This is...a little terrifying to read knowing that I could do this any day now if I decided to. I’m almost afraid of what it would be like, and the possibility of liking it.
This "tulpa" thing looks similar to the standard meditation practice, which is imagining a small buddha, not as a statue, but as an alive, though still, being. Given the nature of the topic, it's not a stretch to mention that from the occultism's point of view, such practice creates a "nest" that will eventually attract a "bird" suitable for that nest and most of the time you wouldn't like the nature of that bird.
many years ago, i attempted a shamanic soul retrieval journey/experiment with a shaman trained in the south american tradition. the idea is that with every trauma we experience, a piece of our soul flees. sometimes, a piece of one's soul is stolen from them or ripped away from them. other times, it simply wanders away because it doesn't want to be with us and would rather go searching for something else.
but, you see...we are never whole until all the pieces of our soul are together and as one unit. the retrieval is a journey to the three worlds..upper, middle and the nether worlds to plead with the piece of the detached dismembered soul to return. one is accompanied by a shaman or psychopomp in this journey. it was also accompanied by a lot of rhythmic drumming.
anything can happen during this journey. one may meet helpful guides or animal guides..or dangerous elements that want to hold on to your piece of lost soul and wouldn't let it go free. sometimes the piece of the lost soul doesnt want to return because in it's detached state, it finds healing because the trauma memories were too acrid.
the shaman sometimes acts on your behalf to wrestle or fight or even kill these hostile beings if they prevent the soul retrieval. sometimes its peaceful. sometimes dangerous. retrieval is not guaranteed. it was one of the many trippy experiences i have had...there was no use of drugs or alcohol. there was no burning incense or smoke or any such thing as i had requested that we dont do any of that. it was just the drumming.
i continued to feel trippy and spaced out for 3-4 days after the experience. i stopped driving for a week or so because i had trouble focusing visually even though i was able to continue functioning normally. i slept a lot and i slept well. but a lot of 'beings' i met during the retrieval trip stayed with me for a long time.
did i imagine them? was it a suggestion by the shaman? maybe. did it matter? i felt so much better and had a certain clarity of mind and lightness of spirit for many many months afterwards.
i was not necessarily a skeptic but neither was a believer. i like to walk into experiences with an open mind. sometimes it works. other times it fails. but in this particular case, it was more beneficial than detrimental.
during the journey i created a few characters to support me during my journey into the under world. i created a different kind of companion for the upper world. i conversed with them for a long time after the experience and then slowly as i got busy with work and other things consumed my time, they slowly faded away. but i like to think that they still reside somewhere deep inside my consciousness. and that they will come back if i beckon them or if the need arises that i have to go retrieve another piece of my soul.
This is incredibly interesting, but also a bit scary. I was under the impression that a "Tulpa" may not necessarily be friendly and can manifest as a cruel or spiteful entity, depending heavily on the emotional state of the practitioner.
Interesting to consider that if this is shown to exist and benefit people, it basically tells you all you need to know about the future of AI companionship, if it wasn’t already obvious.
This should have been posted around the beginning of the quarantine last year. Months of time spent alone would have been enough to allow people to construct sentient tulpas.
There are a raft of names for these things in the West, but I suppose it's inevitable that they would become popular again via their Eastern name.
You could associate the 'Tulpa' phenomenon variously with familiar spirits, guardian angels, demonology, and all sorts, and obviously there's a wide variety of literature on it. My first impression is that doing this without direction (spiritual or otherwise) may not be 100% without risk.
The author of the linked article is clearly an enthusiast, but all medicines are poisons too, right?
I'm going to create an imaginary friend who has better recall of our shared memories so I can get helpful hints and tips when doing stuff I keep forgetting.
Like writing god aweful powershell.
> It is known that when the corpus callosum is severed during an experimental procedure, the experimenter can ask each side of the brain the same question and receive two different answers. When the experimenter asks the right visual field/left hemisphere what they see the participant will respond verbally, whereas if the experimenter asks the left visual field/right hemisphere what they see the participant will not be able to respond verbally but will pick up the appropriate object with their left hand.
So it's definitely possible to have two consciousness occupying the same brain.
> definitely possible to have two consciousness occupying the same brain
Based on the rest of your comment, I think that's quite a leap. The different parts of the brain are obviously not communicating normally with each other & the body, but I'm not sure that means two consciousnesses.
The most recent phenomenon to get this treatment was mindfulness. The problem is that it tends to be enthusiasts who are the first to explore something in a field, with predictable results.
It's hard to call this two consciousness occupying the same brain. It's more likely that brain is flexible enough that each half works independently, creating a consciousness in each of what are now two separate (half sized) brains.
The origins of tulpamancy, as I understand them, were kind of with the “forever alone” crowd - people who had a hard time getting along in society for whatever reason, and fashioned an alternative reality. Nothing wrong with that, up to the point where you become further disconnected from the more commonly agreed upon norms. Do you carry on conversations with the tulpa in public? Does it result in you being even more isolated? Being alone has its own seductive qualities, quite apart from loneliness, do you just stop trying to make real friends at some point?
Do tulpamancers hang out with each other, and do their tuplas come along? It is a problematic dynamic. I’m not sure it’s really doing anyone favors. I could see it being useful as potential practice/conditioning to get past social anxiety but I could also see it becoming a crutch and a magnification of underlying mental illness. People can be tough to deal with, is an imaginary friend an exception?
> The origins of tulpamancy, as I understand them, were kind of with the “forever alone” crowd - people who had a hard time getting along in society for whatever reason
I recently watched a talk about people on autism spectrum (Asperger's Syndrome and full-blown autism) and it literally says that. People with Aspergers often can't fit in, don't get the rules by which others socialize, so they pretty often create a friend to escape loneliness.
Channel: Generation Next
Title: Could it be Autism?
Speaker: Prof Tony Attwood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIrxgD3oqYc
Founder of tulpa.info here. Perhaps I could weigh in.
The most recent wave of tulpamancy, which I would say started late 2011-early 2012 arose from a metaphysical imageboard of all places, until people started trying to understand the psychological rationale for the creation process. I started ".info" more or less as a blog to figure out if any of this was real and as a central location to host guides and community discussion.
