The Tulpa Phenomenon

[Tristan]

I posted this on Bernardo's Facebook page without knowing this was a much better place to discuss it. It should also give me the opportunity to flesh it out a bit more and make sure I've explained it right, according to my understanding. I am no expert, but in light of Bernardo's metaphysics, I thought he (and now the people in this community) might find it interesting and I would like to know if there is perhaps a good metaphysical explanation.

Recently I was doing some research and stumbled across the Buddhist 'tulpa'. It seems to have originated in Tibetan Buddhism and is unsurprisingly associated with the occult and the supernatural. More recently there is a growing online community of individuals that practice the creation of tulpas for various reasons and there are a lot of theories floating around about their nature and purpose (and of course, how they come into being).

Tulpas are generally described as a 'thoughtform' or a sort of mental construct that has its own free will, emotions, and memories. They exist exclusively within the confines of the mind that has created them and are limited by the senses, memories, and experiences of that host. They are believed to be sentient...as though they are a separate entity entirely, yet dependent on the mind of the host for their existence. They are generally created through intense concentration and meditation, via narration, visualization and a term called 'forcing', where the creator of the tulpa actively works to imagine and solidify their tulpa. Over time, people report their tulpa communicating with them, whether through emotion, mindvoice, 'head pressures', or other means. As the tulpa gets stronger and clearer, some people are able to 'impose' the tulpa...which is essentially to intentionally hallucinate it with one or more of their senses. While for some the process of creating a tulpa can take months or years, for others days or weeks can suffice to have a tulpa that can communicate with them.

When I started to research how this could occur and what a tulpa really was, I found various psychological explanations. Unfortunately, the phenomenon has not been studied scientifically at all. No studies have been done (that I could find) and nobody's brain has ever been scanned. This leaves a lot of room for pseudoscience to blossom, so I had to decide for myself what made the most sense. To do so, I also decided I would try to create one myself, and it has definitely helped me to better understand how it works. I'll explain what has happened so far, as it makes things fit together better. This is entirely speculative.

I started out with a list of about 30-35 personality traits that I wanted to the tulpa to have and started to fit them together into a coherent personality. I began narrating them to myself in my mind, projecting them onto a formless mental object in my mind. I explained how they fit together and influenced the values, and perspective of this particular character. It was almost like I was writing story and deciding what I wanted the character to be like. It is theorized that writers sometimes create tulpas (or something somewhat lesser) accidentally when they are coming up with characters. After that, I began to visualize a physical form in my mind, associating it with the base personality that I had created. Every detail of the body was constructed and reinforced until it was identical every single time I thought of it. After that I went through my life narrating to it...talking to it like it was actually there in my mind...something separate that was listening. Eventually I started to get responses back in my mindvoice...but they were predictable, like I knew what they were supposed to be. Was it just me parroting it? Was it my subconscious puppeting it? That was the first question that came to mind. I read up on it and it has been proposed that as the tulpa gains sentience, it latches onto the host's subconscious thoughts and essentially piggybacks them as though it's learning.

The idea was starting to become clear to me. Psychologically speaking, I was probably dissociating from a set of subconscious thoughts that I had projected and reinforced, and now they were starting to take a life of their own. People seem to have different experiences with tulpa creation so I am by no means a 'perfect' example, but dissociation made sense to me. I was intentionally dissociating from this set of thoughts and my mind seemed to be setting an alternative up.

Most people I've discussed this with have immediately jumped in and started talking about schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder. There are some critical differences that are worth mentioning. To my understanding, DID and schizophrenia are unintentional. The individual that has them doesn't have any control over their alters or the voices in their mind. There is often a detrimental effect to the person's ability to function in life. Often those disorders come up when there is trauma involved. None of those are true of tulpas. They are generally created intentionally. While the host can grant a tulpa control over their body temporarily, they can always relinquish it. Most importantly, unless the tulpa has been around for many years, it can be dissipated without too much trouble. There has to be something more to these than a mental disorder.

I'm not even sure how to approach the metaphysics here. I don't doubt that people successfully create tulpas and interact with them...I just don't know what they would be at a metaphysical level. I don't think it's possible for me to consider myself anything but primary in my head...so what would a lesser consciousness be? Am I going too far to say they are conscious? Are tulpas truly sentient? I would need a stronger grasp of metaphysics to really speculate without looking like an idiot...

