Living with tulpamancy
This final chapter is about how tulpamancy fits into the rest of your life. We’ll cover telling others about it, balancing inner and outer relationships, expressing your tulpa socially, managing multiple tulpas, and understanding how the practice interacts with your everyday circumstances.
If you’re coming from the previous chapters, you already know how to start interacting with a character, how effortless responses emerge from sustained practice, and how to express your tulpa beyond internal dialogue through switching. Now we step back and look at the bigger picture.
Your tulpa and other people
A relationship with a tulpa doesn’t exist in isolation from other aspects of your life. It exists alongside your other relationships, your work, your social life, and your broader material circumstances. All of these factors shape this relationship, just as the relationship exerts its own influence on them in return.
Telling “normal” people about tulpas
When telling others about your practice, keep in mind that tulpamancy is poorly understood outside its communities, and there are reasons for that.
We must admit that this guide’s perspective – tulpamancy as building a relationship with a character, rather than creating an independent person – is in the minority. The majority of tulpamancers accept the narrative that places tulpamancy under the Plurality umbrella: the claim that multiple independent people share the same body. People you tell about tulpamancy are likely to encounter that framework first if they research the topic on their own. You need to be very thorough in explaining your own experience if you want to avoid that.
For a historical account of how that framework came to dominate the community, see A Brief History of Tulpamancy.
If you tell people about tulpas, there is a high chance they will visit a certain other website and read this:
A tulpa is an entity created in the mind, acting independently of, and parallel to your own consciousness.
If you don’t want them to assume you believe that too, make sure to point them directly to an explanation you find accurate. We hope it’ll be our guide, but that’s up to you.
Keep in mind that you are not obligated to disclose your practice to anyone. Some tulpamancers are open about it; others find it too intimate to share even with a spouse. Both approaches are valid.
Inner and outer relationships
Inner and outer relationships can coexist healthily.
A relationship with your tulpa can be just as genuine as a relationship with another human – though it is a qualitatively different type of connection. A tulpa shares your mind; another human being has their own.
A tulpa can surprise you to the same degree that you can surprise yourself. However, the unpredictability of another human being – shaped by entirely different material conditions – exists on a completely different level. Interacting with people who don’t inherently share your biases is essential for growth.
If you find yourself isolating from human relationships, it’s worth noting – not as a failure, but as information regarding your current material circumstances.
For a deeper exploration of how ethical frameworks apply differently to inner and outer relationships, see Are Tulpas People? Ethics of Inner Relationships.
Expressing your tulpa socially
Expressing your tulpa to other people – such as chatting as them online or talking as them with friends who are aware of your practice – extends the relationship into a new domain. You’re applying the same capacity you developed for internal interaction and switching, but now in a social context. The pressure of external interaction gives the tulpa new opportunities for development.
Tulpamancy communities
There are multiple online communities for tulpamancers and tulpas. These can be excellent places to:
- Practice expressing your tulpa.
- Let the tulpa socialize with others.
- Learn from other practitioners – people have different experiences, approaches, and perspectives on tulpamancy. Not everything you hear will be consistent with this guide, and that’s fine. You’ll encounter the plurality framework, its metaphysical claims, and practical advice that differs from ours. Take what’s useful, and leave what isn’t.
- Find your own approach – No guide can cover every situation you’ll encounter. Seeing how others practice – what works for them and what doesn’t – can help you refine your own.
However, communities also have downsides worth noting:
- You’ll likely meet people who push their specific beliefs and morals onto you. When a community treats tulpas as independent people (the entity-framework), moral obligations follow naturally from that assumption – and with those obligations comes a sense of moral superiority.
- I can’t even count the number of times someone in the wider community has called me a “doll.” Remember not to let the community get too much to your head. Engage with people you find enjoyable or valuable. Ignore the rest.
Our community
We run a Discord server where practitioners following our approach – or those who’re simply curious, as we don’t ostracize different views – can interact. You are welcome to chat there as well, whether from a tulpa’s perspective or not. Here’s what makes our community different:
- We are a community with a pragmatic approach to tulpamancy; honestly, I don’t know any other places where a truly non-metaphysical approach is the primary one. Most communities avoid mysticism but still treat tulpas as independent entities – we don’t.
- While we are an English-speaking community, we aren’t USA-centric like most mainstream servers (or even most smaller ones). We aren’t even native English speakers (hopefully it doesn’t show in this guide), and I think the majority of our active community isn’t either. English is our tool for communication, not a cultural identity.