Over the years, I've seen a multitude of different kinds of people create tulpas, many of these are lonely, others are bored, and some (like myself) were just trying to see if it was possible. I know one military veteran who created a tulpa due to having PTSD and his tulpa was able to help stop his nightmares.
One thing that I've found is that much of the time if the creator is very introverted, the tulpa tends to be more extroverted. They often encourage the creator to get out more, talk to more people, kind of like a life coach. Being an introvert myself, I know that I've taken social steps that I wouldn't have otherwise had Chess not encouraged me to try. More often than not, I'm seeing tulpamancy resulting in the opposite of isolation. For those suffering from lonileness, having a single friend (especially one who's encouraging) does wonders for self esteem, and means you're more likely to become more social in the long run.
I would love to do a study to find out how the brain responds to hanging out with your tulpa compared to hanging out with a real-life friend, but from what I've seen, I have a feeling that it reacts very similarly. And then there's the growing tulpamancy community.
There's a lot of message boards, a subreddit, and several discord chats for tulpamancy, and even a discord bot that can help the creator "proxy" the tulpa[1]. This means that not only are the creators talking amongst themselves, but tulpas are talking with creators and even talking with each other. Offline, a few of my friends know about my tulpa, but they I rarely proxy her, it would just be similar to telling a friend about a text you just got, "Hey, Chess says XYZ." I know people who hang out with other tulpamancers "in real life" though, and for them it's just normal conversations.
As for carrying on conversations with my tulpa in public, I often just talk with her using my "mental voice" -- that little voice inside of your head, think internal monologue. I've also had a Bluetooth adapter in my ear before so I can just talk out loud in public without looking weird, but even then I would just chat with her under my breath. When I'm home or out hiking, it's just more natural to talk out loud, and so I do.
I'll be happy to try to answer any other questions or weigh in.
Looking over some basic info, I'm kind of surprised that I haven't tried this before. This is because I've played around with Jungian active imagination techniques and IFS.
In the first case (and I haven't really researched this deeply) one way is to enter a recent dream world while awake and "allow" it to play out, talking to the people inside and letting them respond. The approach you decide take with the people is somewhat circumscribed by Jung's archetypes, where you may encounter a guide of the opposite sex, embodied neuroses, other advisors, and eventually connecting with a "Great Man" or God-man figure (the "Self") who is your ultimate truth or something and lets you truly grow (don't think I've gotten this far). According to Jung, the archetypes you encounter are part of the human unconscious mind the same way that eyelashes are part of the human body, and they both give rise to and provide a key to interpreting human religion and spirituality.
In IFS, you meet or summon "parts" of your psyche that may be malfunctioning or acting up because of past trauma or defense mechanisms, getting to know them and healing them. Once they're healed they can help you out, tulpa-style. But the emphasis is on letting them take shape, not creating them. In IFS, you have to be able to connect to your core, non-judgmental spiritual "base" (which is called "Self" in IFS) before talking to the parts.
So this leads to my questions about tulpamancy. How "freeform" are the decisions people make when creating tulpas -- do you see enough commonly shared traits between people's tulpas that would make you think you could "systematize" access to them like above? Do you think that the tulpas are always there in the mind in some form and you're just bringing them out or changing them, or are you actually casting them into existence? Do people ever make mistakes with their tulpas that cause them to be malicious rather than benevolent thoughtforms? Do you have any personal opinions about Jung or IFS?
This is my first time reading about Tulpa, so perhaps this observation is old news, but it sounds an awful lots like how many around me communicate with Jesus day to day. In that sense, perhaps it’s actually historically uncommon for people to have no imaginary friends.
It's been a while since i've been around that community, and recently i wondered what developed between 2013-ish and now.
More specifically, has the recent rise and push for recognition of plurality originated from tulpa communities? [1], for example. A lot of the terminology is different from what i remember, so i wondered if it's an evolution or a parallel development.
Hinduism has 33 million gods. unlike monotheism, hindus get to choose their gods. and we can talk to them. not just gods, there are demons and demi gods, hybrid creatures and celestials and elementals.
tulpa sounds like a product of polytheism.
and yes, it works. i have been exploring my religion during this past covid year and i have remained largely unscathed emotionally/mentally due to this journey. i am not hating it.
I credit a deeper connection to religion with enabling me to thrive over the past few months (though I'd be fine anyway I think.)
In my case I connected with Judaism.
Prayer is your avenue for pouring your heart out to G-d though I'm working on that, doesn't come naturally. On the flip side, I don't think we should confuse the "other" part of our inner monologue as G-d speaking back to us.
> On the flip side, I don't think we should confuse the "other" part of our inner monologue as G-d speaking back to us.
How would one know? Would not a G_d talk back to us? G_d spoke to Abraham and Moses. The covenant itself comes from a chat with G_d.
I looked up this Hebrew word from a Leonard Cohen song.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK4iAjzAoas : You want it darker.. Assassin's Creed trailer). "Hineni". It appears in the Hebrew Scriptures only a handful of times. It means ‘Here I am” and I have often thought about it. I really liked what it meant. Especially the bit about the sacrifice of Isaac on the mount in the Genesis. And when Moses says it during Exodus.
One of the most cliched but likely phased out school morning ritual I recall is the roll call when I was in school. The teacher would sit down with an open ledger and call out our names in alphabetical order. And we have to yell out ‘Present!’.... “Here I am”.
Without the back and forth, there is no acknowledgment from either side. So faith needs a Hineni. Faith needs a “Here I am.” Faith needs a back and forth. It needs a separation between the sacred and the profane. And if we can’t see, hear or touch the sacred, we will have to imagine it.
It also made me wonder...do animals and birds and insects have imagination? Perhaps that’s why they don’t have a God. Imagination is our super power. To not use it would be a pity.
Neurologically, electric impulses in the brain and imbalances of brain chemicals, seizures and epilepsy and injury can cause visions and make us hear voices from god or deja vu or even psychic abilities. This is an illness. This often causes hyper religiousity. To approach god and to realize god as an imagined entity that we will absorb later into our own psyche is not a mental illness. It is entirely rational and it operates with its own control system.
All religions are syncretic from Sumerian/Babylonian times. Even from the oldest recorded words in the Epic of Gilgamesh, we have been hearing the quiet affirmation or the thunderous demands of divinity. Imagined or otherwise.