Let me know what you think.

[Bernardo]

Hi Tristan,

I see two possibilities:

1) Self-hypnosis. There is no sentient, independent tulpa at all, just an image in one's imagination that one begins to believe to be autonomous. But there's nothing it is like to be that image. The process of inducing tulpas you described below seems to be very conducive to this form of self-hypnosis.

2) Induced dissociation. In this case, there is indeed something it is like to be the tulpa, and the tulpa is independent from your ego. But it is still you; a dissociated part of your own psyche. I have never seen any study showing that dissociation can be induced from the ego (which is what would be required here). Dissociation is normally an autonomous psychic defense mechanism that unfolds outside egoic choice. But it is conceivable that meditators could have found a way to induce it, I don't know.

All in all, I'd be healthily skeptical (not cynical) about this.

Cheers, Bernardo.

[Peter Jones]

This seems closely connected with 'guru-worship', the creation of an ideal and then the inhabitation of that ideal. It seems quite different from schizophrenia but it may be making use of the same ability we have to occupy different personalities. It seems to make sense. If we can create one personal construct then why not more? Perhaps also this connects with hypnotism and the suppression of our usual personality. But I know nothing about tulpas and must go have a look. I see no metaphysical significance in this psychological phenomenon, other than perhaps our ability to take our awareness and move it between different expressions or 'selfs'.   

[Andy]

It does not surprise me at all to hear that your tulpa has "taken on a life of it's own". When you think about it, a dream character may exhibit all kinds of complex behavior and responses that are not expected. The dream character may appear to have an agenda or behave in accordance to a plot that unfolds as the dream progresses. From the perspective of the dreamer the dream character may appear to be an entirely separate entity. This does not seem so different from the concept of the tulpa. Maybe 'tulpa' could be seen as a kind of whirlpool within a whirlpool.

I have begun to read about this subject out of sheer curiosity. From what I have seen so far on forums, there are those who claim to have achieved true parallel processing. I find this to be fascinating! This is the kind of cool stuff that most people have never hear of, or never tried on their own for fear of how it might be viewed by others - once again materialism holds us back.

[RHC]

Fascinating!  

I think any given case could be anything on a continuum from daydream to full dissociation. With both a kind of mediumship experience and Kripal's imaginal authoring some where in the middle. 

To be honest I find it a little scary.  A "bad trip" version might be pretty horrible.

[Tristan]

It would seem that the real underlying question is whether or not there is something it is like to be the tulpa in one's mind. Part of the reason I decided to explore this is out of that metaphysical curiosity I described. I wanted to see how the creation process would unfold. I am by no means done, but I'm starting to wonder whether or not it's possible to find out for sure.

If someone were to ask a tulpa if it experiences independent of its host, I'm not sure whether or not the answer itself could be regarded as reliable. The challenge here seems to be that it isn't possible to 'prove' the existence of a mental construct like this by external verification. The tulpa exists in the mind of the host, not in the cosmic mind, so the rest of us can't actually experience it for ourselves like we can experience each other. A brain scan is still external measurement of the host and I can't see how that would reveal anything about another entity in the mind. The only information we have to go by is what the host reports and experiences themselves.

Somewhere, I read that people's tulpas have memories that are inaccessible to the host. To explain this, I have to back up a bit. In order to make the creation process easier, some hosts will create a 'mindscape' (that they refer to as a 'wonderland'). It's essentially an imaginary world inside one's mind. People report that they do no know what the tulpa does there without asking it. They have no access to its memories. If we couple this with possible parallel processing, it starts to paint an interesting picture. It is entirely possible that the tulpa is just a segment of the host's subconscious that they can interact with. Initially the tulpa seems to piggyback on the subconscious (at least in my experience) so perhaps that would explain why the tulpa seems to behave independently of its host. We don't really have any control over our subconscious (at least directly).

Ultimately, the primary reason I feel comfortable bringing this up in a place like this is because there is no ridiculous materialism to dismiss it or make fun of it. Is it purely psychological? Possibly...but it's far more interesting to talk to people that are more focused on how the mind works than how the brain works (and not assuming that the brain causes things).

