[general] Methos's Tulpa Creation Guide

[NotAnonymous]

GAT Commentary:

 

Approved.

 

However, there's a few things that may be worth updating as other people have said, including the references (links).

 

It may also be a good idea not to prime the user with the idea that they will "fuck it up the first time" (``Most people always fuck up their first time and that's OK'').

While making a tulpa is obviously a learning experience, it doesn't mean someone should expect to make unrecoverable mistakes. There's a few other expectations ("I did not feel any kind of real presence existing in my mind until about 20 hours in to the process, which for me was slightly less than two weeks in.") which may also prime the reader in certain directions that may be undesirable to them - instead it may be worth saying "after you get more used to the tulpa, you may feel their mental presence besides you".

 

As for the "black box" approach - if one is to use computer analogies like you did, a thread within a process is a more accurate analogy than a VM - if only because access and identity is more malleable - and a VM typically is isolated from the host, while a thread runs "independently" of other threads while having its own local memory, but still has the same rights over the process and its memory space (ex. for an independent tulpa, it would be one shared body and memory pools).

Although I suppose people are more familiar with OSes and VMs rather than processes, threads/contexts and their memory - even if the latter is a closer analogy (if one is to make such analogies at all) to a tulpa as the relationship is more 'equal' than a VM which runs within a host (and may be emulated, depending on the implementation).

 

Aside from that, I do like the "black box" approach in that it's a good starting attitude towards developing an independent tulpa as you end up assuming they have some degree of thought privacy and their own will and memories, as well as the most important attribute of all: personhood.

 

The "What the hell is a Tulpa then?" makes a few strong assumptions about the physical/neurological nature of the tulpa - which is currently unknown to current science - we can model it psychologically (for example, as an independent/autonomous, conscious phenomenal self-model which is similar to (if not the same class of thing as) our own ego, but which allows for plenty of privacy of thought, different accessible memories, a different working memory and so on).

It may be more useful to describe the nature of the experience and the perception of the tulpa relative to the creator, rather than make assumptions about how neural nets develop (which may also carry unseen assumptions for the reader, again slowing their progress - I do recall making a few weird "theoretical" assumptions about a tulpa's nature which were fairly useless and only slowed down my progress needlessly).

Also, one more thing on the reference to Bluesleeve's opinions - AFAIK he doesn't believe much in the black box model or even in tulpas being independent - you'd see this if you were to read his more recent entries - even if he originally might have either had such beliefs and entertained them as a hypothesis.

However, I do think some of his guides are good (like the essence one), even if a bit too rich in symbolism - in practice one can get to a tulpa's "essence" without doing anything more than careful introspection of one's mental states.

 

The personality section could have some alternatives: for example you mentioned Bluesleeve's essence thing - that can easily replace a rigorous trait-based approach to personality - it's more of an alternative, and many times there's no real need to mix an essence based method, a trait based one, a parrot-and-stop-after-a-while based one and so on as far as personality goes - one of them is typically sufficient, unless it didn't work at all (the goal being to end up feeling that you have another person sharing your mindspace with you).

 

The "5. Emotions/Sentience" section is named rather correctly (an independent tulpa can give off all kinds of emotional responses), yet aside from the section title, I'm not seeing much of a mention of emotional responses in the actual content.

 

You've also used hour counts - for some people this is good as it disciplines them, but for more impatient ones, it may make them treat it like a chore or make them form weird expectations thus stifling their progress.

 

The "Final Thoughts" section seems to include some of the one-liner advice that used to be in the Tulpa General threads (/mlp/ and beyond), some of those advices are good, but others are of questionable nature, for example:

"5. Do not worry and do not have doubt. Remove all traces of doubt from your head. I cannot stress this enough. Doubt is the cancer of Tulpaforcing."

"6. Believe what your Tulpa is doing is what your Tulpa is doing, not you puppeting her..."

is something that I find a bit questionable - you should trust in your tulpa to be able to do stuff, but a curious and sometimes doubtful attitude sometimes gets a tulpa to make more progress than if you're accepting any intrusive thought as your tulpa.

