Ask Lumi's Tulpas

[Jamie]

In response to that, have you ever actually seen someone who had a disorderly/maladaptive relationship with liking dreams better than the waking world? I have seen it spoken about in reference to the lucid dreaming community, "Oh no, what if I get addicted to dreaming and want it more than being awake?" but has that literally ever happened? 

 

I can see someone who's depressed and lonely having a maladaptive experience with dreaming because they chase company/romance/etc in their dreams when they should be trying to find it in the waking world, but I wouldn't even call that "dream addiction", because chasing romance or sexual experiences in your dreams is different (and imo, much easier/simpler) than trying to find romance IRL. 

 

---

 

 

Lumi, I thought about PMing you but I figured it was fine to put this all down publicly and if other people want to chime in it's all welcomed. I realized, man, I am thinking too quickly about this. It's hard to remember sometimes even now, when Cassidy was just a few months old, it's hard to remember when he was a lot less capable, just younger. 

 

Just roughly, what have you seen in other systems? What has been the timeline on how long it takes a new tulpamancer to end up with a vocal tulpa? How long does the active creation process last before it transitions into just, daily life? 

 

I feel like my experiences are biased because I want to say, active creation lasts about 8 months, and continues until about the 2 year mark. Cassidy is 2 and a half now, and when he's 3 I'll probably say it takes 2 and a half years. 

 

Are some people really much, much faster than others? I know some people have strong early experiences, i.e. the tulpa is fluently saying a lot, they get a lot of responses within the first few days. But my inclination is that even in that case, the tulpa really isn't developed yet as a person, it's just not enough time spent existing on Earth. So at the end of the day, do tulpas who start talking very early develop faster than tulpas who take a few weeks to start talking consistently? 

 

 

[Guest]

I'll chime in. Maybe that's all I have to say around here because you know my experience.

 

That said, every system is unique, you shouldn't try to doctrinize the creation process because it's just not consistent or constructive imo.

 

Would you immediately discredit someone who says they have "mature" headmates after two months? Two weeks? What about 20 minutes?

 

Why does it have to be a metric anyone cares about. They'll look back after a year or three and either it will be obvious that they weren't mature early on, or based on everything they've learned in that time, they'll have solid basis to say they were.

 

People change over time, some headmates start from zero, some get a boost like fictives and factives.

 

Maybe you want a more integrated answer because my system is only a little longer in the community than yours, but vocality can be anything from instant to over a year with many systems that just get it right away.

 

I don't personally believe in unconscious parroting, if it's not consiously being done, it's not parroting. In my understanding, everything comes from the subconscious anyway. What would tell the difference and how would you tell the difference then between actual vocality and not? 

 

So if someone claims vocality immediately, at this point whether they're lying or misinterpreting the experience or being honest and actual, who cares? Why does it bother you? Likely they won't be in the community in a year anyway. It doesn't subtract from others' expectations or experience if you simply say, "don't compare yourself to others."

 

/rant

[Glaurung26]

20 minutes ago, BearBaeBeau said:

I'll chime in. Maybe that's all I have to say around here because you know my experience.

 

That said, every system is unique, you shouldn't try to doctrinize the creation process because it's just not consistent or constructive imo.

 

Would you immediately discredit someone who says they have "mature" headmates after two months? Two weeks? What about 20 minutes?

 

Why does it have to be a metric anyone cares about. They'll look back after a year or three and either it will be obvious that they weren't mature early on, or based on everything they've learned in that time, they'll have solid basis to say they were.

 

People change over time, some headmates start from zero, some get a boost like fictives and factives.

 

Maybe you want a more integrated answer because my system is only a little longer in the community than yours, but vocality can be anything from instant to over a year with many systems that just get it right away.

 

I don't personally believe in unconscious parroting, if it's not consiously being done, it's not parroting. In my understanding, everything comes from the subconscious anyway. What would tell the difference and how would you tell the difference then between actual vocality and not? 