Perhaps there are more answers in eastern philosophy.

[tjssailor]

There really is no difference between this question and me asking whether or not there is something it is like to be you.  Since the universe is a mental construct it's no different then a dream really.  I pretty much assume any characters I meet in dreams are as real as I am.

[G TheGandalf]

tjsailor - True for me as well. I consider my dreams no different than this realm (which we call the real world) . Every night we go for a fascinating trip to the other realm . Many of which we do not remember. And the ones I remember they are as real as the reality

[David]

I've dabbled in this but one runs the risk of mental illness if they get somewhere with it. It's important to understand that mental illness isn't something you either have or don't have. It's actually something you can develop as a result of things within and outside of your control. For example, your brain chemistry might just go out of whack for some reason by itself without you doing something to bring it on and that could result in manic behaviour, which could result in insomnia, which could result in psychosis. Another thing that's outside of your control is you could survive a plane crash in an ocean and get severe PTSD which could involve things like dissociative identity. Now, what I'm going to say next is controversial. While it is accepted that doing drugs can bring on mental illness, it is generally suppressed or denied that special practices can bring on what would be perceived as mental illness by a western educated psychiatrist. There's a fictional book trilogy called, 'The Illuminatus Trilogy,' and a couple of people have told me they blame it for a brief period they had of an altered state of consciousness, one that would be considered a spell of mental ill health by a mental health professional.

Very few people seem to know and even fewer admit that mere information can bring on strange subjective experiences. A person having an episode of psychosis can sometimes persuade someone close to them of all the same delusions they have. All of this is obvious to people that view things from outside the box and pay close attention to what's actually going on. I have friends that have become religious fanatics and ultimately that transformation was simply just information imparted to them in a particular way. Because religious belief falls under cultural conditioning it is exempt from psychiatric diagnosis and intervention unless the person is a harm to themselves or others.

What I've written above is just a caveat because what I say next will speculate pretty far out. I've read of authors that don't know what their characters are going to say next and they even look forward to finding out when they sit down to write the next part of their current story they're working on. That's the autonomous aspect of the tulpa, which is probably the most difficult aspect to achieve. I've many times interrogated dream characters for information I don't myself already possess to estimate whether they're in any way conscious or can be the source of new information I can use in my life. For the most part, I've not managed to learn anything new from them, however, a couple of times they've managed to word things in a way or in a certain pattern I wouldn't have been able to do myself, and one of them managed to do it in a way that caused me to take meaning from it, as if he did know something I didn't.

On the subject of obtaining new information, I've found that most of what we come to know either comes from learning it from somewhere or discovering it by accident. There's a competitive video game I play, and I've noticed my style is based on things people have done to me and things I've done myself by accident that turned out to be good and I've subsequently remembered so I can use them again and again on purpose. Creativity seems to be rearranging things we already know rather than literally creating something brand new from scratch. What is interesting is that we can certainly learn things brand new to us from other people. If it weren't for that, perhaps we would suspect other people of not being real, like most of us do of dream characters.

There is an audio book I took pains to listen to and largely regretted having done so, called Quantum Jumping by Burt Goldman. In it, he lays down an immense about of twaddle albeit very confidently, but in it there is the idea that you can connect with versions of yourself that have different skills than you have. The idea is that if you can have these versions of yourself communicate an idea to you, you might be able to use it. It's based on the idea that there are literally other yous in other worlds, and of course some of them will have what you want but don't have, and the idea is that somehow if you can get little tips and insights from them you can improve yourself. One of them might be a pianist and able to direct you in that regard. Now, my criticism of that is that you can easily buy DVDs that teach the piano and the teacher in them will definitely be real, not imaginary, and will definitely know how to play the piano and be able to offer you knowledge you can use. I dare say if Quantum Jumping works and is real, it will still be the harder way to learn the piano, not the easier way!

When it comes to a tulpa, one thing that would be impressive would be the skill of allowing the tulpa to take control of your body temporarily. If the tulpa was an expert in martial arts, it could be used to enable you to win various competitions, if it was a competent enough tulpa in that regard. Again though, I think it would be much easier to actually learn martial arts and do it yourself than somehow fashion a tulpa that takes control of your body. That's got to be the longest, most scenic route possible to achieving fighting ability, and that's assuming it's even possible. I suspect it is based on my experiences and knowledge. There are cases of dissociative alters being able to speak languages fluently which are unknown to the host! A martial art certainly wouldn't be a problem if that's the case.