In Hinduism, there is a concept called Brahman. (Not to be confused with Brahmin who is a person/an individual who engages in priestly activities. A generic wiki entry here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman)
[..] Brahman (Sanskrit: ब्रह्मन्), (Hindi: ब्रह्म) connotes the highest Universal Principle, the Ultimate Reality in the universe. In major schools of Hindu philosophy, it is the material, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists. It is the pervasive, infinite, eternal truth and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes. Brahman as a metaphysical concept refers to the single binding unity behind diversity in all that exists in the universe.[..]
On the other end of the universal cosmic principle aka Brahman is the Atman, the individual soul that is housed in this mortal sheath.
There are two broad schools of religious thought: Dvaita and advaita. Dualism and Non-dualism. Dualism says that there is the soul and then there is the unchanging omniscient godhead.
Non dualism says there is a separation between the individual soul and the universal cosmic principle. But it is temporary. Because there is no difference between the two.
With religion...because we are unable to imagine this all encompassing Brahman, we give it shape and form and names. We pray and talk and offer sacrifices and create rituals.
Believing that the microcosm is in the macrocosm and the macrocosm contains within itself all else will lead us to the Brahman eventually(or at least that’s the hope) and the way it realize the inter connectivity of it all. Because all this is maya.
When I was more atheist/agnostic, I would say all...
Thanks for sharing. I listened. I was surprised that it didn't qualify as a mental illness because it didn't cause distress. I didn't know about that qualifier in regards to mental illness. And then I was surprised the interviewer didn't call it out as mental illness when it turned to distress (eg wrecked her marriage and isolated her away from society into a small group of fellow tulpamancers)
Few thing pop to my mind about subject Tibetan Buddhism “tulpa”:
1. If I remember correctly, one of Thinking Techniques I read long time ago (not sure Edward de Bono) is to create distinctive quorum of distinctive characters you look up to, each having a different hat (book "Six Thinking Hats"). So when we think about problem, we should talk with each person to get its view.
2. Improving Chess ability can be done by playing on both sides.
3. In the movie "A Beautiful Mind" mathematician John Nash had vivid hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. (edit: it looks like rogue "tulpa")
4. Nikola Tesla had ability to imagine any object so intensively on demand they would float like a hologram, with eyes wide open.
What is amazing is that brain can do so much, and our knowledge about its abilities is so small. It would be nice if we knew techniques how to wake up some parts of the brain on demand, the same way one would learning hot to read or write.
With regard to Nikola Tesla, I see some interesting parallels with Elon Musk. Below is an excerpt from his biography.
Elon exhibited all the traits of a curious, energetic tot. He picked things up easily, and Maye, like many mothers do, pegged her son as brilliant and precocious. “He seemed to understand things quicker than the other kids,” she said. The perplexing thing was that Elon seemed to drift off into a trance at times. People spoke to him, but nothing got through when he had a certain, distant look in his eyes. This happened so often that Elon’s parents and doctors thought he might be deaf. “Sometimes, he just didn’t hear you,” said Maye. Doctors ran a series of tests on Elon, and elected to remove his adenoid glands, which can improve hearing in children. “Well, it didn’t change,” said Maye. Elon’s condition had far more to do with the wiring of his mind than how his auditory system functioned. “He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world,” Maye said. “He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.”
Other children did not respond well to these dreamlike states. You could do jumping jacks right beside Musk or yell at him, and he would not even notice. He kept right on thinking, and those around him judged that he was either rude or really weird. “I do think Elon was always a little different but in a nerdy way,” Maye said. “It didn’t endear him to his peers.”
For Musk, these pensive moments were wonderful. At five and six, he had found a way to block out the world and dedicate all of his concentration to a single task. Part of this ability stemmed from the very visual way in which Musk’s mind worked. He could see images in his mind’s eye with a clarity and detail that we might associate today with an engineering drawing produced by computer software. “It seems as though the part of the brain that’s usually reserved for visual processing—the part that is used to process images coming in from my eyes—gets taken over by internal thought processes,” Musk said. “I can’t do this as much now because there are so many things demanding my attention but, as a kid, it happened a lot. That large part of your brain that’s used to handle incoming images gets used for internal thinking.” Computers split their hardest jobs between two types of chips. There are graphics chips that deal with processing the images produced by a television show stream or video game and computational chips that handle general purpose tasks and mathematical operations. Over time, Musk has ended up thinking that his brain has the equivalent of a graphics chip. It allows him to see things out in the world, replicate them in his mind, and imagine how they might change or behave when interacting with other objects. “For images and numbers, I can process their interrelationships and algorithmic relationships,” Musk said. “Acceleration, momentum, kinetic energy—how those sorts of things will be affected by objects comes through very vividly.”
With regard to number 4. I always assumed everyone had this ability, it's only in the last few years I've realized this wasn't at all the case. I was discussing study techniques with an anatomy and physiology prof, they were the first to really clue me in that it wasn't typical to just 'see' the entire human structure in detail. It has it's ups and downs for sure though, not sure how people get by without it to be completely honest. The obvious perk is tinkering with mechanical items or woodworking, can essentially create an exploded part view with full manipulation/rotation of parts, extremely useful in the drafting stage. It looks fairly close to the hologram view from the 1st Iron Man movie [0], just a lot more vivid. It didn't register that it was a hologram the first time I saw the film as a kid, I just thought that was his mental image. It seems like a skill to me more than something I was born with though, biased of course, and I have gotten better at utilizing it in my day-to-day work. For one example of non-obvious utility, through a lot of practice, I am now able to read a function module, then keep the screen state of that function in the corner of my vision, almost like having a floating monitor, biggest difference is that I'm able to update the image on command to whatever I need just by thinking. The biggest issue I have with this, and why I'm still looking forward to high-res VR goggles to do the same thing, is the issue of interruption. It takes a lot of effort to build the state of 6 or 7 'screens' and it takes 1 stupid slack message to bring the tower down. The programmer interrupted comic strip [1] is something that I've passive aggressively had to print out and hang next to my desk.
I would like to say, "teach me" but unfortunately it does not work that way. Over time I learned that there are different brain abilities. Some people are blessed with more, some with less, some people have synesthesia some aphantasia.
