📰 Faq - Tulpas

A tulpa is believed to be an autonomous consciousness coinhabiting a brain with their creator, often with a form of their creator's initial choice and design. A tulpa is entirely sentient and in control of their opinions, feelings, form and movement. They are willingly created via a number of techniques to act as companions, muses, and advisers.

By talking to and fleshing out a personality in your own mind for a sustained period of time, you'll begin to receive responses from that prototype personality. These responses can take many forms, but usually begin as a "reply" to your own thoughts, whether verbal or a sort of emotional sensation. Over time, these responses will grow more coherent and varied, including in ways that may surprise you, and the personality in turn will fill out and grow without your aid.

Having a tulpa is a form of non-clinical plurality that does not impede your mind or body.

Your tulpa is designed to be their own being, and not a clone or copy of you. They may take wildly different or comfortingly similar stances and beliefs to yourself.

Over time, a tulpa can learn to control your body just as your own mind does, and you can share control or entirely switch places, leaving your tulpa in control of your body and yourself as a passive observer, and switch back as and when you see fit.

Consciously deciding answers and thinking them in response is known as 'parroting', effectively putting words in your tulpa's mouth. While it's something to avoid when your tulpa is sentient, it can be an extremely useful creation tool - after all, tulpas created accidentally from fiction writing were essentially parroted into existence.

When you get a more surprising response, a response that comes without any input on your part, you'll know it's really them.

Your initial plans or ideas for a tulpa may be altered by influences both within and outside, and once your tulpa has clear independence they may change themselves further. Some tulpa end up almost exactly as initially designed, while others end up changing beyond recognition as a result of these collective alterations.

Provided the relationship is healthy as a relationship between any other two individuals, and it does not monopolise your time and interfere with your social life with others, a romantic relationship with a tulpa can be perfectly workable.

A mindscape, also known popularly as a wonderland, is a mental environment created in the host's mind where the host and tulpa can interact visually with eachother, without the need for the host to impose their tulpa into their physical environment.

A mindscape/wonderland can be imagined in such a way that large areas of it are undefined or lack clarity. Traveling within the environment outside of areas you've consciously defined can lead to a subconscious, dreamlike generation of environments and landscapes. This has been known to provide interesting and exciting activities for tulpa and their creators alike - it is quite literally letting your mind wander.

In terms of personhood, an alter is not "less" than a tulpa, nor is a tulpa "less" than an alter. While there do exist alters who are fragmentary in nature, who consider themselves parts of a whole, this does not mean that all alters are "just fragments" or consider themselves parts--many are their own Person as much as any host is. Treat any alter you encounter--including those who are fragmentary and/or consider themselves parts--with the same decency and respect as you would any tulpa, host, or other individual.

Tulpa development is thus not appropriative of multiplicity, but another variation on the experience of being multiple, which in itself is a variation on being human.