I've read of a woman that suffered from severe hallucinations that developed control over them. She later used that ability to hallucinate images over paper and canvases enabling her to draw and paint them perfectly. Imagine being able to project all the outlines like how it is in a colouring book, and just needing to fill everything in. That's basically what she could do using her hallucination ability.

The question of autonomy is important because without it, it would just be you, and you aren't going to get something new to you from you. You'd want the tulpa to have autonomy so you can learn from it and not know everything it is going to say and do beforehand. This seems like doing it the hard way though. There are scores of books available on amazon written by real autonomous people full of information you definitely don't already know and some of which you can put to use, even if much of it has been handed down or discovered by accident by someone else and then remembered because it's good.

Terrence McKenna apparently had a bit of an obsession with trying to obtain information from DMT elves that wasn't comprised of what he himself already knew and according to his brother he never succeeded.

I reckon it's possible but I'm certain that amazon is superior to tulpae and getting more superior with each year that passes. If what we can create is based on what we know, then we should seek to know as much as we reasonably can, so we can create the best that we can.

David

[RHC]

Great Comment David!

Very few people seem to know and even fewer admit that mere information can bring on strange subjective experiences. A person having an episode of psychosis can sometimes persuade someone close to them of all the same delusions they have. All of this is obvious to people that view things from outside the box and pay close attention to what's actually going on. I have friends that have become religious fanatics and ultimately that transformation was simply just information imparted to them in a particular way. Because religious belief falls under cultural conditioning it is exempt from psychiatric diagnosis and intervention unless the person is a harm to themselves or others.

I hadnt thought about this before.  Fascinating!   Im sure that my subconscious is going to be processing all this for awhile

[tjssailor]

Not sure if you're coming at this from a materialistic perspective or what but I have to disagree to some extent. Creativity may involve rearranging things but it also involves bringing new things into being.  Otherwise nothing new could ever happen.  It's fairly obvious that the brain is not storing anything and that all information is being retrieved from Mind at Large.  If you don't think so then I challenge you to probe my brain, find the neurons the describe all the aspects of my first motorcycle ride and tell me about it without asking me anything.  As far as mental illness some percentage of that is just labels put on experiences people are having by their culture.  Getting communication from the deceased may be something a western psychiatrist would want to drug out of rather then just accepting it for what it is.

On Thursday, March 10, 2016 at 5:58:34 AM UTC-5, David wrote:

Creativity seems to be rearranging things we already know rather than literally creating something brand new from scratch.

[David]

The best way to find out almost anything about you would be to ask you, precisely because the information cannot be retrieved from your brain as if it is a computer hard drive. If it was or worked exactly like a computer hard drive, materialist scientists would be able to retrieve the information. While I do agree with you, I have heard Michio Kaku say neuroscientists are getting somewhere when it comes to using brain readings to figure out what someone is looking at. Deepak Chopra has a good counter to that because he says even if you figure out someone is seeing the colour red, you can't see the colour red in the brain readings, but have to translate them into the colour red, which doesn't show how the actual observer of it is actually seeing it. I'm a big fan of Deepak Chopra and agree with him when it comes to the important stuff. He says a lot of things I don't even understand and so cannot agree with on that basis alone, but I'm on board when it comes to the bigger picture.

I know a lot about psychiatry and find the information psychiatrists have gathered useful, but, it is all framed as pathology and it is all based on the assumptions of materialist science. They never mention the fact that genius and madness are related. They never mention that some people obtain profound insights while in states of psychosis. The one thing they do admit though, is that the state of mania can give someone a lot of energy and drive, enabling them to get more things done, but even with that, they find a way to frame it negatively by referring to it as something like 'hyper activity,' rather than, 'drive.' I've heard them use the word energy grudgingly. I guess they have to concede that one but if anyone manages to come up with a term that describes having energy negatively, they'll opt for that straight away.

