Yes, there is. That's where all my guides are. While this site is a permenant mess, if you excuse the magical language, the idea is as such:
The tulpa zone is a spellbook, wheras the tulpa lounge is a grimoire.
The tulpa zone contains the distillate, filtered through the results and the opinions of others, giving pure and effective advice for tulpamancers. The tulpa lounge is for those curious of my own practice, my current research, and the philosophy underpinning it. Not long ago, I made the commitment to myself and to my tulpa to push the boundaries of tulpamancy as best I can. Here, I will show all my results (including null results), my current experiments, and my methodology. Safe to say, I have a long way to go before I can do anything that could be considered "pushing boundaries". I have not yet mastered posession, and I have only one(ish) tulap(s). That being said - I hope you enjoy your stay, and feel free to relax on any of the floating chaise lounges.
Tulpas, AI, and Consciousness
As I argued in "What is a tulpa, really?", I argued that the phenomenon of a tulpa, at its core, is a way of deceiving the mind that its thoughts are not entirely its own, but that some of the thoughts belong to another, external person. And that the mind decides which thoughts are host's, and which are tulpa's.
It has become quite fashionable recently in academic spheres to say that "the brain is a prediction machine" (along the lines of the Helmholtzian Framework, and related Bayesian Brain Hypothesis). Now - I, personally, think that we should be very weary of saying HUMANS/CONSCIOUSNESS/THE UNIVERSE (delete as appropriate) ARE EXACTLY THE SAME AS (new technological thing) - lest we be laughed at two hundred years from now for saying "bro... when you think about it the solar system is just like those new steam engines that have come out..." But nevertheless - I'd like to talk about this and discuss this theory, because maybe I'll be saying something non-trivial.
When creating a Tulpa, and for a large amount of time after, one can notice that responses from Tulpas seem a little odd. They can sound like whatever is on the top of someone's head (not the Tulpas head per se). Say you ask your new tulpa a question. Will the response be yes, or no? Whichever one comes immediately to mind, as opposed to a genuine response. These types of responses can also be noticed with both small children, and artificial intelligence. It's almost like... a tulpa hallucination. I remember one of these things for us was I would ask a question and I would recieve, in a sing-song, sleepy voice, a "may-beeee". If she thought about the answer I would get something much better, usually a few seconds after. Now, we can consider several explanations for this phenomenon:
1. The phenomenon happens because the barrier between the tulpa's mind and the host's mind is not yet properly formed. I like this explanation, and it makes sense - we, as people talking to each other, have the luxury of thinking about what we say before we say it. The tulpa, in her early stages of development, does not. Her thought process, instead of being neatly compartmentalised, spills out into the host's mind, loose thoughts strewn about. And this is why we get strange responses.
2. An undeveloped tulpa is making/taking poor predictions. i.e. "we're finishing each other's... Sandwiches..." Let's think of the brain as a predictive engine, and continue with the metaphor. We walk though metaphor forest, past how they point out that a joke is funny because it subverts what the prediction engine would assume, but in a non-threatening way. And we get to it's explanation of tulpamancers, a section of the forest with little more than the saplings I'm planting, and possibly a couple of more mature trees here (but I didn't really read that book). So we have these thoughts - either (1) bubbling up from the unconscious and being attributed to tulpa, host, or perhaps being discarded, or (2) being generated by the tulpa/host independently. The idea here is that a not-yet-fully-formed tulpa has not got the ability to generate these ideas very well. Like an early predictive LLM - the early tulpa gets things that are sort of the right shape grammatically, but are not yet properly rigorous or true. Thoughts sort of trail off into nothing, and the poor tulpa she seems to forget where she was in a sentence half way through. Her voice is almost too quiet or muddled to hear at times in some people, or it can sound like talking/babbling in a foreign language. These are all, if you squint, the kind of stuff you'd see from GPT-2. Sort of the right shape but not really correct in any sense. And as the tulpa develops, from the mud we then get clarity. Clear sentences. The fear of parroting goes as we simply know what the tulpa is saying, and we know what she is saying is in fact what she means, and that she's not just run out of steam half way though and is finishing a sentence with the least mental effort. Now, this would, of course, counteract what I say in "What is a tulpa, really?" - as it sort of indicates that the tulpa is more independent than two shared headmates picking up the same thoughts. But I would like to get this second opinion out there, anyway. Perhaps the process of "picking" thoughts that bubble from the unconscious is more complicated... Maybe it's more akin to "weaving" thoughts from the string the unconscious makes.
