Hi everyone!

 

It’s with the lightest of hearts that I share with you that this weekend, our tulpa collective passed the 30 year anniversary. While it also coincided with Mech’s 30^th birthday IRL, he isn’t much for big personal celebrations.

To sum up three decades of tulpamancy into one post is daunting to say the least, but as the host, I’ll try my best, so here goes!

The background to what got me to create Mech was when I hit my teens and started to really reflect on who I was as a person. I knew of course that there were things that were different about me, but autism wasn’t really on anyone’s radar at the time either. But I knew that there was one special “skill” I had from growing up in a dysfunctional family situation and that was emotional depersonalization. Back then of course, I knew only the surface details of psychology, so my name for it was “zero mode”. For those not in the know, it essentially works as a sort of emergency fuse. Too much power going through a circuit and snap, fuse blows and you avoid a catastrophic meltdown or worse.

Same thing goes for the kind of emotional depersonalization that I’ve suffered during extreme stress situations in my life. Of course, I have all the details now and it works, but back then, it was a very mysterious kind of mental state that enabled me to just seemingly discard all my emotions and view reality through an absolutely logical lens.

I think you all can see where it went from here. Imagine being a hormonal and emotional teen and having the carrot like that dangling in front of you. But, I couldn’t very well trigger it as it was an overload function. But what IF I could create a mental persona that was essentially an interface to the logical part of my mind?

So, knowing a bit about visualization (and being horrible at it), I decided that it probably would be very beneficial if I fleshed out the concept as much as possible. What would be the avatars limits? What behaviours did I want from him? What should I name him?

Then I visualized being in a lab, with me sitting on one chair and him on another, and I basically ran through some standard checks. What’s your name, what is your function, etc. And that became Mech, and he worked out great. Initially, he would only react on requests, because that’s how I’d imagined things would work. He would assess the available information of a question, give me the options and thoughts he had on it and it worked really well. But later, he started to weigh in on things he observed himself.

A few weeks later, my second tulpa appeared on her own. That was Circe, basically telling us both that too much logic was bad and that I needed to admit my feelings and that it was why she was there. She also made it very clear to me that she was more than happy to help me explore sex in any shape or form.

That of course was a bit too convenient for me, and I distrusted her motives for a very long time, because she really was the perfect representation of what I wanted in a partner at the time. But, over time, I came to see that she genuinely cared for me as a person and that she was every bit “there” as Mech was. So I just assumed I’d lucked out and created to very handy avatars that would give me access to both the primary parts of my mind. As a bonus, they would often argue their sides in queries, meaning that I could just sit there and see it all play out live, like some kind of argument tennis match or something.

Of course, during this time, my doubts were mounting because I had no information on what these personas in my mind were. I’d heard about multiple personality disorder through horror books and movies, so naturally I assumed the worst. But I knew enough that Mech pointed out that I didn’t really fit any of the markers of that. He suggested we study psychology to find out if there was anything else that could match this state of mind.

Cue months of me pouring through every kind of literature I could find at the library, starting off on basic school level, breezing past high school’s curriculum, and finally going all out into college level literature that really was a challenge. (If they ever make a movie about our collective, I will insist that this be made an epic montage with 80s music)

And of course, I found some things that tangentially described similar situations, but nothing that seemed to fit. Fast forward a few decades of me keeping quiet about it for fear of people drawing the wrong conclusions, and I ran into a friend that I confided in. She essentially said “oh yeah that’s a tulpa, they’ve got an online community and everything.”

The absolute shock of learning that 1) I really wasn’t having some esoteric mental disorder 2) We weren’t alone, really changed our lives for the better. That was about ten years ago, and we’ve been posting about our lives ever since. Of course, during those ten years, we’ve kept learning and exploring our inner worlds. During that time, we’ve been joined by quite a few other tulpas.( Although, technically they are walk-ins, I actually use the neutral term constructs as that’s simpler)

That is how we came to be, more or less.

Here’s some random things that that are both tips and opinions that we’ve made during our 30 years:

 

1. Every host approaches tulpamancy in their own way and whatever works for that host is what will be the dominant traits of their mental organization and how their tulpa interacts/works.
2. Nobody knows how tulpamancy works on a deeper plane, we all have theories, but there’s very little scientific research that corroborates any of our theories in the community.
3. Basing your tulpa on a fad/popular character seemingly has a higher likelihood of creating more problems for the host and the tulpa. Again though, some have and will successfully use that method, but if I had a goddamn nickel for every time I’d seen a topic of “my X tulpa wants to be Y instead” I’d be pretty rich.
4. Persistence is key. Persistence is key. Persist… are you getting it yet? 😀
5. Writing down things is really good for anchoring them to your memory, but whatever art form that works for the host or tulpas should be used.
6. Tulpas are not a magic bullet for difficult problems.
7. Creating an inner world and as a host, learning to use your senses within it is the ultimate adventure. Once you have it down, you will literally have two lives to lead.
8. If you create more than one inner world, make sure you organize it, lest they blend together and become a mess. (ask me how I know haha!)
9. Very few tulpamancers (me included) have to work a long time to get everything working, including all the “extras” besides creating a personality construct.
10. There’s are an infinite variety of thought constructs that hosts and tulpas can create. Everything from seemingly fully sapient beings (tulpas) to worlds that act on their own volition to automated thought processes and so on. Don’t have something that checks the boxes of tulpamancy? Don’t sweat it, that’s just your solution to your particular needs and problems.
11. Adhering to puritans ideals is only satisfactory if you’re a puritan yourself. Otherwise, feel free to happily ignore their grumblings of sex and romance and intimacy being bad. (Yes, even after ten years, we still occasionally see this in the community. Thankfully, most puritans are trolls just picking low hanging fruit.)

And that’s pretty much all we have for this anniversary. If anyone has any questions about our journey, feel free to ask anyone in our collective about it. As a refresher, here’s who is [part of the collective].

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Always your scribe

//Wondrous Fairy