 

So if someone claims vocality immediately, at this point whether they're lying or misinterpreting the experience or being honest and actual, who cares? Why does it bother you? Likely they won't be in the community in a year anyway. It doesn't subtract from others' expectations or experience if you simply say, "don't compare yourself to others."

 

/rant

Would just like to echo this. I hate dogma and doctrine. Common rules and laws can be useful but should always be in service to those under them. Something, something politicians bad men. Anyways, I've always been a bit of a rebel and non-standard person. Not in the edgy leather jacket, molotov throwing, confederate flag waving way, but just not conforming to expectations instead sticking to my beliefs. For the most part, going on a case by case basis when deciding or judging things is the way to go. Situations are too unique and contextual to make sensible broad sweeping declarations.

[Guest]

To be fair to Jamie, I probably just used his post to rant. He may have been just trying to get a feel for it, but you know.

[Luminesce]

10 hours ago, Jamie said:

Just roughly, what have you seen in other systems? What has been the timeline on how long it takes a new tulpamancer to end up with a vocal tulpa? How long does the active creation process last before it transitions into just, daily life?

  

Surely you know by now that putting an exact timeframe on this like "8 months" is extremely inaccurate. You can choose to not believe in tulpas being sentient and vocal in only a few days, but by no means is anything stopping someone from having by all qualifications a tulpa in a few weeks. Really just up to how open their mind is to the experience.

 

You can make all sorts of waypoints and qualifiers for various levels of development, but vocality in general certainly isn't one of them. Tulpas can literally take anywhere from minutes to years to become vocal.

 

But anyways, since you're asking for my experience specifically in relation to how many systems I've seen develop tulpas..
I'd really sooner put systems into categories rather than try to average them all out. The rough ways I tend to think of how tulpa development goes for people would be:

 

- Day one, instant tulpas, or the first few days (excluding when people spend many, many hours in those few days) - I think of these cases as usually young systems (hosts) with few inhibitions. They may blur the line between roleplaying/imagination and actually having a tulpa, but moooostly I think these experiences can still count as tulpamancy. These systems are infinitely more likely to run into in-system drama or believe in imaginary problems... dramatics in general. Even a basically-roleplaying-host should still end up with a developed tulpa eventually if they follow general community norms, though. Extremely early "switching" would be the most likely way to end up never making a tulpa for such a host, locking them into just having a roleplay personality, I think. But who knows, everyone's brain is different and things will work out differently.

 

- Then there's the most common group especially in recent years, people who create a tulpa who at least has an obvious presence if not vocality within the first month - Expectations play the biggest role in tulpamancy, and as the community has started to accept that tulpas don't always take months and months of hard work to create, new hosts are more open to believing they're experiencing a tulpa early on. Which, of course, leads to having a tulpa. As much as 2012'ers or certain communities may detest tulpas who claim vocality in only a week or two, I can't think of any reasons why they can't easily become fully developed tulpas with the same depth as a real person. If anything, I feel like people who don't have any signs of a tulpa after a few weeks of hard work are holding themselves back or (just as often) their brains are totally not-open to the experience. Still, that gives a healthy amount of time to really get invested in having a tulpa companion long-term, building up their personality and all, doing research...

 

- People who take a few months or up to about seven, I'd say that's totally normal, but by no means a requirement to have a perfectly valid tulpamancy experience. To me it just sounds like a lot of "wasted" time compared to managing to get responses from their tulpa in less time, not a "guarantee they'll be well developed" or something. This was significantly more common before like 2017, even following roughly the same guides and advice, just because of expectations put out by the community I guess. This may also happen for the same reason as the next group -

 

- People who take over a year of working on tulpamancy (without months of downtime), up to 3+ years (any longer is the same). Assuming no weird issues like not knowing they've got the thinking-in-words equivalent of aphantasia, these people probably all have had mental blocks of some kind they had to overcome. Whether that be something simple like being too skeptical of borderline-autonomous experiences and accrediting everything to themselves, never giving their would-be tulpas a chance to develop - or something more insidious, like their whole way of thinking {about tulpas} just blocks out the possible experience of having a tulpa. These people are clearly well past the point of simply needing practice or hope or something, and basically exclusively require some epiphany-type realization or restructuring of how they think in order to be successful. I salute anyone who's managed to create a tulpa after this much time - and I also salute the people who couldn't. At that point, it might just not be worth it anymore...