Anyhow, it would be cool if we could learn how to tap into potential... As I personally think that people who have a more vivid imagination have less fear of death. As they have more colourful dreams, it is easier to imagine "other" worlds... equally as it is easier for a person who seen to imagine colours than those who were born blind.
But I guess, at the end of the day, for the sake of the spices' survival, all those differences are essential as they push as to excel in different fields, and therefore survive.
That's pretty cool. In tiberian literature, this skill is called "shamatha" or just concentration. Lamrim says that it's reachable within 6 month for a person of high ability and may take longer than a lifetime for someone average.
This reads like an incredibly poorly researched article. As in, it sounds like it was written after an hour of googleing and skimming a few of these guides.
It might be interesting to get the opinion of somebody who tried this, mostly out of curiosity.
1. One of the core guidelines is "Don't question it. If you think you may have heard a voice, it was your tulpa." - This becomes important later on
2. True 'sentience', in the meaning that there's a different entity that thinks in parallel to you, is something that seems impossible to achieve. There are a few people who claim that they can do that, but nobody seems to be able to replicate that and at this point I believe that some of the people who think they have a very well manifested tulpa actually suffer from real mental issues that get misinterpreted as tulpa.
After some (a lot) of time spent on creating the Tulpa, I did actually hear a voice that at first surprised me. It genuinely felt like I might be talking to a different person. A huge success, surely, how is it possible that nobody talks about this. However instead of not questioning it, my inquisitive and critical side took over to figure out how it works.
These are my personal findings:
The process of "forcing" a tulpa, not dissimilar to meditation, conditions yourself to:
a) Build a well thought out alternate personality
b) Disassociate certain thoughts from yourself and attribute them to the tulpa
c) Rapidly context switch between two personalities while maintaining the illusion that you are not in fact talking to yourself
In summary, you're training yourself to context-switch and impersonate an alter ego, while also crafting a strong conditioning to ignore that process and instead attribute it to a sentient thought-form
I haven't tried much forcing in earnest, but I've talked to voices in my head that didn't feel like part of me, and I've lurked in r/Tuples for years. It seems pretty common to have "parallel" consciousness among tulpamancers, though I think it depends on how you define and measure that.
Our sense of "continuous consciousness" is already an illusion, built from a series of moments. There are a lot of things about the brain/mind like that that I think make tulpas less unbelievable the more you think about it. Another is that there is a lot of diversity among "normal" brains. If someone can rotate a 3D shape in their head and you can't, you could say one of you has a "real mental issue," or just acknowledge the diversity. Also, a lot of our "thinking" is not conscious; it seems like we experience certain thoughts as "our thoughts that we are consciously thinking" because some process picks out a thought here and there and presents it that way. If another process were to come along and pick out a different 1% of our ongoing thoughts and present it as a coherent stream of consciousness, conforming to a certain personality, it could be another consciousness.
I don't think the brain/mind has one CPU and one program counter and that's that, and anything else is an illusion; I think it's got lots of cores and lots of threads, and if anything the idea that there's one hardcoded main thread is the illusion.
Initial reaction to the title before reading the article: yes, and it's called Twitch.
I think this Tulpa thing is a really fascinating idea but not for treating loneliness unless people are truly locked in.
Now that we have the internet there are a lot of other ways to connect to people that I think are better.
I actually think it may be okay to talk to yourself as a tool for figuring things out. But I don't think that is a good way to relieve loneliness.
But as an example of the power of meditation, it seems interesting. Because normally these types of hallucinations only happen close to a dream state or while asleep. So if people can trigger them while awake that is pretty powerful.
I suspect it might involve entering a bit of a meditative state quickly though.
That's one of the interesting things about brain computer interfaces. Someday we may be able to directly tap in to these simulation capabilities in terms of more conscious control and also recording them.
Or maybe we will someday be able to do a sort of waking lucid dream with a computer display. So for example I could be looking at my code or whatever and visualizing a diagram that would be recorded by the computer.
As someone who's had this when I was a teenager, I can comment on a few things about it.
Mine looked like me. It actually was me, but younger. I imagined him when I was 11 and he never really aged.
I could see him everywhere, sometimes screaming at me from the bleachers on the football field, or right in front of my face. The unique thing though is that he would always comment on what I was doing. It was almost as if I was a machine and he would guide me to where I would go. This being said, there were a lot of disagreements I had with him.
I would notice that when I got overly emotional, he would disappear. When things settled down, he'd come back and comment saying how I shouldn't have thought of/done what I had. I'd have the emotional argument with my logical second personality. We were so distinct from each other that, even looking back on it now, he felt evil.
The biggest benefit for sure was that I never felt alone. People around me were genuinely worried about how much time I spent isolated from everyone else, but it never felt that way. It always felt like I had someone, arguably more important than friends because it seemed like he kept me alive.
The worst part about it was the 'mob' mentality. Initially it didn't seem like much but I noticed that there were some things that I wouldn't have agreed with months before. My opinions would change constantly and it all depends on what he would say. Just imagine overthinking and then having a really close and trusted friend jump to even worse extremes because they feel like it would keep you safe.
Definitely bad to my overall health but I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for him.
Sounds like alter ego created with techniques from MKULTRA project. It never ages. I (illegaly) read Fritz Springmeier's book about this. There's conspiracy theory too, about Katy Perry's alter ego that never ages that named Katheryn.
Definitely saw him and he contributes to the lack of eye contact I give other people. It's hard to look at someone 1 on 1 when you see another person taking attention away. Back to the point, it wasn't super common to see him all the time. You know how you zone out of certain things but are still able to do the tasks? It was like that when he would visually appear.
Auditory would happen a lot more frequently because I was relatively focused on what was going on. Whether it be solving a problem in school and him seeing an error I had done previously, telling me to look back at the question, or him just talking with me about something random, I could hear him. Kind of like the whole whisper in your ear thing but I primarily heard it like he was right behind me talking to my brain (inside my skull to the back of my head).
Presence wise, maybe? I only say that because I rarely flinched because of him. For example, when he first started popping up, I would actually get surprised, maybe even try moving out of the way. Eventually though, I wouldn't even bat eye. I definitely knew what he was going to do and he would definitely do things that would catch others off guard but I saw it coming. If that's the presence you're referring to, then yes.
