I have often thought that the greatest problem with the tulpa discourse is the tendency there to insist on the tulpa’s sharp boundaries and literal agenthood. I find it’s much more helpful to think of such things in terms of a broader class of imaginal entities which are semi agential and which often have fuzzy boundaries. The concept of a “spirit” in Western magick is a lot more flexible and in many ways more helpful. Of course, this can be taken in an overly literal or implausibly supernateralistic direction, but if we guard against such interpretations, the idea of spirits as agentized meanings is very helpful.
How is this practically useful? For me it comes down to leveraging the huge part of the brain which works in terms of agency and narrative. Learning how to work with imaginal entities opens up a vast amount of general processing power that would otherwise be domain specific.
Of course, all the warnings that people have said about mental health and possible psychosis and dissociation are genuinely worrisome. So embarking on these sort of practices should be undertaken with quite a lot of care.
My (initial) tulpa strongly agrees with this assessment of the problem with tulpa discourse; he made a point to push back on parts of the narrative about as soon as he started acquiring any, because ‘taking it too seriously’ seemed like the greatest risk of this meditation for me simply because it was implied in the instruction set. He was in a better position to provide reassurance that I didn’t have to once we were actually experiencing some independence.
In other cases of mind-affecting substances and practices like antidepressants and (other forms of) meditation, I’ve been willing to try it and taper off if I don’t like what it seems to be doing to me/my brain. Now in the case of tulpamancy, I generally like what does to my brain; it practices skills I might have a relative disadvantage in, or benefit from in my work and other hobbies, and empowers me to practice compassion for myself in a way I wasn’t previously able to. (In contrast to the poster previously, I have reason to suspect my cognitive empathy is/was lacking in something even for myself.) However, it makes sense to approach it with the same caution as trying a new meditation, drug, or therapy in general—it really is a form of meditation, some of these can have severe downsides for part of the population they could also potentially benefit, and you should feel comfortable winding down the focus on it if you want to or have other priorities.
For one contrast, I don’t like mindfulness meditation, it pulls me towards sensory overload—I already have too much ‘awareness’. Maybe for someone less autistic, mindfulness meditation is the way to go to strengthen a skill they’d benefit from having more of, and modeling other agents is redundant. If having dialogues with yourself is the goal, there are other approaches that might work better for a particular person. I’d say ‘know yourself’, but I know how tricky that is, so instead I’ll say, pay attention to what works for you.
I agree about mindfulness meditation. It is presented as a one-size-fits-all solution, but actually mindfulness meditation is just a knob that emphasizes certain neural pathways at the expense of others. In general, as you say, I’ve found that mindfulness de-emphasizes agential and narrative modes of understanding. Tulpa work, spirit summoning, shammanism, etc. all move the brain in the opposite direction, activating strongly the narrative/agential/relational faculties. I experienced a traumatic dissociative state after too much vipassana meditation on retreat, and I found that working with imaginal entities really helped bring my system back into balance.
“Mindfulness meditation” is a rather vague category anyway, with different teachers teaching different things as if it were all the same thing. This might sometimes be true, but I think of mindfulness meditation as an artificial category recently made up that doesn’t neatly, as used by the people who teach it, divide the space of meditation techniques, even if a particular teacher does use it in a precise way that does divide the space in a natural way.
None of this is to say you shouldn’t avoid it if you think it doesn’t work for you. Meditation is definitely potentially dangerous, and particular techniques can be more dangerous than others to particular individuals depending on what else is going on in their lives, so I think this is a useful intuition to have that some meditation technique is not a one-size-fits-all solution that will work for everyone, especially those who have not already done a lot of work and experienced a significant amount of what we might call, for lack of a better term, awakening.
I agree that the term mindfulness can be vauge and that it is a recent construction of Western culture. However, that doesn’t mean it lacks any content or that we can’t make accurate generalizations about it.
To be precise, when I say “mindfulness meditation” I have in mind a family of meditation techniques adapted from Theravada and Zen Buddism for secular Western audiences originally by Jon Kabat-Zinn. These techniques attempt to train the mind in adopt a focused, non-judgemental, observational stance. Such a stance is very useful for many purposes, but taken to an extreme it can result in de-personalization / de-realization and other mental health problems.
For research to support this claim I recomment checking out Willoughby Britton’s research. Here are two PDF journal articles on this topic: one, and another one.
