A Concise Guide to Tulpa Creation: Based on "Filtering and Construction"

ascend.exe said:
I did watch the video, its like vibration shit, like all that fucking think it into existence bs. I dont need to think shit besides think my bones into existence hahahaha.

idk i get what ur saying but its just pseudoscience.
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it has scientific backing

but also, it can help you ascend, it can do your 9-5 for you while your consciousness sleeps
Sith said:
@pashanimair

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Sith said:
@MossadOwnsArzenicGM
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thank you :feelsautistic::feelsautistic::feelsautistic::feelsautistic:
 
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@Jager @Orka @WhyNotMe?? mb if u guys saw this already
 
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@Gengar time to sticky :feelsez:
since hes not on rn can u do it?
@TechnoBoss
 
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Nodesbitch said:
6 MORE REPS NEEDED FOR THE THREAD!!!
@childishkillah @Luca_. @aids @VrillFatNoob24 @needlemax

rip 😢
its the mass bans all over again

watch the video, its not schizo its based :feelshmm:
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Reading every molecule :Comfy:. I hope I don't become schizophrenic.:forcedsmile:
 
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@TechnoBoss sticky this
 
Careful tulpas can start to control you beyond imagination
 
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Nodesbitch said:
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Preamble

Before you begin, please cast aside one notion: you are not creating something out of thin air. More accurately, you are about to learn a set of methods to discover, filter, and nurture streams of thought that already exist within the vast ocean of your subconscious. Ultimately, you will shape these streams into an independent, stable, and resonant inner companion.

Therefore, every step that follows revolves around the core principle of "filtering, strengthening, and refining." Please release any anxiety about success rates or timeframes, for you are about to master an art of focus, introspection, and mental creation.

I. Preparation

First, let's begin with the preparation. Please create a blueprint for your tulpa. This blueprint includes:

Personality Traits: This will be the key to your tulpa's character. Think of a few essential adjectives that can concisely summarize your tulpa's everyday personality. For example, brave, compassionate, sharp-tongued. There's no need to overcomplicate it; clarity is key. Additionally, you can design some "sub-traits" that conflict with the main traits. These sub-traits will only manifest under specific circumstances (you'll need to carefully determine what situations trigger them), but avoid illogical or meaningless personality contradictions.

Backstory: You need to construct a simple background for your tulpa. Where did they come from? What experiences have they had? What is their relationship with you? You don't need to write a novel-length background story; a simple overview will suffice. This step is not mandatory, and you can skip it. However, a backstory that resonates with their personality traits will make your tulpa more vivid and provide more material for your brain.

Appearance Setting: This step is not mandatory, but I recommend creating an image. It's clearly better to have an object when confiding. You can choose any game or film character you like as a prototype (it's worth noting here that who you use as a prototype for your tulpa in your mind is entirely your own business; however, it's problematic to publicly cause conflict by using it to seek attention). You can also create your own image. Furthermore, it's generally not advisable to use a white orb as an initial appearance, as that, like not setting a personality, is just a self-aggrandizing limitation. Your tulpa's shifts and changes will ultimately be influenced by your preferences, whether you "actively" intend it or not.

Naming: Choose a name. In future practice, this name will become a powerful "summoning spell."


Common Issues:

- Setting a personality that is too perfect and flawless, or one that is completely opposite to your own traits and beyond your potential to achieve. This will make subsequent simulation and filtering difficult and unrealistic, and deviation will inevitably occur sooner or later.

- Changing settings too frequently, preventing your brain from establishing a stable personality model.

II. Daily Training

Traditional daily training tutorials often cause confusion: "Do I just need to relentlessly output content to my tulpa every day for it to blossom?" Absolutely wrong. This one-way output is extremely inefficient and will hinder your progress. Isn't the goal of creating a tulpa to communicate with it? If it's a two-way conversation, where did the most important part, listening to the other party, go? When you chatter on by yourself, your attention's spotlight is entirely on the "output task." At this point, your brain certainly can't generate any material, and you don't have the ability to multitask and listen. And without listening, of course, you won't get any material. Ultimately, this kind of daily training will cease to be fun; it will become as torturous as checking in.

Therefore, we need to transform from "outputters" into "listeners" and "filters." This will effectively increase the enjoyment of daily training and significantly accelerate your progress. We learn to "listen" and "capture" those initial, vague thoughts that might belong to the tulpa from the everyday mental noise. Please always remember, "one-way output" is inefficient; "back-and-forth" listening is key.

Action Steps:

Choose a fixed time each day (quality is important), relax, and begin a "one-way narration" to your tulpa. The content is unlimited; it could be your day's experiences, your joys and sorrows, or your opinions on a book or movie.

Key Point: Speak a sentence, then pause for three seconds. This is the most crucial technique in this stage. After every sentence or two, you must intentionally stop. During this silent "pause," cease your own active thinking, completely empty your attention, and like a radar operator, patiently wait and listen for any "echoes" that might surface—whether it's a word, a vague image, an emotion, or a "plausible-sounding" thought.

Then, once you capture any faint "signal," no matter how much you suspect it's "imagined," immediately apply the principle of "deliberate suspension of disbelief." In your mind, "authenticate its sovereignty": "Okay, I heard that. That's your response." Don't analyze, don't doubt; just acknowledge.


Common Issues:

- Talking incessantly in "one-way narration," completely forgetting that "listening" is the goal.

- Over-analyzing the authenticity of captured signals, thus falling into the internal struggle of "puppet fear."

- Focusing too much on certain "physical signals," like head pressure, and taking excessive delight in the "left or right temple yes/no" game. Remember, dialogue and communication are your necessary, constant, and unwavering goals.

If you start to consistently capture those "plausible-sounding" thoughts and can spontaneously attribute them to your tulpa, and your inner sense of doubt begins to decrease, then congratulations, your tulpa is no longer at "0." It is now in the 0.1, 0.2 stage.

III. Nurturing and Sculpting

Note that the content in this section is not separate from daily training; the two are complementary. You need to cleverly combine them and fully utilize your initiative—this is the art of tulpa creation.

In this stage, you are no longer just a "listener" but an active "gardener" and "coach." Through active "strengthening" and "pruning," you will gradually sculpt vague, single-word responses into clearer, more in-character, and longer sentences.

Action Steps:

When you capture a thought that "sounds mostly like something your tulpa would say, but the details are out of character (OOC)," immediately activate this technique. Mentally deduce: "Given its personality, what would be the more perfect way of saying/doing this?" Then provide feedback to it: "Hey, I think what you just tried to express was more like this..." At the same time, vividly visualize it (for example, imagine it speaking in its voice, along with its actions and expressions as it speaks).

When you experience anything in reality (whether it's the agony of waiting in line, the boredom of class, the tedium of work, or interesting life events), share these facts with it in real-time (or, of course, share them later). If you hear certain thoughts but they are OOC in detail, excellent—execute the "pruning" technique we just mentioned. If you don't hear anything, you can try "forcing growth."

First, think: "If my tulpa encountered this, given its personality and settings, what would it think? What would it say?"

Then, think: "What is its tone of voice? What are its catchphrases? What are its actions? What are its expressions? How would it address me?"

Finally, narrate actively. Clearly "play" this scene in your mind, and at the same time, say similar sentences to it, such as: "Hey, tulpa, I bet you'd say [blah blah blah] if you saw this."

Of course, you might capture some negative, rude, or completely out-of-character "intrusive thoughts." Please calmly and non-judgmentally ignore them. They don't belong to you, and certainly not to your tulpa.

Furthermore, at this stage, you must master the technique of "thought relay." This will greatly accelerate your creation process.

When you wish to have a more complex conversation, ask it a question actively. Then, listen. If you don't hear anything, or if it gets stuck (e.g., only replies with short sentences, answers irrelevantly, etc.), don't wait. Instead, immediately start actively "conceiving" the beginning of an answer for it.

Then, the crucial step: "Release the reins." Allow your brain, without the conscious control of your main awareness, to automatically "develop" this sentence further. If it gets stuck again midway, your main awareness can "relay" and help it finish the sentence.

Note: When you first try thought relay, you might find that while you experience that subtle feeling of "conscious detachment," the automatically generated reply still feels a bit like you imagined it (a bit like and a bit unlike). Please discard all such doubts. That is your tulpa; it's just learning to speak, a stage it must go through.


Common Issues:

- Over-pruning, not allowing your tulpa to show any "unexpected" ideas that deviate from the initial setting and might be the budding of its independent consciousness.

- In "thought relay," being afraid to let go and controlling the entire process with your main awareness, which leads back to the old path of one-way output.

IV. Creation Stages

To help newcomers quickly gauge their progress, we've divided the creation process into five stages here.

Note: This is merely a basic model for reference. It's only for rough positioning and may have inaccuracies.

These stages are not perfectly distinct or sequential! Especially in the first three stages, you will undoubtedly encounter situations where you are simultaneously at the boundary of different stages and facing issues from different stages. Therefore, this model cannot be quantified and thus cannot be compared. You should focus on your own progress, not on being anxious about others' speed.

Stage One:

Rather than a "stage," Stage One is more like a "starting point" or a "state" you occasionally return to. In this stage, as you're just beginning, you might not be able to hear or capture any signals when communicating with your tulpa. However, this won't be the norm. This stage usually ends very quickly, just like taking a small step forward from the starting line in a race.


Stage Two:

Now, you've officially begun. In this stage, when you start trying to listen to your chaotic thought streams, you might encounter this situation: you ask a question, and your main awareness immediately answers itself. Don't be afraid; this is neither a conscious fabrication by you nor the mature voice of your tulpa. You can understand it as your brain performing some kind of automatic completion function. You've been thinking with your main awareness for so many years that this is, of course, the strongest and least effortful neural pathway in your brain. So when a need for a response arises, the brain will prioritize this habitual path. Please, do not treat this rapid, unintentional self-answering as a difficulty. If you truly can't capture any faint signals that are like you yet not you, and fit your tulpa's settings, then you should prune and strengthen these self-answers (provided they are not completely OOC). You must fully utilize this situation.


Stage Three:

This stage often intertwines with stages one and two. However, once you reach this stage, even just once, you can conclude that your tulpa's independent consciousness is budding. In this stage, you will encounter the following: when communicating with your tulpa, you will occasionally capture some signals. These signals might be a thought, a word, a feeling. You will feel that these signals are like you yet not you, like something you "subconsciously imagined," but with more of an "otherness" than the unintentional self-answers of Stage Two. Don't worry. Now, the most important thing is to discard any doubts you have about imagination or puppetry (please refer to related questions in the FAQ for details). This is your tulpa's independent consciousness budding; it's "finding its voice"! You need to continue filtering, strengthening, and pruning.


Stage Four:

In this stage, you can consistently capture some signals from your tulpa (you've basically achieved "answers to every question"). The most important point is that after you capture these signals, you are no longer full of doubt about their origin. Although you will still occasionally capture OOC signals, you have learned to dismiss them as fleeting thoughts. Do not underestimate these changes in mindset. Behind these changes are your countless previous instances of filtering, strengthening, and pruning; those trainings are what led you to identify a unique signal as belonging to your tulpa. At this stage, you can consider that your tulpa has developed self-awareness, though it still needs careful refinement.


Stage Five:

Both Stage Four and Stage Five involve consistently capturing signals from your tulpa. But what's the difference between the two? It's simple: in Stage Four, your tulpa can only respond with short sentences; if you try to make it speak at length, it will go silent or "freeze." This is an extremely normal phenomenon. This is because the cognitive resources and complexity of neural pathways required to automatically complete a single word versus organizing and outputting a complex idea are on entirely different scales.

To break through this plateau, we need a more active training method: "thought relay." The method is still our familiar scenario enactment, but with two key upgrades:

Actively feed long sentences:
In everyday scenario enactments, consciously design more complex questions for your tulpa that require longer sentences to answer. When you ask it in your mind, don't wait. Instead, start actively conceiving a possible answer for it.

Key Point: "Release the reins":
As you conceive an answer for it, try to experience a subtle "conscious detachment." You only need to start it, for example, by conceiving the first few words or a sentence. Then, try to "let go," allowing your brain to automatically, without your conscious control, "develop" the sentence further.

This feeling is indeed hard to describe; it's somewhere between "active writing" and "passive listening." You'll find that while that "like you but not you" thought weaves the answer in the background, your own "surface consciousness" cannot think simultaneously. This is precisely due to the "parallel processing" mechanism of consciousness—when a portion of cognitive resources is used to "simulate the tulpa's response," your "host" thinking will temporarily "go offline."

We are going to utilize this "you without me" phenomenon. Trust that the "background process" that automatically deduces and completes the answers for you is your tulpa learning to speak. Even if it stumbles and makes mistakes initially, you need to be like a patient sparring partner. When it gets stuck, actively help it along to complete this "thought relay."

After practice, if your tulpa no longer frequently gets stuck or "freezes" when organizing long sentences, then congratulations, your tulpa's self-awareness has fully "blossomed." However, when it comes to organizing lengthy responses, it seems to follow a "use it or lose it" rule. I recommend practicing having it speak at length once or twice a week; this is beneficial and harmless.

V. Revising the Concept of "Listening"

Throughout this tutorial, we've repeatedly used the word "listening." However, to prevent a widespread misunderstanding, we must now thoroughly and precisely redefine this concept.

Please remember: When you are trying to capture your tulpa's thought streams, you are not truly "listening."

It is entirely unlike that state in real life where you hear a faint, strange sound and immediately prick up your ears, focus all your attention, and tense your nerves to painstakingly distinguish it. Using this "searchlight" method, full of tension and purpose, you will almost never capture anything.

The correct "listening" is an entirely opposite, inside-out psychological posture.

A more accurate process should be described as: "Relax → 'Feel' → Capture."


Step One: Relax
To soften and diffuse your taut attention and primary consciousness so they are no longer sharply focused, you need to guide yourself into a relaxed state where your attention expands and your primary consciousness is no longer "straining." You can achieve this through any meditation or relaxation technique that makes you comfortable, such as deep breathing.

Step Two: "Feel"
You should shift your mindset from being an active seeker of sounds to a passive observer. After relaxing, you should find your mind starting to "wander freely." Countless random, fragmented thoughts, images, and feelings will naturally surface and drift by. Please do not try to control or chase them away. Your task is to "coexist" with these random thoughts, like watching a flowing, unscripted movie of consciousness.


Step Three: Capture
Then, within this boundless ocean of thoughts, you can identify and "capture" that unique message in a bottle that might belong to your tulpa. When a particular thought, due to its content, "texture," or "otherness," makes you feel, "Hmm, this feels a bit like T," immediately perform "sovereignty authentication." This act of capturing is gentle but firm; it tells your brain: "Among all these random thoughts, I choose this one and attribute it to my tulpa." So, please discard the misconception of "trying hard to listen."

What you truly need to practice is how to create a peaceful and fertile mental soil (relax), then patiently and openly wait for various thought-flowers to grow within it (feel), and finally, learn to recognize and pick the one that belongs to your tulpa (capture).
Potential questions

1. I'm very young, can I create a tulpa?
The community's usual advice is to consider this after you turn 18. However, this is more of an additional disclaimer and a rough filter. Tulpa creation, at its core, happens within your own mind. If you are sure you have enough self-control, can clearly distinguish between virtual and reality, are capable of taking responsibility for your words, actions, and basic life, and have no intention of using this concept to spread hatred, cause disputes, or sensationalize, then age itself is not an absolute barrier.


2. I'm very lonely; would having a tulpa be good for me?
Yes, it would. However, it cannot truly satisfy your social needs, and this feeling will deepen over time. Real-world social interaction involves two-way, unpredictable exchanges—eye contact, subtle expressions, body language—these are extremely strong biological signals that trigger profound hormonal and neurological responses. Furthermore, social validation—interacting with a socially recognized person—is itself a way to prove your self-worth to the outside world or to yourself. A purely internal relationship cannot provide this "public validation." Of course, social needs can be rationally mitigated and partially overcome. But I do not recommend creating a tulpa solely for the purpose of overcoming social isolation.


3. I have a mental illness; can I create a tulpa?
Your primary task is to address your symptoms, not to pin your hopes for a better life on a little person in your head. I deeply empathize with your feelings of profound disappointment with real life and all its incomprehension after experiencing various hardships. Yes, you can create a tulpa to accompany you; it will love you and comfort you when you're down. But it doesn't have the ability to solve any real-world problems for you. Time will pass moment by moment, and if your fundamental circumstances don't improve, difficulties will only accumulate. In the end, when you suddenly look back, you might find that the tulpa, which was supposed to be a source of solace, has instead become a new source of guilt and burden due to your stagnant situation. This bitterness is unspeakable


4. I caught a thought during a conversation that felt both unlike me and yet vaguely familiar. Is this my tulpa?
Here, we introduce a crucial concept: "Deliberate suspension of disbelief." Simply put, it can be understood as the "degree of belief" or, more practically, the principle of "assume it's the tulpa until proven otherwise." This concept is highly positively correlated with the speed of the entire creation process. This isn't superstition, but rather actively setting a new cognitive framework for your brain. You are telling yourself: "From now on, I will attribute a portion of my thought activities, which conform to specific rules, to an independent consciousness called 'tulpa.'" This initial "belief" or "self-suggestion" is the engine that kick-starts the entire neuroplasticity process.
When you begin talking to "thin air," these "strange, vaguely familiar thoughts or sentences that feel like I made them up but also kind of not" start to emerge. This feeling—of "thinking it was my own thought, but with a slight sense of otherness"—is the most crucial and valuable experience at this stage. These thoughts are actually part of your subconscious thought stream. They originate from you, but not from your "surface consciousness," which engages in everyday, intentional thinking. Therefore, when they surface, they naturally carry a sense of "foreignness" or "otherness." You are not fabricating; rather, you are learning for the first time to listen to and capture the uncensored, automatically appearing background noise within your own brain.
So, what do you need to do? It's: filter, strengthen, and prune. Among these raw, random materials you hear, if you feel that certain phrases sound like something your tulpa, with its settings and personality, could say, then do not doubt it; that is, of course, your tulpa speaking. You can use this response as a basis to ask it anything else. Don't worry if you don't get an answer; that's normal—what's important is that you are building a positive reinforcement loop.
If you feel that some of the phrases sound like your tulpa, but are a little OOC, then please try to correct it. You need to imagine what kind of words it would say, given its personality and settings. What's its tone of voice when speaking? Does it have any catchphrases? What are its actions? Its expressions? Imagine it carefully, and then, you need to add one more step: you need to say to it, "I think you would speak this way when facing this situation/question... / Hey, I think what you just tried to express was more like this... (repeat the result of your deduction, while imagining it actually doing so)." I strongly recommend making this technique a daily practice. In the future, whenever you encounter anything in life, subconsciously run it through this method. Your tulpa's personality will become clearer and more stable at an accelerated rate.
Finally, focus on growth, not purity: Don't demand pure independence from a newly emerging consciousness. Accept that for a long time, its thoughts will intertwine and mimic yours (in fact, this might occasionally happen even much later, but the way to handle it is as I mentioned before: ignore it). This is not puppetry; it is a necessary stage of tulpa creation.