Tangentially related, but I'm adding this as it may help someone some day.
I never really thought about it until a co-worker, out of the blue, asked me, and I had to give words to the phenomenon.
I was walking in the hall at work one day, and said co-worker came up to me and asked. "Hey, distantaidenn, why do you always seem so happy?" I was a bit taken aback, because I never smile, but I suppose I do have an upbeat, and almost relaxed attitude about me.
Then I told him, "You know that voice in your head?" Assuming, most people have one. "Well, the voice I use is constantly giving me positive feedback. Even when things are going bad, it's supporting me and telling me anything is possible."
Until that coworker had asked me, I didn't even realize it, as it was just something I learned to do. When I was younger, and still trying to "figure people out", the voice was somewhat negative and doubtful. I lived a life of confusion and fear. But since adulthood, the one person that I can always count on to keep me upbeat is that little ever present voice, supporting me and pushing me forward each day.
- Does everyone have internal monologue? Google results aren’t clear about this, it seems everyone does but at varying degrees.
- I’m personally overriding mine with podcasts, because my thoughts are extremely dark. The only place where I can channel my thoughts positively is when interacting with people and at work, since I have tasks to do. Better not let that mind wander ;) (I’m joking but many people know how much past experiences can haunt — I miss when I was 15 and able to dream about an imaginary world where we’d invent AI and how we’d organize society about it).
Therapy can only explain things, not solve them. I’m a man. A man can be dead in a ditch, he won’t get help. A woman or a dog would. Such is life. Can’t change that. I have been to about 200 therapy sessions of 5 different psychologists. Cost me thousands. But people don’t offer their nice side to men. Can’t change that. Not many other ways than silencing your internal monologue to shut up the frustration. We are supposed to take all of them, together, and not ask.
Of course it can solve them. If none of your therapists offered you tools to help you get out of a web of thoughts that you suffer under, that is on them. Of course, if it is your own choice then it is on you :)
For what it's worth, what you're talking about just isn't my experience at all. Perhaps it is your perception, and how that impacts the world around you (both what you see and how people respond to you). It's really no different than reading about a car and seeing that car in traffic a hundred times. You see what you focus on - in this case you're focusing on whatever it is you're seeing here and therefore you see it everywhere. That doesn't make it true.
That sounds exactly like a book[1] I've been reading to my toddler. It hadn't occurred to me while reading you could experience the titular "moon" so viscerally.
I don't have an autonomous internal monologue, but I can speak in my mind, meaning just like actual speech but without the physical sound making. But it's not some other entity saying stuff.to be honest, if someone told me they hear voices in their head I would assume they are not 100% alright mentally, which is totally okay of course but I'd suspect perhaps they should seek treatment. Now that I'm seeing so many commenters (probably a biased self selected sample though) saying they hallucinate all the time,see entities and hear voices, I'm less sure and perhaps it's normal?
This makes tulpamancy sound like a voluntary version of what happens when multiple personalities form due to childhood trauma, but that wasn't how the original article made it sound.
From what I understand, recognizing each of the personalities and integrating them into a cooperative "system" is the standard of care for multiple personalities, but trying to induce this voluntarily is a lot different from just creating an imaginary friend.
In this case, a tulpa would share, and sometimes control, your own body.
There is some controversy regarding multiple personality disorded. From what I remember, the amount of multiple personality disorders diagnoses exploded in the 70s and 80s in the USA while the same disorder is rare in the rest of the world.
If people are able to generate Tulpas, it might mean that these multiple personality disorders were in fact generated by the psychiatrists treating these people. This could explain why there was such an increase in the USA while at the same time do not require large number of patients lying about what they are experiencing.
I was hoping that it was about Tulpa. The pandemic had me look into nurturing a Tulpa again but I've avoided it for one or the other reason.
I can personally attest that having an imaginary world and friends is amazing. You can practice a conversation, tell jokes and bounce of ideas. The more you practice, the more distinct the voices become.
After a while, Yes. Vivid daydreams usually go around our own personal wishes to build the reality. A Tulpa or your friend would start to have a unique view and attitude towards life. Think of those voices on the shoulder, one says positive things and asks us to be kind and the other one actively asserting to be selfish.
It seems like most people get into it from the chaos magick sort of angle, involving new-age meditation practices which are quite different to the Eastern tradition. Highly recommend reading the Psychonaut Field Manual for a deep insight into a really interesting subculture:
I don't think so, there are no external standards to tell you if your Tulpa is valid or otherwise. It is your own. Now, if you're regularly meditating or then thinking without distraction might come easy but don't let that stop you from trying.
I have often wondered whether it would be possible to encourage a split personality in myself (or other mental disorder). Psychology is all about thinking to fix yourself, so presumably you can also practice thinking to put yourself into “bad” states.
I love experimenting on my own mind, however I generally avoid doing anything that could be harmfully permanent (although I suspect I have made mistakes in the past - hard to know without an experimental control!)
Experimenting on others is not my idea of fun. Edited for clarity.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadbut, you see...we are never whole until all the pieces of our soul are together and as one unit. the retrieval is a journey to the three worlds..upper, middle and the nether worlds to plead with the piece of the detached dismembered soul to return. one is accompanied by a shaman or psychopomp in this journey. it was also accompanied by a lot of rhythmic drumming.
anything can happen during this journey. one may meet helpful guides or animal guides..or dangerous elements that want to hold on to your piece of lost soul and wouldn't let it go free. sometimes the piece of the lost soul doesnt want to return because in it's detached state, it finds healing because the trauma memories were too acrid.
the shaman sometimes acts on your behalf to wrestle or fight or even kill these hostile beings if they prevent the soul retrieval. sometimes its peaceful. sometimes dangerous. retrieval is not guaranteed. it was one of the many trippy experiences i have had...there was no use of drugs or alcohol. there was no burning incense or smoke or any such thing as i had requested that we dont do any of that. it was just the drumming.
i continued to feel trippy and spaced out for 3-4 days after the experience. i stopped driving for a week or so because i had trouble focusing visually even though i was able to continue functioning normally. i slept a lot and i slept well. but a lot of 'beings' i met during the retrieval trip stayed with me for a long time.
did i imagine them? was it a suggestion by the shaman? maybe. did it matter? i felt so much better and had a certain clarity of mind and lightness of spirit for many many months afterwards.
i was not necessarily a skeptic but neither was a believer. i like to walk into experiences with an open mind. sometimes it works. other times it fails. but in this particular case, it was more beneficial than detrimental.
during the journey i created a few characters to support me during my journey into the under world. i created a different kind of companion for the upper world. i conversed with them for a long time after the experience and then slowly as i got busy with work and other things consumed my time, they slowly faded away. but i like to think that they still reside somewhere deep inside my consciousness. and that they will come back if i beckon them or if the need arises that i have to go retrieve another piece of my soul.
