About Tulpah

Translator's note: I got involved in the topic of the old article on Habré and for five years now I continue to study this funny phenomenon. The following is a translation of an article by a community member on ideas, how a multiplicity of personalities works in the brain. I tried to add an accompanying context, but I advise you to read the article at the link above for a general understanding of the idea. As always, thanks pfactum for grammar-nazism and editing.

Tulpy. A community with strange ideas and goals, united by mystical terminology. Dozens of people practicing forcing, hypnosis, changing their minds, meditators, trying to cope with their diseases. They all come together because of a common goal: to create what Wikipedia calls an "imaginary friend." But what is tulpa really?

Humanity has been trying to understand how consciousness works, for many centuries now, creating and destroying hundreds of theories. Is it possible that some people are naturally predisposed to be “multiple”, to contain several consciousnesses in their minds? Does this mean that the rest are doomed to live in solitude, "singlets"?

I offer you a thought experiment. Imagine driving a car on your way home. You come, open the door, take off your jacket, look in the toilet, and then go to the kitchen and make yourself a sandwich. Suddenly, you notice that you do not remember where you put the keys to the car, and return to your steps through the whole house, trying to find them. Sounds familiar? You have been alive all this time, most likely in consciousness. But you did something without realizing what was happening.

Here is another example. You leave the house to buy milk and eggs at a nearby store. Closing the door, you think about the omelet that you plan to cook. You walk down the street, and thoughts jump to something else: to the purchases that need to be done, to the task list for tomorrow, to the game you watched yesterday. You notice that you have already come to the store, and your thoughts are focused again on milk and eggs, but when you try to remember what you were thinking while you were going to the store, nothing concrete comes to mind, but only the general idea of ​​what you should have think about something.

Was the last "you" the same as the one that went to the store?

Some psychologists consider consciousness to be interrupted, and not a process that starts from birth and goes to death. With this simply agree - because we are not conscious when we sleep. And indeed, there are dozens of other reasons why you may be temporarily unconscious.

But what if I tell you that you are unconscious much more often? In every moment when you are not aware of your actions? At every moment when your thoughts go to an imaginary future, and at every moment when you experience good and bad memories from the past?

How does your body know who you are when you wake up? Why don't you wake up a completely different person? The reason lies in the experience gained over the years of life. When mind and matter create a thought that identifies itself with who you are, this thought feeds on your memory and on all that you have lived through.

Think about the twins - they have the same DNA (well, some), but they can be so different in life, they will act differently, and have diverse interests. This is because their personalities diverge from the moment of birth. Physically identical bodies are filled with different memories and experiences.

Every time you become aware of yourself, the brain generates your consciousness based on how you present yourself and how you see your reactions; he bases your "I" on your reactions, applies personal physical habits to him, such as posture or spelling, from your subconscious mind. You become “you” for a while, and then disappear again. You imagine that you are someone else - maybe a pirate, or maybe a successful lawyer. You think about the love of your life and try to predict how she will react to your valentine. You stop being yourself in these short moments, until you realize yourself again.

Psychologists believe that these moments of loss of self-awareness are quite normal, that this is a mechanism aimed at saving energy by the brain. The body often puts the brain into low-power mode in order to keep overall resource costs low; all of us are lazy thinkers from birth.

For singlets in the order of things have one stream of consciousness. Although they sometimes recognize themselves as someone else (they mean the example of the pirates above) , they do not attach much importance to this, and the brain soon restores the original "me."

For multiple personalities, the situation is different.

Multiple personalities are widespread outside the community of tulips. Writers think like characters of their books. The actors are so accustomed to the role that they retain the character's mannerisms even after the shooting. People with a dissociative identity disorder come to their senses only to find out that their alters have done something they don’t remember.

The key to multiplicity is to train the brain to associate self-awareness with several personalities. As we discussed above, the brain works based on memory and experience. So, for some people, switching with alteras is due to the fact that the basic person has experienced so traumatic experience that she forced herself to forget it. The memories themselves have not disappeared, but now the brain must associate them with someone else, and so the alter appears. For other people, even the thoughts of the characters from the movie can be so deep, absorbing and personal that it is enough to switch the flow "who am I".