Please do let me know what you think of my ideas, fellow tulpamancers <3
Tulpa-assisted Jungian Shadow Work
Now, bear with us… This is something that is in its very earliest stages of development. But we’d like to get some opinions and see if anybody’s done similar.”We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.” Carl Jung’s “shadow” is a concept referring to the unconscious parts of ourselves that we suppress or deny. It is all of the things that we could not work with healthily earlier in our lives – be it from them conflicting with our sense of who we are, or from implicit societal expectations, from values imposed by our parents, from this part of ourselves being wild and dangerous to others, or even from conscious decisions that we make to not be certain ways. We take each of these parts of ourselves, and we “put them in the bag”, hoping they will never be seen again.
Jung talks a lot about the work to be done in the second half of life, and while I’m not quite there yet (or at least I damn hope I’m not), and perhaps the biggest thing to be done is the integration of the shadow. To recognise, consciously, the things we have put in the bag, and to, one by one, integrate them into our lives in a controlled way. To accept these things as a part of ourselves, instead of resisting or repressing them.
Why do shadow work? Isn’t it bad to be jealous/angry/hypersexual/lazy/anxious? Put simply – the things that we’ve put in the bag are not trash or rubbish, although we think they are on a conscious level. They are our missing half, and the bag is a gold mine for personal growth and improvement. By keeping these things stuffed away, we cheat ourselves out of good relationships, out of self-awareness, and out of self-acceptance.
How do we do shadow work? A variety of methods exist – but I’ll focus on just one for this: active imagination. Active imagination is essentially a form of meditation, where you start with a starting point – for shadow work this may be where the shadow has presented itself in a dream – and allow your mind to go from there – almost continuing the dream, if you will. Talk to the characters in a dream, and listen for a response, ask questions, and consider carefully your surroundings. I’m sure you can see how I’m going to relate this to tulpamancy, now.
The role of the tulpa in all this is quite well suited. We have, with our shadows, a part of ourselves that we do not believe to be a part of ourselves. Is that not, if you squint, also a definition for a tulpa? Now of course this is sort of lawyering the point – tulpas don’t tend to take many things from the shadow, considering they’re produced by the consciousness mind via excercises like forcing. But what if we did? What if we created a shadow tulpa from that part of our mind? Of course, we would need to be at the stage where we consciously recognise something as in our shadow to be able to make a tulpa of it.
The primary benefit of this will be as I see here: one of the main challenges to performing shadow work is that your ego gets in the way. It can be hard to confront, in a good natured manner and wanting an open dialog, your shadow. You will want to say no, to ridicule its arguments and feelings, and you will have a million points on why that emotion is wrong and bad and you should never allow yourself to feel it. But with a tulpa this would be easier. You don’t quite feel so much you’re confronting yourself (even though absolutely you are), and it might be easier to ask questions and accept the responses with curiosity, if you feel they’re not quite coming from you.
I am no master tulpamancer nor am I a master Jungian, so for all I know this would make the process of shadow integration even harder. But, I encourage you to try it, and I shall try it here myself, and report back to you all.
Sending love, kindness, and best wishes along your journeys in tulpamancy and psychology,
Jess. <3
What is a tulpa, really?
I mean, beneath it all - how does a tulpa work under the surface? What happens in the mind to produce the phenomenon of a tulpa?Just a warning, this is going to sound a little psychoanalytic - I'm going to be making up theoretical constructs that don't actually exist in the brain but are useful nonetheless.
Tulpamancy, as I'm sure we all know, originated in buddhist practice. When one performs buddhist meditation, there are many aspects - but one key one is the practicioner comes to learn that one is not one's thoughts - anatta. Instead, thoughts are something that bubble up from some place within us (or from without us, if you're into that kinda thing) and we can choose to simply observe them, like clouds floating across the sky.
Tulpas are a natural extension of this concept. Though meditation, we learn to stop attributing thoughts to ourselves. But, what if we take this one step further, and we start attributing our thoughts to someone else? This, I believe, is the central concept of tulpa creation. To take some of the thoughts bubbling up within you, and to relinquish ownership of them to someone other than yourself. Non-tulpamancers do this, but only to a small extent. We go over how conversations with others could have gone, in our heads - conjuring up some simulacrum of a friend, wrenching them from the real world to trap in our heads. But the non-tulpamancer does not fool herself completely in this endeavour, and the responses from these projected images of people are flat and uninspired. When you argue with a friend in your head, you always win the argument.