Actually, no. Metallic's song, "One", is based on the novel, "Johnny Got His Gun".
I happen to be a fan but it is not that difficult to research this stuff.
Also, it’s worth reading the book.
Also they exist. Already very popular in China.
You could associate the 'Tulpa' phenomenon variously with familiar spirits, guardian angels, demonology, and all sorts, and obviously there's a wide variety of literature on it. My first impression is that doing this without direction (spiritual or otherwise) may not be 100% without risk.
The author of the linked article is clearly an enthusiast, but all medicines are poisons too, right?
It reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain where after cutting the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain:
> It is known that when the corpus callosum is severed during an experimental procedure, the experimenter can ask each side of the brain the same question and receive two different answers. When the experimenter asks the right visual field/left hemisphere what they see the participant will respond verbally, whereas if the experimenter asks the left visual field/right hemisphere what they see the participant will not be able to respond verbally but will pick up the appropriate object with their left hand.
So it's definitely possible to have two consciousness occupying the same brain.
Based on the rest of your comment, I think that's quite a leap. The different parts of the brain are obviously not communicating normally with each other & the body, but I'm not sure that means two consciousnesses.
I see them as siamese twins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjoined_twins) where each of the twin had half their brain removed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy).
Do tulpamancers hang out with each other, and do their tuplas come along? It is a problematic dynamic. I’m not sure it’s really doing anyone favors. I could see it being useful as potential practice/conditioning to get past social anxiety but I could also see it becoming a crutch and a magnification of underlying mental illness. People can be tough to deal with, is an imaginary friend an exception?
I recently watched a talk about people on autism spectrum (Asperger's Syndrome and full-blown autism) and it literally says that. People with Aspergers often can't fit in, don't get the rules by which others socialize, so they pretty often create a friend to escape loneliness.
The most recent wave of tulpamancy, which I would say started late 2011-early 2012 arose from a metaphysical imageboard of all places, until people started trying to understand the psychological rationale for the creation process. I started ".info" more or less as a blog to figure out if any of this was real and as a central location to host guides and community discussion.
Over the years, I've seen a multitude of different kinds of people create tulpas, many of these are lonely, others are bored, and some (like myself) were just trying to see if it was possible. I know one military veteran who created a tulpa due to having PTSD and his tulpa was able to help stop his nightmares.
One thing that I've found is that much of the time if the creator is very introverted, the tulpa tends to be more extroverted. They often encourage the creator to get out more, talk to more people, kind of like a life coach. Being an introvert myself, I know that I've taken social steps that I wouldn't have otherwise had Chess not encouraged me to try. More often than not, I'm seeing tulpamancy resulting in the opposite of isolation. For those suffering from lonileness, having a single friend (especially one who's encouraging) does wonders for self esteem, and means you're more likely to become more social in the long run.
I would love to do a study to find out how the brain responds to hanging out with your tulpa compared to hanging out with a real-life friend, but from what I've seen, I have a feeling that it reacts very similarly. And then there's the growing tulpamancy community.
There's a lot of message boards, a subreddit, and several discord chats for tulpamancy, and even a discord bot that can help the creator "proxy" the tulpa[1]. This means that not only are the creators talking amongst themselves, but tulpas are talking with creators and even talking with each other. Offline, a few of my friends know about my tulpa, but they I rarely proxy her, it would just be similar to telling a friend about a text you just got, "Hey, Chess says XYZ." I know people who hang out with other tulpamancers "in real life" though, and for them it's just normal conversations.
As for carrying on conversations with my tulpa in public, I often just talk with her using my "mental voice" -- that little voice inside of your head, think internal monologue. I've also had a Bluetooth adapter in my ear before so I can just talk out loud in public without looking weird, but even then I would just chat with her under my breath. When I'm home or out hiking, it's just more natural to talk out loud, and so I do.
I'll be happy to try to answer any other questions or weigh in.
[1] https://top.gg/bot/431544605209788416
In the first case (and I haven't really researched this deeply) one way is to enter a recent dream world while awake and "allow" it to play out, talking to the people inside and letting them respond. The approach you decide take with the people is somewhat circumscribed by Jung's archetypes, where you may encounter a guide of the opposite sex, embodied neuroses, other advisors, and eventually connecting with a "Great Man" or God-man figure (the "Self") who is your ultimate truth or something and lets you truly grow (don't think I've gotten this far). According to Jung, the archetypes you encounter are part of the human unconscious mind the same way that eyelashes are part of the human body, and they both give rise to and provide a key to interpreting human religion and spirituality.
In IFS, you meet or summon "parts" of your psyche that may be malfunctioning or acting up because of past trauma or defense mechanisms, getting to know them and healing them. Once they're healed they can help you out, tulpa-style. But the emphasis is on letting them take shape, not creating them. In IFS, you have to be able to connect to your core, non-judgmental spiritual "base" (which is called "Self" in IFS) before talking to the parts.
So this leads to my questions about tulpamancy. How "freeform" are the decisions people make when creating tulpas -- do you see enough commonly shared traits between people's tulpas that would make you think you could "systematize" access to them like above? Do you think that the tulpas are always there in the mind in some form and you're just bringing them out or changing them, or are you actually casting them into existence? Do people ever make mistakes with their tulpas that cause them to be malicious rather than benevolent thoughtforms? Do you have any personal opinions about Jung or IFS?
More specifically, has the recent rise and push for recognition of plurality originated from tulpa communities? [1], for example. A lot of the terminology is different from what i remember, so i wondered if it's an evolution or a parallel development.
[1] https://morethanone.info/
tulpa sounds like a product of polytheism.
and yes, it works. i have been exploring my religion during this past covid year and i have remained largely unscathed emotionally/mentally due to this journey. i am not hating it.