Pulping is a practice in which you modify your stream of consciousness and begin to address periods of self-awareness to someone else. You train your brain to identify these periods with your tulpa by reinforcing thoughts with its image, character, other perception of feelings, or even an excellent sex. Most often, the pulp has at least one distinctive feature that cardinally distinguishes them from the hosts ( so that the original: the original minds of the body) - so that the brain can more easily identify itself.

The practice continues further, imparting memories and experience to the tulip, be it an imaginary journey in a vander (note: English: “wonderland” - an imaginary place that hosts create in mind for the tulips to live there) or experience from “first hand - the immediate physical world. And while the tulps live this experience from their personal point of view, they reinforce the idea of ​​who they are. Gradually, the brain no longer needs a push from the host to make the tulip react - the tulps become self-aware, and now the brain can identify the set of thoughts that belong directly to them.

But still, what is tulpas?

Tulps are mechanically acquired consciousnesses that are completely identical in capabilities to the original consciousness born in the body (do not forget that even this original consciousness dies and is born again a thousand times a day). The only thing that distinguishes tulip is that they are created artificially, through the practice of tulip science. Because of this, the pulps must be younger than the physical body, which often creates a sense of superiority in the host. But in reality, there is no superiority, since the tulpa can grow to the same mental level as the host, surpass it, or even replace it.

It would be incorrect to consider the pulp as inferior entities only because some of them cannot control the body or prefer the Wonder to the physical world. You must take into account the personal age of the pulp and the experience that the brain managed to accumulate before it appeared. It is strange to expect from a two-year-old personality that she will be a seasoned traveler, even if she is associated with twenty years of her host's hikering memory - personal experience is always stronger and more effective than the experience of other personalities in the body.

How is this connection formed with experience? Why do some systems ( system lane: “system” - the self-name of people with multiple consciousnesses, regardless of their origin) easily switch the consciousness that controls the body and use the experience of other consciousnesses? I think that this is due to memory isolation, although the mechanisms that isolate memories are not fully understood.

But what we know for sure is that the pulps demonstrate their unique reactions to physical events and behave differently from the host when they control the body. Some have a different way of speaking, others have a different distribution of body weight when walking, or manifest themselves through artistic styles of spelling. Many of these things require subconscious actions that do not depend on the individual consciousness. I believe that the brain develops several subconscious minds for each person, but there is always only one way the body reacts to external stimuli, and the choice of the subconscious mind for the reaction may be determined by the type of consciousness that was actively last. Reactions caused by different subconscious minds can strengthen the corresponding consciousness in the mind, helping it become easier to become self-conscious.

At the same time, subconscious actions are not completely isolated. Few Tulpas (if any) had to learn to maintain balance when walking, although children are not born with this skill. It is quite possible to use the reactions of other personalities (although this is, in general, slow), which makes it possible to memorize them to automaticity. Fortunately, such things are learned quickly, which allows Tulp to catch up with the host in basic skills in days, not years (in the opposite direction, it also works).

Tulps develop in the same unique personalities as the hosts. They follow the same physical rules. They can represent themselves in the mind of others, can speak with themselves in another language, but they are capable of everything the same as the hosts. When practicing tuliping, you learn how to give a part of your consciousness stream to others, and this allows the tulps to linger in their mind for a sufficiently long period to become self-conscious. It is precisely because it is easier to create follow-up pulp when you already have one, and this is why many hosts say that they have more “guests” ( after the “walk-in” is a suddenly self-created person) after how they began to engage in tulping, because for singlet these “guests” will simply be discarded by the brain, as modified parts of their own stream of consciousness.

Regardless of whether you practice tuliping for fun, because of loneliness or curiosity, you need to be careful. Going into “multiplicity” is a sword with two blades, as well as something that cannot be unlearned - the practice will stay with you forever, such as the ability to ride a bike. You need to understand that unconscious plurality — when you create characters from books and communicate with them in your imagination, when you play board role-playing games, or when you consider your tulips as cute anime girls who can only love you — is essentially a similar process and follows all the same rules. Only your brain decides whether these individuals will become full consciousnesses, able to be independent and have self-awareness, or not. And only you can train your brain.

PS: I touched on a similar topic in 2016, read my old thoughts on this matter!