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My stance on the "Tulpa"


Satan

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When I posted this, I knew people probably would assume I was wrong, but I was actually hoping people could tell me HOW it is that I was wrong. So far, that has yet to happen.

 

Ok, let's go there.

 

What a meaningless idea this is, the "tulpa," it is the same thing as role-playing.

 

It's not the same as role-playing. Role-playing takes a conscious effort, whereas tulpas are completely unconscious. As an example, I've had a few instances where I'm sleeping and dreaming, and Fenchurch tells me that I'm dreaming. It won't even be something that I'm consciously aware of, which is why she has to point it out to me. Obviously some part of my brain is aware that I'm dreaming, but I don't consciously make the decision while sleeping to suddenly pretend to be a role-play character telling me that I'm dreaming.

 

I'm sure there are things you do without being aware of them. Typing is a good example, or playing video games -- are you aware of your fingers, or just aware of the screen? It's the same for playing a musical instrument. And driving is another good example, if you drive -- I know I've certainly had instances where I arrived at work and realized that I had no recollection of driving there, because it was so unconscious, automatic, and routine.

 

When you first learn to do the things in my examples, you do them very consciously, paying close attention to every movement you make. When you're an expert at these activities though, it's like your body is doing them while your brain does something else.

 

That's basically what tulpas are. We might be going through the same motions as someone who's role-playing, but it's not a conscious process, the same way that none of these other activities are conscious processes -- some part of the unconscious mind is taking complete control, and makes it seem to us like there's another independent person in our heads.

 

If you have an x chromosome and a y chromosome, you are a male regardless of any personalities in your head, the sex of a person is physical.

 

Well, that's biological gender. Gender identity is very different, which is why people get sex changes.

 

I am male, and Fenchurch is female, but we acknowledge that if she suddenly manifested a physical form, real women would probably think there was something "off" about her. She's about as female as I am, in everything but form. But that's just our experience -- several of our members here are transgender, and you'd probably hear a very different perspective from them.

 

Some may argue that a "tulpa" is different from role-playing as role-playing tends to require a backstory on the world around the character as well as events that may have happened, this is simply role-playing as a different being in the world we live in.

 

It doesn't matter at all whether a tulpa has a backstory or not. What matters is that they exist outside of the host's conscious control.

"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson

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Sushi, that was a wonderful response, but I've still got questions resulting in my skepticism.

 

If it is a part of the unconscious mind that takes conscious control, and can be within your same body even sometimes with a different gender identity without you needing to think about it, is that not what Multiple Personality Disorder is?

 

This website has guides on "creating" a tulpa, and it would be a conscious effort to create one. If you are having the character you've created control your body in the same actions as role-playing, except doing so as a different persona in the real world, then it's bound to happen that eventually this other individual will be able to develop more of a personality on its own without you thinking about it, but in the end it's still you.

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Multiple Personality Disorder, (or Dissociative Identity Disorder, as psychologists have recently renamed it) is different from tulpas in two ways:

 

1. It's natural. People with DID (and healthy multiples) don't choose to be the way they are, like we do. It's up to you if you want to see that as better or worse.

2. It's a disorder. DID is a coping mechanism for childhood trauma, and people with DID have trouble functioning in the way that those of us with tulpas do. To use a metaphor, having a tulpa is like having a friend you share your car with -- having DID is like having dozens of strangers who occasionally shoot you full of elephant tranquilizer and use your car without your permission while you're knocked out.

 


 

As to why we have guides, well, it's the same for everything else you do unconsciously. When you're learning to play guitar or drive a car, you can learn by just doing it (and we have some members who did that -- who one day realized that their imaginary friend had a mind of their own), but it's a lot easier if you have someone to teach you. Even though the end result is unconscious, there's a lot of conscious work to get there.

 

Is it still you? I guess that's a matter of debate. I know guitar players who say it's not them fingering the frets -- their fingers just do it without them.

"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson

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It was after three in the morning when I finished all of that. I went to bed right after, and while I was lying in bed, it occurred to me that I should have linked this article on agency.

 

Basically it's saying that it's hard to say what we are and are not doing, because each of us is made up of a number of independent agents, which are also made up of a number of independent agents, and so on down to the billions of neurons that work independently of each other. And of course the article also mentions tulpas as higher-level agents.