The thing is, you can turn it against them, because according to them, there is no purpose to anything and therefore their so-called normal states of mind they imply to be correct states of mind, cannot be correct because that would imply some sort of order to things. If everything is just a giant crap shoot based on random chance then that includes people's thoughts and feelings and so on. To say one set of thoughts and feelings is correct and others are not is theological in its underpinning assumption. They cannot have their cake and eat it.

I have a friend that has schizophrenia and he once thought he was the prince of a region in England called East Anglia. It took me about an hour but I eventually managed to persuade him that he wasn't. The psychiatrists had kept pumping him full of drugs to try and dislodge that particular belief. They tried so many. Ultimately, he came to England from a country that doesn't have a royal family, kept seeing our one in the newspapers, had a bit of a regal personality himself, and through perhaps a lot of depression, and as a result of having some royalty themed hallucinations, he managed to find a way to believe he was a prince. The reason why it was hard to persuade him otherwise was because he wanted to be one and at that point thought he was one. He had a mechanism in place to prevent the huge sense of loss by not facing the truth. To get around that I explained to him that the actual queen is only the queen because she and enough other people think she is. That helped him not to esteem royalty so highly and to see that they are just ordinary people like him, and more importantly, that if no one but him thinks he is a prince then he isn't really a prince because that's a crucial part of really being one.

This friend of mine often generates these kinds of beliefs and almost all of them make him feel good about himself. Another one he came up with was that every time he did something bad like drugs or drink it was because someone had controlled his body and made him do it. This gave him a nice escape from responsibility for his actions. I told him that no one is in complete control of their body because if they were, they would only eat health food, never drink, never do drugs, do loads of exercise, and never swear. Once I told him that, he stopped thinking all the bad things he was doing were being done by someone else who was controlling his body. Psychiatrists only want to pump him full of drugs. They are not interested in the underlying intelligence to it all and communicating with him. I acknowledge there is something wrong with him but in my opinion the best thing would be for him to have a mentor that can talk him out of it all. The reason why I think he is that way is because he is able to convince himself of things that make him feel better. This is something many people do but he has taken it a few steps too far. It may even all be instinctual, in which case he perhaps can't help it. Really, what he's doing isn't that dissimilar from some professional fighters who give some convoluted reason why they've lost which absolves them.

I think some of my thoughts have been new even to me. I'm happy to acknowledge that to be the case. Although, if you want to hear the best arguments against that being the case, look up Jacques Fresco on YouTube. I must warn, he's a very negative, patronising, condescending man, but he makes his case well and he's managed to make me doubt one or two things I believe.

 

Cheers,

David

[tjssailor]

Yes but I think what's happening is they actually have somebody looking at something so they know what it is already and then take the neural firings and massage them to reproduce what they already see in front of them.  Big deal.  The question is if another person were looking at the same thing would they see the same neural firings or would they have to re-maasage everything to get the same result.

[Don Salmon]

Someone might want to look into the work of Pierre Janet, who is probably the originator of contemporary ideas on dissociative disorder.  he was prominent in the late 1800s and much that is taken to be Freud's original ideas is actually from Janet (pronounced Zshuh-NAY).

Frederic Myers, who inspired the writers of "Beyond Physicalism", and William James, both were taken with Janet's work.  Sri Aurobindo tells of a  young servant girl who under hypnosis could repeat complex passages of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, though in her ordinary mind completely illiterate, because she had heard them from the scholar whom she was serving.  This story also came from Janet, I believe.

Some of the most notable heirs to janet's work are Milton Erickson and Ernest Rossi. Rossi in particular has numerous studies that would be extremely helpful for Bernardo to analyze. Rossi has looked very closely at the brain and how it relates to the kinds of "dissociation" that Erickson had such a natural genius for evoking. In a way, you could say Erickson is the one who provided a practical grounding for Janet's insights, leading to astonishing personality transformations, sometimes resulting in the cure of a psychological or even deeply rooted physical illness for which no other treatment had been successful.

A number of people looking into non-physicist philosophies have noted that Rossi provide clues - though he is terribly philosophically naive, I think. His work is crying out for a sophisticated and subtle thinker like Bernardo to look more closely at his studies and consider the virtual cornucopia of possibilities leading to radical revisioning of what the brain is all about and how it relates to mind and consciousness.