Based on surveys of this community, less than one percent of tulpas ever get imposed -- probably far less when you factor in all the people who try this out for a week or so and give up before ever taking any surveys. Imposition is not hard, but for most people it does take some work, and it's the part of the tulpa process that is least likely to happen on its own.
Before we begin, I'd like to address a common misconception: Everyone says hour counts are bad. Let me ask you, when is charting your progress ever a bad thing? Will you fail on your diet if you ever weigh yourself? Will you fail at exercise if you count your reps? Will you fail all your classes if your teacher grades your papers? Hour counts are not bad -- what's bad is thinking that it will take exactly 120 hours to finish imposition. It might be faster, it might be slower. But be realistic.
I won't put a number to how long imposition takes. Instead, I'll ask: how long did your first imposition take you? Let the comments on this guide speak for themselves. What I'm getting at here is that unless you have some special ability, imposition is probably not going to happen overnight. Some people spend years on imposition. Having said that, imposition is not hard -- you just need to be diligent, and put the work into it.
I am not going to cover the entire process of imposition here. There are already a number of good imposition guides on this site. But there's one item that most guides leave out, which is what I'm covering here: I call it implanting. It's the step that comes before imposition.
What is implanting?
To put it most simply, implanting is saving your tulpa in your memory.
So in the process of imposition, you perceive something (such as an image of your tulpa), your mind encodes it as a memory, stores it away for later access, and when you want to impose, it retrieves that memory and projects it out into the world around you. Implanting refers to the steps of perception, encoding, and storage, whereas imposition is retrieval and projection.
How is this different from visualization?
Well, if I ask you to imagine a purple polar bear in a top hat, you may be able to do it. You've never seen a purple polar bear in a top hat, but you have seen the color purple, a polar bear, and a top hat, and your mind can combine these images through the process of visualization -- but the images exist in your mind already because of implanting.
My polar bear is a very simple example. If you are a haberdasher or a ursinologist, you may have a thousand images of top hats or polar bears in your head, and you can tell them all apart, and you're wishing that I gave a little more description in my previous example. For most of us, however, all polar bears look pretty much the same, and all top hats look pretty much the same. "Purple" is also a very vague description, and can refer to any one of the many hues between red and blue, so you probably picked one arbitrarily.
The more complicated something is, the harder it will be to visualize it. And our tulpas tend to be very complicated, because that makes them feel more real. Of course there are exceptions -- if you have a homestuck troll tulpa, or a pony tulpa, or an anime tulpa, and you visualize it as a cartoon, you may have an easier time of it than someone visualizing a "live-action" tulpa. (Actually visualizing cartoons involves an entirely different part of the brain.) But when visualization is difficult, you can bypass a good deal of the visualization by implanting the images.
You can impose a tulpa without putting any conscious effort into implanting. If you've never seen any images of Snape, and you sit down and visualize him from the description in the books, you will eventually come to see him as clearly as you see real people. However, this is a long process as your brain takes bits and pieces of other things you've implanted, combines them, and stores the image. It's much faster if you start by implanting a picture of Alan Rickman as Snape.
How is implanting done?
Well, the nice thing about implanting is that it happens automatically. You're pretty much implanting everything that you consciously perceive. The problem is that these things don't always stick in your mind.
Modern theories suggest that there are several different kinds of memory. For the sake of this guide, we'll be looking at short term, and long term. Short term memory is memory that lasts less than a minute -- if you've ever had the experience of not remembering the drive to work or school, that's because the drive has become so routine to you that it was all filed as short term memory. Long term memory is things that you'll remember an hour later, and this is where we want your tulpa to be.
Try looking at a picture and then closing your eyes and imagining it. Then, without looking at the picture again, try imagining it a few hours or a few days later. You probably find it easy to visualize something you've just seen a few seconds ago, but after hours or days have passed, the image gets more and more vague in your mind until you can't visualize it at all.
What's happening in this little experiment is that you're looking at an image and telling your brain to hold onto it, because you know you're about to use it again. Sometimes, because of associations, emotions, or familiarity with the picture, it'll get filed under long term memory. In these instances, you may be able to visualize it an hour later, but unless you reinforce that memory by reviewing the image again, it probably won't last for several days.