 

But the question of "is it really me?" is a very complex one, which leads into some deep philosophy. As always in these cases of unanswerable questions, I take the stance that it doesn't make any difference either way, so why worry about it?

"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson

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A disorder is uncontrollable and more importantly negatively impactful to your life, preventing you from functioning efficiently. Multiple personality disorder is not done on purpose and greatly interferes with a healthy, stable lifestyle.

 

"You" is not all there is to You. Just because you're so attached to your ego you can't tell doesn't mean the persona you act off of by default is all you can be. A fully developed tulpa can be as legitimate as your "self". But you are your self AND your tulpa(s) and everything else residing in your subconscious. There's potential for a thousand different people in your mind at this point in your life, and to some extent they can exist parallel to your default one.

 

This is something people usually realize for themselves during the tulpa development process, if they care to take it that far. Though less detailed than that, more of a "My tulpa is their own person just like me" kinda thing. But you can explain it further than that if you care to figure it out for yourself.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.

Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.

My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us about tulpamancy stuff there.

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Guest Anonymous

Aight, seems we got an actually interested one here. Or not.

 

Let me explain how I view things from my perspective and what a "thoughtform" is to me.

 

First of all, there's a general misconception that your consciousness is the same thing as your pesonality/ego/whatever you wanna call it. Consciousness could be best described as a metaphoric sea of thoughts. So if we imagine thoughts to be fishes (size being the complexity of each individual thought), then your ego would be a fishboat. Now where am I going on this? A tulpa/thoughtform/imaginary friend2.0.0 starts as a roleplay, that's true. Adhering to the previous comparison, it lives on the fish you feed it.

 

Now after some time and effort, the process starts to be more and more automated, finally resulting in what you would call a "tulpa". At that point no outside intervention is required to keep it.

 

You know what else is a thought processing automaton? You, me and everyone in this world. Jung once had a thesis about this in his "Model of the psyche", he theoritised that our ego is a self-conscious part of our mind which came out as dominant from the primordial chaos of infancy. That was also used to describe MPD/DID as two equally powerful coalitions of neural activity that refused to blend into each other. And speaking from a subjective viewpoint, a thoughtform is capable of seizing control of the body in a manner an ego would do.

 

There's no empirical evidence to be provided for any of my claims above, so feel free to dismiss them. Hopefully one day we will get the needed technology to get an insight on the inner machinations of our brain. Until then, we can only speculate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EDIT:

 

I just couldn't help myself.

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I also think it's worth adding, OP, that you seem to be stuck on tulpas either being RPing (if we create them and control what they do) or MPD/DID (if they have a mind of their own), but it's not quite that binary.

 

You could say that forcing, the act of creating a tulpa, starts out similarly to roleplaying, as you have to think up what you want your tulpa to be like and think through what they would do in order to form that personality. But, after a while, the tulpa becomes autonomous, and doesn't need you to constantly, consciously control their actions (like you would with a roleplay character), and is able to think on their own, acting as a separate consciousness inside your head. The fact that you have to consciously create a tulpa and work hard to make one is what makes them different from DID (well, one of the reasons, anyway). And the fact that they eventually become autonomous and capable of thinking on their own makes them different from mere roleplay characters.

Pinky is not a pony. She's an imp.

Sunray is an angel-imp. Ex is humanoid. Kael is a dragon. Magnum is a dog.

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There was also theory a while back (not quite sure on the community's opinion of it on a whole now, or then), that creating a tulpa was also a possible way to kind of create a health alternate personality.

 

Because they are, or seem to be, truly separate consciousnesses like an alter of someone suffering from DID, there might be a connection to tulpa and multiple personalities.

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There was also theory a while back (not quite sure on the community's opinion of it on a whole now, or then), that creating a tulpa was also a possible way to kind of create a health alternate personality.

 

Because they are, or seem to be, truly separate consciousnesses like an alter of someone suffering from DID, there might be a connection to tulpa and multiple personalities.

 

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of connection. But the difference is very important to note for people still trying to wrap their heads around the concept.

Pinky is not a pony. She's an imp.

Sunray is an angel-imp. Ex is humanoid. Kael is a dragon. Magnum is a dog.

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