In my case I connected with Judaism.
Prayer is your avenue for pouring your heart out to G-d though I'm working on that, doesn't come naturally. On the flip side, I don't think we should confuse the "other" part of our inner monologue as G-d speaking back to us.
How would one know? Would not a G_d talk back to us? G_d spoke to Abraham and Moses. The covenant itself comes from a chat with G_d.
I looked up this Hebrew word from a Leonard Cohen song.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK4iAjzAoas : You want it darker.. Assassin's Creed trailer). "Hineni". It appears in the Hebrew Scriptures only a handful of times. It means ‘Here I am” and I have often thought about it. I really liked what it meant. Especially the bit about the sacrifice of Isaac on the mount in the Genesis. And when Moses says it during Exodus.
One of the most cliched but likely phased out school morning ritual I recall is the roll call when I was in school. The teacher would sit down with an open ledger and call out our names in alphabetical order. And we have to yell out ‘Present!’.... “Here I am”.
Without the back and forth, there is no acknowledgment from either side. So faith needs a Hineni. Faith needs a “Here I am.” Faith needs a back and forth. It needs a separation between the sacred and the profane. And if we can’t see, hear or touch the sacred, we will have to imagine it.
It also made me wonder...do animals and birds and insects have imagination? Perhaps that’s why they don’t have a God. Imagination is our super power. To not use it would be a pity.
Neurologically, electric impulses in the brain and imbalances of brain chemicals, seizures and epilepsy and injury can cause visions and make us hear voices from god or deja vu or even psychic abilities. This is an illness. This often causes hyper religiousity. To approach god and to realize god as an imagined entity that we will absorb later into our own psyche is not a mental illness. It is entirely rational and it operates with its own control system.
All religions are syncretic from Sumerian/Babylonian times. Even from the oldest recorded words in the Epic of Gilgamesh, we have been hearing the quiet affirmation or the thunderous demands of divinity. Imagined or otherwise.
In Hinduism, there is a concept called Brahman. (Not to be confused with Brahmin who is a person/an individual who engages in priestly activities. A generic wiki entry here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman)
[..] Brahman (Sanskrit: ब्रह्मन्), (Hindi: ब्रह्म) connotes the highest Universal Principle, the Ultimate Reality in the universe. In major schools of Hindu philosophy, it is the material, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists. It is the pervasive, infinite, eternal truth and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes. Brahman as a metaphysical concept refers to the single binding unity behind diversity in all that exists in the universe.[..]
On the other end of the universal cosmic principle aka Brahman is the Atman, the individual soul that is housed in this mortal sheath.
There are two broad schools of religious thought: Dvaita and advaita. Dualism and Non-dualism. Dualism says that there is the soul and then there is the unchanging omniscient godhead.
Non dualism says there is a separation between the individual soul and the universal cosmic principle. But it is temporary. Because there is no difference between the two.
With religion...because we are unable to imagine this all encompassing Brahman, we give it shape and form and names. We pray and talk and offer sacrifices and create rituals.
Believing that the microcosm is in the macrocosm and the macrocosm contains within itself all else will lead us to the Brahman eventually(or at least that’s the hope) and the way it realize the inter connectivity of it all. Because all this is maya.
When I was more atheist/agnostic, I would say all...
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/49hr6k
I’m still not sure how I think about this, it sounds scary and interesting at the same time.
We don't call being part of a cult a mental illness either. It's just a poor life decision :)
1. If I remember correctly, one of Thinking Techniques I read long time ago (not sure Edward de Bono) is to create distinctive quorum of distinctive characters you look up to, each having a different hat (book "Six Thinking Hats"). So when we think about problem, we should talk with each person to get its view.
2. Improving Chess ability can be done by playing on both sides.
3. In the movie "A Beautiful Mind" mathematician John Nash had vivid hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. (edit: it looks like rogue "tulpa")
4. Nikola Tesla had ability to imagine any object so intensively on demand they would float like a hologram, with eyes wide open.
What is amazing is that brain can do so much, and our knowledge about its abilities is so small. It would be nice if we knew techniques how to wake up some parts of the brain on demand, the same way one would learning hot to read or write.
[0] https://i2.wp.com/medialist.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/... [1] https://heeris.id.au/trinkets/ProgrammerInterrupted.png
Anyhow, it would be cool if we could learn how to tap into potential... As I personally think that people who have a more vivid imagination have less fear of death. As they have more colourful dreams, it is easier to imagine "other" worlds... equally as it is easier for a person who seen to imagine colours than those who were born blind.
But I guess, at the end of the day, for the sake of the spices' survival, all those differences are essential as they push as to excel in different fields, and therefore survive.
It might be interesting to get the opinion of somebody who tried this, mostly out of curiosity.
1. One of the core guidelines is "Don't question it. If you think you may have heard a voice, it was your tulpa." - This becomes important later on
2. True 'sentience', in the meaning that there's a different entity that thinks in parallel to you, is something that seems impossible to achieve. There are a few people who claim that they can do that, but nobody seems to be able to replicate that and at this point I believe that some of the people who think they have a very well manifested tulpa actually suffer from real mental issues that get misinterpreted as tulpa.
After some (a lot) of time spent on creating the Tulpa, I did actually hear a voice that at first surprised me. It genuinely felt like I might be talking to a different person. A huge success, surely, how is it possible that nobody talks about this. However instead of not questioning it, my inquisitive and critical side took over to figure out how it works. These are my personal findings:
The process of "forcing" a tulpa, not dissimilar to meditation, conditions yourself to:
a) Build a well thought out alternate personality
b) Disassociate certain thoughts from yourself and attribute them to the tulpa
c) Rapidly context switch between two personalities while maintaining the illusion that you are not in fact talking to yourself
In summary, you're training yourself to context-switch and impersonate an alter ego, while also crafting a strong conditioning to ignore that process and instead attribute it to a sentient thought-form
Our sense of "continuous consciousness" is already an illusion, built from a series of moments. There are a lot of things about the brain/mind like that that I think make tulpas less unbelievable the more you think about it. Another is that there is a lot of diversity among "normal" brains. If someone can rotate a 3D shape in their head and you can't, you could say one of you has a "real mental issue," or just acknowledge the diversity. Also, a lot of our "thinking" is not conscious; it seems like we experience certain thoughts as "our thoughts that we are consciously thinking" because some process picks out a thought here and there and presents it that way. If another process were to come along and pick out a different 1% of our ongoing thoughts and present it as a coherent stream of consciousness, conforming to a certain personality, it could be another consciousness.
