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How to get past the 'skeptical' mindset?


NovaIce

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I feel as though I have been battling a week to believe in my Tulpa. It's not that I can't sense him, smell him, hear him talk, but now... I am sure someone here has been where I am now.

 

"Hearing voices and out of instinct my mind is screaming: This isn't logical! You're creating an alternate personality! You live alone, you start hearing the voices and here's where it got you. You're snapping!"

 

"You created Evan. He's not an "extension" of you. He's just a part of you that you don't want to face!"

 

Others are starting to catch on to my behavior. Those I know or those that know me now see that I need "help". That I need to take meds... Any conversation I have been having with anyone has been like this:

 

"He's real, but a part of me. He's to become my lifelong companion."

"Evan isn't real. You need help. He doesn't exist."

Constant back and forth.

 

But I need help. How do I work past this stage? How can I break the barriers and accept Evan (though I know he is a part of me) that he isn't some alternate personality out of some spiteful moment? That I'm not insane? Did you too go through such a stage?

 

How do I say to myself that creating such a being is "okay"?

 

~NovaIce

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Well, I personally think that tulpas are just advanced imaginary friends. There is nothing wrong with having imaginary friend though. Actually, it seems that they affect children in a good way, imo there is no reason to think that his presence indicates a problem.

Be rational.

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A little about myself, maybe you can understand where I stand...

 

I was always told "I can't" all my life, by my family and my mom hated my active imagination so much she did anything and everything to stop me as I grew up. As a teen, she took away my video games and writings even sent me to a psychiatrist thinking that having an "imaginary friend" or even "roleplay" was some sort of sin.

 

Ten years later, they believe they still have control over me, which I broke free from a few years ago. Those, like myself. Will still judge. Believing that I need to "grow up", but they don't experience what I have, so I continue to shut out whatever negative thoughts they may have.

 

So you can see why it's hard for me to work past such things...

 

For the record, I have dealt with many fields of metaphysical that my Family has a hard time to believe. They call it active imagination. I know it and experience it as Astral Travel, Studies of Time Travel, if Dimensional Jumping is Possible, Alternate Realities and Recently- Tulpa Forming.

 

I am a woman of science, not of magical thinking. I work on proof. Evidence of what I experience myself or stories of those that I know they are speaking of truth.

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For a moment, I thought this was just a personal matter you had to deal with, but since you allowed others to encroach into your endeavors, it seems more of you wanting to learn how to get past their skepticism of it. I don’t have any experiential learning on how to assess something like that other than an inference that you could educate them more about the concept, though this might augment the skepticism, especially if they see communities being active in this.

 

Another thing you could consider would be introducing them to the concept of lucid dreaming, which unlike this phenomenon, is actually scientifically proven, if that has any shred of credibility in their eyes. There’s forums catered in teaching one how to lucid dream, interact with dream characters, and much more, and and yet people are capable of living quotidian lifestyles just fine. Though, if you do something like this, and try to do a comparative analysis with tulpas, there may be a lot of equivocation, at least in their perspective because they may feel taking an attempt to treat them as sentient in this waking life rather than dreaming experiences would be “crazier,” and other hyperboles.

 

As for ontological presumptions on tulpa, i.e., what makes a tulpa, a tulpa:

 

- Like you mentioned in the OP, many people have gone through this where they wonder if they’re a tulpa, daemon, alternate personality, anima/animus, etc.

 

- Anecdotal cases where people label a thought-form, or imaginary entity other than a tulpa probably have been going through the same hypothetical model of treating them as sentient, and may not really feel they would deem them as tulpa. There tends to be analogues, e.g., quasi-tulpa, spirit guide, partitioned unconscious, bits of one’s psyche, and so much more that people utilize to try and grasp whatever degree of sentience, and other factors they hold dear to them.

