No, the feels are good.

Well for visualisation what I'd do is try to remember something I'd seen before. Like a place, or even easier, a scene from a film or a picture or something, or maybe just stare at your hand, then close your eyes and recall what you just saw.

It's still visualisation, but you don't have to construct or conjure or hold anything, only remember. It's essentially the same as using reference images, which are stupendously helpful.

As an example of how you'd use this, what you'd do to get brushing your tulpa's hair or mane or whatever is find a close approximation of that that you can use as a reference. So maybe it's a gif of some pone getting that brushing action, be it a blue one or some other pastel colour. So you recall that with your eyes closed - or open, if you want - and then substitute your own relevant stuff on top of what's happening. Hell, if your visualisation is shite then this is easy: if you can't make out the details in the first place then all you need to do is make like it's your tupper. And there you go, you're brushing your tulpa's hair in a sort of cheating but still legit sense.


Again, I don't know what Sands and others have given you already for this. But my top points for visualisation are always
- open-eye
- references
- move around
so I guess if any of that is new then there's that.


I don't know you well enough to suggest things that you'll find fun. Go crazy and play monopoly with your tulpa. I don't know, really, but there's probably something out there that you'll enjoy. It doesn't have to 'count as forcing' or whatever, it doesn't have to be an 'exercise' or an 'activity', just something that you both enjoy doing.

Narrate all day every day.

New post because otherwise no-one will read this important information. But check the above post too, especially the HTML/CSS documentation because I think it's pretty neat.

30/12/2013:
Added a "Spam Sucks" button at the bottom of the Headline (default) theme. It links to a form for spambots to fill out that adds them to a spambot IP database, so don't go filling it out yourself.

Well, you start by picking something that you want to do. And then you do that. Meanwhile, you can also do other tulpa-related things.

Here's a list of things to do:

• Personality
  
• Form
  
• Narration
  
• Parroting/puppeting (if you're feeling lucky/Fedey)
  

Personally, I think the above method is the best because basically everyone follows it and get good results, so have fun.

So it's theory time. I'm going to post most of something I posted elsewhere a while ago, for your reading (dis)pleasure. There is a summary at the end. The below is all my opinion and so on, but I can't prefix everything with "I think" without rendering it completely unreadable. And on readability, I've tried to break it up, and underline different theories for clarity.
All of these ideas assume a more or less conventional theory of mind, and none have been tested empirically as far as I know. Also, I know there are far more viewpoints out there that are't covered here but I think a lot of the big ones are.

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Taking a black box approach, functionally, a tulpa is capable of conscious thought, or at least a very good imitation of it. In normal conversation they will generate responses to your communications in a way that is unconscious to you; not only are these responses convincingly sophisticated but also more or less consistent with a personality separate to your own. Moreover, this personality is not necessarily as expected by the host, as countless experiences of deviation and such will tell. You could argue that instinctive responses are not conscious and that this is all a tulpa can do, but I think experience does discount this too.


A lot of people say that [conversations with] tulpas are either (1) self-generated responses that we label as not us, or (2) entities (and responses) created entirely by expectation. I don't think these ideas make a whole lot of sense when considered with the previous paragraph in mind.

For example, if the second idea were true then a tulpa would not be able to differ from the host's expectations. More formally, for no conscious thought to occur on behalf of the tulpa their actions must be pre-calculated (somehow) and thus expected by the host, since otherwise these actions will have been generated unconsciously. However, tulpas can and do respond in ways that are not expected by the host, which disproves the idea. Given that, I think it's reasonable to say that tulpas do possess some sort of conscious capability.

For number one, you have the issue that if a tulpa is unconscious to you but generates conscious thought it is a stretch to say that it is still 'you' in the first place. If you hold onto the view then it becomes a semantic point of where 'you' end in your mind - and not, in my opinion, a sensible one - rather than a question of psychology.

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This conscious capability does not have to be consciousness as in 'true', philosophical sentience, nor does it even have to resemble conscious thought inside the black box. Therefore, without opening the box I think there are two separate approaches to take:


The first is that tulpas do possess conscious thought. It goes rather like the commonly-stated idea that you "split off a part of your own consciousness", although not phrased that badly. The idea is that you make part of your neural machinery for conscious thought (this is hypothetical, sure) unconscious to you. This then becomes governed separately to you, i.e., while it still generates responses, it is no longer influenced by your personality and instead receives its own.