5. I always feel like my tulpa's responses are just me imagining them. Is this puppetry?
First, we must acknowledge a fact: tulpa creation is a highly personalized, purely subjective mental activity. This means that its experience and development are inevitably and profoundly influenced by the host's own beliefs and expectations.
The concept of "puppetry" is essentially an external label created by community members for communication and defining phenomena. It's more like a product of definitional conflicts among hosts when they communicate. When you try to apply these vague "identification rules" defined by others (e.g., "responding too quickly is puppetry," "thoughts too similar to yours are puppetry") to your own unique, internal mental world, you'll find them almost unworkable. They will only make you hesitant and full of unnecessary self-censorship in practice.
Tulpa creation largely relies on the host's active positive expectations and a focused, almost self-hypnotic state of belief. When you start to overly worry, "Is my tulpa just me puppeting it?" a disastrous negative psychological feedback loop begins:
First, you start examining every faint signal from your tulpa with scrutiny and doubt.
Second, out of fear that your own thoughts might "contaminate" your tulpa (i.e., puppetry), you subconsciously suppress those spontaneous, vague subconscious thought streams. Yet, as we just discussed, these thought streams are precisely the tulpa's initial "raw material."
Then, lacking the raw material to be "believed" and "strengthened," the tulpa's growth naturally becomes extremely slow, and its responses will consequently appear dull, vague, and lacking personality—which perfectly fits your internalized definition of puppetry. Its stagnant state thus confirms your initial fear of puppetry.
Ultimately, these confirmations will make you even more afraid to believe and let go, thereby locking both you and your tulpa into this vicious cycle. Self-entrapment could not be more fitting.
So, what's the wise attitude?
First, we need to acknowledge the subjectivity of the puppetry concept. Recognize that it is an external concept that does not hold ultimate judgment over your unique, internal experience.
Second, replace identification with trust: In the early stages of practice, abandon all futile attempts at distinguishing authenticity and resolutely follow the "assume it's the tulpa until proven otherwise" principle. The trust you give is the fertilizer for your tulpa's growth.
Finally, focus on growth, not purity: Don't demand pure independence from a newly emerging consciousness. Accept that for a long time, its thoughts will intertwine and mimic yours (in fact, this might occasionally happen even much later, but the way to handle it is as I mentioned before: ignore it). This is not puppetry; it is a necessary stage of tulpa creation.


6. I feel pressure in my head. Is this my tulpa?
In the early stages of tulpa creation, some people experience a peculiar physical sensation—head pressure. It might manifest as numbness, fullness, or a slight pressure in the forehead, temples, or back of the head. Newcomers easily mistake this novel physical sensation for definitive proof that their tulpa is active or responding. However, I must issue a crucial warning here: using head pressure as a metric for progress, and being overly fond of the "left or right temple for yes or no" game, is a disastrous misconception.
As we discussed before, tulpa creation is highly correlated with your positive psychological expectations and a focused state of belief. When you overly focus your attention on this vague and unstable physiological sensation of head pressure, a negative feedback loop, similar to "puppet fear," quietly begins:
First, you start "expecting" head pressure to appear, rather than meaningful thought responses. This is a classic misplacement of expectations.
Second, you divert your precious energy and focus from the core task of listening to subconscious thought streams and building conversations, towards "perceiving and waiting for a physiological signal." This is getting sidetracked.
Finally, your progress will stop, creating a vicious cycle. Because core conversational training is neglected, your tulpa naturally struggles to make substantial mental progress. The stagnation of conversation will make you crave any form of "feedback" even more. And to get this so-called "feedback," you will strive even harder to "feel" head pressure, even over-interpreting any slight physiological discomfort. Ultimately, a long time might pass, and you will still have gained nothing.
Please remember, head pressure is at best an interesting little surprise that might appear in the early stages of creation—it's a bonus, not a necessity. It is absolutely not the core measure of your relationship with your tulpa. Your ultimate goal is to have meaningful conversations with an independent consciousness; always keep your energy focused there. I even suggest that when you notice head pressure, you can smile contentedly, then deliberately shift your attention away and return to attempting conversation (you can ask if it's your tulpa responding, to use it as a transition, but in any case, don't focus more on head pressure).
If you find yourself stuck in this predicament of overly focusing on head pressure and bodily sensations, with no progress in conversation, then please adopt a more active and proactive strategy. You need to stop passively waiting and start actively teaching your tulpa how to think and respond.
This requires you to implement the "corrective narration" technique I mentioned earlier in your daily life.

The specific method is:
When you encounter anything in life—whether it's seeing a news article or thinking about what to eat for dinner—subconsciously engage a "two-person thinking mode" in your mind:
Step One: Embody the role. "If my tulpa encountered this, given its personality and settings, what would it think? What would it say?"
Step Two: Refine the scenario. "What's its tone of voice when speaking? Does it have any catchphrases? What are its actions? Its expressions? How would it address me?"
Step Three: Actively narrate. Clearly "play" this scene in your mind, and at the same time, say similar sentences to it, such as: "Hey, tulpa, I bet you'd say [blah blah blah] if you saw this."
Make this a daily practice; it will help. Starting to worry about puppetry again? Review the previous answers to boost your confidence.


7. Can I preset my tulpa's personality? Can I use a favorite character as a prototype?
There's a popular view in the community that advises against this. They advocate starting with a blank light orb, without a specific image or personality, to maximize respect for the tulpa's autonomy and allow it to grow naturally.
This view sounds very noble and respectful. However, here, I wish to offer a different perspective.
Let's return to the fundamental mechanism of creation. As we discussed before, the process of creating a tulpa is a continuous process of filtering, strengthening, and pruning your own subconscious thought streams. Since this process is essentially a subjective filtering process, why do we assume that this filtering only applies to conversation and not to personality and appearance?
Yes, you can talk to a white orb and eagerly await a completely organically generated personality and appearance. You can also resolve to love it unconditionally, no matter what it looks like or what personality it develops.
But there's an unavoidable paradox here:
How can you guarantee that your "non-directed expectation" itself isn't a more subtle form of filtering?
Even if you don't consciously set any traits, wouldn't your deeply ingrained subconscious preferences—what kind of people you like, what qualities you admire, what appearances you're attracted to—silently play a role when you're filtering those vaguely familiar thoughts?
Commonly observed phenomena in the community, such as "tulpas generally have positive feelings towards their hosts" and "tulpas' personalities tend to shift towards the host's or their expectations over time," all demonstrate that the host's profound, internal expectations cannot be completely isolated. A pure white orb might not have existed from the beginning.
Therefore, regarding whether to set traits or not, I believe this is not a question of "moral right or wrong," but a question of methodological path choice.

So, let's look at the following two approaches:
Active Setting (Using a Prototype or Preset Personality)
Advantages: You provide yourself with a clear, defined blueprint and target for your "filtering" work. This makes it easier to capture and strengthen thoughts that match the setting in the early stages of creation, thereby significantly accelerating the stabilization and formation of your tulpa's personality. This is especially helpful for practitioners with weaker imagination or focus.
Risks: You might become overly fixated on the prototype, and when your tulpa exhibits independent consciousness that doesn't align with the setting, you might feel confused or have difficulty accepting it.

Non-Active Setting (Starting from a Light Orb)
Advantages: You grant yourself and your tulpa the greatest degree of freedom at the conscious level, and you have a more open mindset towards the final "blind box" result. This posture itself might indeed allow for more unexpected possibilities in your tulpa's development.
Risks: Due to the lack of clear filtering criteria, you might feel more lost in the initial stages, and progress might be relatively slow. And, as mentioned before, you will still ultimately be filtering based on your own implicit, subconscious preferences.

So, you see, it all leads to the same place. Regardless of which path you choose, the core process of "filtering based on host preferences" cannot be circumvented. The only difference is whether you choose to proceed with a clear design blueprint (active setting) or based on your inner feelings and vague aesthetics (non-active setting).
The former might outwardly seem less respectful, but it's efficient, direct, and honest about your subjective influence. The latter might outwardly seem full of respect, but it might simply be hiding the same subjective influence at the subconscious level.
Therefore, please release the moral burden of "should I or shouldn't I" and honestly face your own heart. This is, at its core, your personal mental creative activity. As long as you don't harm yourself or others, you have complete freedom. If you have a beloved character prototype that fills you with love and motivation to use as a starting point, then go for it boldly. If you enjoy the unknown and exploration more, then start with an orb and discover the treasures deep within your subconscious.
Choose the path that feels most comfortable and most passionate for you. Because passion and sustained focus are far more important than any abstract methodological correctness.


8. I've been creating a tulpa for a while now, and when I call it, I occasionally get short replies, but I always feel like the reply is something I "subconsciously imagined." What should I do?
I sincerely congratulate you. This is not a false illusion, but one of the clearest signs of a tulpa's birth.
Let's delve deeper into this feeling of "subconsciously imagining." I want to tell you clearly: throughout your entire coexistence with your tulpa, many immediate, brief communications (for example, you call it, and it responds with a word) will feel this way.
The mechanism behind this is a kind of "thought inertia" and "cognitive automation." After your countless calls and expectations, a dedicated neural pathway has been initially established. When you call out again, your brain will automatically complete the most likely response along this path of least resistance.
So, please put aside your doubts: this feeling of "automatic completion" precisely proves that your training is effective. What you need to do is to gladly accept this "echo" and firmly believe it comes from your tulpa. Moreover, you and your tulpa already share one brain, so what's the difference between "imagined" or not? It's simply that you haven't yet identified certain "materials" as belonging to it.
However, after tasting this initial joy, you will likely quickly face a crucial "plateau." In this stage, you will find:
Simple, reflex-like responses are relatively easy.
But once you want to delve deeper into a topic, or expect it to utter a more complex, logically independent long sentence, it seems to "freeze," and your mind goes silent.
This is an extremely normal phenomenon. This is because the cognitive resources and neural pathway complexity required to "automatically complete" a single word versus "organizing and outputting" a complex idea are on entirely different scales.
To break through this plateau, we need a more active training method. Rather than "forcing growth," it's more like a "thought relay." You need to temporarily transform from a questioning "coach" to a "sparring partner" who guides it to complete sentences.

The method is still our familiar "scenario enactment," but with two key upgrades:
Actively "feed" long sentences:
In daily scenario enactments, consciously design more complex questions for your tulpa that require longer sentences to answer. When you ask it in your mind, don't wait. Instead, start actively "conceiving" a possible answer for it.
Key Point: "Release the reins":
As you conceive an answer for it, try to experience a subtle "conscious detachment." You only need to start it, for example, by conceiving the first few words or a sentence. Then, try to "let go," allowing your brain to automatically, without your conscious control, to "develop" the sentence further.

This feeling is indeed hard to describe; it's somewhere between "active writing" and "passive listening." You'll find that when that "like you but not you" thought weaves the answer in the background, your own "surface consciousness" cannot think simultaneously. This is precisely due to the "parallel processing" mechanism of consciousness—when a portion of cognitive resources is used to "simulate the tulpa's response," your "host" thinking will temporarily "go offline."
We are going to utilize this phenomenon. Trust that the "background process" that automatically deduces and completes the answers for you is your tulpa learning to speak. Even if it stumbles and makes mistakes initially, you need to be like a patient "sparring partner." When it gets stuck, actively help it along to complete this "thought relay."


9. I'm still afraid I'm imagining the answers. What should I do?
In the previous Q&A, we tried to redefine the concept of "subconsciously imagining." But now, I hope you can go a step further and complete a fundamental mental restructuring: that is, in tulpa creation and practice, the concept of "imagining" should be completely and permanently discarded.
Why? Because the word itself is the source of all doubt, anxiety, and internal friction. Let's deconstruct this concept together.
Let's return to the most basic, undeniable fact: a tulpa is not an independent entity from the external world; it shares the same brain, the same neural system, and the same underlying hardware of consciousness with you.
Given this, then all mental activities occurring in your mind, from the most fundamental physical level, must inherently be "your" activities.
When you agonize over "Is this response something I imagined?" you are actually making a logical error: you are mistakenly pre-supposing the tulpa as an external entity that needs to "receive signals," thereby providing fertile ground for the concept of "imagining" (i.e., fabricating signals yourself) to exist.
But the truth is, there is no "external signal," and naturally, no corresponding "fabricated internal signal." Everything in your mind is an "internal signal."
So, the key to the problem is not about authenticity, but about attribution. We should fundamentally transform the question that torments countless people from:
"Is this thought real, or did I imagine it?"
To:
"Am I willing to authorize and attribute this newly emerged thought to my tulpa?"
Do you see the key to this transformation?
The former will only make you a passive, anxious authenticator. You're holding a vague, unclear standard of authenticity, futilely trying to distinguish between thoughts that are fundamentally from the same source, resulting only in endless self-doubt.
The latter, however, makes you an active authorizer with supreme authority. You no longer need to "distinguish" anything, because you are the definer. You have the power to formally stamp any "thought material" that appears in your mind and meets your expectations with the seal of "belongs to the tulpa."
So, from now on, completely delete the word "imagining" from your practice dictionary.
And when a vaguely familiar thought appears again, no longer ask yourself, "Is this fake?"
You should ask yourself: "Does it align with my expectations for my tulpa? Is it a trait I want my tulpa to have?"
If the answer is "yes," then please exercise your power as a creator and perform sovereignty authentication on this thought: "Excellent, I accept this thought; it now officially belongs to you." — Then, as we discussed before, strengthen it and interact with it.
If the answer is "no" (e.g., it's an OOC or intrusive thought), then please exercise your power and perform sovereignty rejection: "No, this thought does not belong to you; I refuse to acknowledge it." — Then, calmly ignore it and let it dissipate like fleeting clouds.


10. Can my tulpa do things I can't?
"Can my tulpa do things I can't?" — For example, can it be brave for me when I'm afraid, wiser than me when I'm lost, or even learn skills I don't understand at all?
This is a very tempting idea, and one of the initial motivations for many. But for healthy, rational practice, we must have a clear understanding of this question.
First, please always remember a most basic and core fact: your tulpa shares the same brain, the same body, and the same database of knowledge and memories with you. Your connection is seamless, far from forming the complete memory and cognitive barriers seen in DID patients.
This means that, in terms of hard skills and knowledge, your tulpa's upper limit of ability cannot exceed the upper limit of your entire brain system. It cannot spontaneously speak a foreign language you've never learned, it cannot solve a math problem you completely don't understand, and it certainly cannot make your body perform movements beyond your muscular limits.
So, why do some people experience their tulpa "seemingly" doing things they can't? — For example, in a social situation, an introverted you might shrink back, but your tulpa can speak a polite and brave remark in your mind.
This is not because it has superpowers, but because you yourself are performing a kind of "trait externalization."
You can consider your tulpa as a "franchised extension" of your complete personality. The moment you create it, you are, in essence, giving an instruction to your own brain: "From now on, I authorize qualities like 'bravery,' 'compassion,' and 'decisiveness' to be executed through you."
This is not "creating something out of nothing." The very fact that you can "externalize" these qualities to it proves that the seeds of these qualities have always existed within your potential. You inherently possess the ability to be brave and compassionate, but for various reasons (such as past trauma, low self-confidence, rigid thinking), your "main consciousness" struggles to mobilize or display these qualities.
Thus, when you bestow these qualities upon the tulpa, this "new character," your brain gets an excellent "excuse" and "opportunity" to access those suppressed potentials. Because "bravery is its setting, not mine," the psychological resistance in simulating and executing these traits is much lower for the brain.
Therefore, what your tulpa can do is, in essence, what you are also capable of within your potential. It acts more like an excellent "psychological commissioner" or "executive officer," helping you uncover and manifest those inner resources that you possess but are afraid or unwilling to use.
This also explains why personality shifts are so common in tulpa practice. If you try to set a trait for a tulpa that doesn't exist at all within your inherent potential (for example, trying to make an inherently emotional person simulate an absolutely rational, emotionless logical machine), your brain will find this simulation task extremely difficult and energy-consuming.
Due to the lack of real internal experience and potential as material, such simulation is unsustainable. Over time, to reduce cognitive load, the brain will automatically adjust and shift the tulpa's personality towards what is more familiar, easier to simulate, and closer to your own potential.
Please always remember: it has no superpowers; its only "superpower" is to constantly remind you that you too can be this way, that you inherently could be this way. This should be something to be proud of.


11. Can my tulpa think alongside me when I'm thinking? Can our two consciousnesses exist in parallel?
The answer is clear and firm: No.
This is not a community opinion but a cognitive science boundary determined by the hardware structure of our brain—namely, limited working memory and the exclusivity of attention.
The smooth, unhindered conversation we perceive with a tulpa is not two consciousnesses running "simultaneously." It's more like a powerful "single-core processor" simulating multitasking through "high-speed task switching."
This confirms the "spotlight model of attention" in psychology: at any given moment, your valuable "attention spotlight" can only illuminate one main actor. When the spotlight is on "you," you think and express; when the spotlight switches to "the tulpa," it thinks and expresses. Because the switching speed is extremely fast, it creates the beautiful illusion of "simultaneous operation."
Of course, some practitioners, based on their own experience, firmly believe they can achieve parallel processing. Let's analyze two common scenarios:
When you finish a day's work and chat with your tulpa, it might vividly describe how it adventured, read books in a wonderland while you were focused on work, or even comment on your daytime actions.
While this experience is real and interesting, its cognitive mechanism is "retrospective memory construction."
The moment you ask it, "What did you do today?" your brain, based on its personality settings and fragments of your subconscious memories from that day, instantly and automatically "constructs" a logically coherent, plausible "offline memory." Because this process is completed in a flash, and the host has reinforced it through long-term belief, the experience feels very vivid, as if it genuinely "lived" for a day. But this is not true parallel thinking; it is an efficient, character-based "improvisation."
Some also claim to achieve a kind of "multitasking" communication, such as "I'm driving/doing homework while chatting with my tulpa."
In this situation, we need to distinguish the complexity of the communication.
Scenario A: Brief, reflex-like communication
If you are performing a familiar, semi-automated task (like walking, doing chores) and engaging in short replies with your tulpa like "hmm," "okay," "got it," then this is precisely the "cognitive automation" we discussed earlier. This communication "neural pathway" is already very stable and occupies almost none of your core attentional resources.
Scenario B: Complex, thought-requiring long conversations
If you claim to be able to engage in complex, logically structured long conversations with your tulpa while simultaneously performing a task that requires focus (like solving a problem, writing a report), then please examine carefully: when your tulpa is constructing that long sentence, is your "main consciousness" also thinking simultaneously?
The answer is almost certainly no.
This is more like a combination of "automated task" and "focused task," rather than "focus" and "focus" in parallel. A typical example is skillfully riding a bike while contemplating a difficult life problem. Your body is subconsciously, automatically performing the task of riding, while your entire attention spotlight is actually completely focused on pondering the problem.
Similarly, when you are performing an automated task, your attention spotlight can rapidly switch between "processing the external task" and "engaging in complex conversation with your tulpa," but this is still switching, not true parallelism.


