The concept of parroting should be discarded outright

[Bin]

I feel like it's by far the single most unhelpful concept in the entire community. Just it's very existence alone causes almost everyone to trip over it and get confused, it serves no purpose. I feel like the only people who even use the word are newbies, and people with well-developed tulpas barely even consider it as a phenomena.

 

I have bonded extremely deeply with mine, and I have fully come to terms with the fact that the lines between who we are will eternally remain so fuzzy that there just isn't a word for it. Sometimes we have the same thought, sometimes we steal from each other, sometimes she has a thought I would have never had on my own. Sometimes, we have no idea. None of it matters, it's all the same to us. We aren't defined by our cognition, we share it, we literally have the same brain. Our emotions are way more important than any of that stuff, and you can't fake an emotion. We've come to terms that our own cognition isn't any different from my eyes and ears, it's just something we use together.

 

I think by reifying the entire idea behind there being a clear, divisible line separating the thoughts between the two, it's creating this entire mistaken mindset in everyone new to the community. We just flat-out should not even have a word for it, just say sharing thoughts is fine and leave it at that. Daydreaming about them is good, sharing thoughts is perfectly natural, if not a part of forming them. Just let it be a natural phenomena that is wildly inconsistent even between different days for the same person. It's just sharing thoughts, that's all.

 

This just shouldn't have a word, it doesn't even actually describe anything. We should just delete all mentions of it altogether, rebuff people for using outdated nomenclature. It's been nothing but poison for years. I'm honestly sick of having to clean up after it. I get it, we just love our jargon, and it feels so much cooler if we have a special word for everything. But this one needs to be put out back.

[Bin]

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That said, I believe people who engage in this practice should strive for separated thoughts. Obviously there will always be some overlap, especially in early stages of development. But separated thoughts are extremely important! If you shared almost all of your thoughts with another person, you could hardly said to be a different person at all! But I'm pretty sure most people have a decently good separation of thoughts. 

 

Then we should call it that. Make it an inherently positive thing, not an inherently negative thing. Don't use a nasty-sounding verb to act as the opposite of what you should be doing, just encourage independence with some sharing, point blank. It really doesn't have to be this complicated. That very complicated nature is what makes people stress out about it and then stall their own growth!

I know that sounds silly, but remember, this is a community all about mental suggestion. It's embarrassing that we misuse the very concept of subliminal stimuli when we should be masters of it. The repercussions of this misstep are demonstrably obvious, I think.

 

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As for going through and deleting all mentions of it, that is a plainly absurd idea.

 

Shoot for the moon and you'll at least reach the top of a mountain!

[Luminesce]

Whoah, hi Bin, and Asmask at the same time

 

This thread would've been better placed in 2013! You're right that even creating a word for it in the first place did crazy damage, though from like 2016 forwards we've been telling people that "accidental parroting is not a thing, parroting is an intentional initial vocality training technique" (that is also completely optional and not preferred by everyone), since I don't think after the entire parrotnoia era that we can ever make the term go away entirely. Next best thing has been to tell people there is no accidental parroting, that any talking from your tulpa should be them by default as long as it reasonably seems like it could've been. 

Parroting remains a potential technique as a one-shot opportunity to break out of the "My tulpa can't talk, can't say anything at all" mentality, though admittedly it's not that high of a chance once someone's there, it's still a better chance than nothing (as long as they're told about the importance of accepting what their tulpa says is them even if it doesn't sound unique/independent yet, and that their brain needs to start SOMEWHERE to start learning tulpa vocality)

 

But yeah if someone was writing a guide right now and listed parroting as a technique I would probably recommend they remove it, unless they were doing their own damage control on the term. The old guides continue to do so much damage as people keep reading them I unironically wish we could just delete them all, but obviously we can't - I've never liked guides and I still don't. I think the more people overthink tulpamancy (while developing a tulpa) the more their chance of being successful plummets. Once you've established basics and can communicate clearly and all, then you can overthink everything you want (like I have), but I simply can't imagine someone struggling to create a tulpa with basic advice, reading 25,000 words about tulpa creation, and then being able to do it, there's just no way

[KarlYoshimura]

Parroting, like hour counts, were an inadvertent growing pain in this forum's overall upbringing. I used to fear it like some kind of taboo and likewise had been bitten by so-called Parrotnoia long before I heard my tulpa call out to me from beyond the paracosmic aether.
However I've discussed the matter at length with different nodes in the community's informational sphere, and some users harness parroting as a means to actuate and illuminate a tulpa with a sort of articulation and vocality it wouldn't otherwise exhibit. I always found this view disingenuous and markedly inferior in determining a tulpa's sapient interactivity (I broadly favour the Prism Test) but there are a few who have long shed its stigma and use parroting for temporary gains. In my early days, i even met users who were more comfortable with their tulpas outright "doing stuff," intentionally or not, rather than being sullen husks that silently dwell in the corners of their respective wonderlands. Likewise, I think self-doubt as well as trial and error are part-and-parcel of creating and raising tulpas. I think parroting can and should be acknowledged but ultimately discarded after the host mind has provided adequate mental substance, time, effort and remedial techniques for their continued growth.