I have often thought that the greatest problem with the tulpa discourse is the tendency there to insist on the tulpa’s sharp boundaries and literal agenthood. I find it’s much more helpful to think of such things in terms of a broader class of imaginal entities which are semi agential and which often have fuzzy boundaries. The concept of a “spirit” in Western magick is a lot more flexible and in many ways more helpful. Of course, this can be taken in an overly literal or implausibly supernateralistic direction, but if we guard against such interpretations, the idea of spirits as agentized meanings is very helpful.
How is this practically useful? For me it comes down to leveraging the huge part of the brain which works in terms of agency and narrative. Learning how to work with imaginal entities opens up a vast amount of general processing power that would otherwise be domain specific.
Of course, all the warnings that people have said about mental health and possible psychosis and dissociation are genuinely worrisome. So embarking on these sort of practices should be undertaken with quite a lot of care.
My (initial) tulpa strongly agrees with this assessment of the problem with tulpa discourse; he made a point to push back on parts of the narrative about as soon as he started acquiring any, because ‘taking it too seriously’ seemed like the greatest risk of this meditation for me simply because it was implied in the instruction set. He was in a better position to provide reassurance that I didn’t have to once we were actually experiencing some independence.
In other cases of mind-affecting substances and practices like antidepressants and (other forms of) meditation, I’ve been willing to try it and taper off if I don’t like what it seems to be doing to me/my brain. Now in the case of tulpamancy, I generally like what does to my brain; it practices skills I might have a relative disadvantage in, or benefit from in my work and other hobbies, and empowers me to practice compassion for myself in a way I wasn’t previously able to. (In contrast to the poster previously, I have reason to suspect my cognitive empathy is/was lacking in something even for myself.) However, it makes sense to approach it with the same caution as trying a new meditation, drug, or therapy in general—it really is a form of meditation, some of these can have severe downsides for part of the population they could also potentially benefit, and you should feel comfortable winding down the focus on it if you want to or have other priorities.
For one contrast, I don’t like mindfulness meditation, it pulls me towards sensory overload—I already have too much ‘awareness’. Maybe for someone less autistic, mindfulness meditation is the way to go to strengthen a skill they’d benefit from having more of, and modeling other agents is redundant. If having dialogues with yourself is the goal, there are other approaches that might work better for a particular person. I’d say ‘know yourself’, but I know how tricky that is, so instead I’ll say, pay attention to what works for you.
I agree about mindfulness meditation. It is presented as a one-size-fits-all solution, but actually mindfulness meditation is just a knob that emphasizes certain neural pathways at the expense of others. In general, as you say, I’ve found that mindfulness de-emphasizes agential and narrative modes of understanding. Tulpa work, spirit summoning, shammanism, etc. all move the brain in the opposite direction, activating strongly the narrative/agential/relational faculties. I experienced a traumatic dissociative state after too much vipassana meditation on retreat, and I found that working with imaginal entities really helped bring my system back into balance.
“Mindfulness meditation” is a rather vague category anyway, with different teachers teaching different things as if it were all the same thing. This might sometimes be true, but I think of mindfulness meditation as an artificial category recently made up that doesn’t neatly, as used by the people who teach it, divide the space of meditation techniques, even if a particular teacher does use it in a precise way that does divide the space in a natural way.
None of this is to say you shouldn’t avoid it if you think it doesn’t work for you. Meditation is definitely potentially dangerous, and particular techniques can be more dangerous than others to particular individuals depending on what else is going on in their lives, so I think this is a useful intuition to have that some meditation technique is not a one-size-fits-all solution that will work for everyone, especially those who have not already done a lot of work and experienced a significant amount of what we might call, for lack of a better term, awakening.
I agree that the term mindfulness can be vauge and that it is a recent construction of Western culture. However, that doesn’t mean it lacks any content or that we can’t make accurate generalizations about it.
To be precise, when I say “mindfulness meditation” I have in mind a family of meditation techniques adapted from Theravada and Zen Buddism for secular Western audiences originally by Jon Kabat-Zinn. These techniques attempt to train the mind in adopt a focused, non-judgemental, observational stance. Such a stance is very useful for many purposes, but taken to an extreme it can result in de-personalization / de-realization and other mental health problems.
For research to support this claim I recomment checking out Willoughby Britton’s research. Here are two PDF journal articles on this topic: one, and another one.