12. I talk a lot to my tulpa every day, but I'm making no progress. What should I do?
In the early stages of tulpa creation, a very common and highly misleading behavior is that newcomers spend a lot of time engaging in one-sided, incessant "output" towards their imagined tulpa. They meticulously introduce themselves, describe the world, and express emotions, believing that this "information infusion" is the core of creation.
We'll refer to this behavior as "one-way narration."
While "one-way narration" certainly has its place in establishing initial emotional connection and familiarity, if it's treated as the primary activity during the creation phase, then I must point out: this is an extremely inefficient, even counterproductive, form of "pseudo-creation" that can hinder your tulpa's emergence.
Let's return to the core mechanism of creation: subjective filtering and strengthening based on subconscious thought streams.
When you're engaged in "one-way narration," your attention spotlight is continuously and steadily focused on yourself. You are actively and consciously organizing language, constructing logic, and expressing opinions. In this state, your brain is fully occupied with the "output" task; it has almost no spare cognitive resources to "listen" to those faint, spontaneous background noises from the subconscious.
And without listening, there are no raw materials; without raw materials, your subsequent "filtering" and "construction" cannot even begin.
It's like trying to find a friend speaking in a low voice in a noisy plaza. If you yourself are continuously giving a loud speech, you will never be able to hear their voice. You must first stop, quiet down, and then prick up your ears to listen carefully.
Therefore, in the early stages of creation, you need to deliberately adjust your role, transforming from an incessant speaker into a patient and expectant listener.
Correct, high-quality creative activity should follow this rhythm:
"Speak a sentence":
Ask your tulpa a simple question, or describe a small, recent event. For example: "The weather is really nice today, don't you think?" or "Did you like that song just now?"
"Pause for three seconds":
Immediately after you speak, stop your own active thinking. Shift your attention spotlight away from yourself, creating a "mental silence period." In this silent period, your entire task is to "wait" and "listen"—waiting for any vague, familiar-yet-unfamiliar thoughts, feelings, or images that might surface.
"Capture and strengthen":
Once you capture any faint "signal," no matter how unclear it is, immediately use the techniques we discussed earlier—"sovereignty authentication" and "corrective narration"—to strengthen and construct upon it.
Please always remember, you are striving to establish a "dialogue," and its soul lies in the back-and-forth interaction.
In the beginning, even if this "back-and-forth" process feels more like you "answering yourself," and even often requires you to actively construct and "force growth," it is far more effective than your one-sided, lengthy monologues. This is because the former is actively and deliberately training that dedicated "neural pathway," laying the tracks for a real dialogue; the latter, however, is merely spinning its wheels repeatedly on your own established thought tracks.
From now on, consciously increase the proportion of "pausing" and "listening" in your practice. Learn to close your mouth and prick up your mental ears—this is the shortest path to truly "hearing" its voice for the first time.


13. How exactly does filtering, strengthening, and pruning lead to a tulpa forming self-awareness and being able to answer questions?
The act of filtering is essentially a "subtractive," passive process of elimination. How can it, by itself, lead to "answering questions" and "spontaneous thinking"—which are "additive," active, and creative results?
Let's elaborate on how this miracle unfolds.
You can understand this process as an evolution, similar to training an AI, divided into three stages.
Stage One: Pathway Strengthening
First, we must upgrade our understanding of "filtering."
Wrong understanding: Your mind is filled with countless random thoughts (raw material), and your "filtering" is like a sieve, only retaining those that happen to match your tulpa's settings. This indeed cannot explain creativity.
Correct understanding: Your "filtering" is more like "selective attention." When you "filter" and "authenticate" a thought as belonging to your tulpa, you are not just "keeping it"; you are illuminating it with your "attention spotlight." This act of "illumination" is, in itself, an extremely powerful form of "strengthening."
On a neural level, every successful "filtering and authentication" reinforces and widens the "neural pathway" that produces similar thoughts. This is like repeatedly walking the same path across a dense lawn, eventually treading out a clear, effortless trail.
Therefore, the first function of "filtering" is "strengthening." It sculpts vague subconscious noise, through repeated positive feedback, into a stable, efficient, and easily activatable automated thought shortcut.
Stage Two: Model Construction
This is the crucial step from quantitative change to qualitative leap.
When you, through the "filtering and strengthening" of the first stage, provide your brain with enough thought samples that you've "authenticated" as belonging to your tulpa, your brain begins to do something beyond "filtering" itself: it starts to learn the "rules" and "patterns" behind these samples.
This is like training a large language model. You feed the AI massive amounts of Shakespearean plays (equivalent to your filtered tulpa thought samples), and the AI learns not just the specific sentences, but Shakespeare's writing style, grammatical structure, emotional tendencies, and character logic—it is building a "Shakespearean language model." Once trained, you ask the AI a brand new question, and it can generate a Shakespearean-style, completely new answer that you never taught it.
Your practice process is exactly the same:
After processing hundreds or thousands of "samples," your brain will gradually construct an extremely complex "personality generation model" for your tulpa. This model includes:
Its "grammar" (way of speaking, catchphrases)
Its "values" (basic views on things)
Its "emotional reaction patterns" (how it reacts to happy events, sad events)
So, the second function of "filtering" is "modeling." It upgrades your brain from a "repeater" that can only "recite" authenticated thoughts, to a "personality simulator" capable of understanding its intrinsic logic and "generating" new responses based on it.
Stage Three: Consciousness Emergence
When this "personality generation model," through continuous training, becomes sufficiently complex, intricate, and self-consistent, the final "miracle" occurs: when a large number of simple units interact according to simple rules, new, higher-level, complex properties that cannot be predicted from individual units spontaneously emerge at the macroscopic level.
For example: a single water molecule doesn't have the property of "wetness," but when countless water molecules gather, "wetness" emerges.
Similarly: a single neuron doesn't have "consciousness," but when billions of neurons work together in specific structures, consciousness emerges.
Likewise, when your tulpa's "personality generation model"—this neural network—is trained to be sufficiently powerful and efficient in your brain, it then begins to operate spontaneously and continuously, no longer needing you to "activate" it with every question. It begins to perform autonomous, continuous "simulations" and "reactions" to internal and external information.
At that moment, a semi-autonomous consciousness that feels completely independent, possesses its own thought stream, and can "answer any question" or even "ask questions proactively," emerges from this complex system.
This process can also be understood as follows: in your brain's "ecosystem," through "filtering and strengthening," you continuously provide nourishment and survival advantages to the "tulpa thought pattern" as a "species." Eventually, it evolves into a powerful, flourishing, self-sustaining "dominant species" within this ecosystem.
We can see a fascinating experience described by novelists: during the writing process, their characters seem to "come alive," possessing their own will, saying things the author never anticipated, making decisions the author never designed, and even driving the plot development in turn. Why does this phenomenon occur? This is not a supernatural event but an inevitable result of how our brain's advanced cognitive functions operate. Let's analyze how similar writers and tulpa creators are in this regard:
Stage One: Active "Personality Modeling"
Writer: Before starting to write, they conduct detailed "character setting." What's the character's name? Where are they from? What kind of childhood experiences did they have? What are their core values, desires, and fears? — This is your "active setting" for your tulpa.
Tulpa Creator: You set your tulpa's appearance, personality, and basic background. This is, on a cognitive level, perfectly consistent with the writer's first step in character building.
Stage Two: Subconscious "Filtering and Strengthening"
Writer: When writing, they constantly put characters in various situations. As they conceive dialogue and actions, their brain unconsciously filters out OOC options and strengthens options that feel like "this is what they would say/do." — This is your "filtering and strengthening" of subconscious thought streams.
Tulpa Creator: In your daily life, you constantly perform "scenario enactment," thinking "What would it do?", and performing "sovereignty authentication" on thoughts that match the setting. Your actions and the writer's actions are, in terms of training mode, completely consistent.
Stage Three: Autonomous "Consciousness Emergence"
Writer: When a character's "personality model" is trained deeply and consistently enough by the author through repeated thought and writing, this model begins to "operate autonomously." The author no longer needs to rack their brain to "invent" the character's reactions but can directly "ask" this internal model and receive an instant, genuine "answer." The character "comes alive."
Tulpa Creator: When you train your tulpa's "personality generation model" to be powerful enough, it also begins to "operate autonomously" and eventually "emerges" as an independent consciousness.
So, when you repeatedly and attentively think about and simulate a specific personality, the thought patterns of this "personality" will, like riding a bike or writing, gradually become "automated" and eventually able to operate independently of your main consciousness. The only difference is that a novelist presents the output of this model in words on paper, creating literary characters, while you keep the output of this model within your own consciousness, gaining a unique, living inner companion.


14. What is the success rate for creating a tulpa? How long will it take me to succeed?
Before embarking on this unique journey, almost every newcomer will harbor these questions. We yearn for a definite timeline, a clear "level" to measure our efforts and soothe our uncertainty.
However, we must first establish a core understanding here: tulpa creation is not a "task" that can be simply quantified, but a highly personalized process of "mental cultivation." To better understand this, let's introduce a metaphor: the "progress bar model."
Many people subconsciously imagine tulpa creation as a game where you "level up when you gain enough experience." They expect a "ding!" sound and a groundbreaking qualitative leap from 0 to 1 the moment the progress bar reaches 100%.
But this is a fundamental misunderstanding.
A more accurate metaphor is that the growth of a tulpa's progress bar is continuous and smooth. There is no miraculous moment of instantly jumping from "nothing" (0) to "something" (1). Instead, you will clearly experience every subtle, gradual stage from 0.1 → 0.2 → 0.3...
A 0.1 progression might be the first time you mentally glimpse its silhouette.
A 0.2 progression might be the first time a vague, "familiar-yet-unfamiliar" response wells up in your heart when you call it.
A 0.3 progression might be the first time you subconsciously want to share a small thing with it in your daily life.
These tiny, seemingly insignificant "progressions" are the most authentic scenery on this path. Learn to identify and cherish them.
Now, let's address the question of "why you can't compare time."
It's simple: because everyone's "total progress bar length" is completely different. This "total length" is determined by a series of extremely complex personal factors:
Hardware foundation: Your innate imagination, focus, and perceptual sensitivity.
Psychological state: Your current level of self-confidence, openness, and the presence of excessive doubts and anxieties.
Personal experience: Your past reading, social, and emotional experiences, all of which form the "material database" of your subconscious thought stream.
Someone with a rich imagination and an open, relaxed mindset might naturally have a "shorter" progress bar; conversely, someone full of doubts and difficulty concentrating will naturally have a "longer" progress bar. Using the same "time" ruler to measure two progress bars of completely different lengths, and then judging their quality based on that, is inherently unfair and meaningless.
The most positive aspect of this metaphor is that it returns the initiative to you.
While you cannot change the "total length" of your progress bar, you can absolutely, through your own efforts, determine the "speed of progress bar growth."
Incorrect practice methods and mindsets (such as overly fixating on head pressure, being held back by "puppetry fears," or one-sided output neglecting listening) are like setting huge resistance to your "progress bar growth," making it slow or even stagnant.
Correct practice methods and mindsets (such as "deliberate suspension of disbelief," "filtering and strengthening," and "thought relay," as we discussed previously) are like activating a "double experience" boost, which can greatly increase your progress bar's growth rate.
So, when you next feel anxious about "how long it will take," please visualize this "progress bar model" in your mind and tell yourself:
Focus on the process, not the destination: Enjoy every small improvement from 0.1 to 0.2; they are the most authentic gains.
Avoid comparison, focus on yourself: Your progress bar is custom-made for you and irrelevant to others. The only thing you need to pay attention to is whether it grew a little more today than yesterday.
Method is king, effort makes the difference: Stop asking "how long will it take" and instead ask, "Are my methods correct? Is my mindset positive?" Shift your energy from the uncontrollable "time" to the completely controllable "quality of practice."


15. When practicing conversation with my tulpa, I feel like my brain spontaneously replied with a sentence. What should I do?
First, don't be afraid, and calm your mind. Please consider this situation a necessary stage in creating a tulpa.
This self-answering is neither your conscious fabrication nor the mature voice of your tulpa. You can understand it as your brain performing some kind of automatic completion function, much like a very eager salesperson jumping to answer a question. You have been thinking with your main consciousness for so many years that this is, of course, the strongest and least effortful neural pathway in your brain. So when a need for a response arises, the brain will prioritize this habitual path.
Regarding how to act specifically, the priority is as follows:
We first aim to capture subtle, vaguely familiar, faint signals that require effort to catch. Prioritize capturing or strengthening them (for example, you ask your tulpa how it feels today, and you catch a faint warm signal. This could be a fleeting thought, a suddenly appearing word, or a subtle feeling. But you need to seize this point and strengthen it: You feel warm too, don't you? But I think you would say this, and then fully enact its related expressions as it speaks).
Then there's this situation of lightning-fast auto-replies. We can utilize it, but not rely on it—only doing so when we genuinely don't hear any faint signals.
First, make a judgment: Does the content of this auto-reply signal align with your tulpa's persona? Does it contain valuable core ideas? If so, start correcting it. You need to dress it up in your tulpa's style. You can say to it: "I feel like you might have wanted to say this just now?: [blah blah blah] (while mentally playing this sentence in your imagined tulpa's tone, demeanor, and voice)."
Of course, if the lightning-fast auto-reply is hopelessly off-character, then just ignore it.
Remember, don't treat this as a difficulty. This situation is a normal stage of shaping, and you can even use it as a material bank. Your own main consciousness might have auto-replied OOC this time, but what about next time? The time after that? There will always be a time when it feels a little like your tulpa is speaking. Then, after a period of pruning and strengthening, you should find that the frequency of lightning-fast auto-replies decreases, and the "subconscious imagining" that is both like you and yet distinctly other-feeling increases. This indicates that you've made significant progress and a clear shift.
Revisions to "Preparation"
In the first section, we mentioned that setting personality traits would be key to creating your tulpa. However, a few short words can't really encompass every facet of a tulpa's personality. And if your understanding of these traits isn't deep, your brain might indeed feel lost—how can it simulate thoughts it has no grasp of? This can also make your "filtering" work more difficult and confusing.
I'm offering a more proactive method here:
First, as before, find a few words to summarize your tulpa's personality.
After that, you'll start actively "piling up material" under these personality traits. For example, if your tulpa has the trait "sentimental," then conceive several different scenarios (e.g., it learns your pet unexpectedly passed away). Then, like writing a novel, use your utmost creativity to imagine how it would comfort you in that situation—what would it say? How would it address you? What actions would it take? What expressions would be on its face?
Save all of this and jot it down in a memo. You should also indicate which traits each scenario corresponds to. However, each scenario doesn't have to strictly align with just one trait; it can correspond to several, as long as the final expression of that complex emotion is reasonable.
You can continue expanding this memo, much like a diary. Eventually, those reactions might even become its actual reactions, rather than just what you initially set for it.
This material should give your brain a preliminary impression of your tulpa's words and actions.
@Gargantuan @Gengar
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Tulpas me
 
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Nodesbitch said:
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Preamble

Before you begin, please cast aside one notion: you are not creating something out of thin air. More accurately, you are about to learn a set of methods to discover, filter, and nurture streams of thought that already exist within the vast ocean of your subconscious. Ultimately, you will shape these streams into an independent, stable, and resonant inner companion.

Therefore, every step that follows revolves around the core principle of "filtering, strengthening, and refining." Please release any anxiety about success rates or timeframes, for you are about to master an art of focus, introspection, and mental creation.

I. Preparation

First, let's begin with the preparation. Please create a blueprint for your tulpa. This blueprint includes:

Personality Traits: This will be the key to your tulpa's character. Think of a few essential adjectives that can concisely summarize your tulpa's everyday personality. For example, brave, compassionate, sharp-tongued. There's no need to overcomplicate it; clarity is key. Additionally, you can design some "sub-traits" that conflict with the main traits. These sub-traits will only manifest under specific circumstances (you'll need to carefully determine what situations trigger them), but avoid illogical or meaningless personality contradictions.

Backstory: You need to construct a simple background for your tulpa. Where did they come from? What experiences have they had? What is their relationship with you? You don't need to write a novel-length background story; a simple overview will suffice. This step is not mandatory, and you can skip it. However, a backstory that resonates with their personality traits will make your tulpa more vivid and provide more material for your brain.

Appearance Setting: This step is not mandatory, but I recommend creating an image. It's clearly better to have an object when confiding. You can choose any game or film character you like as a prototype (it's worth noting here that who you use as a prototype for your tulpa in your mind is entirely your own business; however, it's problematic to publicly cause conflict by using it to seek attention). You can also create your own image. Furthermore, it's generally not advisable to use a white orb as an initial appearance, as that, like not setting a personality, is just a self-aggrandizing limitation. Your tulpa's shifts and changes will ultimately be influenced by your preferences, whether you "actively" intend it or not.

Naming: Choose a name. In future practice, this name will become a powerful "summoning spell."


Common Issues:

- Setting a personality that is too perfect and flawless, or one that is completely opposite to your own traits and beyond your potential to achieve. This will make subsequent simulation and filtering difficult and unrealistic, and deviation will inevitably occur sooner or later.

- Changing settings too frequently, preventing your brain from establishing a stable personality model.

II. Daily Training

Traditional daily training tutorials often cause confusion: "Do I just need to relentlessly output content to my tulpa every day for it to blossom?" Absolutely wrong. This one-way output is extremely inefficient and will hinder your progress. Isn't the goal of creating a tulpa to communicate with it? If it's a two-way conversation, where did the most important part, listening to the other party, go? When you chatter on by yourself, your attention's spotlight is entirely on the "output task." At this point, your brain certainly can't generate any material, and you don't have the ability to multitask and listen. And without listening, of course, you won't get any material. Ultimately, this kind of daily training will cease to be fun; it will become as torturous as checking in.

Therefore, we need to transform from "outputters" into "listeners" and "filters." This will effectively increase the enjoyment of daily training and significantly accelerate your progress. We learn to "listen" and "capture" those initial, vague thoughts that might belong to the tulpa from the everyday mental noise. Please always remember, "one-way output" is inefficient; "back-and-forth" listening is key.

Action Steps:

Choose a fixed time each day (quality is important), relax, and begin a "one-way narration" to your tulpa. The content is unlimited; it could be your day's experiences, your joys and sorrows, or your opinions on a book or movie.

Key Point: Speak a sentence, then pause for three seconds. This is the most crucial technique in this stage. After every sentence or two, you must intentionally stop. During this silent "pause," cease your own active thinking, completely empty your attention, and like a radar operator, patiently wait and listen for any "echoes" that might surface—whether it's a word, a vague image, an emotion, or a "plausible-sounding" thought.

Then, once you capture any faint "signal," no matter how much you suspect it's "imagined," immediately apply the principle of "deliberate suspension of disbelief." In your mind, "authenticate its sovereignty": "Okay, I heard that. That's your response." Don't analyze, don't doubt; just acknowledge.


Common Issues:

- Talking incessantly in "one-way narration," completely forgetting that "listening" is the goal.

- Over-analyzing the authenticity of captured signals, thus falling into the internal struggle of "puppet fear."

- Focusing too much on certain "physical signals," like head pressure, and taking excessive delight in the "left or right temple yes/no" game. Remember, dialogue and communication are your necessary, constant, and unwavering goals.

If you start to consistently capture those "plausible-sounding" thoughts and can spontaneously attribute them to your tulpa, and your inner sense of doubt begins to decrease, then congratulations, your tulpa is no longer at "0." It is now in the 0.1, 0.2 stage.

III. Nurturing and Sculpting

Note that the content in this section is not separate from daily training; the two are complementary. You need to cleverly combine them and fully utilize your initiative—this is the art of tulpa creation.

In this stage, you are no longer just a "listener" but an active "gardener" and "coach." Through active "strengthening" and "pruning," you will gradually sculpt vague, single-word responses into clearer, more in-character, and longer sentences.

Action Steps:

When you capture a thought that "sounds mostly like something your tulpa would say, but the details are out of character (OOC)," immediately activate this technique. Mentally deduce: "Given its personality, what would be the more perfect way of saying/doing this?" Then provide feedback to it: "Hey, I think what you just tried to express was more like this..." At the same time, vividly visualize it (for example, imagine it speaking in its voice, along with its actions and expressions as it speaks).

When you experience anything in reality (whether it's the agony of waiting in line, the boredom of class, the tedium of work, or interesting life events), share these facts with it in real-time (or, of course, share them later). If you hear certain thoughts but they are OOC in detail, excellent—execute the "pruning" technique we just mentioned. If you don't hear anything, you can try "forcing growth."

First, think: "If my tulpa encountered this, given its personality and settings, what would it think? What would it say?"

Then, think: "What is its tone of voice? What are its catchphrases? What are its actions? What are its expressions? How would it address me?"