So how do you make it stay? Well, a lot of things cause memories to remain longer, such as emotions, associations, and so on. The one that's easiest to work with, however, is repetition. Basically, if you look at an image again and again -- particularly if you think about it as you look at it -- your brain is more likely to realize that this is important, and thus to hold onto it.
Before we go into a little more depth on this, I'd like to tell you about two shortcuts in this process: sleep and meditation.
There's a powerful connection between sleep and learning. Basically, the brain uses sleep to process your memories, so if you're getting enough sleep, you're more likely to remember things well. But there's more to it than that. If you implant before sleeping, you're more likely to retain the information as long term memory. Also, if you can, a nap in the middle of the day will also help a great deal at implanting memories.
Meditation helps the process along as well -- you'll often find while meditating that you can call up images from decades earlier. Try doing half an hour (or more -- preferably more) of anapana meditation every day. It will focus your mind, and help you get through the implanting stage much faster. Some people say they don't have the patience and diligence for meditation -- actually, anapana increases your patience and diligence, and both traits will help a great deal with imposition. I highly recommend making this part of your routine.
When implanting, it helps to imagine the brain working a lot like a muscle. You can't just do a bunch of pushups on the first day of the month and consider that a full exercise routine. By the time your pushup day comes up next month, you'll have lost all the muscle you built up last month. Likewise, you should maintain a regular implanting schedule -- ten minutes every week is not likely to make a difference. Take it seriously, and commit yourself to a regular routine.
Visual implanting
I highly recommend that you use models to make implanting easier. If you don't have a form selected, try talking to your tulpa about it, and see if you can pick one out together. My favorite place for visual models is shutterstock.com, because it allows you to search for other pictures of the same model. Shutterstock does cost money to get the images without the watermarks, but I haven't found the watermarks to be a great hindrance to visualization, and I haven't found any free stock photo sites that are as easy to search by model. Having said that, there are other stock photo sites out there, so shop around.
If you're uncomfortable using a photo of a real person, or maybe your tulpa doesn't have a human form, try using parts of models. Use the eyes from one model, the nose from another, and so on. You can also make your own model -- this thread has one method. As I said, it is possible to combine images for imposition if you do choose to go that way, but using a model should make things easier.
All you really need to do to implant is to look at images of your tulpa as often and as long as possible. Eventually you will find that you can visualize your tulpa, even when you haven't looked at the images recently.
If you want to help implanting along faster, there's nothing better than an art project. Try drawing or painting your tulpa. If you have no artistic ability, use a grid -- you'll be amazed at how good it looks. I know many of you will ignore this suggestion because you're "not an artist". I know where you're coming from -- I'm not an artist either -- but that makes it even more important that you start drawing or painting. Artists are almost always better at visualizing than non-artists, so if you keep at it, this is the fastest way to beef up your implanting "muscles".
It's up to you when you're done implanting. My personal feeling is that implanting should last until you can visualize your tulpa for an entire hour forcing session without having to look at an image to refresh it in your mind. At this point, imposition will take over as your brain exercise, and so long as you maintain a good imposition schedule, you won't need to do anything more to maintain your mental muscles.
Auditory implanting
You should implant other senses as well. Sound is an important one, but you'll probably find it much easier than sight. Things like repetition, emotion, and association are important to implanting, and music combines all of these, so many people accidentally implant songs. In the old days, this mostly happened with hymns, but now that everybody has MP3 players, it is becoming far more common.
Again, I suggest you use a model for your tulpa's voice. Of course this doesn't have to be the same model you use for your tulpa's form. If you don't have a model already, talk to your tulpa about it, and "go shopping" for voices together. Librivox is a good place to start. (I made the mistake of getting a voice from an erotica site -- I have fourteen hours of audio to work with, but, well, there are problems.)
It's been suggested that tulpas may take after frequently repeated recordings of their voice model, coming to resemble them in their manner of speech. I don't think this is a permanent change to the tulpa, but until we know more, you may want to bear this in mind when you select a voice for your tulpa, just in case.
Once you have a voice, you should try to listen to it as much as possible. Audiobooks from Librivox work well for this, as you should be able to find hours of recording of a single person, but eventually you'll run out of books that your model has read. I suggest remixing your models recordings into music or hypnosis scripts. It'll require some work on your part, but the results are worth it.