 

 

10 hours ago, Jamie said:

Are some people really much, much faster than others? I know some people have strong early experiences, i.e. the tulpa is fluently saying a lot, they get a lot of responses within the first few days. But my inclination is that even in that case, the tulpa really isn't developed yet as a person, it's just not enough time spent existing on Earth. So at the end of the day, do tulpas who start talking very early develop faster than tulpas who take a few weeks to start talking consistently? 

 

Yes, some people just get it much, much faster. And sort of yes - there is a worry that people who create nearly instant tulpas have not actually created a tulpa by any means, and that could be problematic if they don't practice tulpamancy/interaction with their would-be tulpa in ways that lead to them becoming one. However, just because it takes someone six months to create their tulpa doesn't mean that tulpa is now any more developed as a person than a week-one tulpa. They may or may not have a stronger baseline of existing in the mind if they happen to come around naturally after that much time (and not some sudden breakthrough), but... the week-one tulpa has now existed for just under 6 months, which can be a LOT of time to get development in. They could be totally out of the "developing as a tulpa" phase by then and really just developing as a person. Though even my tulpas took a couple years to reach the point they've more or less been at since, but we figured everything out on our own without knowing about "tulpas".

 

The last part of your question though - you're comparing "very early" tulpas to "a few weeks" tulpas? "A few weeks" is still pretty fast, but specifying this - tulpas that take a day or two to come into existence are at much higher risk of being "roleplay-y" or "imaginary friend-y". Basically the chance of that drops like a rock after a few days because your brain clearly wasn't immediately jumping to those things, though this is just looking at said people afterwards - I don't think someone who was the former would avoid it by trying to take longer per se. But I still believe even an instant-tulpa of a young host can become a tulpa just fine if they follow the community's norms for thinking of and interacting with your tulpa.

 

Pretty much the only problem with super-fast "creation" is if you then forego tulpamancy practices and fall into either roleplaying or purely imagination-type stuff (daydreaming, fantasizing etc.)

 

I think in most cases, managing to create a tulpa's presence and snippets of vocality in the first few weeks would be optimal. Working just as hard as someone who takes 6 months, it can only benefit your tulpa to get in more practice more quickly. But for people who are totally willing to commit for the long-haul, there's nothing wrong with it taking months either. Around the 9 month mark of no progress I would start to consider something about your mindset of tulpamancy is problematic, though

Edited March 13, 2021 by Luminesce

[Wray]

12 hours ago, Luminesce said:

Extremely early "switching" would be the most likely way to end up never making a tulpa for such a host, locking them into just having a roleplay personality, I think.

If you get a chance, could you go into more detail on your thoughts about this? With my current understanding, I didn't think there was any way to really "lock oneself out" of having a tulpa. Do you think there's something that would prevent the host in this case from developing the roleplay character into a tulpa later on, using correct practices?

[Jamie]

Quote

Anyways, I've always been a bit of a rebel and non-standard person. Not in the edgy leather jacket, molotov throwing, confederate flag waving way, but just not conforming to expectations instead sticking to my beliefs. For the most part, going on a case by case basis when deciding or judging things is the way to go. Situations are too unique and contextual to make sensible broad sweeping declarations.

This motherfucker microwaves his noodles for 1:30 instead of the 2:00 it says on the box. I like them a little more al dente too. 

 

---

 

Bear, I get the point of the rant, and my only response is that I have never thought unconscious parroting was really a big deal/common problem. I think "I know my experience is shallow but I know I am also putting on an act and misrepresenting how "real" I actually experience my tulpas to be to avoid feeling like a failure" is a thing, but that is very far from "unconscious."- and you can't just accuse other people of thinking that way, inherently you only know that about yourself. 