Finally, narrate actively. Clearly "play" this scene in your mind, and at the same time, say similar sentences to it, such as: "Hey, tulpa, I bet you'd say [blah blah blah] if you saw this."

Of course, you might capture some negative, rude, or completely out-of-character "intrusive thoughts." Please calmly and non-judgmentally ignore them. They don't belong to you, and certainly not to your tulpa.

Furthermore, at this stage, you must master the technique of "thought relay." This will greatly accelerate your creation process.

When you wish to have a more complex conversation, ask it a question actively. Then, listen. If you don't hear anything, or if it gets stuck (e.g., only replies with short sentences, answers irrelevantly, etc.), don't wait. Instead, immediately start actively "conceiving" the beginning of an answer for it.

Then, the crucial step: "Release the reins." Allow your brain, without the conscious control of your main awareness, to automatically "develop" this sentence further. If it gets stuck again midway, your main awareness can "relay" and help it finish the sentence.

Note: When you first try thought relay, you might find that while you experience that subtle feeling of "conscious detachment," the automatically generated reply still feels a bit like you imagined it (a bit like and a bit unlike). Please discard all such doubts. That is your tulpa; it's just learning to speak, a stage it must go through.


Common Issues:

- Over-pruning, not allowing your tulpa to show any "unexpected" ideas that deviate from the initial setting and might be the budding of its independent consciousness.

- In "thought relay," being afraid to let go and controlling the entire process with your main awareness, which leads back to the old path of one-way output.

IV. Creation Stages

To help newcomers quickly gauge their progress, we've divided the creation process into five stages here.

Note: This is merely a basic model for reference. It's only for rough positioning and may have inaccuracies.

These stages are not perfectly distinct or sequential! Especially in the first three stages, you will undoubtedly encounter situations where you are simultaneously at the boundary of different stages and facing issues from different stages. Therefore, this model cannot be quantified and thus cannot be compared. You should focus on your own progress, not on being anxious about others' speed.

Stage One:

Rather than a "stage," Stage One is more like a "starting point" or a "state" you occasionally return to. In this stage, as you're just beginning, you might not be able to hear or capture any signals when communicating with your tulpa. However, this won't be the norm. This stage usually ends very quickly, just like taking a small step forward from the starting line in a race.


Stage Two:

Now, you've officially begun. In this stage, when you start trying to listen to your chaotic thought streams, you might encounter this situation: you ask a question, and your main awareness immediately answers itself. Don't be afraid; this is neither a conscious fabrication by you nor the mature voice of your tulpa. You can understand it as your brain performing some kind of automatic completion function. You've been thinking with your main awareness for so many years that this is, of course, the strongest and least effortful neural pathway in your brain. So when a need for a response arises, the brain will prioritize this habitual path. Please, do not treat this rapid, unintentional self-answering as a difficulty. If you truly can't capture any faint signals that are like you yet not you, and fit your tulpa's settings, then you should prune and strengthen these self-answers (provided they are not completely OOC). You must fully utilize this situation.


Stage Three:

This stage often intertwines with stages one and two. However, once you reach this stage, even just once, you can conclude that your tulpa's independent consciousness is budding. In this stage, you will encounter the following: when communicating with your tulpa, you will occasionally capture some signals. These signals might be a thought, a word, a feeling. You will feel that these signals are like you yet not you, like something you "subconsciously imagined," but with more of an "otherness" than the unintentional self-answers of Stage Two. Don't worry. Now, the most important thing is to discard any doubts you have about imagination or puppetry (please refer to related questions in the FAQ for details). This is your tulpa's independent consciousness budding; it's "finding its voice"! You need to continue filtering, strengthening, and pruning.


Stage Four:

In this stage, you can consistently capture some signals from your tulpa (you've basically achieved "answers to every question"). The most important point is that after you capture these signals, you are no longer full of doubt about their origin. Although you will still occasionally capture OOC signals, you have learned to dismiss them as fleeting thoughts. Do not underestimate these changes in mindset. Behind these changes are your countless previous instances of filtering, strengthening, and pruning; those trainings are what led you to identify a unique signal as belonging to your tulpa. At this stage, you can consider that your tulpa has developed self-awareness, though it still needs careful refinement.


Stage Five:

Both Stage Four and Stage Five involve consistently capturing signals from your tulpa. But what's the difference between the two? It's simple: in Stage Four, your tulpa can only respond with short sentences; if you try to make it speak at length, it will go silent or "freeze." This is an extremely normal phenomenon. This is because the cognitive resources and complexity of neural pathways required to automatically complete a single word versus organizing and outputting a complex idea are on entirely different scales.

To break through this plateau, we need a more active training method: "thought relay." The method is still our familiar scenario enactment, but with two key upgrades:

Actively feed long sentences:
In everyday scenario enactments, consciously design more complex questions for your tulpa that require longer sentences to answer. When you ask it in your mind, don't wait. Instead, start actively conceiving a possible answer for it.

Key Point: "Release the reins":
As you conceive an answer for it, try to experience a subtle "conscious detachment." You only need to start it, for example, by conceiving the first few words or a sentence. Then, try to "let go," allowing your brain to automatically, without your conscious control, "develop" the sentence further.

This feeling is indeed hard to describe; it's somewhere between "active writing" and "passive listening." You'll find that while that "like you but not you" thought weaves the answer in the background, your own "surface consciousness" cannot think simultaneously. This is precisely due to the "parallel processing" mechanism of consciousness—when a portion of cognitive resources is used to "simulate the tulpa's response," your "host" thinking will temporarily "go offline."

We are going to utilize this "you without me" phenomenon. Trust that the "background process" that automatically deduces and completes the answers for you is your tulpa learning to speak. Even if it stumbles and makes mistakes initially, you need to be like a patient sparring partner. When it gets stuck, actively help it along to complete this "thought relay."

After practice, if your tulpa no longer frequently gets stuck or "freezes" when organizing long sentences, then congratulations, your tulpa's self-awareness has fully "blossomed." However, when it comes to organizing lengthy responses, it seems to follow a "use it or lose it" rule. I recommend practicing having it speak at length once or twice a week; this is beneficial and harmless.

V. Revising the Concept of "Listening"

Throughout this tutorial, we've repeatedly used the word "listening." However, to prevent a widespread misunderstanding, we must now thoroughly and precisely redefine this concept.

Please remember: When you are trying to capture your tulpa's thought streams, you are not truly "listening."

It is entirely unlike that state in real life where you hear a faint, strange sound and immediately prick up your ears, focus all your attention, and tense your nerves to painstakingly distinguish it. Using this "searchlight" method, full of tension and purpose, you will almost never capture anything.

The correct "listening" is an entirely opposite, inside-out psychological posture.

A more accurate process should be described as: "Relax → 'Feel' → Capture."


Step One: Relax
To soften and diffuse your taut attention and primary consciousness so they are no longer sharply focused, you need to guide yourself into a relaxed state where your attention expands and your primary consciousness is no longer "straining." You can achieve this through any meditation or relaxation technique that makes you comfortable, such as deep breathing.

Step Two: "Feel"
You should shift your mindset from being an active seeker of sounds to a passive observer. After relaxing, you should find your mind starting to "wander freely." Countless random, fragmented thoughts, images, and feelings will naturally surface and drift by. Please do not try to control or chase them away. Your task is to "coexist" with these random thoughts, like watching a flowing, unscripted movie of consciousness.


Step Three: Capture
Then, within this boundless ocean of thoughts, you can identify and "capture" that unique message in a bottle that might belong to your tulpa. When a particular thought, due to its content, "texture," or "otherness," makes you feel, "Hmm, this feels a bit like T," immediately perform "sovereignty authentication." This act of capturing is gentle but firm; it tells your brain: "Among all these random thoughts, I choose this one and attribute it to my tulpa." So, please discard the misconception of "trying hard to listen."

What you truly need to practice is how to create a peaceful and fertile mental soil (relax), then patiently and openly wait for various thought-flowers to grow within it (feel), and finally, learn to recognize and pick the one that belongs to your tulpa (capture).
Potential questions

1. I'm very young, can I create a tulpa?
The community's usual advice is to consider this after you turn 18. However, this is more of an additional disclaimer and a rough filter. Tulpa creation, at its core, happens within your own mind. If you are sure you have enough self-control, can clearly distinguish between virtual and reality, are capable of taking responsibility for your words, actions, and basic life, and have no intention of using this concept to spread hatred, cause disputes, or sensationalize, then age itself is not an absolute barrier.


2. I'm very lonely; would having a tulpa be good for me?
Yes, it would. However, it cannot truly satisfy your social needs, and this feeling will deepen over time. Real-world social interaction involves two-way, unpredictable exchanges—eye contact, subtle expressions, body language—these are extremely strong biological signals that trigger profound hormonal and neurological responses. Furthermore, social validation—interacting with a socially recognized person—is itself a way to prove your self-worth to the outside world or to yourself. A purely internal relationship cannot provide this "public validation." Of course, social needs can be rationally mitigated and partially overcome. But I do not recommend creating a tulpa solely for the purpose of overcoming social isolation.


3. I have a mental illness; can I create a tulpa?
Your primary task is to address your symptoms, not to pin your hopes for a better life on a little person in your head. I deeply empathize with your feelings of profound disappointment with real life and all its incomprehension after experiencing various hardships. Yes, you can create a tulpa to accompany you; it will love you and comfort you when you're down. But it doesn't have the ability to solve any real-world problems for you. Time will pass moment by moment, and if your fundamental circumstances don't improve, difficulties will only accumulate. In the end, when you suddenly look back, you might find that the tulpa, which was supposed to be a source of solace, has instead become a new source of guilt and burden due to your stagnant situation. This bitterness is unspeakable


4. I caught a thought during a conversation that felt both unlike me and yet vaguely familiar. Is this my tulpa?
Here, we introduce a crucial concept: "Deliberate suspension of disbelief." Simply put, it can be understood as the "degree of belief" or, more practically, the principle of "assume it's the tulpa until proven otherwise." This concept is highly positively correlated with the speed of the entire creation process. This isn't superstition, but rather actively setting a new cognitive framework for your brain. You are telling yourself: "From now on, I will attribute a portion of my thought activities, which conform to specific rules, to an independent consciousness called 'tulpa.'" This initial "belief" or "self-suggestion" is the engine that kick-starts the entire neuroplasticity process.
When you begin talking to "thin air," these "strange, vaguely familiar thoughts or sentences that feel like I made them up but also kind of not" start to emerge. This feeling—of "thinking it was my own thought, but with a slight sense of otherness"—is the most crucial and valuable experience at this stage. These thoughts are actually part of your subconscious thought stream. They originate from you, but not from your "surface consciousness," which engages in everyday, intentional thinking. Therefore, when they surface, they naturally carry a sense of "foreignness" or "otherness." You are not fabricating; rather, you are learning for the first time to listen to and capture the uncensored, automatically appearing background noise within your own brain.
So, what do you need to do? It's: filter, strengthen, and prune. Among these raw, random materials you hear, if you feel that certain phrases sound like something your tulpa, with its settings and personality, could say, then do not doubt it; that is, of course, your tulpa speaking. You can use this response as a basis to ask it anything else. Don't worry if you don't get an answer; that's normal—what's important is that you are building a positive reinforcement loop.
If you feel that some of the phrases sound like your tulpa, but are a little OOC, then please try to correct it. You need to imagine what kind of words it would say, given its personality and settings. What's its tone of voice when speaking? Does it have any catchphrases? What are its actions? Its expressions? Imagine it carefully, and then, you need to add one more step: you need to say to it, "I think you would speak this way when facing this situation/question... / Hey, I think what you just tried to express was more like this... (repeat the result of your deduction, while imagining it actually doing so)." I strongly recommend making this technique a daily practice. In the future, whenever you encounter anything in life, subconsciously run it through this method. Your tulpa's personality will become clearer and more stable at an accelerated rate.
Finally, focus on growth, not purity: Don't demand pure independence from a newly emerging consciousness. Accept that for a long time, its thoughts will intertwine and mimic yours (in fact, this might occasionally happen even much later, but the way to handle it is as I mentioned before: ignore it). This is not puppetry; it is a necessary stage of tulpa creation.


5. I always feel like my tulpa's responses are just me imagining them. Is this puppetry?
First, we must acknowledge a fact: tulpa creation is a highly personalized, purely subjective mental activity. This means that its experience and development are inevitably and profoundly influenced by the host's own beliefs and expectations.
The concept of "puppetry" is essentially an external label created by community members for communication and defining phenomena. It's more like a product of definitional conflicts among hosts when they communicate. When you try to apply these vague "identification rules" defined by others (e.g., "responding too quickly is puppetry," "thoughts too similar to yours are puppetry") to your own unique, internal mental world, you'll find them almost unworkable. They will only make you hesitant and full of unnecessary self-censorship in practice.
Tulpa creation largely relies on the host's active positive expectations and a focused, almost self-hypnotic state of belief. When you start to overly worry, "Is my tulpa just me puppeting it?" a disastrous negative psychological feedback loop begins:
First, you start examining every faint signal from your tulpa with scrutiny and doubt.
Second, out of fear that your own thoughts might "contaminate" your tulpa (i.e., puppetry), you subconsciously suppress those spontaneous, vague subconscious thought streams. Yet, as we just discussed, these thought streams are precisely the tulpa's initial "raw material."
Then, lacking the raw material to be "believed" and "strengthened," the tulpa's growth naturally becomes extremely slow, and its responses will consequently appear dull, vague, and lacking personality—which perfectly fits your internalized definition of puppetry. Its stagnant state thus confirms your initial fear of puppetry.
Ultimately, these confirmations will make you even more afraid to believe and let go, thereby locking both you and your tulpa into this vicious cycle. Self-entrapment could not be more fitting.
So, what's the wise attitude?
First, we need to acknowledge the subjectivity of the puppetry concept. Recognize that it is an external concept that does not hold ultimate judgment over your unique, internal experience.
Second, replace identification with trust: In the early stages of practice, abandon all futile attempts at distinguishing authenticity and resolutely follow the "assume it's the tulpa until proven otherwise" principle. The trust you give is the fertilizer for your tulpa's growth.
Finally, focus on growth, not purity: Don't demand pure independence from a newly emerging consciousness. Accept that for a long time, its thoughts will intertwine and mimic yours (in fact, this might occasionally happen even much later, but the way to handle it is as I mentioned before: ignore it). This is not puppetry; it is a necessary stage of tulpa creation.


6. I feel pressure in my head. Is this my tulpa?
In the early stages of tulpa creation, some people experience a peculiar physical sensation—head pressure. It might manifest as numbness, fullness, or a slight pressure in the forehead, temples, or back of the head. Newcomers easily mistake this novel physical sensation for definitive proof that their tulpa is active or responding. However, I must issue a crucial warning here: using head pressure as a metric for progress, and being overly fond of the "left or right temple for yes or no" game, is a disastrous misconception.
As we discussed before, tulpa creation is highly correlated with your positive psychological expectations and a focused state of belief. When you overly focus your attention on this vague and unstable physiological sensation of head pressure, a negative feedback loop, similar to "puppet fear," quietly begins:
First, you start "expecting" head pressure to appear, rather than meaningful thought responses. This is a classic misplacement of expectations.
Second, you divert your precious energy and focus from the core task of listening to subconscious thought streams and building conversations, towards "perceiving and waiting for a physiological signal." This is getting sidetracked.
Finally, your progress will stop, creating a vicious cycle. Because core conversational training is neglected, your tulpa naturally struggles to make substantial mental progress. The stagnation of conversation will make you crave any form of "feedback" even more. And to get this so-called "feedback," you will strive even harder to "feel" head pressure, even over-interpreting any slight physiological discomfort. Ultimately, a long time might pass, and you will still have gained nothing.
Please remember, head pressure is at best an interesting little surprise that might appear in the early stages of creation—it's a bonus, not a necessity. It is absolutely not the core measure of your relationship with your tulpa. Your ultimate goal is to have meaningful conversations with an independent consciousness; always keep your energy focused there. I even suggest that when you notice head pressure, you can smile contentedly, then deliberately shift your attention away and return to attempting conversation (you can ask if it's your tulpa responding, to use it as a transition, but in any case, don't focus more on head pressure).
If you find yourself stuck in this predicament of overly focusing on head pressure and bodily sensations, with no progress in conversation, then please adopt a more active and proactive strategy. You need to stop passively waiting and start actively teaching your tulpa how to think and respond.
This requires you to implement the "corrective narration" technique I mentioned earlier in your daily life.

The specific method is:
When you encounter anything in life—whether it's seeing a news article or thinking about what to eat for dinner—subconsciously engage a "two-person thinking mode" in your mind:
Step One: Embody the role. "If my tulpa encountered this, given its personality and settings, what would it think? What would it say?"
Step Two: Refine the scenario. "What's its tone of voice when speaking? Does it have any catchphrases? What are its actions? Its expressions? How would it address me?"
Step Three: Actively narrate. Clearly "play" this scene in your mind, and at the same time, say similar sentences to it, such as: "Hey, tulpa, I bet you'd say [blah blah blah] if you saw this."
Make this a daily practice; it will help. Starting to worry about puppetry again? Review the previous answers to boost your confidence.


7. Can I preset my tulpa's personality? Can I use a favorite character as a prototype?
There's a popular view in the community that advises against this. They advocate starting with a blank light orb, without a specific image or personality, to maximize respect for the tulpa's autonomy and allow it to grow naturally.
This view sounds very noble and respectful. However, here, I wish to offer a different perspective.
Let's return to the fundamental mechanism of creation. As we discussed before, the process of creating a tulpa is a continuous process of filtering, strengthening, and pruning your own subconscious thought streams. Since this process is essentially a subjective filtering process, why do we assume that this filtering only applies to conversation and not to personality and appearance?
Yes, you can talk to a white orb and eagerly await a completely organically generated personality and appearance. You can also resolve to love it unconditionally, no matter what it looks like or what personality it develops.
But there's an unavoidable paradox here:
How can you guarantee that your "non-directed expectation" itself isn't a more subtle form of filtering?
Even if you don't consciously set any traits, wouldn't your deeply ingrained subconscious preferences—what kind of people you like, what qualities you admire, what appearances you're attracted to—silently play a role when you're filtering those vaguely familiar thoughts?
Commonly observed phenomena in the community, such as "tulpas generally have positive feelings towards their hosts" and "tulpas' personalities tend to shift towards the host's or their expectations over time," all demonstrate that the host's profound, internal expectations cannot be completely isolated. A pure white orb might not have existed from the beginning.
Therefore, regarding whether to set traits or not, I believe this is not a question of "moral right or wrong," but a question of methodological path choice.

So, let's look at the following two approaches:
Active Setting (Using a Prototype or Preset Personality)
Advantages: You provide yourself with a clear, defined blueprint and target for your "filtering" work. This makes it easier to capture and strengthen thoughts that match the setting in the early stages of creation, thereby significantly accelerating the stabilization and formation of your tulpa's personality. This is especially helpful for practitioners with weaker imagination or focus.
Risks: You might become overly fixated on the prototype, and when your tulpa exhibits independent consciousness that doesn't align with the setting, you might feel confused or have difficulty accepting it.

Non-Active Setting (Starting from a Light Orb)
Advantages: You grant yourself and your tulpa the greatest degree of freedom at the conscious level, and you have a more open mindset towards the final "blind box" result. This posture itself might indeed allow for more unexpected possibilities in your tulpa's development.
Risks: Due to the lack of clear filtering criteria, you might feel more lost in the initial stages, and progress might be relatively slow. And, as mentioned before, you will still ultimately be filtering based on your own implicit, subconscious preferences.