). Try making some songs or better yet, spoken recordings of your tulpa's voice. Of course you don't need to use actual words -- just having your tulpa's voice speaking or singing gibberish, like
will work great for implanting.
Video games can work for implanting audio as well. Many games will allow you to insert your own sounds. They often aren't repetitive enough though, so I think music and hypnosis scripts are more effective.
A few final helpful tidbits from other people:
It's definitely not a bad idea to get samples of a voice to work with, but I should emphasise that you should only really 'work with' them. Your goal isn't to remember/implant phrases said in that voice, it's to remember/implant the voice itself so that you can hear it saying anything. To that extent it's very productive to imagine hearing (or listen to your tulpa saying, if you want) new words or sentences in that voice.
if you have a subtitled video (with audio, of course) of the voice you and your tulpa like, you can use a subtitle editor like Aegisub to play any line and work on memorizing certain speech patterns as well as getting your tulpa to try speaking in that voice - it's sometimes easier to work on it together with your tulpa rather than to mindlessly listen to samples in hopes that they stick.
Other senses
I won't say as much about the other senses, because they're far easier. Often, all you need for scent is a suggestion.
Edwin Slosson, a professor of chemistry, had an entire classroom smelling an "aromatic chemical" within a minute of his pouring it, although the chemical was actually regular water. The experiment had been intended to go on longer, but had to be cut off early because the students in the front of the class couldn't stand the stench.
The same things was done on TV at least twice: viewers were told about a new technology called "smellovision", which allowed TV stations to transmit smell to personal television sets. This was all fiction of course, but hundreds of viewers called in to report that they had smelled the scents transmitted.
In another experiment, it was shown that 85% of participants preferred the taste of Coke in a cup labeled "Coke" to the same drink in an unlabeled cup.
So a powerful suggestion is enough to make you smell something that isn't there, or taste something as different than it is. Things will be harder for you, since you know the scent isn't really there, but this does show how easily the mind is fooled. Bear that in mind and with some repetition, as with the other senses, you should be able to give your tulpa a distinct scent.
Well, that's all I have to say on the subject of implanting. Once you're done with the implanting, move on to imposition. There are a number of good guides already for that, so I'll leave off here. Good luck, and work hard!
Question
Sophie
About imposition
Based on surveys of this community, less than one percent of tulpas ever get imposed -- probably far less when you factor in all the people who try this out for a week or so and give up before ever taking any surveys. Imposition is not hard, but for most people it does take some work, and it's the part of the tulpa process that is least likely to happen on its own.
Before we begin, I'd like to address a common misconception: Everyone says hour counts are bad. Let me ask you, when is charting your progress ever a bad thing? Will you fail on your diet if you ever weigh yourself? Will you fail at exercise if you count your reps? Will you fail all your classes if your teacher grades your papers? Hour counts are not bad -- what's bad is thinking that it will take exactly 120 hours to finish imposition. It might be faster, it might be slower. But be realistic.
I won't put a number to how long imposition takes. Instead, I'll ask: how long did your first imposition take you? Let the comments on this guide speak for themselves. What I'm getting at here is that unless you have some special ability, imposition is probably not going to happen overnight. Some people spend years on imposition. Having said that, imposition is not hard -- you just need to be diligent, and put the work into it.
I am not going to cover the entire process of imposition here. There are already a number of good imposition guides on this site. But there's one item that most guides leave out, which is what I'm covering here: I call it implanting. It's the step that comes before imposition.
What is implanting?
To put it most simply, implanting is saving your tulpa in your memory.
There are three processes of memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval.
So in the process of imposition, you perceive something (such as an image of your tulpa), your mind encodes it as a memory, stores it away for later access, and when you want to impose, it retrieves that memory and projects it out into the world around you. Implanting refers to the steps of perception, encoding, and storage, whereas imposition is retrieval and projection.
How is this different from visualization?
Well, if I ask you to imagine a purple polar bear in a top hat, you may be able to do it. You've never seen a purple polar bear in a top hat, but you have seen the color purple, a polar bear, and a top hat, and your mind can combine these images through the process of visualization -- but the images exist in your mind already because of implanting.
