Is Tulpa me?

[noricha]

I don't have any tulpas left but i have a small question.

Is Tulpa really a reflection of myself but have I given it an identity? If so, what is the difference between me and my tulpa?

[Luminesce]

The average person will, by default, have the view that "they" are their entire brain and body. They associate their sense of self with every part of their body and mind, because they have no reason not to. So every random unintentional thought, every instinct, every unintentional body twitch, all of it was "them".

 

I realized this was actually not the case before tulpamancy, in my time reading lots of "Western Buddhism" books and articles. I learned that your sense of self is really just a small part of your brain, the conscious-thinking part. It associates itself with whatever it wants (though this is warranted for memories and experiences), but it is not actually all of those things. "You" aren't those things. What you experience as "you" is the consciously thinking part of the brain, and all other tasks, from beating the heart to automatically walking while your mind is elsewhere, are just different parts of your brain and body that "you" aren't even controlling. The tricky thing is that the conscious part of the brain can decide to plug-in and take control of many things temporarily, such as breathing manually instead of automatically, and that fools people into thinking that "they" are responsible for those things all the time, when they're not, it is other parts of your brain handling them for you 99% of the time.

 

This is in my opinion very important to realize for tulpamancy. While "you" can be used to refer to the entire human being, externally.. Internally, in your own mind, what constitutes "you" is very different. Your sense of self should be your memories/experiences, preferences, values, associations with things and people. Your brain uses that sense of "you" as a pilot for the conscious part of the brain. This is also what your tulpa would be! Their own sense of self, their own memories/experiences, preferences, values, and associations with things and people.

 

But when you've extended your sense of self to identify with everything about your body, like your heart beating, your brain handling countless subconscious tasks, and even just random not-conscious thoughts you didn't have on purpose, there's not really room left to have a tulpa that's "separate from you". Because you're claiming literally everything in your head as you, any attempts to create a tulpa will likely be rejected as "No, that's just me."

 

It is true that a just-starting tulpa is likely going to sound and feel very similar to you. Through intent and expectations, you teach your brain over time that they're actually an independent entity, until eventually they do actually start to sound and feel different from yourself. Eventually this should become so clear that it's impossible to even doubt whether it was you or them that said or thought something.

 

But still, to even get past that starting point, you can't be claiming every single thought in your brain as automatically "you". Some thoughts really just kind of get generated and "suggested" to you by your brain, without your intent. If you automatically assume all of those "were you", then a tulpa will never be able to get their start, because anything that could be them (even if it's not! Belief that they're an independent entity in your mind is necessary to teach your brain tulpamancy and make them actually independent eventually) will be shut down as "just you".

 

Some people do manage to create a tulpa and practice tulpamancy fine despite having this belief that they are normally everything that goes on in their head. In these cases, I think they tend to rely on random occurrences of thought that "feel alien", and then they convince themselves (if successful) that that was their tulpa. But if you work with this model, if your brain never accidentally generates an "alien-feeling" thought, you will never accomplish creating a tulpa. Alien thoughts and feelings are not actually necessary to start the tulpa creation process, only intent and expectation. As in my own case, your tulpa will start to sound and feel different as they develop, even if they started as indistinguishable from your own thoughts (and not "alien-feeling"). But only if you can accept that not all thoughts that occur in your brain are you. If you claim ownership of every single thought and feeling, even when you literally had no conscious part in forming them and they just happened at random (my brain for example likes to bring up criticisms of random things for me to ponder, without my intending to think them at all), then your tulpa likely will never be able to get a start in its development.

 

 

So anyways, the short answer is that a tulpa is exactly what your own sense of self is - a collection of experiences, values, associations with other things and people, and so on. But if you believe that you are your entire brain and body, and not just the conscious part of your brain, you're likely to reject any potential progress in tulpa development by claiming any thoughts or feelings that come up as "just you", even if you had no part in creating them.

[noricha]

7 hours ago, Luminesce said:

The average person will, by default, have the view that "they" are their entire brain and body. They associate their sense of self with every part of their body and mind, because they have no reason not to. So every random unintentional thought, every instinct, every unintentional body twitch, all of it was "them".

 

I realized this was actually not the case before tulpamancy, in my time reading lots of "Western Buddhism" books and articles. I learned that your sense of self is really just a small part of your brain, the conscious-thinking part. It associates itself with whatever it wants (though this is warranted for memories and experiences), but it is not actually all of those things. "You" aren't those things. What you experience as "you" is the consciously thinking part of the brain, and all other tasks, from beating the heart to automatically walking while your mind is elsewhere, are just different parts of your brain and body that "you" aren't even controlling. The tricky thing is that the conscious part of the brain can decide to plug-in and take control of many things temporarily, such as breathing manually instead of automatically, and that fools people into thinking that "they" are responsible for those things all the time, when they're not, it is other parts of your brain handling them for you 99% of the time.