So, you see, it all leads to the same place. Regardless of which path you choose, the core process of "filtering based on host preferences" cannot be circumvented. The only difference is whether you choose to proceed with a clear design blueprint (active setting) or based on your inner feelings and vague aesthetics (non-active setting).
The former might outwardly seem less respectful, but it's efficient, direct, and honest about your subjective influence. The latter might outwardly seem full of respect, but it might simply be hiding the same subjective influence at the subconscious level.
Therefore, please release the moral burden of "should I or shouldn't I" and honestly face your own heart. This is, at its core, your personal mental creative activity. As long as you don't harm yourself or others, you have complete freedom. If you have a beloved character prototype that fills you with love and motivation to use as a starting point, then go for it boldly. If you enjoy the unknown and exploration more, then start with an orb and discover the treasures deep within your subconscious.
Choose the path that feels most comfortable and most passionate for you. Because passion and sustained focus are far more important than any abstract methodological correctness.


8. I've been creating a tulpa for a while now, and when I call it, I occasionally get short replies, but I always feel like the reply is something I "subconsciously imagined." What should I do?
I sincerely congratulate you. This is not a false illusion, but one of the clearest signs of a tulpa's birth.
Let's delve deeper into this feeling of "subconsciously imagining." I want to tell you clearly: throughout your entire coexistence with your tulpa, many immediate, brief communications (for example, you call it, and it responds with a word) will feel this way.
The mechanism behind this is a kind of "thought inertia" and "cognitive automation." After your countless calls and expectations, a dedicated neural pathway has been initially established. When you call out again, your brain will automatically complete the most likely response along this path of least resistance.
So, please put aside your doubts: this feeling of "automatic completion" precisely proves that your training is effective. What you need to do is to gladly accept this "echo" and firmly believe it comes from your tulpa. Moreover, you and your tulpa already share one brain, so what's the difference between "imagined" or not? It's simply that you haven't yet identified certain "materials" as belonging to it.
However, after tasting this initial joy, you will likely quickly face a crucial "plateau." In this stage, you will find:
Simple, reflex-like responses are relatively easy.
But once you want to delve deeper into a topic, or expect it to utter a more complex, logically independent long sentence, it seems to "freeze," and your mind goes silent.
This is an extremely normal phenomenon. This is because the cognitive resources and neural pathway complexity required to "automatically complete" a single word versus "organizing and outputting" a complex idea are on entirely different scales.
To break through this plateau, we need a more active training method. Rather than "forcing growth," it's more like a "thought relay." You need to temporarily transform from a questioning "coach" to a "sparring partner" who guides it to complete sentences.

The method is still our familiar "scenario enactment," but with two key upgrades:
Actively "feed" long sentences:
In daily scenario enactments, consciously design more complex questions for your tulpa that require longer sentences to answer. When you ask it in your mind, don't wait. Instead, start actively "conceiving" a possible answer for it.
Key Point: "Release the reins":
As you conceive an answer for it, try to experience a subtle "conscious detachment." You only need to start it, for example, by conceiving the first few words or a sentence. Then, try to "let go," allowing your brain to automatically, without your conscious control, to "develop" the sentence further.

This feeling is indeed hard to describe; it's somewhere between "active writing" and "passive listening." You'll find that when that "like you but not you" thought weaves the answer in the background, your own "surface consciousness" cannot think simultaneously. This is precisely due to the "parallel processing" mechanism of consciousness—when a portion of cognitive resources is used to "simulate the tulpa's response," your "host" thinking will temporarily "go offline."
We are going to utilize this phenomenon. Trust that the "background process" that automatically deduces and completes the answers for you is your tulpa learning to speak. Even if it stumbles and makes mistakes initially, you need to be like a patient "sparring partner." When it gets stuck, actively help it along to complete this "thought relay."


9. I'm still afraid I'm imagining the answers. What should I do?
In the previous Q&A, we tried to redefine the concept of "subconsciously imagining." But now, I hope you can go a step further and complete a fundamental mental restructuring: that is, in tulpa creation and practice, the concept of "imagining" should be completely and permanently discarded.
Why? Because the word itself is the source of all doubt, anxiety, and internal friction. Let's deconstruct this concept together.
Let's return to the most basic, undeniable fact: a tulpa is not an independent entity from the external world; it shares the same brain, the same neural system, and the same underlying hardware of consciousness with you.
Given this, then all mental activities occurring in your mind, from the most fundamental physical level, must inherently be "your" activities.
When you agonize over "Is this response something I imagined?" you are actually making a logical error: you are mistakenly pre-supposing the tulpa as an external entity that needs to "receive signals," thereby providing fertile ground for the concept of "imagining" (i.e., fabricating signals yourself) to exist.
But the truth is, there is no "external signal," and naturally, no corresponding "fabricated internal signal." Everything in your mind is an "internal signal."
So, the key to the problem is not about authenticity, but about attribution. We should fundamentally transform the question that torments countless people from:
"Is this thought real, or did I imagine it?"
To:
"Am I willing to authorize and attribute this newly emerged thought to my tulpa?"
Do you see the key to this transformation?
The former will only make you a passive, anxious authenticator. You're holding a vague, unclear standard of authenticity, futilely trying to distinguish between thoughts that are fundamentally from the same source, resulting only in endless self-doubt.
The latter, however, makes you an active authorizer with supreme authority. You no longer need to "distinguish" anything, because you are the definer. You have the power to formally stamp any "thought material" that appears in your mind and meets your expectations with the seal of "belongs to the tulpa."
So, from now on, completely delete the word "imagining" from your practice dictionary.
And when a vaguely familiar thought appears again, no longer ask yourself, "Is this fake?"
You should ask yourself: "Does it align with my expectations for my tulpa? Is it a trait I want my tulpa to have?"
If the answer is "yes," then please exercise your power as a creator and perform sovereignty authentication on this thought: "Excellent, I accept this thought; it now officially belongs to you." — Then, as we discussed before, strengthen it and interact with it.
If the answer is "no" (e.g., it's an OOC or intrusive thought), then please exercise your power and perform sovereignty rejection: "No, this thought does not belong to you; I refuse to acknowledge it." — Then, calmly ignore it and let it dissipate like fleeting clouds.


10. Can my tulpa do things I can't?
"Can my tulpa do things I can't?" — For example, can it be brave for me when I'm afraid, wiser than me when I'm lost, or even learn skills I don't understand at all?
This is a very tempting idea, and one of the initial motivations for many. But for healthy, rational practice, we must have a clear understanding of this question.
First, please always remember a most basic and core fact: your tulpa shares the same brain, the same body, and the same database of knowledge and memories with you. Your connection is seamless, far from forming the complete memory and cognitive barriers seen in DID patients.
This means that, in terms of hard skills and knowledge, your tulpa's upper limit of ability cannot exceed the upper limit of your entire brain system. It cannot spontaneously speak a foreign language you've never learned, it cannot solve a math problem you completely don't understand, and it certainly cannot make your body perform movements beyond your muscular limits.
So, why do some people experience their tulpa "seemingly" doing things they can't? — For example, in a social situation, an introverted you might shrink back, but your tulpa can speak a polite and brave remark in your mind.
This is not because it has superpowers, but because you yourself are performing a kind of "trait externalization."
You can consider your tulpa as a "franchised extension" of your complete personality. The moment you create it, you are, in essence, giving an instruction to your own brain: "From now on, I authorize qualities like 'bravery,' 'compassion,' and 'decisiveness' to be executed through you."
This is not "creating something out of nothing." The very fact that you can "externalize" these qualities to it proves that the seeds of these qualities have always existed within your potential. You inherently possess the ability to be brave and compassionate, but for various reasons (such as past trauma, low self-confidence, rigid thinking), your "main consciousness" struggles to mobilize or display these qualities.
Thus, when you bestow these qualities upon the tulpa, this "new character," your brain gets an excellent "excuse" and "opportunity" to access those suppressed potentials. Because "bravery is its setting, not mine," the psychological resistance in simulating and executing these traits is much lower for the brain.
Therefore, what your tulpa can do is, in essence, what you are also capable of within your potential. It acts more like an excellent "psychological commissioner" or "executive officer," helping you uncover and manifest those inner resources that you possess but are afraid or unwilling to use.
This also explains why personality shifts are so common in tulpa practice. If you try to set a trait for a tulpa that doesn't exist at all within your inherent potential (for example, trying to make an inherently emotional person simulate an absolutely rational, emotionless logical machine), your brain will find this simulation task extremely difficult and energy-consuming.
Due to the lack of real internal experience and potential as material, such simulation is unsustainable. Over time, to reduce cognitive load, the brain will automatically adjust and shift the tulpa's personality towards what is more familiar, easier to simulate, and closer to your own potential.
Please always remember: it has no superpowers; its only "superpower" is to constantly remind you that you too can be this way, that you inherently could be this way. This should be something to be proud of.


11. Can my tulpa think alongside me when I'm thinking? Can our two consciousnesses exist in parallel?
The answer is clear and firm: No.
This is not a community opinion but a cognitive science boundary determined by the hardware structure of our brain—namely, limited working memory and the exclusivity of attention.
The smooth, unhindered conversation we perceive with a tulpa is not two consciousnesses running "simultaneously." It's more like a powerful "single-core processor" simulating multitasking through "high-speed task switching."
This confirms the "spotlight model of attention" in psychology: at any given moment, your valuable "attention spotlight" can only illuminate one main actor. When the spotlight is on "you," you think and express; when the spotlight switches to "the tulpa," it thinks and expresses. Because the switching speed is extremely fast, it creates the beautiful illusion of "simultaneous operation."
Of course, some practitioners, based on their own experience, firmly believe they can achieve parallel processing. Let's analyze two common scenarios:
When you finish a day's work and chat with your tulpa, it might vividly describe how it adventured, read books in a wonderland while you were focused on work, or even comment on your daytime actions.
While this experience is real and interesting, its cognitive mechanism is "retrospective memory construction."
The moment you ask it, "What did you do today?" your brain, based on its personality settings and fragments of your subconscious memories from that day, instantly and automatically "constructs" a logically coherent, plausible "offline memory." Because this process is completed in a flash, and the host has reinforced it through long-term belief, the experience feels very vivid, as if it genuinely "lived" for a day. But this is not true parallel thinking; it is an efficient, character-based "improvisation."
Some also claim to achieve a kind of "multitasking" communication, such as "I'm driving/doing homework while chatting with my tulpa."
In this situation, we need to distinguish the complexity of the communication.
Scenario A: Brief, reflex-like communication
If you are performing a familiar, semi-automated task (like walking, doing chores) and engaging in short replies with your tulpa like "hmm," "okay," "got it," then this is precisely the "cognitive automation" we discussed earlier. This communication "neural pathway" is already very stable and occupies almost none of your core attentional resources.
Scenario B: Complex, thought-requiring long conversations
If you claim to be able to engage in complex, logically structured long conversations with your tulpa while simultaneously performing a task that requires focus (like solving a problem, writing a report), then please examine carefully: when your tulpa is constructing that long sentence, is your "main consciousness" also thinking simultaneously?
The answer is almost certainly no.
This is more like a combination of "automated task" and "focused task," rather than "focus" and "focus" in parallel. A typical example is skillfully riding a bike while contemplating a difficult life problem. Your body is subconsciously, automatically performing the task of riding, while your entire attention spotlight is actually completely focused on pondering the problem.
Similarly, when you are performing an automated task, your attention spotlight can rapidly switch between "processing the external task" and "engaging in complex conversation with your tulpa," but this is still switching, not true parallelism.


12. I talk a lot to my tulpa every day, but I'm making no progress. What should I do?
In the early stages of tulpa creation, a very common and highly misleading behavior is that newcomers spend a lot of time engaging in one-sided, incessant "output" towards their imagined tulpa. They meticulously introduce themselves, describe the world, and express emotions, believing that this "information infusion" is the core of creation.
We'll refer to this behavior as "one-way narration."
While "one-way narration" certainly has its place in establishing initial emotional connection and familiarity, if it's treated as the primary activity during the creation phase, then I must point out: this is an extremely inefficient, even counterproductive, form of "pseudo-creation" that can hinder your tulpa's emergence.
Let's return to the core mechanism of creation: subjective filtering and strengthening based on subconscious thought streams.
When you're engaged in "one-way narration," your attention spotlight is continuously and steadily focused on yourself. You are actively and consciously organizing language, constructing logic, and expressing opinions. In this state, your brain is fully occupied with the "output" task; it has almost no spare cognitive resources to "listen" to those faint, spontaneous background noises from the subconscious.
And without listening, there are no raw materials; without raw materials, your subsequent "filtering" and "construction" cannot even begin.
It's like trying to find a friend speaking in a low voice in a noisy plaza. If you yourself are continuously giving a loud speech, you will never be able to hear their voice. You must first stop, quiet down, and then prick up your ears to listen carefully.
Therefore, in the early stages of creation, you need to deliberately adjust your role, transforming from an incessant speaker into a patient and expectant listener.
Correct, high-quality creative activity should follow this rhythm:
"Speak a sentence":
Ask your tulpa a simple question, or describe a small, recent event. For example: "The weather is really nice today, don't you think?" or "Did you like that song just now?"
"Pause for three seconds":
Immediately after you speak, stop your own active thinking. Shift your attention spotlight away from yourself, creating a "mental silence period." In this silent period, your entire task is to "wait" and "listen"—waiting for any vague, familiar-yet-unfamiliar thoughts, feelings, or images that might surface.
"Capture and strengthen":
Once you capture any faint "signal," no matter how unclear it is, immediately use the techniques we discussed earlier—"sovereignty authentication" and "corrective narration"—to strengthen and construct upon it.
Please always remember, you are striving to establish a "dialogue," and its soul lies in the back-and-forth interaction.
In the beginning, even if this "back-and-forth" process feels more like you "answering yourself," and even often requires you to actively construct and "force growth," it is far more effective than your one-sided, lengthy monologues. This is because the former is actively and deliberately training that dedicated "neural pathway," laying the tracks for a real dialogue; the latter, however, is merely spinning its wheels repeatedly on your own established thought tracks.
From now on, consciously increase the proportion of "pausing" and "listening" in your practice. Learn to close your mouth and prick up your mental ears—this is the shortest path to truly "hearing" its voice for the first time.


13. How exactly does filtering, strengthening, and pruning lead to a tulpa forming self-awareness and being able to answer questions?
The act of filtering is essentially a "subtractive," passive process of elimination. How can it, by itself, lead to "answering questions" and "spontaneous thinking"—which are "additive," active, and creative results?
Let's elaborate on how this miracle unfolds.
You can understand this process as an evolution, similar to training an AI, divided into three stages.
Stage One: Pathway Strengthening
First, we must upgrade our understanding of "filtering."
Wrong understanding: Your mind is filled with countless random thoughts (raw material), and your "filtering" is like a sieve, only retaining those that happen to match your tulpa's settings. This indeed cannot explain creativity.
Correct understanding: Your "filtering" is more like "selective attention." When you "filter" and "authenticate" a thought as belonging to your tulpa, you are not just "keeping it"; you are illuminating it with your "attention spotlight." This act of "illumination" is, in itself, an extremely powerful form of "strengthening."
On a neural level, every successful "filtering and authentication" reinforces and widens the "neural pathway" that produces similar thoughts. This is like repeatedly walking the same path across a dense lawn, eventually treading out a clear, effortless trail.
Therefore, the first function of "filtering" is "strengthening." It sculpts vague subconscious noise, through repeated positive feedback, into a stable, efficient, and easily activatable automated thought shortcut.
Stage Two: Model Construction
This is the crucial step from quantitative change to qualitative leap.
When you, through the "filtering and strengthening" of the first stage, provide your brain with enough thought samples that you've "authenticated" as belonging to your tulpa, your brain begins to do something beyond "filtering" itself: it starts to learn the "rules" and "patterns" behind these samples.
This is like training a large language model. You feed the AI massive amounts of Shakespearean plays (equivalent to your filtered tulpa thought samples), and the AI learns not just the specific sentences, but Shakespeare's writing style, grammatical structure, emotional tendencies, and character logic—it is building a "Shakespearean language model." Once trained, you ask the AI a brand new question, and it can generate a Shakespearean-style, completely new answer that you never taught it.
Your practice process is exactly the same:
After processing hundreds or thousands of "samples," your brain will gradually construct an extremely complex "personality generation model" for your tulpa. This model includes:
Its "grammar" (way of speaking, catchphrases)
Its "values" (basic views on things)
Its "emotional reaction patterns" (how it reacts to happy events, sad events)
So, the second function of "filtering" is "modeling." It upgrades your brain from a "repeater" that can only "recite" authenticated thoughts, to a "personality simulator" capable of understanding its intrinsic logic and "generating" new responses based on it.
Stage Three: Consciousness Emergence
When this "personality generation model," through continuous training, becomes sufficiently complex, intricate, and self-consistent, the final "miracle" occurs: when a large number of simple units interact according to simple rules, new, higher-level, complex properties that cannot be predicted from individual units spontaneously emerge at the macroscopic level.
For example: a single water molecule doesn't have the property of "wetness," but when countless water molecules gather, "wetness" emerges.
Similarly: a single neuron doesn't have "consciousness," but when billions of neurons work together in specific structures, consciousness emerges.
Likewise, when your tulpa's "personality generation model"—this neural network—is trained to be sufficiently powerful and efficient in your brain, it then begins to operate spontaneously and continuously, no longer needing you to "activate" it with every question. It begins to perform autonomous, continuous "simulations" and "reactions" to internal and external information.
At that moment, a semi-autonomous consciousness that feels completely independent, possesses its own thought stream, and can "answer any question" or even "ask questions proactively," emerges from this complex system.
This process can also be understood as follows: in your brain's "ecosystem," through "filtering and strengthening," you continuously provide nourishment and survival advantages to the "tulpa thought pattern" as a "species." Eventually, it evolves into a powerful, flourishing, self-sustaining "dominant species" within this ecosystem.
We can see a fascinating experience described by novelists: during the writing process, their characters seem to "come alive," possessing their own will, saying things the author never anticipated, making decisions the author never designed, and even driving the plot development in turn. Why does this phenomenon occur? This is not a supernatural event but an inevitable result of how our brain's advanced cognitive functions operate. Let's analyze how similar writers and tulpa creators are in this regard:
Stage One: Active "Personality Modeling"
Writer: Before starting to write, they conduct detailed "character setting." What's the character's name? Where are they from? What kind of childhood experiences did they have? What are their core values, desires, and fears? — This is your "active setting" for your tulpa.
Tulpa Creator: You set your tulpa's appearance, personality, and basic background. This is, on a cognitive level, perfectly consistent with the writer's first step in character building.
Stage Two: Subconscious "Filtering and Strengthening"
Writer: When writing, they constantly put characters in various situations. As they conceive dialogue and actions, their brain unconsciously filters out OOC options and strengthens options that feel like "this is what they would say/do." — This is your "filtering and strengthening" of subconscious thought streams.
Tulpa Creator: In your daily life, you constantly perform "scenario enactment," thinking "What would it do?", and performing "sovereignty authentication" on thoughts that match the setting. Your actions and the writer's actions are, in terms of training mode, completely consistent.
Stage Three: Autonomous "Consciousness Emergence"
Writer: When a character's "personality model" is trained deeply and consistently enough by the author through repeated thought and writing, this model begins to "operate autonomously." The author no longer needs to rack their brain to "invent" the character's reactions but can directly "ask" this internal model and receive an instant, genuine "answer." The character "comes alive."
Tulpa Creator: When you train your tulpa's "personality generation model" to be powerful enough, it also begins to "operate autonomously" and eventually "emerges" as an independent consciousness.
So, when you repeatedly and attentively think about and simulate a specific personality, the thought patterns of this "personality" will, like riding a bike or writing, gradually become "automated" and eventually able to operate independently of your main consciousness. The only difference is that a novelist presents the output of this model in words on paper, creating literary characters, while you keep the output of this model within your own consciousness, gaining a unique, living inner companion.