My polar bear is a very simple example. If you are a haberdasher or a ursinologist, you may have a thousand images of top hats or polar bears in your head, and you can tell them all apart, and you're wishing that I gave a little more description in my previous example. For most of us, however, all polar bears look pretty much the same, and all top hats look pretty much the same. "Purple" is also a very vague description, and can refer to any one of the many hues between red and blue, so you probably picked one arbitrarily.
The more complicated something is, the harder it will be to visualize it. And our tulpas tend to be very complicated, because that makes them feel more real. Of course there are exceptions -- if you have a homestuck troll tulpa, or a pony tulpa, or an anime tulpa, and you visualize it as a cartoon, you may have an easier time of it than someone visualizing a "live-action" tulpa. (Actually visualizing cartoons involves an entirely different part of the brain.) But when visualization is difficult, you can bypass a good deal of the visualization by implanting the images.
You can impose a tulpa without putting any conscious effort into implanting. If you've never seen any images of Snape, and you sit down and visualize him from the description in the books, you will eventually come to see him as clearly as you see real people. However, this is a long process as your brain takes bits and pieces of other things you've implanted, combines them, and stores the image. It's much faster if you start by implanting a picture of Alan Rickman as Snape.
How is implanting done?
Well, the nice thing about implanting is that it happens automatically. You're pretty much implanting everything that you consciously perceive. The problem is that these things don't always stick in your mind.
Modern theories suggest that there are several different kinds of memory. For the sake of this guide, we'll be looking at short term, and long term. Short term memory is memory that lasts less than a minute -- if you've ever had the experience of not remembering the drive to work or school, that's because the drive has become so routine to you that it was all filed as short term memory. Long term memory is things that you'll remember an hour later, and this is where we want your tulpa to be.
Try looking at a picture and then closing your eyes and imagining it. Then, without looking at the picture again, try imagining it a few hours or a few days later. You probably find it easy to visualize something you've just seen a few seconds ago, but after hours or days have passed, the image gets more and more vague in your mind until you can't visualize it at all.
What's happening in this little experiment is that you're looking at an image and telling your brain to hold onto it, because you know you're about to use it again. Sometimes, because of associations, emotions, or familiarity with the picture, it'll get filed under long term memory. In these instances, you may be able to visualize it an hour later, but unless you reinforce that memory by reviewing the image again, it probably won't last for several days.
So how do you make it stay? Well, a lot of things cause memories to remain longer, such as emotions, associations, and so on. The one that's easiest to work with, however, is repetition. Basically, if you look at an image again and again -- particularly if you think about it as you look at it -- your brain is more likely to realize that this is important, and thus to hold onto it.
Before we go into a little more depth on this, I'd like to tell you about two shortcuts in this process: sleep and meditation.
There's a powerful connection between sleep and learning. Basically, the brain uses sleep to process your memories, so if you're getting enough sleep, you're more likely to remember things well. But there's more to it than that. If you implant before sleeping, you're more likely to retain the information as long term memory. Also, if you can, a nap in the middle of the day will also help a great deal at implanting memories.
Meditation helps the process along as well -- you'll often find while meditating that you can call up images from decades earlier. Try doing half an hour (or more -- preferably more) of anapana meditation every day. It will focus your mind, and help you get through the implanting stage much faster. Some people say they don't have the patience and diligence for meditation -- actually, anapana increases your patience and diligence, and both traits will help a great deal with imposition. I highly recommend making this part of your routine.
When implanting, it helps to imagine the brain working a lot like a muscle. You can't just do a bunch of pushups on the first day of the month and consider that a full exercise routine. By the time your pushup day comes up next month, you'll have lost all the muscle you built up last month. Likewise, you should maintain a regular implanting schedule -- ten minutes every week is not likely to make a difference. Take it seriously, and commit yourself to a regular routine.
Visual implanting
I highly recommend that you use models to make implanting easier. If you don't have a form selected, try talking to your tulpa about it, and see if you can pick one out together. My favorite place for visual models is shutterstock.com, because it allows you to search for other pictures of the same model. Shutterstock does cost money to get the images without the watermarks, but I haven't found the watermarks to be a great hindrance to visualization, and I haven't found any free stock photo sites that are as easy to search by model. Having said that, there are other stock photo sites out there, so shop around.