I don't think the brain/mind has one CPU and one program counter and that's that, and anything else is an illusion; I think it's got lots of cores and lots of threads, and if anything the idea that there's one hardcoded main thread is the illusion.
I think this Tulpa thing is a really fascinating idea but not for treating loneliness unless people are truly locked in.
Now that we have the internet there are a lot of other ways to connect to people that I think are better.
I actually think it may be okay to talk to yourself as a tool for figuring things out. But I don't think that is a good way to relieve loneliness.
But as an example of the power of meditation, it seems interesting. Because normally these types of hallucinations only happen close to a dream state or while asleep. So if people can trigger them while awake that is pretty powerful.
I suspect it might involve entering a bit of a meditative state quickly though.
That's one of the interesting things about brain computer interfaces. Someday we may be able to directly tap in to these simulation capabilities in terms of more conscious control and also recording them.
Or maybe we will someday be able to do a sort of waking lucid dream with a computer display. So for example I could be looking at my code or whatever and visualizing a diagram that would be recorded by the computer.
Mine looked like me. It actually was me, but younger. I imagined him when I was 11 and he never really aged.
I could see him everywhere, sometimes screaming at me from the bleachers on the football field, or right in front of my face. The unique thing though is that he would always comment on what I was doing. It was almost as if I was a machine and he would guide me to where I would go. This being said, there were a lot of disagreements I had with him.
I would notice that when I got overly emotional, he would disappear. When things settled down, he'd come back and comment saying how I shouldn't have thought of/done what I had. I'd have the emotional argument with my logical second personality. We were so distinct from each other that, even looking back on it now, he felt evil.
The biggest benefit for sure was that I never felt alone. People around me were genuinely worried about how much time I spent isolated from everyone else, but it never felt that way. It always felt like I had someone, arguably more important than friends because it seemed like he kept me alive.
The worst part about it was the 'mob' mentality. Initially it didn't seem like much but I noticed that there were some things that I wouldn't have agreed with months before. My opinions would change constantly and it all depends on what he would say. Just imagine overthinking and then having a really close and trusted friend jump to even worse extremes because they feel like it would keep you safe.
Definitely bad to my overall health but I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for him.
Definitely saw him and he contributes to the lack of eye contact I give other people. It's hard to look at someone 1 on 1 when you see another person taking attention away. Back to the point, it wasn't super common to see him all the time. You know how you zone out of certain things but are still able to do the tasks? It was like that when he would visually appear.
Auditory would happen a lot more frequently because I was relatively focused on what was going on. Whether it be solving a problem in school and him seeing an error I had done previously, telling me to look back at the question, or him just talking with me about something random, I could hear him. Kind of like the whole whisper in your ear thing but I primarily heard it like he was right behind me talking to my brain (inside my skull to the back of my head).
Presence wise, maybe? I only say that because I rarely flinched because of him. For example, when he first started popping up, I would actually get surprised, maybe even try moving out of the way. Eventually though, I wouldn't even bat eye. I definitely knew what he was going to do and he would definitely do things that would catch others off guard but I saw it coming. If that's the presence you're referring to, then yes.
I never really thought about it until a co-worker, out of the blue, asked me, and I had to give words to the phenomenon.
I was walking in the hall at work one day, and said co-worker came up to me and asked. "Hey, distantaidenn, why do you always seem so happy?" I was a bit taken aback, because I never smile, but I suppose I do have an upbeat, and almost relaxed attitude about me.
Then I told him, "You know that voice in your head?" Assuming, most people have one. "Well, the voice I use is constantly giving me positive feedback. Even when things are going bad, it's supporting me and telling me anything is possible."
Until that coworker had asked me, I didn't even realize it, as it was just something I learned to do. When I was younger, and still trying to "figure people out", the voice was somewhat negative and doubtful. I lived a life of confusion and fear. But since adulthood, the one person that I can always count on to keep me upbeat is that little ever present voice, supporting me and pushing me forward each day.
- I’m personally overriding mine with podcasts, because my thoughts are extremely dark. The only place where I can channel my thoughts positively is when interacting with people and at work, since I have tasks to do. Better not let that mind wander ;) (I’m joking but many people know how much past experiences can haunt — I miss when I was 15 and able to dream about an imaginary world where we’d invent AI and how we’d organize society about it).
No, I think in pictures, smells and shapes.
> my thoughts are extremely dark
If you have harmful thought loops that give you problems in daily life, that's something to seek therapy for.
I do have negative thoughts.
For what it's worth, what you're talking about just isn't my experience at all. Perhaps it is your perception, and how that impacts the world around you (both what you see and how people respond to you). It's really no different than reading about a car and seeing that car in traffic a hundred times. You see what you focus on - in this case you're focusing on whatever it is you're seeing here and therefore you see it everywhere. That doesn't make it true.
1: https://mindhealth.org/store/Theres-a-Happy-Moon-in-My-Side-...
Perhaps the form of an imaginary friend plays a significant role in coping with loneliness.
This is the most hilarious question I found right away:
> When I have sex with my girl is there a way to make sure my tulpa doesn’t see
But then it also gets you thinking.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/kzq9jr/some_questio...
From what I understand, recognizing each of the personalities and integrating them into a cooperative "system" is the standard of care for multiple personalities, but trying to induce this voluntarily is a lot different from just creating an imaginary friend.
In this case, a tulpa would share, and sometimes control, your own body.
If people are able to generate Tulpas, it might mean that these multiple personality disorders were in fact generated by the psychiatrists treating these people. This could explain why there was such an increase in the USA while at the same time do not require large number of patients lying about what they are experiencing.
https://www.deviantart.com/bluefluke/art/The-Psychonaut-Fiel...
I love experimenting on my own mind, however I generally avoid doing anything that could be harmfully permanent (although I suspect I have made mistakes in the past - hard to know without an experimental control!)
Experimenting on others is not my idea of fun. Edited for clarity.