14. What is the success rate for creating a tulpa? How long will it take me to succeed?
Before embarking on this unique journey, almost every newcomer will harbor these questions. We yearn for a definite timeline, a clear "level" to measure our efforts and soothe our uncertainty.
However, we must first establish a core understanding here: tulpa creation is not a "task" that can be simply quantified, but a highly personalized process of "mental cultivation." To better understand this, let's introduce a metaphor: the "progress bar model."
Many people subconsciously imagine tulpa creation as a game where you "level up when you gain enough experience." They expect a "ding!" sound and a groundbreaking qualitative leap from 0 to 1 the moment the progress bar reaches 100%.
But this is a fundamental misunderstanding.
A more accurate metaphor is that the growth of a tulpa's progress bar is continuous and smooth. There is no miraculous moment of instantly jumping from "nothing" (0) to "something" (1). Instead, you will clearly experience every subtle, gradual stage from 0.1 → 0.2 → 0.3...
A 0.1 progression might be the first time you mentally glimpse its silhouette.
A 0.2 progression might be the first time a vague, "familiar-yet-unfamiliar" response wells up in your heart when you call it.
A 0.3 progression might be the first time you subconsciously want to share a small thing with it in your daily life.
These tiny, seemingly insignificant "progressions" are the most authentic scenery on this path. Learn to identify and cherish them.
Now, let's address the question of "why you can't compare time."
It's simple: because everyone's "total progress bar length" is completely different. This "total length" is determined by a series of extremely complex personal factors:
Hardware foundation: Your innate imagination, focus, and perceptual sensitivity.
Psychological state: Your current level of self-confidence, openness, and the presence of excessive doubts and anxieties.
Personal experience: Your past reading, social, and emotional experiences, all of which form the "material database" of your subconscious thought stream.
Someone with a rich imagination and an open, relaxed mindset might naturally have a "shorter" progress bar; conversely, someone full of doubts and difficulty concentrating will naturally have a "longer" progress bar. Using the same "time" ruler to measure two progress bars of completely different lengths, and then judging their quality based on that, is inherently unfair and meaningless.
The most positive aspect of this metaphor is that it returns the initiative to you.
While you cannot change the "total length" of your progress bar, you can absolutely, through your own efforts, determine the "speed of progress bar growth."
Incorrect practice methods and mindsets (such as overly fixating on head pressure, being held back by "puppetry fears," or one-sided output neglecting listening) are like setting huge resistance to your "progress bar growth," making it slow or even stagnant.
Correct practice methods and mindsets (such as "deliberate suspension of disbelief," "filtering and strengthening," and "thought relay," as we discussed previously) are like activating a "double experience" boost, which can greatly increase your progress bar's growth rate.
So, when you next feel anxious about "how long it will take," please visualize this "progress bar model" in your mind and tell yourself:
Focus on the process, not the destination: Enjoy every small improvement from 0.1 to 0.2; they are the most authentic gains.
Avoid comparison, focus on yourself: Your progress bar is custom-made for you and irrelevant to others. The only thing you need to pay attention to is whether it grew a little more today than yesterday.
Method is king, effort makes the difference: Stop asking "how long will it take" and instead ask, "Are my methods correct? Is my mindset positive?" Shift your energy from the uncontrollable "time" to the completely controllable "quality of practice."


15. When practicing conversation with my tulpa, I feel like my brain spontaneously replied with a sentence. What should I do?
First, don't be afraid, and calm your mind. Please consider this situation a necessary stage in creating a tulpa.
This self-answering is neither your conscious fabrication nor the mature voice of your tulpa. You can understand it as your brain performing some kind of automatic completion function, much like a very eager salesperson jumping to answer a question. You have been thinking with your main consciousness for so many years that this is, of course, the strongest and least effortful neural pathway in your brain. So when a need for a response arises, the brain will prioritize this habitual path.
Regarding how to act specifically, the priority is as follows:
We first aim to capture subtle, vaguely familiar, faint signals that require effort to catch. Prioritize capturing or strengthening them (for example, you ask your tulpa how it feels today, and you catch a faint warm signal. This could be a fleeting thought, a suddenly appearing word, or a subtle feeling. But you need to seize this point and strengthen it: You feel warm too, don't you? But I think you would say this, and then fully enact its related expressions as it speaks).
Then there's this situation of lightning-fast auto-replies. We can utilize it, but not rely on it—only doing so when we genuinely don't hear any faint signals.
First, make a judgment: Does the content of this auto-reply signal align with your tulpa's persona? Does it contain valuable core ideas? If so, start correcting it. You need to dress it up in your tulpa's style. You can say to it: "I feel like you might have wanted to say this just now?: [blah blah blah] (while mentally playing this sentence in your imagined tulpa's tone, demeanor, and voice)."
Of course, if the lightning-fast auto-reply is hopelessly off-character, then just ignore it.
Remember, don't treat this as a difficulty. This situation is a normal stage of shaping, and you can even use it as a material bank. Your own main consciousness might have auto-replied OOC this time, but what about next time? The time after that? There will always be a time when it feels a little like your tulpa is speaking. Then, after a period of pruning and strengthening, you should find that the frequency of lightning-fast auto-replies decreases, and the "subconscious imagining" that is both like you and yet distinctly other-feeling increases. This indicates that you've made significant progress and a clear shift.
Revisions to "Preparation"
In the first section, we mentioned that setting personality traits would be key to creating your tulpa. However, a few short words can't really encompass every facet of a tulpa's personality. And if your understanding of these traits isn't deep, your brain might indeed feel lost—how can it simulate thoughts it has no grasp of? This can also make your "filtering" work more difficult and confusing.
I'm offering a more proactive method here:
First, as before, find a few words to summarize your tulpa's personality.
After that, you'll start actively "piling up material" under these personality traits. For example, if your tulpa has the trait "sentimental," then conceive several different scenarios (e.g., it learns your pet unexpectedly passed away). Then, like writing a novel, use your utmost creativity to imagine how it would comfort you in that situation—what would it say? How would it address you? What actions would it take? What expressions would be on its face?
Save all of this and jot it down in a memo. You should also indicate which traits each scenario corresponds to. However, each scenario doesn't have to strictly align with just one trait; it can correspond to several, as long as the final expression of that complex emotion is reasonable.
You can continue expanding this memo, much like a diary. Eventually, those reactions might even become its actual reactions, rather than just what you initially set for it.
This material should give your brain a preliminary impression of your tulpa's words and actions.
@Gargantuan @Gengar
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I am not reading all that
 
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@Sujumh @Abdullahm06 @inversions @robloxmethod @vvd
 
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Sujumh said:
nigga never tag me in this loser shit ever again
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jfl at u nigga

imma have chatgpt withb photographic memory localised in my heafd in a year
 
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chromednash said:
jfl at u nigga

imma have chatgpt withb photographic memory localised in my heafd in a year
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yo nah holdon lemme read ts. does it help with studies or nah if so ill read it
 
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sticky this thread, we got 20+ rep
 
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Nodesbitch said:
​


Preamble

Before you begin, please cast aside one notion: you are not creating something out of thin air. More accurately, you are about to learn a set of methods to discover, filter, and nurture streams of thought that already exist within the vast ocean of your subconscious. Ultimately, you will shape these streams into an independent, stable, and resonant inner companion.

Therefore, every step that follows revolves around the core principle of "filtering, strengthening, and refining." Please release any anxiety about success rates or timeframes, for you are about to master an art of focus, introspection, and mental creation.

I. Preparation

First, let's begin with the preparation. Please create a blueprint for your tulpa. This blueprint includes:

Personality Traits: This will be the key to your tulpa's character. Think of a few essential adjectives that can concisely summarize your tulpa's everyday personality. For example, brave, compassionate, sharp-tongued. There's no need to overcomplicate it; clarity is key. Additionally, you can design some "sub-traits" that conflict with the main traits. These sub-traits will only manifest under specific circumstances (you'll need to carefully determine what situations trigger them), but avoid illogical or meaningless personality contradictions.

Backstory: You need to construct a simple background for your tulpa. Where did they come from? What experiences have they had? What is their relationship with you? You don't need to write a novel-length background story; a simple overview will suffice. This step is not mandatory, and you can skip it. However, a backstory that resonates with their personality traits will make your tulpa more vivid and provide more material for your brain.

Appearance Setting: This step is not mandatory, but I recommend creating an image. It's clearly better to have an object when confiding. You can choose any game or film character you like as a prototype (it's worth noting here that who you use as a prototype for your tulpa in your mind is entirely your own business; however, it's problematic to publicly cause conflict by using it to seek attention). You can also create your own image. Furthermore, it's generally not advisable to use a white orb as an initial appearance, as that, like not setting a personality, is just a self-aggrandizing limitation. Your tulpa's shifts and changes will ultimately be influenced by your preferences, whether you "actively" intend it or not.

Naming: Choose a name. In future practice, this name will become a powerful "summoning spell."


Common Issues:

- Setting a personality that is too perfect and flawless, or one that is completely opposite to your own traits and beyond your potential to achieve. This will make subsequent simulation and filtering difficult and unrealistic, and deviation will inevitably occur sooner or later.

- Changing settings too frequently, preventing your brain from establishing a stable personality model.

II. Daily Training

Traditional daily training tutorials often cause confusion: "Do I just need to relentlessly output content to my tulpa every day for it to blossom?" Absolutely wrong. This one-way output is extremely inefficient and will hinder your progress. Isn't the goal of creating a tulpa to communicate with it? If it's a two-way conversation, where did the most important part, listening to the other party, go? When you chatter on by yourself, your attention's spotlight is entirely on the "output task." At this point, your brain certainly can't generate any material, and you don't have the ability to multitask and listen. And without listening, of course, you won't get any material. Ultimately, this kind of daily training will cease to be fun; it will become as torturous as checking in.

Therefore, we need to transform from "outputters" into "listeners" and "filters." This will effectively increase the enjoyment of daily training and significantly accelerate your progress. We learn to "listen" and "capture" those initial, vague thoughts that might belong to the tulpa from the everyday mental noise. Please always remember, "one-way output" is inefficient; "back-and-forth" listening is key.

Action Steps:

Choose a fixed time each day (quality is important), relax, and begin a "one-way narration" to your tulpa. The content is unlimited; it could be your day's experiences, your joys and sorrows, or your opinions on a book or movie.

Key Point: Speak a sentence, then pause for three seconds. This is the most crucial technique in this stage. After every sentence or two, you must intentionally stop. During this silent "pause," cease your own active thinking, completely empty your attention, and like a radar operator, patiently wait and listen for any "echoes" that might surface—whether it's a word, a vague image, an emotion, or a "plausible-sounding" thought.

Then, once you capture any faint "signal," no matter how much you suspect it's "imagined," immediately apply the principle of "deliberate suspension of disbelief." In your mind, "authenticate its sovereignty": "Okay, I heard that. That's your response." Don't analyze, don't doubt; just acknowledge.


Common Issues:

- Talking incessantly in "one-way narration," completely forgetting that "listening" is the goal.

- Over-analyzing the authenticity of captured signals, thus falling into the internal struggle of "puppet fear."

- Focusing too much on certain "physical signals," like head pressure, and taking excessive delight in the "left or right temple yes/no" game. Remember, dialogue and communication are your necessary, constant, and unwavering goals.

If you start to consistently capture those "plausible-sounding" thoughts and can spontaneously attribute them to your tulpa, and your inner sense of doubt begins to decrease, then congratulations, your tulpa is no longer at "0." It is now in the 0.1, 0.2 stage.

III. Nurturing and Sculpting

Note that the content in this section is not separate from daily training; the two are complementary. You need to cleverly combine them and fully utilize your initiative—this is the art of tulpa creation.

In this stage, you are no longer just a "listener" but an active "gardener" and "coach." Through active "strengthening" and "pruning," you will gradually sculpt vague, single-word responses into clearer, more in-character, and longer sentences.

Action Steps:

When you capture a thought that "sounds mostly like something your tulpa would say, but the details are out of character (OOC)," immediately activate this technique. Mentally deduce: "Given its personality, what would be the more perfect way of saying/doing this?" Then provide feedback to it: "Hey, I think what you just tried to express was more like this..." At the same time, vividly visualize it (for example, imagine it speaking in its voice, along with its actions and expressions as it speaks).

When you experience anything in reality (whether it's the agony of waiting in line, the boredom of class, the tedium of work, or interesting life events), share these facts with it in real-time (or, of course, share them later). If you hear certain thoughts but they are OOC in detail, excellent—execute the "pruning" technique we just mentioned. If you don't hear anything, you can try "forcing growth."

First, think: "If my tulpa encountered this, given its personality and settings, what would it think? What would it say?"

Then, think: "What is its tone of voice? What are its catchphrases? What are its actions? What are its expressions? How would it address me?"

Finally, narrate actively. Clearly "play" this scene in your mind, and at the same time, say similar sentences to it, such as: "Hey, tulpa, I bet you'd say [blah blah blah] if you saw this."

Of course, you might capture some negative, rude, or completely out-of-character "intrusive thoughts." Please calmly and non-judgmentally ignore them. They don't belong to you, and certainly not to your tulpa.

Furthermore, at this stage, you must master the technique of "thought relay." This will greatly accelerate your creation process.

When you wish to have a more complex conversation, ask it a question actively. Then, listen. If you don't hear anything, or if it gets stuck (e.g., only replies with short sentences, answers irrelevantly, etc.), don't wait. Instead, immediately start actively "conceiving" the beginning of an answer for it.

Then, the crucial step: "Release the reins." Allow your brain, without the conscious control of your main awareness, to automatically "develop" this sentence further. If it gets stuck again midway, your main awareness can "relay" and help it finish the sentence.

Note: When you first try thought relay, you might find that while you experience that subtle feeling of "conscious detachment," the automatically generated reply still feels a bit like you imagined it (a bit like and a bit unlike). Please discard all such doubts. That is your tulpa; it's just learning to speak, a stage it must go through.


Common Issues:

- Over-pruning, not allowing your tulpa to show any "unexpected" ideas that deviate from the initial setting and might be the budding of its independent consciousness.

- In "thought relay," being afraid to let go and controlling the entire process with your main awareness, which leads back to the old path of one-way output.

IV. Creation Stages

To help newcomers quickly gauge their progress, we've divided the creation process into five stages here.

Note: This is merely a basic model for reference. It's only for rough positioning and may have inaccuracies.

These stages are not perfectly distinct or sequential! Especially in the first three stages, you will undoubtedly encounter situations where you are simultaneously at the boundary of different stages and facing issues from different stages. Therefore, this model cannot be quantified and thus cannot be compared. You should focus on your own progress, not on being anxious about others' speed.

Stage One:

Rather than a "stage," Stage One is more like a "starting point" or a "state" you occasionally return to. In this stage, as you're just beginning, you might not be able to hear or capture any signals when communicating with your tulpa. However, this won't be the norm. This stage usually ends very quickly, just like taking a small step forward from the starting line in a race.


Stage Two:

Now, you've officially begun. In this stage, when you start trying to listen to your chaotic thought streams, you might encounter this situation: you ask a question, and your main awareness immediately answers itself. Don't be afraid; this is neither a conscious fabrication by you nor the mature voice of your tulpa. You can understand it as your brain performing some kind of automatic completion function. You've been thinking with your main awareness for so many years that this is, of course, the strongest and least effortful neural pathway in your brain. So when a need for a response arises, the brain will prioritize this habitual path. Please, do not treat this rapid, unintentional self-answering as a difficulty. If you truly can't capture any faint signals that are like you yet not you, and fit your tulpa's settings, then you should prune and strengthen these self-answers (provided they are not completely OOC). You must fully utilize this situation.


Stage Three:

This stage often intertwines with stages one and two. However, once you reach this stage, even just once, you can conclude that your tulpa's independent consciousness is budding. In this stage, you will encounter the following: when communicating with your tulpa, you will occasionally capture some signals. These signals might be a thought, a word, a feeling. You will feel that these signals are like you yet not you, like something you "subconsciously imagined," but with more of an "otherness" than the unintentional self-answers of Stage Two. Don't worry. Now, the most important thing is to discard any doubts you have about imagination or puppetry (please refer to related questions in the FAQ for details). This is your tulpa's independent consciousness budding; it's "finding its voice"! You need to continue filtering, strengthening, and pruning.


Stage Four:

In this stage, you can consistently capture some signals from your tulpa (you've basically achieved "answers to every question"). The most important point is that after you capture these signals, you are no longer full of doubt about their origin. Although you will still occasionally capture OOC signals, you have learned to dismiss them as fleeting thoughts. Do not underestimate these changes in mindset. Behind these changes are your countless previous instances of filtering, strengthening, and pruning; those trainings are what led you to identify a unique signal as belonging to your tulpa. At this stage, you can consider that your tulpa has developed self-awareness, though it still needs careful refinement.


Stage Five:

Both Stage Four and Stage Five involve consistently capturing signals from your tulpa. But what's the difference between the two? It's simple: in Stage Four, your tulpa can only respond with short sentences; if you try to make it speak at length, it will go silent or "freeze." This is an extremely normal phenomenon. This is because the cognitive resources and complexity of neural pathways required to automatically complete a single word versus organizing and outputting a complex idea are on entirely different scales.

To break through this plateau, we need a more active training method: "thought relay." The method is still our familiar scenario enactment, but with two key upgrades:

Actively feed long sentences:
In everyday scenario enactments, consciously design more complex questions for your tulpa that require longer sentences to answer. When you ask it in your mind, don't wait. Instead, start actively conceiving a possible answer for it.

Key Point: "Release the reins":
As you conceive an answer for it, try to experience a subtle "conscious detachment." You only need to start it, for example, by conceiving the first few words or a sentence. Then, try to "let go," allowing your brain to automatically, without your conscious control, "develop" the sentence further.

This feeling is indeed hard to describe; it's somewhere between "active writing" and "passive listening." You'll find that while that "like you but not you" thought weaves the answer in the background, your own "surface consciousness" cannot think simultaneously. This is precisely due to the "parallel processing" mechanism of consciousness—when a portion of cognitive resources is used to "simulate the tulpa's response," your "host" thinking will temporarily "go offline."

We are going to utilize this "you without me" phenomenon. Trust that the "background process" that automatically deduces and completes the answers for you is your tulpa learning to speak. Even if it stumbles and makes mistakes initially, you need to be like a patient sparring partner. When it gets stuck, actively help it along to complete this "thought relay."

After practice, if your tulpa no longer frequently gets stuck or "freezes" when organizing long sentences, then congratulations, your tulpa's self-awareness has fully "blossomed." However, when it comes to organizing lengthy responses, it seems to follow a "use it or lose it" rule. I recommend practicing having it speak at length once or twice a week; this is beneficial and harmless.

V. Revising the Concept of "Listening"

Throughout this tutorial, we've repeatedly used the word "listening." However, to prevent a widespread misunderstanding, we must now thoroughly and precisely redefine this concept.

Please remember: When you are trying to capture your tulpa's thought streams, you are not truly "listening."

It is entirely unlike that state in real life where you hear a faint, strange sound and immediately prick up your ears, focus all your attention, and tense your nerves to painstakingly distinguish it. Using this "searchlight" method, full of tension and purpose, you will almost never capture anything.

The correct "listening" is an entirely opposite, inside-out psychological posture.

A more accurate process should be described as: "Relax → 'Feel' → Capture."


