| 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. [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?