If you're uncomfortable using a photo of a real person, or maybe your tulpa doesn't have a human form, try using parts of models. Use the eyes from one model, the nose from another, and so on. You can also make your own model -- this thread has one method. As I said, it is possible to combine images for imposition if you do choose to go that way, but using a model should make things easier.
All you really need to do to implant is to look at images of your tulpa as often and as long as possible. Eventually you will find that you can visualize your tulpa, even when you haven't looked at the images recently.
If you want to help implanting along faster, there's nothing better than an art project. Try drawing or painting your tulpa. If you have no artistic ability, use a grid -- you'll be amazed at how good it looks. I know many of you will ignore this suggestion because you're "not an artist". I know where you're coming from -- I'm not an artist either -- but that makes it even more important that you start drawing or painting. Artists are almost always better at visualizing than non-artists, so if you keep at it, this is the fastest way to beef up your implanting "muscles".
It's up to you when you're done implanting. My personal feeling is that implanting should last until you can visualize your tulpa for an entire hour forcing session without having to look at an image to refresh it in your mind. At this point, imposition will take over as your brain exercise, and so long as you maintain a good imposition schedule, you won't need to do anything more to maintain your mental muscles.
Auditory implanting
You should implant other senses as well. Sound is an important one, but you'll probably find it much easier than sight. Things like repetition, emotion, and association are important to implanting, and music combines all of these, so many people accidentally implant songs. In the old days, this mostly happened with hymns, but now that everybody has MP3 players, it is becoming far more common.
Again, I suggest you use a model for your tulpa's voice. Of course this doesn't have to be the same model you use for your tulpa's form. If you don't have a model already, talk to your tulpa about it, and "go shopping" for voices together. Librivox is a good place to start. (I made the mistake of getting a voice from an erotica site -- I have fourteen hours of audio to work with, but, well, there are problems.)
It's been suggested that tulpas may take after frequently repeated recordings of their voice model, coming to resemble them in their manner of speech. I don't think this is a permanent change to the tulpa, but until we know more, you may want to bear this in mind when you select a voice for your tulpa, just in case.
Once you have a voice, you should try to listen to it as much as possible. Audiobooks from Librivox work well for this, as you should be able to find hours of recording of a single person, but eventually you'll run out of books that your model has read. I suggest remixing your models recordings into music or hypnosis scripts. It'll require some work on your part, but the results are worth it.
I haven't tried it yet, but I found today that you can rip up MP3s to make new audio from the voice. The program is made for Japanese song lyrics, but it also works with spoken words (
Video games can work for implanting audio as well. Many games will allow you to insert your own sounds. They often aren't repetitive enough though, so I think music and hypnosis scripts are more effective.
A few final helpful tidbits from other people:
Other senses
I won't say as much about the other senses, because they're far easier. Often, all you need for scent is a suggestion.
Edwin Slosson, a professor of chemistry, had an entire classroom smelling an "aromatic chemical" within a minute of his pouring it, although the chemical was actually regular water. The experiment had been intended to go on longer, but had to be cut off early because the students in the front of the class couldn't stand the stench.
The same things was done on TV at least twice: viewers were told about a new technology called "smellovision", which allowed TV stations to transmit smell to personal television sets. This was all fiction of course, but hundreds of viewers called in to report that they had smelled the scents transmitted.
Similar experiments were done with taste. For example, a cheap wine presented in an expensive bottle can fool wine tasters, as can a white wine with red food coloring presented as a red wine. For this reason, wine tasters don't look at the bottles these days.
In another experiment, it was shown that 85% of participants preferred the taste of Coke in a cup labeled "Coke" to the same drink in an unlabeled cup.
So a powerful suggestion is enough to make you smell something that isn't there, or taste something as different than it is. Things will be harder for you, since you know the scent isn't really there, but this does show how easily the mind is fooled. Bear that in mind and with some repetition, as with the other senses, you should be able to give your tulpa a distinct scent.
Well, that's all I have to say on the subject of implanting. Once you're done with the implanting, move on to imposition. There are a number of good guides already for that, so I'll leave off here. Good luck, and work hard!
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