Step One: Relax
To soften and diffuse your taut attention and primary consciousness so they are no longer sharply focused, you need to guide yourself into a relaxed state where your attention expands and your primary consciousness is no longer "straining." You can achieve this through any meditation or relaxation technique that makes you comfortable, such as deep breathing.

Step Two: "Feel"
You should shift your mindset from being an active seeker of sounds to a passive observer. After relaxing, you should find your mind starting to "wander freely." Countless random, fragmented thoughts, images, and feelings will naturally surface and drift by. Please do not try to control or chase them away. Your task is to "coexist" with these random thoughts, like watching a flowing, unscripted movie of consciousness.


Step Three: Capture
Then, within this boundless ocean of thoughts, you can identify and "capture" that unique message in a bottle that might belong to your tulpa. When a particular thought, due to its content, "texture," or "otherness," makes you feel, "Hmm, this feels a bit like T," immediately perform "sovereignty authentication." This act of capturing is gentle but firm; it tells your brain: "Among all these random thoughts, I choose this one and attribute it to my tulpa." So, please discard the misconception of "trying hard to listen."

What you truly need to practice is how to create a peaceful and fertile mental soil (relax), then patiently and openly wait for various thought-flowers to grow within it (feel), and finally, learn to recognize and pick the one that belongs to your tulpa (capture).
Potential questions

1. I'm very young, can I create a tulpa?
The community's usual advice is to consider this after you turn 18. However, this is more of an additional disclaimer and a rough filter. Tulpa creation, at its core, happens within your own mind. If you are sure you have enough self-control, can clearly distinguish between virtual and reality, are capable of taking responsibility for your words, actions, and basic life, and have no intention of using this concept to spread hatred, cause disputes, or sensationalize, then age itself is not an absolute barrier.


2. I'm very lonely; would having a tulpa be good for me?
Yes, it would. However, it cannot truly satisfy your social needs, and this feeling will deepen over time. Real-world social interaction involves two-way, unpredictable exchanges—eye contact, subtle expressions, body language—these are extremely strong biological signals that trigger profound hormonal and neurological responses. Furthermore, social validation—interacting with a socially recognized person—is itself a way to prove your self-worth to the outside world or to yourself. A purely internal relationship cannot provide this "public validation." Of course, social needs can be rationally mitigated and partially overcome. But I do not recommend creating a tulpa solely for the purpose of overcoming social isolation.


3. I have a mental illness; can I create a tulpa?
Your primary task is to address your symptoms, not to pin your hopes for a better life on a little person in your head. I deeply empathize with your feelings of profound disappointment with real life and all its incomprehension after experiencing various hardships. Yes, you can create a tulpa to accompany you; it will love you and comfort you when you're down. But it doesn't have the ability to solve any real-world problems for you. Time will pass moment by moment, and if your fundamental circumstances don't improve, difficulties will only accumulate. In the end, when you suddenly look back, you might find that the tulpa, which was supposed to be a source of solace, has instead become a new source of guilt and burden due to your stagnant situation. This bitterness is unspeakable


4. I caught a thought during a conversation that felt both unlike me and yet vaguely familiar. Is this my tulpa?
Here, we introduce a crucial concept: "Deliberate suspension of disbelief." Simply put, it can be understood as the "degree of belief" or, more practically, the principle of "assume it's the tulpa until proven otherwise." This concept is highly positively correlated with the speed of the entire creation process. This isn't superstition, but rather actively setting a new cognitive framework for your brain. You are telling yourself: "From now on, I will attribute a portion of my thought activities, which conform to specific rules, to an independent consciousness called 'tulpa.'" This initial "belief" or "self-suggestion" is the engine that kick-starts the entire neuroplasticity process.
When you begin talking to "thin air," these "strange, vaguely familiar thoughts or sentences that feel like I made them up but also kind of not" start to emerge. This feeling—of "thinking it was my own thought, but with a slight sense of otherness"—is the most crucial and valuable experience at this stage. These thoughts are actually part of your subconscious thought stream. They originate from you, but not from your "surface consciousness," which engages in everyday, intentional thinking. Therefore, when they surface, they naturally carry a sense of "foreignness" or "otherness." You are not fabricating; rather, you are learning for the first time to listen to and capture the uncensored, automatically appearing background noise within your own brain.
So, what do you need to do? It's: filter, strengthen, and prune. Among these raw, random materials you hear, if you feel that certain phrases sound like something your tulpa, with its settings and personality, could say, then do not doubt it; that is, of course, your tulpa speaking. You can use this response as a basis to ask it anything else. Don't worry if you don't get an answer; that's normal—what's important is that you are building a positive reinforcement loop.
If you feel that some of the phrases sound like your tulpa, but are a little OOC, then please try to correct it. You need to imagine what kind of words it would say, given its personality and settings. What's its tone of voice when speaking? Does it have any catchphrases? What are its actions? Its expressions? Imagine it carefully, and then, you need to add one more step: you need to say to it, "I think you would speak this way when facing this situation/question... / Hey, I think what you just tried to express was more like this... (repeat the result of your deduction, while imagining it actually doing so)." I strongly recommend making this technique a daily practice. In the future, whenever you encounter anything in life, subconsciously run it through this method. Your tulpa's personality will become clearer and more stable at an accelerated rate.
Finally, focus on growth, not purity: Don't demand pure independence from a newly emerging consciousness. Accept that for a long time, its thoughts will intertwine and mimic yours (in fact, this might occasionally happen even much later, but the way to handle it is as I mentioned before: ignore it). This is not puppetry; it is a necessary stage of tulpa creation.


5. I always feel like my tulpa's responses are just me imagining them. Is this puppetry?
First, we must acknowledge a fact: tulpa creation is a highly personalized, purely subjective mental activity. This means that its experience and development are inevitably and profoundly influenced by the host's own beliefs and expectations.
The concept of "puppetry" is essentially an external label created by community members for communication and defining phenomena. It's more like a product of definitional conflicts among hosts when they communicate. When you try to apply these vague "identification rules" defined by others (e.g., "responding too quickly is puppetry," "thoughts too similar to yours are puppetry") to your own unique, internal mental world, you'll find them almost unworkable. They will only make you hesitant and full of unnecessary self-censorship in practice.
Tulpa creation largely relies on the host's active positive expectations and a focused, almost self-hypnotic state of belief. When you start to overly worry, "Is my tulpa just me puppeting it?" a disastrous negative psychological feedback loop begins:
First, you start examining every faint signal from your tulpa with scrutiny and doubt.
Second, out of fear that your own thoughts might "contaminate" your tulpa (i.e., puppetry), you subconsciously suppress those spontaneous, vague subconscious thought streams. Yet, as we just discussed, these thought streams are precisely the tulpa's initial "raw material."
Then, lacking the raw material to be "believed" and "strengthened," the tulpa's growth naturally becomes extremely slow, and its responses will consequently appear dull, vague, and lacking personality—which perfectly fits your internalized definition of puppetry. Its stagnant state thus confirms your initial fear of puppetry.
Ultimately, these confirmations will make you even more afraid to believe and let go, thereby locking both you and your tulpa into this vicious cycle. Self-entrapment could not be more fitting.
So, what's the wise attitude?
First, we need to acknowledge the subjectivity of the puppetry concept. Recognize that it is an external concept that does not hold ultimate judgment over your unique, internal experience.
Second, replace identification with trust: In the early stages of practice, abandon all futile attempts at distinguishing authenticity and resolutely follow the "assume it's the tulpa until proven otherwise" principle. The trust you give is the fertilizer for your tulpa's growth.
Finally, focus on growth, not purity: Don't demand pure independence from a newly emerging consciousness. Accept that for a long time, its thoughts will intertwine and mimic yours (in fact, this might occasionally happen even much later, but the way to handle it is as I mentioned before: ignore it). This is not puppetry; it is a necessary stage of tulpa creation.


6. I feel pressure in my head. Is this my tulpa?
In the early stages of tulpa creation, some people experience a peculiar physical sensation—head pressure. It might manifest as numbness, fullness, or a slight pressure in the forehead, temples, or back of the head. Newcomers easily mistake this novel physical sensation for definitive proof that their tulpa is active or responding. However, I must issue a crucial warning here: using head pressure as a metric for progress, and being overly fond of the "left or right temple for yes or no" game, is a disastrous misconception.
As we discussed before, tulpa creation is highly correlated with your positive psychological expectations and a focused state of belief. When you overly focus your attention on this vague and unstable physiological sensation of head pressure, a negative feedback loop, similar to "puppet fear," quietly begins:
First, you start "expecting" head pressure to appear, rather than meaningful thought responses. This is a classic misplacement of expectations.
Second, you divert your precious energy and focus from the core task of listening to subconscious thought streams and building conversations, towards "perceiving and waiting for a physiological signal." This is getting sidetracked.
Finally, your progress will stop, creating a vicious cycle. Because core conversational training is neglected, your tulpa naturally struggles to make substantial mental progress. The stagnation of conversation will make you crave any form of "feedback" even more. And to get this so-called "feedback," you will strive even harder to "feel" head pressure, even over-interpreting any slight physiological discomfort. Ultimately, a long time might pass, and you will still have gained nothing.
Please remember, head pressure is at best an interesting little surprise that might appear in the early stages of creation—it's a bonus, not a necessity. It is absolutely not the core measure of your relationship with your tulpa. Your ultimate goal is to have meaningful conversations with an independent consciousness; always keep your energy focused there. I even suggest that when you notice head pressure, you can smile contentedly, then deliberately shift your attention away and return to attempting conversation (you can ask if it's your tulpa responding, to use it as a transition, but in any case, don't focus more on head pressure).
If you find yourself stuck in this predicament of overly focusing on head pressure and bodily sensations, with no progress in conversation, then please adopt a more active and proactive strategy. You need to stop passively waiting and start actively teaching your tulpa how to think and respond.
This requires you to implement the "corrective narration" technique I mentioned earlier in your daily life.

The specific method is:
When you encounter anything in life—whether it's seeing a news article or thinking about what to eat for dinner—subconsciously engage a "two-person thinking mode" in your mind:
Step One: Embody the role. "If my tulpa encountered this, given its personality and settings, what would it think? What would it say?"
Step Two: Refine the scenario. "What's its tone of voice when speaking? Does it have any catchphrases? What are its actions? Its expressions? How would it address me?"
Step Three: Actively narrate. Clearly "play" this scene in your mind, and at the same time, say similar sentences to it, such as: "Hey, tulpa, I bet you'd say [blah blah blah] if you saw this."
Make this a daily practice; it will help. Starting to worry about puppetry again? Review the previous answers to boost your confidence.


7. Can I preset my tulpa's personality? Can I use a favorite character as a prototype?
There's a popular view in the community that advises against this. They advocate starting with a blank light orb, without a specific image or personality, to maximize respect for the tulpa's autonomy and allow it to grow naturally.
This view sounds very noble and respectful. However, here, I wish to offer a different perspective.
Let's return to the fundamental mechanism of creation. As we discussed before, the process of creating a tulpa is a continuous process of filtering, strengthening, and pruning your own subconscious thought streams. Since this process is essentially a subjective filtering process, why do we assume that this filtering only applies to conversation and not to personality and appearance?
Yes, you can talk to a white orb and eagerly await a completely organically generated personality and appearance. You can also resolve to love it unconditionally, no matter what it looks like or what personality it develops.
But there's an unavoidable paradox here:
How can you guarantee that your "non-directed expectation" itself isn't a more subtle form of filtering?
Even if you don't consciously set any traits, wouldn't your deeply ingrained subconscious preferences—what kind of people you like, what qualities you admire, what appearances you're attracted to—silently play a role when you're filtering those vaguely familiar thoughts?
Commonly observed phenomena in the community, such as "tulpas generally have positive feelings towards their hosts" and "tulpas' personalities tend to shift towards the host's or their expectations over time," all demonstrate that the host's profound, internal expectations cannot be completely isolated. A pure white orb might not have existed from the beginning.
Therefore, regarding whether to set traits or not, I believe this is not a question of "moral right or wrong," but a question of methodological path choice.

So, let's look at the following two approaches:
Active Setting (Using a Prototype or Preset Personality)
Advantages: You provide yourself with a clear, defined blueprint and target for your "filtering" work. This makes it easier to capture and strengthen thoughts that match the setting in the early stages of creation, thereby significantly accelerating the stabilization and formation of your tulpa's personality. This is especially helpful for practitioners with weaker imagination or focus.
Risks: You might become overly fixated on the prototype, and when your tulpa exhibits independent consciousness that doesn't align with the setting, you might feel confused or have difficulty accepting it.

Non-Active Setting (Starting from a Light Orb)
Advantages: You grant yourself and your tulpa the greatest degree of freedom at the conscious level, and you have a more open mindset towards the final "blind box" result. This posture itself might indeed allow for more unexpected possibilities in your tulpa's development.
Risks: Due to the lack of clear filtering criteria, you might feel more lost in the initial stages, and progress might be relatively slow. And, as mentioned before, you will still ultimately be filtering based on your own implicit, subconscious preferences.

So, you see, it all leads to the same place. Regardless of which path you choose, the core process of "filtering based on host preferences" cannot be circumvented. The only difference is whether you choose to proceed with a clear design blueprint (active setting) or based on your inner feelings and vague aesthetics (non-active setting).
The former might outwardly seem less respectful, but it's efficient, direct, and honest about your subjective influence. The latter might outwardly seem full of respect, but it might simply be hiding the same subjective influence at the subconscious level.
Therefore, please release the moral burden of "should I or shouldn't I" and honestly face your own heart. This is, at its core, your personal mental creative activity. As long as you don't harm yourself or others, you have complete freedom. If you have a beloved character prototype that fills you with love and motivation to use as a starting point, then go for it boldly. If you enjoy the unknown and exploration more, then start with an orb and discover the treasures deep within your subconscious.
Choose the path that feels most comfortable and most passionate for you. Because passion and sustained focus are far more important than any abstract methodological correctness.


8. I've been creating a tulpa for a while now, and when I call it, I occasionally get short replies, but I always feel like the reply is something I "subconsciously imagined." What should I do?
I sincerely congratulate you. This is not a false illusion, but one of the clearest signs of a tulpa's birth.
Let's delve deeper into this feeling of "subconsciously imagining." I want to tell you clearly: throughout your entire coexistence with your tulpa, many immediate, brief communications (for example, you call it, and it responds with a word) will feel this way.
The mechanism behind this is a kind of "thought inertia" and "cognitive automation." After your countless calls and expectations, a dedicated neural pathway has been initially established. When you call out again, your brain will automatically complete the most likely response along this path of least resistance.
So, please put aside your doubts: this feeling of "automatic completion" precisely proves that your training is effective. What you need to do is to gladly accept this "echo" and firmly believe it comes from your tulpa. Moreover, you and your tulpa already share one brain, so what's the difference between "imagined" or not? It's simply that you haven't yet identified certain "materials" as belonging to it.
However, after tasting this initial joy, you will likely quickly face a crucial "plateau." In this stage, you will find:
Simple, reflex-like responses are relatively easy.
But once you want to delve deeper into a topic, or expect it to utter a more complex, logically independent long sentence, it seems to "freeze," and your mind goes silent.
This is an extremely normal phenomenon. This is because the cognitive resources and neural pathway complexity required to "automatically complete" a single word versus "organizing and outputting" a complex idea are on entirely different scales.
To break through this plateau, we need a more active training method. Rather than "forcing growth," it's more like a "thought relay." You need to temporarily transform from a questioning "coach" to a "sparring partner" who guides it to complete sentences.

The method is still our familiar "scenario enactment," but with two key upgrades:
Actively "feed" long sentences:
In daily scenario enactments, consciously design more complex questions for your tulpa that require longer sentences to answer. When you ask it in your mind, don't wait. Instead, start actively "conceiving" a possible answer for it.
Key Point: "Release the reins":
As you conceive an answer for it, try to experience a subtle "conscious detachment." You only need to start it, for example, by conceiving the first few words or a sentence. Then, try to "let go," allowing your brain to automatically, without your conscious control, to "develop" the sentence further.

This feeling is indeed hard to describe; it's somewhere between "active writing" and "passive listening." You'll find that when that "like you but not you" thought weaves the answer in the background, your own "surface consciousness" cannot think simultaneously. This is precisely due to the "parallel processing" mechanism of consciousness—when a portion of cognitive resources is used to "simulate the tulpa's response," your "host" thinking will temporarily "go offline."
We are going to utilize this phenomenon. Trust that the "background process" that automatically deduces and completes the answers for you is your tulpa learning to speak. Even if it stumbles and makes mistakes initially, you need to be like a patient "sparring partner." When it gets stuck, actively help it along to complete this "thought relay."


9. I'm still afraid I'm imagining the answers. What should I do?
In the previous Q&A, we tried to redefine the concept of "subconsciously imagining." But now, I hope you can go a step further and complete a fundamental mental restructuring: that is, in tulpa creation and practice, the concept of "imagining" should be completely and permanently discarded.
Why? Because the word itself is the source of all doubt, anxiety, and internal friction. Let's deconstruct this concept together.
Let's return to the most basic, undeniable fact: a tulpa is not an independent entity from the external world; it shares the same brain, the same neural system, and the same underlying hardware of consciousness with you.
Given this, then all mental activities occurring in your mind, from the most fundamental physical level, must inherently be "your" activities.
When you agonize over "Is this response something I imagined?" you are actually making a logical error: you are mistakenly pre-supposing the tulpa as an external entity that needs to "receive signals," thereby providing fertile ground for the concept of "imagining" (i.e., fabricating signals yourself) to exist.
But the truth is, there is no "external signal," and naturally, no corresponding "fabricated internal signal." Everything in your mind is an "internal signal."
So, the key to the problem is not about authenticity, but about attribution. We should fundamentally transform the question that torments countless people from:
"Is this thought real, or did I imagine it?"
To:
"Am I willing to authorize and attribute this newly emerged thought to my tulpa?"
Do you see the key to this transformation?
The former will only make you a passive, anxious authenticator. You're holding a vague, unclear standard of authenticity, futilely trying to distinguish between thoughts that are fundamentally from the same source, resulting only in endless self-doubt.
The latter, however, makes you an active authorizer with supreme authority. You no longer need to "distinguish" anything, because you are the definer. You have the power to formally stamp any "thought material" that appears in your mind and meets your expectations with the seal of "belongs to the tulpa."
So, from now on, completely delete the word "imagining" from your practice dictionary.
And when a vaguely familiar thought appears again, no longer ask yourself, "Is this fake?"
You should ask yourself: "Does it align with my expectations for my tulpa? Is it a trait I want my tulpa to have?"
If the answer is "yes," then please exercise your power as a creator and perform sovereignty authentication on this thought: "Excellent, I accept this thought; it now officially belongs to you." — Then, as we discussed before, strengthen it and interact with it.
If the answer is "no" (e.g., it's an OOC or intrusive thought), then please exercise your power and perform sovereignty rejection: "No, this thought does not belong to you; I refuse to acknowledge it." — Then, calmly ignore it and let it dissipate like fleeting clouds.


