Tulpas
Aleks TK
...Where to start with tulpas?
The concept comes from buddhist mysticism. Early Buddhist texts reference ‘thoughtforms’, beings or objects conjured through sheer mental or spiritual discipline. In modern times tulpamancy refers to the practice of forming seemingly sentient autonomous personalities which coexist within the meditator’s mind, manifesting as chronic hallucinations.
More than just imaginary friends, phenomenon can be better compared to a controlled form of dissociative identity disorder. The tulpa interacts with the host through waves of emotion, raw thought, and speech in the form of auditory hallucination. More advanced practices involve visualizing the tulpa’s form and imposing it into the surrounding environment. As well as physical manifestations, lucid dreaming, allowing a tulpa to possess the host’s body. Think Tyler Durden from Fight Club.
Modern communities tend not associate the concept with mysticism, rather seeing tulpas in terms of cognitive psychology. There are dozens of web forms where members share guides on the creation and maintenance of tulpas. Keeping journals of their experiences and sharing theories about the underlying mechanics of the phenomenon.
I have always been incredibly skeptical of dissociative personality disorder. I initially dismissed claims of tulpas, ‘headmates’, or other forms of DID as cases of overactive imaginations combined with delusion and mental illness. However experiences of other members of PsychonautWiki, as well as my own first-hand experience with tulpamancy, has forced me to re-evaluate these positions.
To create a tulpa one begins by choosing a personality and form. The form need not be human, and the personality does not need to coincide with the host’s. The tulpa can be a human or dragon or rock or have any other characteristics the host imagines, and the more specific and detailed, the better. However, as the community frequently warns, as tulpas grow they often diverge from these initial parameters.
The host then engages in ‘tulpaforcing’, which involves interacting with the tulpa in different ways. During these initial sessions the point isn’t to make the tulpa ‘do’ anything. The interaction begins as entirely one-sided. My own tulpa started as a subtle presence, a kind cluster of thoughts I was aware of and would interact with for an hour or so on a daily basis.
Eventually I started feeling pressures on my scalp when engaged in this process. I learned that this was a very common experience when tulpaforcing. I started receiving emotional ‘echos’ during my interactions with the tulpa. Eventually these emotional echos became distinct thoughts. Not quite words, but concepts and images, always of a very alien and foreign nature. Like they were clearly not ‘me’ in a way that is difficult to describe.
Eventually my tulpa began moving itself in my mind’s eye. It was able to speak in simple phrases, then coherent sentences. Its personality and form began to solidify, and its actions began outright surprising me. By this point my scalp noticeably buzzed every time I interacted with it, like a painless headache.
Five members of our community have experimented with tulpas. All to a fair degree of success. Our experiences match a consistent trend between each other and the tulpa community as a whole. One of our members, KayTwo, has been interacting with her tulpa for several years, and they have reached a fairly advanced stage.
She has been performing some advanced ‘switching’ techniques and has occasionally blacked-out when her tulpa takes control of the body. I find this phenomenon very interesting, and although I would be uncomfortable claiming that tulpas are ‘real’ in any way and not simply a product of the imaginary. However it is interesting to speculate on the implications of the brain being able to form a ‘second-self’.
We have around 25 people on our mailing list right now. Most of them are from the AGI mailing list, but I think a few of them are from the tulpa.info community. I would like to start a discussion about other people’s experience with tulpas, as well as any theories about their underlying mechanics from a cognitive psychology point of view.
For more information I encourage you to look up the PsychonautWiki article on tulpas.
Links:
[https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Tulpa]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/wiki/faq]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/wiki/guides]
[https://community.tulpa.info/]
-- Aleks TK (PsychonautWiki.org) [I am not a member of the staff]
Ben Goertzel
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PsychonautWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to psychonautwik...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to psychon...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/psychonautwiki/5618663B.7030601%40riseup.net.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
http://goertzel.org
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
Aleks TK
I suspect something similar may happen when exploring the fourth jhana in samatha meditation, otherwise known as "siddhis". Apparently when cultivating incredibly strong concentration one can cause all sorts of hallucinations including out of body experiences (I suspect astral projection is probably very similar to lucid dreaming), apparent contact with autonomous entities, seeing chakras and auras, and other strange things.
Mapping out these altered states of consciousness for myself and documenting my experiences is one of my main goals for the next year. I'm about to start a thread about it.
KayTwo, can you tell us more about your experiences with Ashley?
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/psychonautwiki/CACYTDBdD%2BjOaswT0Saz87PbU0PFOwO9u2TEveo8DBa-LvHQ5UA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
-- Aleks TK (PsychonautWiki.org) [I am not a member of the staff]