 

This is in my opinion very important to realize for tulpamancy. While "you" can be used to refer to the entire human being, externally.. Internally, in your own mind, what constitutes "you" is very different. Your sense of self should be your memories/experiences, preferences, values, associations with things and people. Your brain uses that sense of "you" as a pilot for the conscious part of the brain. This is also what your tulpa would be! Their own sense of self, their own memories/experiences, preferences, values, and associations with things and people.

 

But when you've extended your sense of self to identify with everything about your body, like your heart beating, your brain handling countless subconscious tasks, and even just random not-conscious thoughts you didn't have on purpose, there's not really room left to have a tulpa that's "separate from you". Because you're claiming literally everything in your head as you, any attempts to create a tulpa will likely be rejected as "No, that's just me."

 

It is true that a just-starting tulpa is likely going to sound and feel very similar to you. Through intent and expectations, you teach your brain over time that they're actually an independent entity, until eventually they do actually start to sound and feel different from yourself. Eventually this should become so clear that it's impossible to even doubt whether it was you or them that said or thought something.

 

But still, to even get past that starting point, you can't be claiming every single thought in your brain as automatically "you". Some thoughts really just kind of get generated and "suggested" to you by your brain, without your intent. If you automatically assume all of those "were you", then a tulpa will never be able to get their start, because anything that could be them (even if it's not! Belief that they're an independent entity in your mind is necessary to teach your brain tulpamancy and make them actually independent eventually) will be shut down as "just you".

 

Some people do manage to create a tulpa and practice tulpamancy fine despite having this belief that they are normally everything that goes on in their head. In these cases, I think they tend to rely on random occurrences of thought that "feel alien", and then they convince themselves (if successful) that that was their tulpa. But if you work with this model, if your brain never accidentally generates an "alien-feeling" thought, you will never accomplish creating a tulpa. Alien thoughts and feelings are not actually necessary to start the tulpa creation process, only intent and expectation. As in my own case, your tulpa will start to sound and feel different as they develop, even if they started as indistinguishable from your own thoughts (and not "alien-feeling"). But only if you can accept that not all thoughts that occur in your brain are you. If you claim ownership of every single thought and feeling, even when you literally had no conscious part in forming them and they just happened at random (my brain for example likes to bring up criticisms of random things for me to ponder, without my intending to think them at all), then your tulpa likely will never be able to get a start in its development.

 

 

So anyways, the short answer is that a tulpa is exactly what your own sense of self is - a collection of experiences, values, associations with other things and people, and so on. But if you believe that you are your entire brain and body, and not just the conscious part of your brain, you're likely to reject any potential progress in tulpa development by claiming any thoughts or feelings that come up as "just you", even if you had no part in creating them.

I want to ask you another little question.
Is reviving a tulpa possible when the tulpa was killed about half a year ago? And if it succeeds, does the tulpa have any problems?

[Luminesce]

"Killing" tulpas is called dissipation in this community, primarily because you can't really "kill" a tulpa. You can do it symbolically, and if it's meaningful to you then you can consider it the case, but realistically that's not how it works from a psychological perspective.

 

Dissipation is the act of choosing to no longer direct any attention to or otherwise allow your tulpa to be active anymore. By not thinking about them at all, they'll normally start to fade over time and become harder to "bring back". This process changes immensely by how developed the tulpa was; if they were less than a few months old, most likely there won't be anything of substance left (unless you spent a lot of time with them) after not too long. But a tulpa that was a year or older is likely to never be truly gone, their neural connections in the brain will fade a bit but are likely still able to be brought back/made active again if you choose to do so (at least, within 1-5 years I'd say). Usually they lose progress in vocal clarity and maybe independence a bit depending on how long it's been - these can simply be regained through forcing exactly how you made progress the first time, and it should be easier. It's rather common for tulpas who aren't active for a while to experience some temporary loss of vocal clarity and such.

 

But then, tulpas who have been active in the system for multiple years, they are likely so ingrained in the brain that the neural connections that made them up will likely never disappear entirely (or with an estimate by me here, for around 8+ years at least). However, part of the dissipation process is simply the commitment to never making them active again, not thinking about them like a tulpa who is present. In that sense, nearly all tulpas can be effectively dissipated no matter their age (except maybe those in systems trained to make themselves active from time to time, but this is generally a purposely obtained skill that the large majority of tulpamancers never gain).

 

It's not considered particularly ethical in this community to just dissipate tulpas willy-nilly, though - as we do treat them like people. To give some reference for this though: Dissipating any tulpa who never achieved vocality and independence is normally considered acceptable (but unnecessary, if you're just going to create another..); and dissipating any well-developed tulpa is accepted only if they were actively harming or intending to harm you (this won't happen without you expecting it to, though), or in certain cases, if the tulpa themselves wants to be dissipated.