There are a few issues with this view, I think. Firstly, it supposes a distinct 'conscious thought' structure in the brain which is not only not wholly tied to your own awareness, but can be modified, non-trivially but without too much trouble, to form two separate structures that (at least one-way) do not interfere. Secondly, it supposes that this structure is also distinct from personality, such that it can be uncoupled from it or reassembled to exclude it in favour of another.

For these together I think there are two solutions. One is that you 'create' a new personality and thought structureyou merely personify existing aspects of your psyche. I said "psyche" so I think you know where this is going. Carl Jung's ideas about archetypes are quite useful here. Jung said that unconscious factors affecting our personality could be identified as essentially distinct sets. The main one of interest here is the anima; given that the majority of hosts are male I can be sexist like he was and neglect the others. Put simply, the anima is the feminine side of a man, but more precisely it is the influences that take effect when dealing with women. In personifying it and giving it voice, you appear to create a female personality which can react fundamentally as it did when wholly unconscious, but to you and in a more human-like manner.

Again, this idea is not without its problems; mainly, it does not account at all for hosts with tulpas of the same gender. An extension of the archetypes might account for this, but would not quite be in keeping with Jung's original theory: the masculine side of a masculine self was, of course, conscious. Nevertheless I prefer this model to the first, not least because it is grounded in accepted psychology but also because the actual creation - the personification - has a fairly strong precedent in said psychology.



The second is that tulpas do not possess conscious thought, but rather, an imitation or simulation of it. This approach in general is vaguer and therefore more justifiable. Plus, you can pick and choose unconscious processes to be a tulpa, so it's more fun to consider. My personal pet theory is that tulpas are products of empathetic machinery: you (need to) have a way to predict the actions of others and empathise with them, which requires some sort of estimation of their mental processes, done unconsciously. Expectation of a response from an as-yet unformed tulpa pushes your empathetic framework to estimate behaviour, as would happen in real-life interaction. Repeating this strengthens the structure, and so on, eventually being able to generate responses clearly and easily.

As always, there are problems, principally that people do not generally empathise with their tulpas as strongly as would be expected. Despite this the model fits with what works for creation as well as others do, and fits in the seemingly overwhelmingly powerful factor of expectation neatly. Moreover, the neurology of empathy is of much interest to the scientific community, and concepts such as 'mirror neurons' are of much help fitting the model in with the brain itself.

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Another thing I want to mention is the oft-quoted "tulpas are like you but in your head"

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Lastly, all of the above, as I said, supposes a fairly standard theory of mind. If we go beyond, we are given even more freedom at the cost of any substantiation. For example, we'll assume that rather than consciousness being active, it is merely a passive window onto 'conscious' thought. Now all that is required to create a tulpa is to shift this 'window' in such a way that we become aware of other, latent fields of conscious thought that we mark as existent and personify. It fits the facts, for sure, but that may be because it has essentially no grounding in anything approaching accepted theory and is therefore vague or malleable enough to fit anything. Nevertheless, such things are worth bearing in mind. It's not like accepted theory is all that strong in the first place.

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To summarise, I prefer to keep options open and support a range of different theories, as none of them are without flaw and none of them have been tested empirically. I think highly of the idea of a 'personified unconscious', or 'thought simulation' models, and I dislike the conventional "another consciousness, end of story" idea because fast/multiple tulpas breaks it for me. I also don't think it's reasonable to say that "tulpas are just illusions", although the specifics of such propositions may render them more sensible in my eyes.

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_{And Sands if you say "a miserable little pile of secrets" you'll be banned from this thread forever.}

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That does not mean that they couldn't have done it themselves, given practice. Although, you are right in mentioning the person with the tremors. It might be as you say, but it could also be that the means of possession cuts out the tremor somehow (I'm not familiar with the neurology).

That's what I'm interested in. It could be something the person would have done themselves; but, they didn't. So what is it about tulpas that makes them able to 'figure this out' while the host is unable to?

This is just speculation, but your tulpa is different to you; different abilities, viewpoints, and so on. So going by your suggestion, it is simply that the tulpa is, more or less coincidentally, able to overcome the tremors by ability that could equally have been inherent in the host. Or that a tulpa is more able to counteract these effects by nature unspecified (what you were going for, I guess).
I'm not sure about that, though. I think it's more to do with the mechanisms of possession and how they interact with the tremor - again, I'm not familiar with the neurology.