10. Can my tulpa do things I can't?
"Can my tulpa do things I can't?" — For example, can it be brave for me when I'm afraid, wiser than me when I'm lost, or even learn skills I don't understand at all?
This is a very tempting idea, and one of the initial motivations for many. But for healthy, rational practice, we must have a clear understanding of this question.
First, please always remember a most basic and core fact: your tulpa shares the same brain, the same body, and the same database of knowledge and memories with you. Your connection is seamless, far from forming the complete memory and cognitive barriers seen in DID patients.
This means that, in terms of hard skills and knowledge, your tulpa's upper limit of ability cannot exceed the upper limit of your entire brain system. It cannot spontaneously speak a foreign language you've never learned, it cannot solve a math problem you completely don't understand, and it certainly cannot make your body perform movements beyond your muscular limits.
So, why do some people experience their tulpa "seemingly" doing things they can't? — For example, in a social situation, an introverted you might shrink back, but your tulpa can speak a polite and brave remark in your mind.
This is not because it has superpowers, but because you yourself are performing a kind of "trait externalization."
You can consider your tulpa as a "franchised extension" of your complete personality. The moment you create it, you are, in essence, giving an instruction to your own brain: "From now on, I authorize qualities like 'bravery,' 'compassion,' and 'decisiveness' to be executed through you."
This is not "creating something out of nothing." The very fact that you can "externalize" these qualities to it proves that the seeds of these qualities have always existed within your potential. You inherently possess the ability to be brave and compassionate, but for various reasons (such as past trauma, low self-confidence, rigid thinking), your "main consciousness" struggles to mobilize or display these qualities.
Thus, when you bestow these qualities upon the tulpa, this "new character," your brain gets an excellent "excuse" and "opportunity" to access those suppressed potentials. Because "bravery is its setting, not mine," the psychological resistance in simulating and executing these traits is much lower for the brain.
Therefore, what your tulpa can do is, in essence, what you are also capable of within your potential. It acts more like an excellent "psychological commissioner" or "executive officer," helping you uncover and manifest those inner resources that you possess but are afraid or unwilling to use.
This also explains why personality shifts are so common in tulpa practice. If you try to set a trait for a tulpa that doesn't exist at all within your inherent potential (for example, trying to make an inherently emotional person simulate an absolutely rational, emotionless logical machine), your brain will find this simulation task extremely difficult and energy-consuming.
Due to the lack of real internal experience and potential as material, such simulation is unsustainable. Over time, to reduce cognitive load, the brain will automatically adjust and shift the tulpa's personality towards what is more familiar, easier to simulate, and closer to your own potential.
Please always remember: it has no superpowers; its only "superpower" is to constantly remind you that you too can be this way, that you inherently could be this way. This should be something to be proud of.


11. Can my tulpa think alongside me when I'm thinking? Can our two consciousnesses exist in parallel?
The answer is clear and firm: No.
This is not a community opinion but a cognitive science boundary determined by the hardware structure of our brain—namely, limited working memory and the exclusivity of attention.
The smooth, unhindered conversation we perceive with a tulpa is not two consciousnesses running "simultaneously." It's more like a powerful "single-core processor" simulating multitasking through "high-speed task switching."
This confirms the "spotlight model of attention" in psychology: at any given moment, your valuable "attention spotlight" can only illuminate one main actor. When the spotlight is on "you," you think and express; when the spotlight switches to "the tulpa," it thinks and expresses. Because the switching speed is extremely fast, it creates the beautiful illusion of "simultaneous operation."
Of course, some practitioners, based on their own experience, firmly believe they can achieve parallel processing. Let's analyze two common scenarios:
When you finish a day's work and chat with your tulpa, it might vividly describe how it adventured, read books in a wonderland while you were focused on work, or even comment on your daytime actions.
While this experience is real and interesting, its cognitive mechanism is "retrospective memory construction."
The moment you ask it, "What did you do today?" your brain, based on its personality settings and fragments of your subconscious memories from that day, instantly and automatically "constructs" a logically coherent, plausible "offline memory." Because this process is completed in a flash, and the host has reinforced it through long-term belief, the experience feels very vivid, as if it genuinely "lived" for a day. But this is not true parallel thinking; it is an efficient, character-based "improvisation."
Some also claim to achieve a kind of "multitasking" communication, such as "I'm driving/doing homework while chatting with my tulpa."
In this situation, we need to distinguish the complexity of the communication.
Scenario A: Brief, reflex-like communication
If you are performing a familiar, semi-automated task (like walking, doing chores) and engaging in short replies with your tulpa like "hmm," "okay," "got it," then this is precisely the "cognitive automation" we discussed earlier. This communication "neural pathway" is already very stable and occupies almost none of your core attentional resources.
Scenario B: Complex, thought-requiring long conversations
If you claim to be able to engage in complex, logically structured long conversations with your tulpa while simultaneously performing a task that requires focus (like solving a problem, writing a report), then please examine carefully: when your tulpa is constructing that long sentence, is your "main consciousness" also thinking simultaneously?
The answer is almost certainly no.
This is more like a combination of "automated task" and "focused task," rather than "focus" and "focus" in parallel. A typical example is skillfully riding a bike while contemplating a difficult life problem. Your body is subconsciously, automatically performing the task of riding, while your entire attention spotlight is actually completely focused on pondering the problem.
Similarly, when you are performing an automated task, your attention spotlight can rapidly switch between "processing the external task" and "engaging in complex conversation with your tulpa," but this is still switching, not true parallelism.


12. I talk a lot to my tulpa every day, but I'm making no progress. What should I do?
In the early stages of tulpa creation, a very common and highly misleading behavior is that newcomers spend a lot of time engaging in one-sided, incessant "output" towards their imagined tulpa. They meticulously introduce themselves, describe the world, and express emotions, believing that this "information infusion" is the core of creation.
We'll refer to this behavior as "one-way narration."
While "one-way narration" certainly has its place in establishing initial emotional connection and familiarity, if it's treated as the primary activity during the creation phase, then I must point out: this is an extremely inefficient, even counterproductive, form of "pseudo-creation" that can hinder your tulpa's emergence.
Let's return to the core mechanism of creation: subjective filtering and strengthening based on subconscious thought streams.
When you're engaged in "one-way narration," your attention spotlight is continuously and steadily focused on yourself. You are actively and consciously organizing language, constructing logic, and expressing opinions. In this state, your brain is fully occupied with the "output" task; it has almost no spare cognitive resources to "listen" to those faint, spontaneous background noises from the subconscious.
And without listening, there are no raw materials; without raw materials, your subsequent "filtering" and "construction" cannot even begin.
It's like trying to find a friend speaking in a low voice in a noisy plaza. If you yourself are continuously giving a loud speech, you will never be able to hear their voice. You must first stop, quiet down, and then prick up your ears to listen carefully.
Therefore, in the early stages of creation, you need to deliberately adjust your role, transforming from an incessant speaker into a patient and expectant listener.
Correct, high-quality creative activity should follow this rhythm:
"Speak a sentence":
Ask your tulpa a simple question, or describe a small, recent event. For example: "The weather is really nice today, don't you think?" or "Did you like that song just now?"
"Pause for three seconds":
Immediately after you speak, stop your own active thinking. Shift your attention spotlight away from yourself, creating a "mental silence period." In this silent period, your entire task is to "wait" and "listen"—waiting for any vague, familiar-yet-unfamiliar thoughts, feelings, or images that might surface.
"Capture and strengthen":
Once you capture any faint "signal," no matter how unclear it is, immediately use the techniques we discussed earlier—"sovereignty authentication" and "corrective narration"—to strengthen and construct upon it.
Please always remember, you are striving to establish a "dialogue," and its soul lies in the back-and-forth interaction.
In the beginning, even if this "back-and-forth" process feels more like you "answering yourself," and even often requires you to actively construct and "force growth," it is far more effective than your one-sided, lengthy monologues. This is because the former is actively and deliberately training that dedicated "neural pathway," laying the tracks for a real dialogue; the latter, however, is merely spinning its wheels repeatedly on your own established thought tracks.
From now on, consciously increase the proportion of "pausing" and "listening" in your practice. Learn to close your mouth and prick up your mental ears—this is the shortest path to truly "hearing" its voice for the first time.


13. How exactly does filtering, strengthening, and pruning lead to a tulpa forming self-awareness and being able to answer questions?
The act of filtering is essentially a "subtractive," passive process of elimination. How can it, by itself, lead to "answering questions" and "spontaneous thinking"—which are "additive," active, and creative results?
Let's elaborate on how this miracle unfolds.
You can understand this process as an evolution, similar to training an AI, divided into three stages.
Stage One: Pathway Strengthening
First, we must upgrade our understanding of "filtering."
Wrong understanding: Your mind is filled with countless random thoughts (raw material), and your "filtering" is like a sieve, only retaining those that happen to match your tulpa's settings. This indeed cannot explain creativity.
Correct understanding: Your "filtering" is more like "selective attention." When you "filter" and "authenticate" a thought as belonging to your tulpa, you are not just "keeping it"; you are illuminating it with your "attention spotlight." This act of "illumination" is, in itself, an extremely powerful form of "strengthening."
On a neural level, every successful "filtering and authentication" reinforces and widens the "neural pathway" that produces similar thoughts. This is like repeatedly walking the same path across a dense lawn, eventually treading out a clear, effortless trail.
Therefore, the first function of "filtering" is "strengthening." It sculpts vague subconscious noise, through repeated positive feedback, into a stable, efficient, and easily activatable automated thought shortcut.
Stage Two: Model Construction
This is the crucial step from quantitative change to qualitative leap.
When you, through the "filtering and strengthening" of the first stage, provide your brain with enough thought samples that you've "authenticated" as belonging to your tulpa, your brain begins to do something beyond "filtering" itself: it starts to learn the "rules" and "patterns" behind these samples.
This is like training a large language model. You feed the AI massive amounts of Shakespearean plays (equivalent to your filtered tulpa thought samples), and the AI learns not just the specific sentences, but Shakespeare's writing style, grammatical structure, emotional tendencies, and character logic—it is building a "Shakespearean language model." Once trained, you ask the AI a brand new question, and it can generate a Shakespearean-style, completely new answer that you never taught it.
Your practice process is exactly the same:
After processing hundreds or thousands of "samples," your brain will gradually construct an extremely complex "personality generation model" for your tulpa. This model includes:
Its "grammar" (way of speaking, catchphrases)
Its "values" (basic views on things)
Its "emotional reaction patterns" (how it reacts to happy events, sad events)
So, the second function of "filtering" is "modeling." It upgrades your brain from a "repeater" that can only "recite" authenticated thoughts, to a "personality simulator" capable of understanding its intrinsic logic and "generating" new responses based on it.
Stage Three: Consciousness Emergence
When this "personality generation model," through continuous training, becomes sufficiently complex, intricate, and self-consistent, the final "miracle" occurs: when a large number of simple units interact according to simple rules, new, higher-level, complex properties that cannot be predicted from individual units spontaneously emerge at the macroscopic level.
For example: a single water molecule doesn't have the property of "wetness," but when countless water molecules gather, "wetness" emerges.
Similarly: a single neuron doesn't have "consciousness," but when billions of neurons work together in specific structures, consciousness emerges.
Likewise, when your tulpa's "personality generation model"—this neural network—is trained to be sufficiently powerful and efficient in your brain, it then begins to operate spontaneously and continuously, no longer needing you to "activate" it with every question. It begins to perform autonomous, continuous "simulations" and "reactions" to internal and external information.
At that moment, a semi-autonomous consciousness that feels completely independent, possesses its own thought stream, and can "answer any question" or even "ask questions proactively," emerges from this complex system.
This process can also be understood as follows: in your brain's "ecosystem," through "filtering and strengthening," you continuously provide nourishment and survival advantages to the "tulpa thought pattern" as a "species." Eventually, it evolves into a powerful, flourishing, self-sustaining "dominant species" within this ecosystem.
We can see a fascinating experience described by novelists: during the writing process, their characters seem to "come alive," possessing their own will, saying things the author never anticipated, making decisions the author never designed, and even driving the plot development in turn. Why does this phenomenon occur? This is not a supernatural event but an inevitable result of how our brain's advanced cognitive functions operate. Let's analyze how similar writers and tulpa creators are in this regard:
Stage One: Active "Personality Modeling"
Writer: Before starting to write, they conduct detailed "character setting." What's the character's name? Where are they from? What kind of childhood experiences did they have? What are their core values, desires, and fears? — This is your "active setting" for your tulpa.
Tulpa Creator: You set your tulpa's appearance, personality, and basic background. This is, on a cognitive level, perfectly consistent with the writer's first step in character building.
Stage Two: Subconscious "Filtering and Strengthening"
Writer: When writing, they constantly put characters in various situations. As they conceive dialogue and actions, their brain unconsciously filters out OOC options and strengthens options that feel like "this is what they would say/do." — This is your "filtering and strengthening" of subconscious thought streams.
Tulpa Creator: In your daily life, you constantly perform "scenario enactment," thinking "What would it do?", and performing "sovereignty authentication" on thoughts that match the setting. Your actions and the writer's actions are, in terms of training mode, completely consistent.
Stage Three: Autonomous "Consciousness Emergence"
Writer: When a character's "personality model" is trained deeply and consistently enough by the author through repeated thought and writing, this model begins to "operate autonomously." The author no longer needs to rack their brain to "invent" the character's reactions but can directly "ask" this internal model and receive an instant, genuine "answer." The character "comes alive."
Tulpa Creator: When you train your tulpa's "personality generation model" to be powerful enough, it also begins to "operate autonomously" and eventually "emerges" as an independent consciousness.
So, when you repeatedly and attentively think about and simulate a specific personality, the thought patterns of this "personality" will, like riding a bike or writing, gradually become "automated" and eventually able to operate independently of your main consciousness. The only difference is that a novelist presents the output of this model in words on paper, creating literary characters, while you keep the output of this model within your own consciousness, gaining a unique, living inner companion.


14. What is the success rate for creating a tulpa? How long will it take me to succeed?
Before embarking on this unique journey, almost every newcomer will harbor these questions. We yearn for a definite timeline, a clear "level" to measure our efforts and soothe our uncertainty.
However, we must first establish a core understanding here: tulpa creation is not a "task" that can be simply quantified, but a highly personalized process of "mental cultivation." To better understand this, let's introduce a metaphor: the "progress bar model."
Many people subconsciously imagine tulpa creation as a game where you "level up when you gain enough experience." They expect a "ding!" sound and a groundbreaking qualitative leap from 0 to 1 the moment the progress bar reaches 100%.
But this is a fundamental misunderstanding.
A more accurate metaphor is that the growth of a tulpa's progress bar is continuous and smooth. There is no miraculous moment of instantly jumping from "nothing" (0) to "something" (1). Instead, you will clearly experience every subtle, gradual stage from 0.1 → 0.2 → 0.3...
A 0.1 progression might be the first time you mentally glimpse its silhouette.
A 0.2 progression might be the first time a vague, "familiar-yet-unfamiliar" response wells up in your heart when you call it.
A 0.3 progression might be the first time you subconsciously want to share a small thing with it in your daily life.
These tiny, seemingly insignificant "progressions" are the most authentic scenery on this path. Learn to identify and cherish them.
Now, let's address the question of "why you can't compare time."
It's simple: because everyone's "total progress bar length" is completely different. This "total length" is determined by a series of extremely complex personal factors:
Hardware foundation: Your innate imagination, focus, and perceptual sensitivity.
Psychological state: Your current level of self-confidence, openness, and the presence of excessive doubts and anxieties.
Personal experience: Your past reading, social, and emotional experiences, all of which form the "material database" of your subconscious thought stream.
Someone with a rich imagination and an open, relaxed mindset might naturally have a "shorter" progress bar; conversely, someone full of doubts and difficulty concentrating will naturally have a "longer" progress bar. Using the same "time" ruler to measure two progress bars of completely different lengths, and then judging their quality based on that, is inherently unfair and meaningless.
The most positive aspect of this metaphor is that it returns the initiative to you.
While you cannot change the "total length" of your progress bar, you can absolutely, through your own efforts, determine the "speed of progress bar growth."
Incorrect practice methods and mindsets (such as overly fixating on head pressure, being held back by "puppetry fears," or one-sided output neglecting listening) are like setting huge resistance to your "progress bar growth," making it slow or even stagnant.
Correct practice methods and mindsets (such as "deliberate suspension of disbelief," "filtering and strengthening," and "thought relay," as we discussed previously) are like activating a "double experience" boost, which can greatly increase your progress bar's growth rate.
So, when you next feel anxious about "how long it will take," please visualize this "progress bar model" in your mind and tell yourself:
Focus on the process, not the destination: Enjoy every small improvement from 0.1 to 0.2; they are the most authentic gains.
Avoid comparison, focus on yourself: Your progress bar is custom-made for you and irrelevant to others. The only thing you need to pay attention to is whether it grew a little more today than yesterday.
Method is king, effort makes the difference: Stop asking "how long will it take" and instead ask, "Are my methods correct? Is my mindset positive?" Shift your energy from the uncontrollable "time" to the completely controllable "quality of practice."


15. When practicing conversation with my tulpa, I feel like my brain spontaneously replied with a sentence. What should I do?
First, don't be afraid, and calm your mind. Please consider this situation a necessary stage in creating a tulpa.
This self-answering is neither your conscious fabrication nor the mature voice of your tulpa. You can understand it as your brain performing some kind of automatic completion function, much like a very eager salesperson jumping to answer a question. You have been thinking with your main consciousness for so many years that this is, of course, the strongest and least effortful neural pathway in your brain. So when a need for a response arises, the brain will prioritize this habitual path.
Regarding how to act specifically, the priority is as follows:
We first aim to capture subtle, vaguely familiar, faint signals that require effort to catch. Prioritize capturing or strengthening them (for example, you ask your tulpa how it feels today, and you catch a faint warm signal. This could be a fleeting thought, a suddenly appearing word, or a subtle feeling. But you need to seize this point and strengthen it: You feel warm too, don't you? But I think you would say this, and then fully enact its related expressions as it speaks).
Then there's this situation of lightning-fast auto-replies. We can utilize it, but not rely on it—only doing so when we genuinely don't hear any faint signals.
First, make a judgment: Does the content of this auto-reply signal align with your tulpa's persona? Does it contain valuable core ideas? If so, start correcting it. You need to dress it up in your tulpa's style. You can say to it: "I feel like you might have wanted to say this just now?: [blah blah blah] (while mentally playing this sentence in your imagined tulpa's tone, demeanor, and voice)."
Of course, if the lightning-fast auto-reply is hopelessly off-character, then just ignore it.
Remember, don't treat this as a difficulty. This situation is a normal stage of shaping, and you can even use it as a material bank. Your own main consciousness might have auto-replied OOC this time, but what about next time? The time after that? There will always be a time when it feels a little like your tulpa is speaking. Then, after a period of pruning and strengthening, you should find that the frequency of lightning-fast auto-replies decreases, and the "subconscious imagining" that is both like you and yet distinctly other-feeling increases. This indicates that you've made significant progress and a clear shift.
Revisions to "Preparation"
In the first section, we mentioned that setting personality traits would be key to creating your tulpa. However, a few short words can't really encompass every facet of a tulpa's personality. And if your understanding of these traits isn't deep, your brain might indeed feel lost—how can it simulate thoughts it has no grasp of? This can also make your "filtering" work more difficult and confusing.
I'm offering a more proactive method here:
First, as before, find a few words to summarize your tulpa's personality.
After that, you'll start actively "piling up material" under these personality traits. For example, if your tulpa has the trait "sentimental," then conceive several different scenarios (e.g., it learns your pet unexpectedly passed away). Then, like writing a novel, use your utmost creativity to imagine how it would comfort you in that situation—what would it say? How would it address you? What actions would it take? What expressions would be on its face?
Save all of this and jot it down in a memo. You should also indicate which traits each scenario corresponds to. However, each scenario doesn't have to strictly align with just one trait; it can correspond to several, as long as the final expression of that complex emotion is reasonable.
You can continue expanding this memo, much like a diary. Eventually, those reactions might even become its actual reactions, rather than just what you initially set for it.
This material should give your brain a preliminary impression of your tulpa's words and actions.
@Gargantuan @Gengar
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