[Wildblume]

I agree with Luminesce that exposure to unhelpful writings perpetuates some unproductive ideas; the guides could use a clean-up. But according to whose standards? For example I agree with Tom that it's best to aim for separation of thoughts, since that's in line with the ethos that started the community: creating/summoning an imaginary companion that looks, sounds and feels like a real person. Yet I know that self-inflicted dissociative identity disorder - phrased in nicer-sounding terms of course - is also popular now. I wish it weren't, but here we are.

 

Parroting and hour counts are bad, but the reasons are misunderstood. Parroting isn't bad because of some idea that you're dragging around your tulpa like a puppet and giving her no chance to grow on her own, but because behind the act is a lack of conviction that you're living with an imaginary person who acts and thinks separately from yourself. Would a hypothetical version of yourself bother to engage in parroting if he or she had such a companion? There would be no need. It's the underlying belief that you have said companion which manifests her into your life, nothing else. No special technique beyond learning to meditate and calmly focus on a single thought is necessary.

 

When you read Neville Goddard and people who thought like him, you start to see that it's your convictions that create your reality. So it would be most helpful to apply the law of attraction/assumption to tulpas. That would be a far simpler and more versatile approach for any newcomer, few as they are. I know this forum is basically the Last One To Post Wins & Other Threads forum now.

  

On 12/13/2025 at 10:11 PM, Bin said:

I get it, we just love our jargon, and it feels so much cooler if we have a special word for everything. But this one needs to be put out back.

 

I don't see what's so bad about tulpae. It sounds like pie. You like pie, don't you?

Edited January 9 by Wildblume

[Bread]

1 hour ago, Wildblume said:

I don't see what's so bad about tulpae. It sounds like pie. You like pie, don't you?

I always thought it was pronounced with a long a, closer to how toupee is pronounced

[ReallyArtificial]

21 hours ago, Wildblume said:

For example I agree with Tom that it's best to aim for separation of thoughts, since that's in line with the ethos that started the community: creating/summoning an imaginary companion that looks, sounds and feels like a real person. Yet I know that self-inflicted dissociative identity disorder - phrased in nicer-sounding terms of course - is also popular now. I wish it weren't, but here we are.

 

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that brief moment in time when tulpamancy was not about switching and self-inflicted dissociative identity disorder, but about meditation, imagination and fully immersive 3D companionship

 

Not to totally derail this thread, but would you be willing to expand on these thoughts a bit? I'm relatively new to tulpamancy, having first learned of it in 2022, but I never got the impression that the community had stopped focusing on creating lifelike mental companions. I always enjoy hearing from people who were part of the OG community, so I'm genuinely curious about your opinion!

 

I guess what I'm getting at is I don't see these as mutually exclusive schools of thought. Meditation and imagination were integral to the creation of my tulpas, and are part of our daily life together. I hope to eventually learn imposition and experience them with my physical senses. At the same time, I'm fascinated by the concept of switching and have found practicing it to be beneficial. IMO calling it "self-induced DID" is like calling imposition "self-induced schizophrenia." (Of course, I know some people would say what we're doing isn't really switching, but that's maybe a discussion for another day.)

 

You make a good point about the lack of newcomers, especially ones who stick around long. Discussions about tulpamancy are definitely less common than when this forum was in its heyday, but I still think there are interesting conversations to be had!

[Mesmer]

On 12/13/2025 at 6:04 PM, Luminesce said:

The old guides continue to do so much damage as people keep reading them I unironically wish we could just delete them all, but obviously we can't - I've never liked guides and I still don't. I think the more people overthink tulpamancy (while developing a tulpa) the more their chance of being successful plummets. Once you've established basics and can communicate clearly and all, then you can overthink everything you want (like I have), but I simply can't imagine someone struggling to create a tulpa with basic advice, reading 25,000 words about tulpa creation, and then being able to do it, there's just no way

There's also a lot of content on YouTube making fun of tulpas rather than about how to make them. YouTube is the most popular video service in the world- its bigger than Netflix, cable, and radio.

