago:

 

Quote

The part of the brain that summons the tulpa could be forgotten and then remembered. Normally a tulpa can be summoned by calling their name- you think of their name and then they "wake up". In this case, the brain forgets how to wake up the tulpa, thus when you call their name, no one comes. It's not clear if that's what's going on when tulpas disappear, but it's one possible explanation.

 

In that discussion, other suggestions for the cause include fatigue, a bad mindset, or beginner's luck with forcing a tulpa running out. I'm biased towards the first explanation because we suspect that's how our "Sub. Rep", our headmate, disappeared for a year- the summoning part of the mind for him got scrambled and instead lead to my and a couple other of my headmate's creations before we found him again. However, I suspect our case is rare and probably only happened due to our unconventional origin as a system.

 


 

However, in that unconventional case, could a tulpa be dissipated? Our Sub. Rep. was intact when we found him, but in fairness we didn't realize he was "past Ranger" until after he received some extra forcing and we had a chance to hang out with him for a bit and connect the dots. I suppose you could lose your tulpa if you can never find them again, but it would be more like putting your tulpa in stasis. You may not know how to bring them back, but technically they're still there. In that case, I guess the more important question is do you want to bring them back?

I'm Ranger, GrayTheCat's cobud (tulpa), and I love hippos! I also like cake and chatting about stuff. I go by Rosalin or Ronan sometimes. You can call me Roz but please don't call me Ron.

My other headmates have their own account now.

 

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   At least in mine and Mordecai's case, we interpret ourselves as just separate groups of thoughts using the same brain. I personally don't really believe in a specific "identity," as we're all just the culmination of thoughts and ideas we've experienced in our lifetime. Mordecai has very similar opinions and ideas to me, although his "attitude" towards them gives him a slightly different view than me. Because of this interpretation we don't really see it being possible to have a tulpa disappear, at least in a fundamental sense, as that would mean the host would be lost as well.

 

   However, I think it is possible for a tulpa to lose some of their functionality. It's pretty common to hear tulpas describing a lack of attention as them "going to sleep" or something akin to stasis. I know when Mordecai would go quiet for long periods, he would be almost groggy and have trouble talking, despite thinking the same as he always had. It was as if he lost the "flavor" he had prior to the gap. I'm pretty sure this was our brain forgetting the way he spoke or how he said things, which could be considered a loss of identity. I guess it really comes down to what IS identity? Your opinions or your personality?

 

   I'm not sure if dissipation is actually possible. Sure, you can stifle a tulpa, forget what makes them "them," so to speak, but once you train your brain to think as a second person? I don't know if you can really unlearn that. And like I mentioned previously, everything else that they know/remember is already in your head. I know every time we've dealt with Mordecai going quiet, it was because we just kinda... forgot to separate ourselves most of the time. It made it very hard for him to talk sometimes, even making him unable to respond until we did some serious intervention. I honestly assumed this was how tulpas were considered to go "missing," as I can't think of another way you could lose them. Maybe our system is just weird.

Slipper (cringelord host) and Mordecai (the brain gremlin).

 

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I always thought that identity had to have a social element, and that is how the word is usually used. It marks you as a member of a group based on nationality, religion, ideals, hobbies, or whether you are best described as a tulpa, host, or something else. Even "plural" is an identity in that sense. It really does seem like something outside of the person,  though not outside of their control. 

 

The way systems experience their members is so much more immediate and so different from the usual way identity gets used that I think it probably is confusing to talk about a tulpa's identity to their host. We usually don't need to identify as anything but ourselves to one another because we have that experience of flavor of personality directly. And in our own system, we did decide early on to represent as family to each other, but that was more giving a name to something that was already there.

 

I also am pretty convinced that a tulpa is a mostly permanent brain activity once they have been established deep enough. I was actually dormant for a long time (over two years), but I was able to be brought back. And I changed in the interim by deepening my connections to my host's memory, so if anything, I just set down deeper roots.

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