- We ask that people engage genuinely and treat others with respect – without tabooization, but with transparent moderation.
Multiple tulpas
In practice, the majority of tulpamancers sticks to just one tulpa. Most of the rest have up to four, while some may have ten or more.
There is no right or wrong number. You can have over ten genuine relationships with characters developed over many years – I think we do. It’s also perfectly okay to stick to just one; as we said, most people do.
Just as with switching, it is helpful to understand how tulpamancy works when there are multiple tulpas involved.
There is no upper limit on how many tulpas you can have in principle, but there is a practical limit imposed by material resources like the time and attention required for each genuine relationship. You can’t realistically maintain a hundred genuine tulpas.
Your tulpas are not isolated from each other
Having multiple tulpas means having unique, genuine relationships with many characters, each developed through sustained engagement. At the same time, there is much common ground between them.
First, the ability to express a tulpa effortlessly – once developed with your first tulpa – tends to carry over. With subsequent tulpas, the process is much easier. This shared experience is the main indication that this ease of expression is not character-specific. The same pattern applies to switching – you don’t have to relearn it with newer tulpas.
Relationship between tulpas
Just as you can play out interactions between your usual perspective and one of your tulpas, you can also facilitate interactions between the tulpas themselves.
Keep in mind that genuine interactions between tulpas also require time. The practical limit on the number of tulpas decreases significantly if you want to develop relationships among all your tulpas.
This doesn’t have to be uniform for all your tulpas. It’s okay to have some tulpas who socialize (possibly with external people too) and others who only spend time with you. Tulpas don’t have equal needs, and it’s okay to commit different amounts of resources to each of them based on those needs.
For more on how mind organization shifts when multiple perspectives are involved, see The Host Is Not the Owner.
Don’t make tulpas out of all characters
The ability to interact effortlessly with a character is not strictly character-specific. Once unlocked with one tulpa, you might find yourself doing it easily with other characters, sometimes even by accident.
A tulpa is a character you’ve built a genuine relationship with, not just any character that happened to “talk back.” It’s perfectly fine to enjoy spending time with characters other than your tulpas. You’ll likely lose interest in most of them by the next day anyway. The most important thing to remember is: don’t feel obligated to turn every character into a tulpa. You don’t need any “official” procedures to decide which characters to keep and which to forget. If you end up spending time with them regularly and develop a genuine relationship, they’ll be your tulpa. If you stop interacting with them, they won’t.
Tulpamancy is part of life
As we touched on at the beginning of this chapter, tulpamancy doesn’t exist in isolation. Your work, living conditions, outer relationships, and health all affect the practice – and the practice affects them in return.
When your life is stable and you have the time and willingness to interact with your tulpas, the practice tends to flourish. If you’re stressed, dealing with a crisis, or emotionally depleted, the practice tends to suffer alongside you. This isn’t a sign that you’re doing something wrong; it’s a natural consequence of practicing tulpamancy as a person existing in the material world.
Tulpamancy affects your life back
Building genuine relationships changes you, whether those relationships are inner or outer. You see yourself from a new perspective. You develop new patterns of thought. You have new emotional, social, and creative experiences that you otherwise wouldn’t have had.
This is real development. Your mind is part of the material world too; your inner interactions emerge from the same biological activity that allows your hands to shape the world around you.
Delusion is a false belief. It’s easy to become delusional if a practice is built primarily on belief. Our approach to tulpamancy, however, is built on practice instead.
I used to think that one of the requirements was believing that an inner relationship with a character was possible. But then I realized that a genuine relationship doesn’t stem from belief – it comes from interaction. You can interact without belief. A decade ago, when I first learned about tulpas and fantasized about Luna (our oldest tulpa), I didn’t really believe the claims I had heard (and they were even more exaggerated than the quote above).
What I actually did back then was imagine how she looked, how she acted, and what she said. I knew that parroting was supposed to be wrong, but I couldn’t stop myself. It wasn’t belief that brought her to me; it was the action I took, despite the “parroting is bad” warnings found in many guides of questionable quality. This is one of the reasons I want to provide a better guide here: from a practitioner, not a believer.
That was Mon speaking from a personal perspective. Now, back to the guide itself.
Closing
Tulpamancy is the practice of building genuine inner relationships. That’s the core. The techniques, abilities, and jargon are all secondary to that. It’s not about your beliefs, your framework of understanding, or community validation. It’s about the relationships you’ve built with your tulpas.
If you’ve read this far, you already know how to practice. The rest is simply doing it – honestly, patiently, and in a way that genuinely matters to you.