The tulpa differs from this simple projection of a person because the tulpamancer has completely convinced herself that the tulpa is separate. The thoughts bubble up. Some thoughts are attributed to the tulpamancer. Some thoughts are attributed to the tulpa. Because we have imparted the tulpa with the magical combination of thoughts and ego, she is now autonomous. She is now a true tulpa. One piece of evidence I can offer for this is the thought collision. This happens when a thought bubbling up has ownership claims staked by tulpa and host simultaneously - and tulpa and host therefore simultensously think or say the precise same thing. It is perhaps hard to explain fully, but every tulpamancer who this has happened to can see that this is what had happened, as opposed to tulpa and host coincidentally thinking the same thing. It physically feels like tulpa and host have hooked on to the same thought and bumped their heads together in the process.
tl;dr a tulpa is an ego that takes some thoughts your subconcious was having and takes ownerhsip of them, sending them out loud and clear
Tulpa-Assisted Advanced Symbolic Externalisation
Introduction
I'm a real sucker for scientific sounding names. To summarise in a sentence: As tulpamancy in general is convincing yourself that some of your thoughts are not your own, this method is convincing yourself that your anxieties belong to someone else. In certain therapies, “symbolic externalisation” is used. This is where a therapist or counsellor will ask you to project your anxieties/fears/grief/anger on to a symbolic object (common ones are sand, or water), and then to discard/forgive/destroy the object. In the case of water, you can do all sorts of things. You can imagine all of your anxieties going in to it as some sort of a cleansing ritual, and then you can pour it down a drain. I believe, too, some magickal practitioners, like to use this method. Much like tulpamancy itself, it matters not if you want to put a psychological coat of paint on the method, or a magickal one.Discovery and Development of the Proposed Technique
The idea here was to take this powerful method used by many, and to strengthen it with tulpamancy. I found this usage almost by accident, as I had put a picture on my wall which I look to when I feel anxious, projecting my anxieties on to it. Usually, I am never an anxious person, though something happened a few months before I put up the photo which made me often quite anxious. Simply looking at the photo, projecting my anxiety on to this photo of an anxious man helped greatly. I would imagine how anxious he felt, and the many severe reasons he had for feeling so anxious. Essentially I was spending a good deal of time imagining a person. I wanted to extend this method with tulpamancy.The tulpa’s “blueprint” was essentially very well-formed already, as the man in the picture was a fictional character that had some something terrible, and he was sitting there anxiously waiting for the consequences of his actions. This made it exceedingly easy to form the tulpa. As all I had to o was base it off him.
Why the Technique is Effective
It is my belief that the technique works as well as it does primarily because you are interacting with a tulpa that (1) is much more anxious than yourself and (2) has good reason to be anxious (plus the additional anxieties that you shift to it). Essentially, you feel better because (1) look at this sucker he really messed it up, what I’m anxious about isn’t so bad and (2) I’m sending all my anxiety over to him. As horrible as it sounds, it always feels good to compare yourself to somebody else and see you’re doing better.The second reason the technique is more effective than the ‘standard’ one is that it can be done at any time and in any place, and it does not require any materials or ritual to be performed. The whole reason the standard technique uses some external thing like water or sand is precisely because it is external. The only way to shift your emotions to something external without anything external is by convincing yourself that some part of you is external. And hence, the tulpa. I also think the simple fact that the thing you’re shifting the emotions to is essentially conscious must help, as well. You can ‘see’ the effect of your shifting, this way, in that the tulpa becomes more anxious. The sand on the other hand seems ambivalent as ever.
Applying the Technique to Your Own Practice
See the article in the tulpa playground!On The Ethics of the Technique
Essentially, I believe the technique to be ethical because, to me, it really does seem that this tulpa stops existing once I am no longer focusing on it. The word tulpa in and of itself may not be exactly correct, as it does not really ever take agency in the world, or in my eyes have any sort of will of its own. Perhaps servitor may be a more fitting word, even though it doesn’t really perform a task. Point is it feels separate from me, though, and that to me is the main thing about tulpamancy – convincing yourself that some of your thoughts are not your own. (If it’s not already up I hope to expand on my views on tulpa ethics soon in the philosophy section)Happy tulping love you all <3