Many times one's experiences will just make it impossible not to doubt and rather than deal with the doubt head on, some people suppress it while still encountering it and leading to more issues.

An example of a better mindset would be this: http://tulpanetwork.com/network/general-discussion/absence-of-disbelief-or-schrodinger%27s-tulpa/

A few examples of people who had had major issues with the "don't doubt no matter what" mindset can be found in this thread: http://community.tulpa.info/thread-misinterpretation-of-%E2%80%9Cassuming-sentience-from-start%E2%80%9D-philosophy

 

That said, while I do disapprove of 5 and 6, I do think 10("Trust your Tulpa") is quite beneficial - having trust in the tulpa (be it their current intent or more general things like their existence, personhood, will, abilities, etc), especially as they slowly earn it is a great boost to progress and to actually having fun with your tulpa and having interesting and meaningful interactions with them.

I'm unsure what to think of 4 ("Don't expect a voice out of nowhere. This takes TIME.") as well - some people do get faster progress there, even if it's not the case for most people (unless they overestimate their progress). Is it worth priming them to expect that they won't get fast progress? - consider for example someone with a well-develop imagination and the right "skills" could get results much faster than someone starting from nothing.

Some other assumptions like "Your Tulpa will know everything about you and there is no way to lie to your Tulpa or it to you." may also be false for some people - I can think of at least a few who keep secrets from each other (especially those that can switch).

"She will know what's going on in your life because you will both share the same memory." while a shared memory pool is not uncommon, it's not an absolute truth that all tulpas obey.

A good deal of the assumptions there are *should*'s not *is*'s, that is, things that should be, not genuine limitations on how a tulpa could function - while it may not be an ideal situation, keeping secrets or even a lie or two is not something impossible, unless you do your best to make it impossible (for either host or tulpa) - trust is something that should be earned - just like a relationship is something to be developed, not something to be served on a silver platter.

Some of these assumptions may even be a bit incompatible with the black box model you presented earlier, and don't match the experiences of some people (but could very well match the experiences of people who made a tulpa while expecting them to be absolute truths).

 

BTW... I have to say "Raina speaks to me using binaural beats. It's a system of communication we've developed while forcing." sounds pretty impressive!

 

tl;dr: Decent general-purpose guide, approved, however I wish more caution would be exercised with the assumptions made in the guide and more thinking done on how it will affect the tulpa and their development.

[Averian]

Envision, not in-vision, this is a very wordy guide but I can't say it's bad. just format it in the future. I approve.

[Linkzelda]

Approved:

 

Waffles

CyberD

Linkzelda

 

Sands (though it may be an approval pending given reasons stated here:

 

http://community.tulpa.info/thread-general-methos-s-tulpa-creation-guide?pid=87797#pid87797 <-- If your opinion has changed since then Sands, please inform me or waffles, or in this thread.

 

 

Mayormorgan

 

ThunderClap

 

Schlondark

 

 

NotAnonymous (Approval in pending most likely based on the critique given for OP to consider re-evaluation)

 

 

Averian

 

 

 

Disapproved:

Blank Votes:

 

 

 

No vote:

 

Zero - He gave a critique but it seemed his response was still in a WIP:

 

http://community.tulpa.info/thread-general-methos-s-tulpa-creation-guide?pid=88409#pid88409

 

 

 

 

 

 

If GAT members that have an approval pending can update ASAP, please do so.

 

If there isn't a consensus made by the deadline (12-23-2013), it will be un-stickied until GAT members have a better resolve in their voting.

 

 

Of course, the community is always free to provide their opinions.

[waffles]

Nah, NotAnonymous' vote was a pretty clear approval. That's 8/12, so this'll go in Guides.

[GGMethos]

Removed a few things.

 

Most importantly, no longer using CondeelezaRiceBox. Thank God.

[Souls8]

https://gist.github.com/GGMethos/5341046

 

Unfortunately this leads to a 404

[Vos]

 

Unfortunately this leads to a 404

 

The page is archived here. I'll add this link to the OP and will upload it somewhere else if I can't get in contact with Methos. I've updated the OP with the new Github link.