| I'm not a mental health professional and I'm not even specifically going to advise against this or anything. I truly don't know enough to know whether it's inherently dangerous or just an extreme outlier on the continuum of human experiences of selfhood. But I have some experiences and observations that may be relevant that I'd like to share and maybe you can find something useful in them. I have, at this stage in my life, known several people who, whatever their specific clinical diagnosis, you could fairly say "lost their mind." Government-chip-in-brain believers, reincarnations of alexander the great, friends with an invisible alien, that sort of thing. What remains one of the most frightening experiences of my life was realizing that I had known one of these people 15+ years before, when he was a college student. We had a brief but strong friendship and then lost touch. Was he predisposed to serious mental illness back then? Must have been I guess but I couldn't tell and neither could he I think. All the other people I know who lost themselves in this way, it happened through addiction. When talking about a single individual it's very hard to find where addiction begins and mental illness begins, so maybe this is unique to that context but I don't think so. You don't get a warning letter about what specific risks your own mind has for you. There's no blood test for this. Most of the craziest people you've ever encountered were probably pretty normal once. This transformation is a process and I don't think you can see it happen from within it. I've spent some time out there myself, and it wasn't all bad, but I didn't mean to go out and I'm glad I'm back. I think the slavic religions and others with this tradition are onto something with the "holy fools" and similar figures. Some of us may be called to have a different relationship with reality, and they, or we, may benefit from that in some complex societal way. But from my experiences and from knowing people who have gone on that trip, there is a heavy cost. So my advice is just to pursue this, if at all, with another person. An open-minded mental health professional, a spiritual guide, just a close friend; someone who knows and respects you outside of this context. Someone who is going to stay moored and let you know if you're starting to drift, who can evaluate what you might lose if you continue. That way you can at least make an informed choice about whether to continue on that path, rather than one day notice where you are and realize you don't know the way back. |
I actually have told my friends and family about my experiments with tulpamancy. I told my parents a few months after my tulpa became 'vocal' and I warned my close friends before I started to keep an eye on me and let me know if I started acting delusional or my personality started to shift.