Tulpa and Illusion of Independent Agency

In time, many tulpamancers experience their fantasizing coming not just from conscious effort. We experience our tulpas talking back to us without our conscious effort and we feel their agency in their words and actions. It can feel like talking with another person.

You will likely experience it as a side effect of fantasizing about your tulpa at some point.

IIA isn’t a new phenomenon

Sounds extraordinary? As I already mentioned, it doesn’t happen only to tulpamancers. It’s also experienced by fiction authors with their original characters and by children with their imaginary friends¹. In the article provided in the source, the experience is called Illusion of Independent Agency. From its abstract:

The illusion of independent agency (IIA) occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, and/or actions. Children often report this sort of independence in their descriptions of imaginary companions. This study investigated the extent that adult writers experience IIA with the characters they create for their works of fiction.

Tulpamancers aren’t the first to experience characters talking back to them and aren’t really special in this area.

IIA is a human skill

Making imaginary characters feeling alive in one’s mind is a skill of a human. It’s not a tulpa’s skill to speak. If you are able to experience tulpa talking back to you, you might be able to experience it with other characters. Part of being able to hear a character is knowing them but not necessarily having any special relationship with them. Writers that experience it with their original characters usually don’t.

As I mentioned above, if you learn how to experience IIA with your tulpa, you might experience it spontaneously with other characters. You might catch yourself talking to a waifu from anime you just watched. It might be tempting to try to keep all the characters that ever talked back to you as tulpas… But you probably won’t build lasting relationships with most of them and eventually stop interacting with them at all in that case. Remember, IIA doesn’t make a tulpa, your interactions and relationship do.

It’s also possible to experience it from other forms of imagination. If you have practice wonderlanding, you might experience the imaginary place acting “alive” while fantasizing about it.

Tulpamancy is not all about IIA

IIA sometimes just won’t trigger. And that’s one of reasons why people shouldn’t depend on it too much when it comes to interactions and relationships with their tulpas. Conscious interactions are as valid as interactions coming from IIA. They ultimately come from the very same mind. IIA is not evidence for tulpas having their own. IIA shouldn’t be seen a source of validity for our tulpamancy experience but a source of immersion in your fantasizing.

The illusionary part of IIA is independence

Illusion in the name doesn’t mean that our interactions with our tulpa are not real. What’s illusionary in this experience, is tulpa being perceived as having independent mind. In reality, all of our thoughts come from the same mind. When tulpa talks back to us, it’s still our thoughts. It’s us thinking from tulpa’s perspective, obtaining their identity.

Summary

Experience of imaginary companions acting alive in our mind might not be well known in whole society but is known to science. It’s not specific to tulpamancy.

Experiencing it is a skill not specific to one character. And while experiencing it brings more immersion to fantasizing, it doesn’t make your tulpamancy experience more valid then before. It doesn’t make anime waifu that happened to talk back to you accidentally another tulpa by itself either.

Be careful to not become completely dependent on it when it comes to your interactions with your tulpa.

Tulpa doesn’t have their own independent mind when we experience them talking back to us. It’s still us but under their identity.