 

---

 

Thanks Lumi, it's a lot to think about. You got what I wasn't able to phrase correctly, there's a few different groups involved here. When I think about Cassidy, I heard him say words on the first day, and he was able to have a basic conversation within the first three days. I think more and more that the speed of which early vocality comes is dependent almost entirely on the host's mindset. The part that gets tricky to me is I simply don't think personality development can be cheesed that way- boosted, probably, like in the case of character-based tulpas. But existence as a (idealistically) real person is different categorically from a character's backstory or past RP experience. 

 

An "instant" tulpa, to me, is a host with a mind very open to hearing responses, who also doesn't care so much about what's real, or they care very much about a certain character/identity that they already know about and so can rapidly produce those responses. When Cassidy was just a few days old, he was pretty much a tabula rasa which I think is a term that should be introduced more into tulpamancy (along with the other side of the coin, innatism.) He didn't even have a name, he didn't have an appearance, he didn't have likes or dislikes or hobbies or preferences- so as you can imagine, he wasn't very chatty. But if he innately had those things, he probably would have been able to fluently talk and chitchat almost instantly, since I was also very open to hearing responses and didn't have any sort of block against it, having known what it's like already. 

 

There is a tradeoff in there, between speed and posture/good form. "No natural block against it" will certainly speed things up, but the lack of a mental filter can cause other problems if the person doesn't have good form/mindset about things. And tulpas being created with innate personalities/characterizations will also probably speed up early vocality and, well, personality development at least on paper, but that group does tend to have issues with good form... 

 

---

 

An alternative methodology I have seen proposed as a way to act as a "safety buffer" of sorts is for an interested tulpamancer to devote themselves for several weeks to perhaps even months on building a wonderland before starting on the tulpa, while presumably devouring guides and other resources and thinking about it all. Some of the fundamentals, like how a visual-spatial internal experience and an internal form feels like, can be started learning that way ahead of time, as well as meditation, visualization training, etc. 

 

In practice I simply feel like it wouldn't stop the people who would never make it anyways, people who try it out as a fad and probably never make their way onto .info or the Discord or don't stay long- if they can't commit to a tulpa, they aren't going to commit to weeks of staring at floorboards, windows, furniture, and their own bodies with their mind's eye. But why would you ever tailor your methods towards the people who were never going to make it? For someone who has sincere interests and ability, it might be interesting. I don't have many case studies of that situation to say much about its impacts on development and experience, and honestly it might be causation/correlation issue: It might not be that tulpamancers who devoted months to building a wonderland before a tulpa benefited from doing the wonderland first. It might be that anyone who is willing to devote themselves to anything for months before starting the tulpa, will have more of the skills needed to devote themselves to the tulpa's development. 

 

I didn't wait hardly two days after finding out about tulpas to start, and it turned out fine. I used to regret that: it didn't occur to me until Cassidy was a month old that I could bring Gavin back, and I thought Gavin would be angered that it really was like I "replaced him." If I had just waited, Cassidy probably never would have been created and I just would have revitalized Gavin. But Cassidy sort of laughed, and got me to think about it differently: if Gavin never existed, Cassidy definitely wouldn't exist. And he's happy he was born. And I was a hesitant to bring Gavin back, but Cassidy wanted me to- so Gavin tells me, if Cassidy didn't exist, he probably wouldn't have gotten a second life. They both are alive because the other one was born. Silly! 

 

Edited March 16, 2021 by Ranger
Removed unecessary formatting from quoted text

[Luminesce]

4 hours ago, Wray said:

If you get a chance, could you go into more detail on your thoughts about this? With my current understanding, I didn't think there was any way to really "lock oneself out" of having a tulpa. Do you think there's something that would prevent the host in this case from developing the roleplay character into a tulpa later on, using correct practices?

 

Of course, you can't literally lock yourself out of having a tulpa. But practically speaking, people can definitely either have/create mental blocks, or the most tragic, create a mindset/ways of thinking that block out certain experiences. No one's immune to this, and while it's not impossible to rework a mindset, it sure is hard as heck to do.