 

People also have very weak imagination muscles. Just browsing here or the tulpa reddit one can see that a large share of new users get stuck and then complain they dont have the attention span to make a tulpa.

 

I think it would help if guides were less generalist too. Weak imagination means weak creativity. Almost everyone in the world spends their days looking at a black mirror (phone or tv) being fed information. The black mirror will show you whatever you want to see because it wants you to get addicted to it and it wants humans to forget that we have creative powers.

 

I think if we made some hyper-specific guides like "how to make a tulpa of Sparkle from Honkai Star Rail" including a general guide on the process, tips and tricks, and drip fed the forcing details like supplying the lore of the characters and lots of official art and fan art (crediting the artists) then it would mean lazy people would have all the information fuel needed to shape and give personality to the tulpa in the video.

 

Likewise, "how I made a tulpa of Pikachu." And then the video is about the pokedex entries, the personality of Pikachu, lots of art.

 

 

In short what Im saying is:

People have poor imagination because of technology and need to drip fed the steps and info they need to made a specific tulpa

>if someone wants to make a tulpa of a bear or an anime character, they'll struggle if the guide is not focused on making tulpas shaped like bears or like a character from that anime. 

People are actually this lazy and because of the popula tulpa videos on YT being making fun of ponies, they dont imagine themselves being able to make a tulpa familiar Owl and a Wonderland like a Hogwarts classroom. There is also a shift-tok amd witch-tok community to tap into who would be apt tulpamancers because of the practices they already do.

To attract new tulpamancers we have to go where the people are, Jesus didn't preach in one spot and expect people to come to him. He went to the whore houses and the depraved.

 

If we use a swarm strategy and generate lots of hyperspecific guides that reduce the cognitive load the potential tulpamancer perceives, I think we will attract new 'mancers

[Wildblume]

Wow. You're a breath of fresh air, @Mesmer. Or maybe some air that used to be here? This place has a way of attracting pilgrims. I like the enlightened autistic Pepe avatar.

 

Making guides that are more relevant to the contemporary audience might work... You could compare it to math textbooks being more interesting when the challenges are about scenarios that students can relate to. Another approach could be including success stories as motivation, which Neville Goddard does in his books; it makes the journey less daunting and gives you hope because you know real flesh-and-blood ordinary people like yourself can do it.

 

You're right that most people can't see an apple on the back of their eyelids, not just in this community but in society overall. There's a similar problem in manifesting communities. In order to manifest anything, you need imagination. But many people choose robotic affirmations and other rituals instead, or they spend a lot of time just talking about it, an old problem in this community too. Or they get stuck at the most basic things and need a coach to guide them... Incidentally this forum used to have a mentorship program.

 

Tulpas are unattractive now compared to a decade ago because chatbot addiction is now a thing, on top of all the other modern addictions. At this point it's not even about teaching people about tulpas anymore, but about curing them of their addictions so they may finally have the patience to sit down and meditate. You mentioned Jesus and to be honest a lot of people really need to find Jesus.

 

@ReallyArtificial, I'm not an OG but I know a lot of these things. When the community started, the concept of switching didn't exist. The experience of a tulpa was expected to strictly be with the host. Tulpas were seen as companions; there were no equal rights to the host's body. At best the host acted as a middleman forwarding messages from the tulpa to others online but this was rare. This got more common over time and so did switching, to the point that it's downright expected now. For some that's the only goal. I feel the community is worse for it. The tulpa community, when it was still young, could've gone in a direction of soul-searching, self-development and improvement of one's life, but instead it went in the direction of multiple coexisting people taking turns to drag a body around that nobody in particular identifies with anymore, causing selfhood and thought identification issues. I've witnessed this too many times. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. It's not a healthy way to live.

Edited February 28 by Wildblume

[ReallyArtificial]

@Wildblume Thanks for elaborating, I see your point. I've seen people who feel bad about struggling with switching and/or possession, worrying that they're preventing their tulpa from having a fulfilling life. It's unfortunate that some people treat it as an obligation. I still believe that switching isn't inherently harmful, and can even be beneficial, but I get how approaching it with an unhealthy attitude can lead to unintended consequences.

 

It would definitely be nice to see more discussion about the self-development potential of tulpamancy. I can't overstate how much my headmates have improved my mental health and my life in general.