[FiveFiction]

On 3/16/2023 at 11:08 PM, Luminesce said:

Some heavy shit

I just…wow. You basically put into words what I’ve been trying to even THINK in words for years. One of my friends back in the day who knew I had tulpas and was curious when I explained the concept to him actually joked with me: “What if when you create a tulpa you just end up realizing you were a tulpa the whole time?”

Fun stuff. 

[KusaNyan]

On 3/16/2023 at 9:08 PM, Luminesce said:

But still, to even get past that starting point, you can't be claiming every single thought in your brain as automatically "you". Some thoughts really just kind of get generated and "suggested" to you by your brain, without your intent. If you automatically assume all of those "were you", then a tulpa will never be able to get their start, because anything that could be them (even if it's not! Belief that they're an independent entity in your mind is necessary to teach your brain tulpamancy and make them actually independent eventually) will be shut down as "just you".

 

Some people do manage to create a tulpa and practice tulpamancy fine despite having this belief that they are normally everything that goes on in their head. In these cases, I think they tend to rely on random occurrences of thought that "feel alien", and then they convince themselves (if successful) that that was their tulpa. But if you work with this model, if your brain never accidentally generates an "alien-feeling" thought, you will never accomplish creating a tulpa. Alien thoughts and feelings are not actually necessary to start the tulpa creation process, only intent and expectation. As in my own case, your tulpa will start to sound and feel different as they develop, even if they started as indistinguishable from your own thoughts (and not "alien-feeling"). But only if you can accept that not all thoughts that occur in your brain are you. If you claim ownership of every single thought and feeling, even when you literally had no conscious part in forming them and they just happened at random (my brain for example likes to bring up criticisms of random things for me to ponder, without my intending to think them at all), then your tulpa likely will never be able to get a start in its development.

Certainly not the original poster, but I believe this is a significant challenge for many individuals engaged in tulpa development. It seems there’s a scarcity of resources dedicated to helping practitioners differentiate between self-generated thoughts, mental “background noise,” and those that might actually originate from a tulpa. Your observations resonate strongly with me, and I would be very interested to hear if anyone within the tulpa community has developed effective methods or insights (or if there are any guides I may have overlooked) for making these distinctions more manageable.

[The Incans]

People see every thought as them because the personality comes together as one during childhood (for Neurotyical brains). This is usually by 8-9 years old…before that the personality is still fragmented. 

 

If a child goes through severe abuse or has ongoing medical problemsthat affect this process (eg old epilepsy drugs  - Phenobarbitone - can actually change the structure of the developing brain)  throughout the critical period of personality development this process may not be completed so they go on to develop Dissociative Disorders.  

 

People who have a NT brain will struggle more with creating and forcing Tulpa because as said above they see every thought/action as them. This is why it was thought to have taken years of meditation for the Tibetan Monks to create Tulpa…Meditation is used because it (done properly) takes you to a place of being dissociated from reality briefly.

 

People with more Neuro Diverse brains whose brains may have not fully completed this process and conditions such as Autism and ADHD (where it is easier to dissociate from reality anyway  than for the general public) will often create Tulpa quicker and much easier because their brain is basically in in the state where its possible for them to attribute (or more easily imagine attributing) some actions/thoughts to an outside force such as an Invisible friend/Tulpa.

 

People with DID find it easiest of all as they have had alters all their life and don’t know anything else…new alters can be easily created by anything seen as traumatic and existing alters ’splitting’..for them Tulpa’s can be created much the same way and quickly become fully sentient..able to take executive control of the body etc. 

 

The problem being much therapy focuses on encouraging them to integrate their alters by revisiting their trauma’s or communicating with those part that part of life is over now so they will integrate within the system. This is why there is a divide between communities with Traumagenic Alters and other forms of ‘multiplicity’…where people are seen to be creating Tulpa’s for fun and entertainment.

 

My own ability came from constant ongoing medical trauma before the age of 7 and due to medication have no memory of those 7 years at all. I do remember being bullied throughout school due to being seen as different but I had the ability to create social masks due to the autism and because of the DID they existed as fully seperate selves. (although at that age I didn’t understand this and they were not aware of each other).

 

I have a vivid imagination so creating new Tulpa and bringing them to life by allowing them to blend with past social mask fragments that could host makes it easy for mine to come to life and quickly develop their own sense of self seperate to mine. Mine are also based on past family members (who have since passed) for which I know how they would think, or act and how that would be different to my onwn thoughts and reactions…so my brain easily seperates them regardless of how many Tulpa I have active.