 

I most often see this problem (I think - I don't know exactly what's going on in other people's heads) with switching, which is fully understandable. Letting your tulpa exist/be vocal, and learning to switch, are the two most ridiculous roadblocks in tulpamancy that can easily be shut down by an unfortunate mindset/way of thinking about them. All I can do to help people avoid this is be as preachy as I am on .info - normally I would never talk so matter-of-factly about purely subjective things, but really that's what I have to do in order to give people the sureness they need to believe in their experiences and not fail to accomplish them.

 

But in this specific case of "switching extremely early", it's basically what I said here:

16 hours ago, Luminesce said:

Pretty much the only problem with super-fast "creation" is if you then forego tulpamancy practices and fall into either roleplaying or purely imagination-type stuff (daydreaming, fantasizing etc.)

 

In this case, falling into roleplaying. If you "learn to switch" extremely early on (relative, but in my mind, ~the first week or two), there's a solid chance you won't have developed your tulpa nearly enough to support such an activity. If your tulpa's existence isn't strongly solidified in your mind yet, I honestly see switching as more likely to be roleplaying or "creating mask personalities" than actually switching with your tulpa. Maybe no one talks about it, but switching really does require both headmates have a well deveoped sense of self (And of course, most hosts have been developing one for themselves their whole life). Your brain needs to know what your tulpa is like relatively in-depth in order to switch with and then be them - a weak, not very developed tulpa who is still close to just an imaginary friend without their own stable, autonomous presence is not a good candidate for this.

 

I imagine a (surely very young/immature host) system that does this is likely to end up building up the wrong neural connections, with the "switched tulpa" being built more out of the host's imagining being them than the tulpa's existing neural pathways, if that makes sense. Basically as I said, they would likely fall into roleplaying/creating mask personalities rather than the typical tulpamancy experience.

 

This doesn't "lock them out of" having or developing a tulpa, but... it really complicates things. And as I mentioned, creating these thought patterns and mindset can be seriously difficult to overcome later. More broadly, I see people who can only talk to their tulpas through a chat program, people who can only switch with their tulpas and not be active at the same time (this makes me think Dissociative Identity Disorder, but assuming a purely learned tulpamancy experience here), and lighter things like hosts who think they can't interact with their tulpas sometimes because they believe their tulpa sleeps for long periods of time.. Creating mental blocks like these can range from quirky to crippling. And I've had extremely little success trying to help people suffering from mental blocks, mainly in either creating a vocal tulpa, or in switching.

 

So that's what I meant by it possibly being dangerous to "switch" early on. It just seems like the quickest way to derail your tulpamancy practice into an alternate, non-tulpamancy experience, and it could be hard to come back from.

 

I've gotta be honest though, I'm exclusively thinking of hosts age 12 to 14 when I talk about these hypotheticals. And when I think about them "eventually overcoming" such problems, I think of them dropping tulpamancy for a few years and coming back when they're a little (or a lot) older. Just based on my experiences.

 

*"These hypotheticals" referring to problems immature/young-host systems run into. Literally anyone can suffer from mental blocks, especially in "creating a vocal tulpa" and "learning to switch", this has little to do with age. Honestly, "mental blocks" are FAR less common in young host systems. Young host systems are more likely to be open to all sorts of experiences, which is a double-edged sword, as they can easily go down the wrong paths and cement wrong (or just different) ways of thinking in their brains.

Edited March 13, 2021 by Luminesce

[Guest]

Switching has just become too easy for us now. Though I agree it's important to have your first time be with a "mature" headmate, after that the experience with us has been that we can switch with any thoughtform we can imagine. I don't see that as detracting fron the integrity of switching, rather just showing more of the true nature of switching in that it is replacing what is front, be that a person or any other thoughtform or nothing. In the case of nothing, BodyOS does whatever it's left with as far as instructions.

[Luminesce]

A lot of guidelines and advice go right out the window once you're experienced enough, lol. Although I thought about what she'd be like for roughly a week, Lucilyn was an "instant-tulpa" as far as her actual creation went, and she went on to have the strongest presence (and honestly, visualization/imposition) of any of my tulpas. Once you're good at this stuff you can do it all far more easily.