 

- With that said, I’m not sure what you could do to get past the stage other than you truly feeling that what you professed, e.g., them being a potential lifelong companion, and what have you is actually something you can foresee yourself being content with; after that, that’s up to you and them to come to terms with. The people you interact with may very well care about your well-being, though, sometimes the lack of information makes one absolve any potential to take efforts to understand someone; it's something where you may realize that the endeavors are within your private, and subjective experience, and wanting to have others accept you for what you're doing is going to be something difficult simply because how people react is unpredictable.

 

 

Edit:

 

As for your stance of being a person of Science, I'm not sure anecdotal evidence, appeal to the populace, and things of that nature could be anything of empirical merit; maybe something for soft science, but probably not anything empirical. Though, I don't think you would have to worry about Science being the end-all be-all model of living out your life as that would be something one would try to utilize Science to reconcile with that cannot, or would be difficult to be done, i.e., Scientism.

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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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First thing: don't tell people about your tulpa unless you have a very good reason for it. I'd say that it leads to bad things ten times as often as it leads to good things.

 

As for everything else, I think you're just looking at tulpas in the wrong way. We don't make tulpas because we're crazy -- we make tulpas to keep us sane.

 

Carl Jung is sometimes called the father of modern psychology. He's the one who took Freud's theories that everything is sexual, and children want to have sex with their parents, and turned it into a respectable practice.

 

Jung wasn't just speaking from theory -- he was speaking from personal experience. At the age of 38, Jung began to see visions and hear voices. He worried that it was psychosis or schizophrenia, but rather than living in fear of what was happening to him, he embraced it. He began to deliberately induce these hallucinations. Rather than cowering in fear when monsters and demons appeared before him, he asked them what they meant and what message they had for him.

 

Jung accepted these visions as guides -- not something negative, but something positive. Chief among them was one named Philemon. Jung said this of Philemon:

 

Philemon and figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.

 

Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru.

 

During this period, Jung developed theories which became the foundation of modern psychology, such as the collective unconscious, the process of individualization, and the concepts of the complex, synchronicity, and archetypes. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was also founded on his theories. He had an indispensable influence on both psychology and literature. He recorded all of his experiences in the Red Book, which you can read yourself, if you like.

 

Jung was not the first person to have conversations with figments of his mind. Actually, this is an ancient practice. Plato tells us in his Apology that Socrates claimed to have a daimonion, (a "divine something") that warned him with a voice against making mistakes.

 

The word "genius" originally meant a divine spirit. It came to its current meaning of smart or talented person in a very similar way to Socrates' daimonion -- it was believed that art wasn't the ability of the artist, but the ability of this divine spirit who chose to act through the artist. Likewise for the Muses.

 

And of course I hardly even need to mention Joan of Arc, an uneducated and illiterate peasant child, who led France to victory during the Hundred Years War. She insisted up until the moment of her death that her success was due to divine voices that guided her.

 

But let's move up to modern times. A 1973 study involved healthy people being institutionalized for saying they heard voices. All but one were diagnosed with schizophrenia on that basis alone. They spent, on average 19 days in the hospital, and were forced to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release -- even though they were healthy in every way, and reported that they hadn't heard any voices since being admitted.

 

Obviously society is very scared of people who hear voices. But should we be? The truth is, nearly 40% of non-institutionalized people in first world countries have experienced hallucinations. The most common are auditory hallucinations -- i.e. hearing voices or music. Hearing voices is not, in itself, crazy -- or uncommon. But nobody wants to admit to this sort of thing because there's such a stigma against it.

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

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There's too much misunderstanding about tulpas to be able to speak of them with non-believers. It'll almost universally create the impression that you have mental issues.

 

In the some of the more liberal states of the USA

*cough* California, etc. *cough*

, even someone suspecting that your mental health is in question is enough to get your guns seized: You are treated as guilty until proven innocent. You'll end up having to waste your own time and money to prove yourself mentally fit to get them back.

 

If you ever get deemed as mentally unstable by any medical professional, you'll have a hard time legally getting guns anywhere.

 

So, if you like your 2A Constitutional freedoms, you'll never, ever tell anyone.

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