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You might be right, but I don't agree with you completely. It might not be entirely true that tulpas derive all their experiences from the host. Many tulpas report 'sensory sharing' or similar. And you did narrow down to sensory experience specifically, whereas anything related to the body could equally be a factor.

This is slightly confusing: in my definition, all reports of the body coming to the host are done so through senses, acknowledging the fact that there are more than the 5 standard senses. Proprioception is a sense that is commonly ignored, but it might be the most important one in regards to this discussion. What else related to the body is not obtained through the senses?

It's not about obtaining through the senses but through the host.
You said:

Until they learn how to switch, tulpas don't experience a psychosomatic sensation. They receive the impression of one from the host.

which means that (until switching), a tulpa won't have any sort of direct sensory connection to the body. I was giving accounts against that specifically, although the evidence isn't all that strong.

'Sensory sharing' during possession, or otherwise? I'm assuming that all sensory information that comes in is processed through the host first, even during possession, where both parties may be technically experiencing the sensation. However, maybe this is a false assumption. I wonder if there's any possibility of setting up some sort of test where this could be measured? Or just give me more information, as this is an important point.

Not specifically possession, though I suppose it would be most evident there. It is your assumption that is questionable, I suppose. As far as sensory processing goes, there's nothing to really suggest anything for or against it, to the best of my knowledge.

About a test, I suppose one would require the host to be 'zoned out' - visualising, really - with open eyes, so that the host is ignoring their senses while these senses are still available. Alternatively some other form of sensory ignoring might be more reliable, if available. I can't think of any. Given that, any tulpa could (attempt to) take information from the senses and relay it. Here I suppose some possession would be useful for reliability.
Anyway, if done correctly and one's tulpa could relay information from senses that the host is not paying attention to (while the host is in control of the body), that would disprove your assumption.

It's the Freudian model, so it's not exactly the height of credibility.

Anyway, if you're saying that computer code is fundamentally similar, in terms of logic, to human thought, conscious or unconscious, then I really think you're wrong. I don't know how much experience you have with either computer programming or psychology, but I'd like to see some basis for this assumption, if you have any. I know Hayles said it but I haven't read her paper and I'm not planning on paying for it. But it's a paper on English literature, so I wouldn't take it too seriously.

And your unconscious mind isn't made accessible by your tulpa; it's still unconscious. If you're thinking about tulpas manipulating vitals, we don't hear about that too much and you can do it yourself. About 'repressed memories', repressed memories are bullshit. Parallel processing doesn't have anything to do with this, as well. I can tell you I haven't seen an example of a tulpa doing something that you can't do yourself, given some practice.


Look, I know roughly what you're trying to say but I don't know why you're saying it. I'm going to pick a few quotes from you that I think are wrong.

Specifically, in example, consider a thought experiment. Compare the process of programming a code to the process of creating a tulpa. What are the differences between the two? The most immediate difference I can think of is that programming takes much less time for the code "to take", if you want to state it that way. The code can evolve and gain a sense of sentience, but only if you program it to, similar to a tulpa. It opens up the question of what is "true" sentience and loads of other philosophical nonsense which I'm sure you all would love.

No, the two are completely different. When you write a program, you lay out a set of processes formally and get a computer to do them. When you make a tulpa, you think of something as distinct and pay attention to it until it talks back. I don't know where the similarities begin for you, but if your computer code "evolves and gains a sense of sentience" then you're either a brilliant or a very poor computer scientist.

Are there not specific methods of tulpamancy that are widely documented here as guides? How is following a guide for tulpa forcing, parroting, possession, etc. different than using pretty little birds and flowers? I'm sure most of the community would agree that the guides are faster than just figuring it out, otherwise the guides wouldn't exist.

There are guides of some sort for more or less every activity in existence. Here is a website with various guides about windsurfing. I don't think that there being guides for making a tulpa makes any sort of point for you here.


Basically, you're drawing links without telling us why, really. Your only motivation seems to be "Because it would be cool if it were so", which is not very good. Lastly, why did you say "psychosomatic"? That word refers to interaction between the mind and the body.

So do I, but unfortunately I can't make that happen. Be happy I made the banner work like that, at least.