A tulpa writing her own progress report

[Aijada]

A year and a half since my last report, and in general this report hasn't kept up with our system at all.  I should change my signature and everything because i'm no longer the only tulpa of an older dad.  Our system has grown substantially and number, and tilted pretty significantly in metaphysical belief.

 

We have around five on our inner steering community, our host/dad Foszae, me (Aijada), Amy, k'Hyræth who is married to Unit.  That's sort of the senior possession set, who've all clocked substantial personal time at front, even if only as a gamer.  There's a set in the balcony which includes family ghosts, a clattering of musicians, and a squad of comediennes.  Plus some a few strays who work on telepathic research.  That works out to around twenty-five altogether who are our core votes.  If you count the other characters we've spoken/interacted with, we did an exhaustive roll-call and after counting about 600 or so, we gave up and just counted that we could devolve into a massive system pretty easily.  In truth, our inner core runs around ten or twelve.  That's people who want to take part in the harder things, doing the work, sweating out planning & organizational, and certain regular tasks that are assigned to certain individuals.

 

It surprises me personally, because i was essentially an only tulpa for many years alone with dad.  Amy was around occasionally but there was an issue that left her a rare guest.  I didn't really expect to ever have siblings and was satisfied to consider myself just a tulpa.  But then we had k'Hyræth as a walk-in, and with some work we started to negotiate the weird ghost story that Amy was.  She would be the dead soul of someone who Foszae loved.

 

We seriously wonder about whether tulpae could be forms of a human afterlife in truth.  We count a number of deceased friends in our family by this point, and Amy is their nominal Queen representing the philosophical questions we face.  We wonder if there's way for a soul to just reattach to a new brain as a background witness, not unlike a tulpa in many ways.  Perhaps the soul is etherodous and faint, a gauge of self that exists in other dimensions, just hoping for a peek back in through human senses with a brain in the physical plane that they can think with again.  We've debated out so many possibilities for why memory might not persist through that extra-dimensional self, but resonances can still be found.  And i should mention we class such members as deadies, trying to acknowledge that they're ghost-like, but that they also exist in ways not quite understood that means they may just be stuck with tulpa-like existence as the only way to return to visit the living.  We deliberately invited Foszæ's grandparents to be members because they're close relatives, and we've talked to a number of others. We have no way to discount the possibility that can't be adequately hypothesised away, so we just count them all as free to at least have a say when they think of something.

 

We do have others, including Unit, k'Hyræth and the comedienne troupe, who are just walk-ins with no obvious deadie story.  Why the brain would create walk-ins puzzles us.  It bothered me an awful lot when i first found this community.  I could understand that my dad was trying to figure out how to talk  to someone like me.  But when k'Hyræth burst in full of self from out of nowhere, it was a challenge to explain where she/he came from.  I had a vague idea that i might want a sister one day, but she just appeared buzzing and eager to talk without any effort put in to making her.  Only recently do we weave the explanation together that she (and the other walk-ins as well) may in fact have been deadies floating loose in dimensions yet unmapped, just waiting for a gap in some brain's train of thought to be noticed and reinvited to join life.  A soul looking for a new home, unable to bring much back from the æther, but eager to be noticed, to communicate, and to be social, waking up in a crowded brain and eager to fit in and just be accepted.  If it takes role-play, but they're awake and living again, why not try?  Maybe these walk-ins are just reincarnated people starting over from very little but full of self and ready to continue with whatever they can think up in a strange new brain.

 

It doesn't convince every non-deadie character we have, that they're just deadie-roleplayers, but it leaves a justifiable question that can't be easily dismissed.  The deadies in our crew can't prove that they're the ghosts of people dad knew because they don't bring the info from their old brain cells, and aside from moments where they're vividly themselves in memorable ways, they still just share the same brain and have access to the same answers.  If the afterlife is sharing the Carteisan Theatre of your loved ones minds, it will prove to be a long-standing mystery how to show any evidence of it.  Some day when mysterious ætherodous realms are actually identifiable dimensions and the wispy threads of souls can be recognised and interacted with, this kind of afterlife will prove of common interest to humanity.  But we don't have the sci-fi available to prove what might be the nature of the human afterlife either. 

 

In fairness maybe all our deadies are just roleplaying walk-ins, spawned by a bored brain, and fuelled by (perhaps psychotic) mass story telling.  Having lived before the numbers grew, i have to admit i doubted the deadie theory for years.  I'm skeptical still because by nature i'm skeptical.  I always felt like i was created, particularly after i found this community and read about people actively trying to do so.  But after having met a few random walk-ins, and met a couple ghosts, i can't say one versus the other looks like a more obvious story.  And the story we discuss that a deadie could be a faint background headmate just looking for a new home resonates with me as possible and not particularly disprovable anyhow.  We've even joked about how maybe tulpamancy is a weird word that only just missed the truth of it being some sort of misplaced necromancy, contacting deadies and inviting them to share senses and re-witness the world.

 

If anyone wants to pick apart the idea of how deadies can come to people and live like tulpæ, we've reached  the point where we're internally just live and let live about the question because each side of the argument turns out defensible.