A Concise Guide to Tulpa Creation: Based on "Filtering and Construction"

[Valaeus]

This tutorial was originally written in Chinese and then translated into English. Therefore, some expressions may be ambiguous or incorrect. All feedback and criticism are welcome.

[Valaeus]

15. **When practicing conversation with my tulpa, I feel like my brain spontaneously replied with a sentence. What should I do?**

 

    First, don't be afraid, and calm your mind. Please consider this situation a necessary stage in creating a tulpa.

 

    This self-answering is neither your conscious fabrication nor the mature voice of your tulpa. You can understand it as your brain performing some kind of **automatic completion function,** much like a very eager salesperson jumping to answer a question. You have been thinking with your main consciousness for so many years that this is, of course, the strongest and least effortful neural pathway in your brain. So when a need for a response arises, the brain will prioritize this habitual path.

 

    Regarding how to act specifically, the priority is as follows:

 

    We first aim to **capture subtle, vaguely familiar, faint signals that require effort to catch.** Prioritize capturing or strengthening them (for example, you ask your tulpa how it feels today, and you catch a faint warm signal. This could be a fleeting thought, a suddenly appearing word, or a subtle feeling. But you need to seize this point and strengthen it: *You feel warm too, don't you? But I think you would say this,* and then fully enact its related expressions as it speaks).

 

    Then there's this situation of lightning-fast auto-replies. We can utilize it, but not rely on it—only doing so when we genuinely don't hear any faint signals.

 

    First, make a judgment: Does the content of this auto-reply signal **align with your tulpa's persona? Does it contain valuable core ideas?** If so, start correcting it. You need to dress it up in your tulpa's style. You can say to it: "I feel like you might have wanted to say this just now?: [blah blah blah] (while mentally playing this sentence in your imagined tulpa's tone, demeanor, and voice)."

 

    Of course, if the lightning-fast auto-reply is hopelessly off-character, then just ignore it.

 

    Remember, don't treat this as a difficulty. This situation is a normal stage of shaping, and you can even use it as a material bank. Your own main consciousness might have auto-replied OOC this time, but what about next time? The time after that? There will always be a time when it feels a little like your tulpa is speaking. Then, after a period of pruning and strengthening, you should find that the frequency of lightning-fast auto-replies decreases, and the "subconscious imagining" that is both like you and yet distinctly other-feeling increases. This indicates that you've made significant progress and a clear shift.

[Valaeus]

## Revisions to "Preparation"

 

In the first section, we mentioned that setting personality traits would be key to creating your tulpa. However, a few short words can't really encompass every facet of a tulpa's personality. And if your understanding of these traits isn't deep, your brain might indeed feel lost—how can it simulate thoughts it has no grasp of? This can also make your "filtering" work more difficult and confusing.

 

I'm offering a more proactive method here:

 

First, as before, find a few words to summarize your tulpa's personality.

 

After that, you'll start actively **"piling up material" under these personality traits.** For example, if your tulpa has the trait "sentimental," then conceive several different scenarios (e.g., it learns your pet unexpectedly passed away). Then, like writing a novel, use your utmost creativity to imagine how it would comfort you in that situation—what would it say? How would it address you? What actions would it take? What expressions would be on its face?

 

Save all of this and jot it down in a memo. You should also indicate which traits each scenario corresponds to. However, each scenario doesn't have to strictly align with just one trait; it can correspond to several, as long as the final expression of that complex emotion is reasonable.

 

You can continue expanding this memo, much like a diary. Eventually, those reactions might even become its actual reactions, rather than just what you initially set for it.

 

This material should give your brain a preliminary impression of your tulpa's words and actions.

[Abvieon]

This is one of the best guides I have come across in a long time, and despite being a translation puts things in a very clear and easy to understand way. It's structured and logical, there is not a lot of "fluff" which can make some other guides harder to read.

 

Based on what I've seen in my time in my community, the techniques you describe here are some of the most effective. Many people do not understand the importance of being willing to consciously direct and build upon an emerging tulpa, "pruning" out of character or nonsensical thoughts. A mistake many people make is the assumption that a brand new tulpa already fully exists and is just waiting to be heard. While this is actually true in some edge cases (e.g. someone was already plural in some way and comes to discover it through tulpamancy rather than creating a new headmate,) for the majority of new practitioners, they are building a neural structure that doesn't exist yet, which usually requires some degree of conscious intervention like puppeting, parroting or thought pruning to "get the ball rolling."

 

That advice only stops being applicable once a tulpa has developed consistent autonomy and no longer needs your help to act. However, many people can only get to that point through starting with activities like those. 

 

I liked how you emphasized the importance of using both "output" and "listening." I see many people do only one or the other, and I also used to make the mistake of having 90% of my forcing time being only narration ("Output".) and as a result progress was extremely slow for a long time. I think this guide can help speed up people's progress.

 

Another thing I liked is your explanation of what is happening neurologically when you create a tulpa. I think hearing a more literal, technical explanation of what is going on can help people who have a hard time with 'just believing.' The comparison to training an AI makes the concept easy to digest. Something that's bugged me about some guides, including a lot of more recent ones, is that they chalk tulpamancy up to being "just about belief" or "just about imagination," and neglect to include anything about the neurological changes and processes involved. Belief and imagination are important for enabling the pathways to these changes, but someone saying a tulpa exists only because you "believe in them" or "imagine them" is no different from saying you only know how to drive a car or speak a language because you "believe you can" or "imagine you can." No, these are actual skills that are developed through creating new neural pathways through time and repetition, it leads to being able to do something you could not before. The same goes for tulpamancy.

 

I only have a couple nitpicks. One being that I disagree with the claim that parallel thinking is impossible. i think it is more nuanced than this - I think it is only impossible if the tulpa and host are trying to use the exact same areas of the mind/brain while thinking. If their tasks or different enough, or draw from different mental resources, I believe they can be performed in parallel. For example, the conscious mind and subconscious mind appear to be separate "systems" that can be utilized simultaneously - for example, let's say you are walking and you notice a car drive by on the street. Then, at the exact same time, your tulpa notices a bird fly by. Suddenly, your tulpa asks you "Did you see that bird?" and you have no idea what they're talking about, because you didn't see it - your attention was occupied by the car. I think this can occur because your tulpa may utilize your subconscious - which already picks up on data you are not consciously aware of - in parallel to you using your conscious mind to pay attention to something different. There are other examples of simultaneous use of split mental resources (left brain thinking vs. right brain thinking may also be one,) but this is the most prominent example.

 

I also disagree with the idea that everything happening within the brain is inherently coming from yourself. The part of your brain that can be considered "you," even in a singlet, is relatively small. The brain is constantly processing data you are not consciously aware of, constantly doing things outside of the scope of your control. You don't normally consciously decide which memories to keep or discard, you don't consciously make your heart beat, etc. It is more like your own personality and autonomy is an emergent property of these bigger processes occurring under the surface. You yourself are just like a tulpa the brain automatically created out of necessity as you grew up. I think the idea that "It is all you" can be counterproductive to tulpa creation. As then, any thought that pops up will automatically be considered to "come from you," making it harder for those thoughts to gain momentum to the point of forming an autonomous, self directing structure/narrative.

I am surprised nobody has replied to this guide yet and I hope it gains some more traction. Aside from the nitpicks I mentioned I think it is very useful.

Edited September 29, 2025 by Abvieon

[Powangzhuiyang]

Hi Valaeus,

I read your guide “A Concise Guide to Tulpa Creation: Based on ‘Filtering and Construction’” on Tulpa.info where you mention it was originally written in Chinese. Could you please share the original Chinese article or tell me where it was published? Thanks a lot!