Tulpa, interactions and relationship

Relationship and interactions

If a tulpa is a character that we have a meaningful relationship with, the logical conclusion is that we need to build such a relationship to make a tulpa.

What comes first, relationship or interactions?

Relationship is closely coupled with interactions. Interactions we had define the relationship while the established relationship shapes our future interactions.

Just like eggs existed long before chickens, in this loop the start point is also clear – interaction happens first. For any relationship to be established, some interaction (possibly one-sided) needs to happen first.

Build relationship through interaction. Interact with relationship in mind.

Interactions with tulpa happens through imagination, we literally fantasize about them.

If you want your tulpa to be kind, imagine them acting with kindness. If you want them to be tsundere, imagine them acting like a tsundere.

If you want you and tulpa to be lovers, imagine you and your tulpa acting like lovers.

If you want your relationship to be meaningful, think of it seriously.

Listen to your feelings and move your relationship with tulpa through mutual interactions in a way that’s comfortable for you. Don’t force stuff that doesn’t feel right but don’t hesitate to fulfill your fantasies if it feels good with you.

You can assume that your tulpa is aware of existing in your imagination from the start or introduce such awareness at some point.

How to interact?

Take your time

First, you don’t need to overdo it. Spend time with your tulpa when you want it and can afford it. I’ve said it’s necessary to maintain your relationship with your tulpa but you don’t have to dedicate your whole spare time for them. Don’t make it a chore and don’t blame yourself if you missed it for some time.

Tulpa’s form

In the community, tulpa’s appearance is called a form. It’s an idea of appearance rather than its visualization.

If you can’t visualize it, you don’t need to. Think about what is significant in their appearance. E.g. my tulpas strongly identify with color of their hair and eyes but don’t really care about having constant specific height but it might be different for others.

If your tulpa is inspired with character made by someone else, you can focus on similarities and differences between your tulpa and that character. And not just in case of appearance.

Narration and mutual interactions

When you imagine tulpa acting in a certain situation, it’s called narration. It should be self-explanatory.

Rather than observing tulpa’s behavior from a third person perspective, you can interact with them as yourself while narrating. Your mutual interactions build your relationship, as I mentioned in the previous section.

Imaginary place

While some people (including myself) ignore the concept of space when interacting with a tulpa or narrating, others might feel more comfortable with imagining it too. In the community, people who care about it often call such an imaginary place a wonderland.

Imaginary time

Children often make various rationalizations of what happens with them when children aren’t playing with them¹. Some kids expect them to have their own lives somewhere else when they are absent.

Tulpamancers can do the same, living with implication that tulpas have some parallel lives when they aren’t interacting with them, usually in fictional places mentioned just above.

Keep in mind, stuff happening only in imaginary time remain just fictional. If you check what your tulpa is doing at the moment, you are literally making it up. If check what they were doing in the past, it’s being made up too. If you never do any retrospection of such events in real time, they never materialize and therefore never contribute to anything meaningful. It matters especially in relationships between multiple tulpas. If you have two tulpas and just assume they do stuff together without materializing it in a retrospection, they won’t establish a meaningful relationship with each other like that.

Imposition

In the early stages of the community achieving an ability to see our tulpas on top of real world’s image was a popular choice of an ultimate goal for a tulpamancer. Such an ability is called visual imposition,

In practice few people care about visually imposing their tulpas like that nowadays and even less succeed. There is a consensus in the community that visual imposition is hard and requires a lot of practice but achieving it is possible.

It’s not the only form of imposition though. You can also imagine your tulpa sitting next to them or in your lap. Or hugging a pillow while thinking it’s your tulpa. You can also impose the tulpa’s presence in the world without doing any visualization on top of it. These forms of imposition are simple and effective without much practice contrary to visual imposition.

Just talk!

You can always just have a dialogue with your tulpa within your mind. It might be the easiest thing to do if you can’t or don’t want to focus solely on fantasizing at given moment but would like to spend some time with your tulpa.

Write it down

When it’s hard to focus your attention on your conversation with a tulpa within your mind, writing it down might help. Even if you get distracted for a while, you can return to it later after dealing with the distraction.

What happens when tulpa no longer interacts?

Tulpas technically don’t live. In consequence, they can’t really die either but they can stop functioning as tulpas.

We mentioned before that a tulpa is an imaginary companion that has mutual interactions and relationship with us. But not all bonds last forever.

If you no longer have meaningful relationship with them, they are nothing more than ordinary original characters. Sometimes not very original tbh. With the lost bond, the interaction is lost too. And in the other way around, relationship also erodes with lack of interactions.

Keep in mind, that while tulpa can revert into ordinary OC, it’s possible to do the opposite too. You can turn an ordinary OC into a tulpa or “revive” a tulpa that’s been abandoned.

By the way, in the community, the word used for tulpa being reverted to OC is called dissipation. We say that tulpa that reverted to OC dissipated.

Summary

Making a tulpa and maintaining our relationship depends on fantasizing about our interactions. Interactions define relationship and relationship shapes interactions. These are two sides of the same coin in tulpamancy.

Tulpas don’t live or die but they can revert to ordinary characters. Ordinary characters can be elevated (possibly back) into tulpas.