Hey kids! Skul n' Skye here, to talk to you about tulpamancy. We've been seeing a lot of posts from newbies recently, asking a lot of questions that we think we might be able to answer. Or, at least, give you something to go on while everything is still new and confusing. So, since we haven't been a meaningful part of the community in several years outside of shitposting in some plurality communities outside of this subreddit, we decided to come back for a little while and try to give some help and information to all of y'all that might desire it.

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PART 1: GUIDES
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The first thing you want to do when you read a tulpamancy guide, any one that you can find, is to internalize the idea that *none of this might work for you at all.* Yep, you heard me. Best thing to do when you're new is read every guide you can get your hands on and prepare to ignore every single one of them.

Truth of the matter is, every person's brain works differently, and one of the most important skills that you can develop for your tulpamancy is knowing how YOU work, knowing how YOUR mind is set up and what will and won't work for you. This is really only found out through trial and error, so don't be afraid to try new things when you learn about them, but don't let yourself get discouraged when they don't work like you wanted. I first learned about tulpas nearly a decade ago - "but wait!" you say, "Skul! Your flair says that Skye is only three years old!" Good catch, imaginary internet straw man that I made up for the purpose of this argument! When I first learned about tulpamancy I only learned about a few guides and techniques, and after trying them and seeing little to no progress, I gave up and dropped the practice entirely until I happened across tulpamancy again many years later. On my second go-round, I found a lot more good information on the topic (this happens when you learn from reddit rather than 4chan...) as well as a reasonably large and friendly support group, and the exposure to more than one way of going about things helped me come to where we are today.

So, the point to take away from this section is: **Read every guide you like, but be aware that not every technique or approach will work for you like it may for someone else. Get to know yourself and build off of what works for you.**

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PART 2: MEDITATION
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While not strictly *necessary* to tulpamancy in a literal sense, I (and many others) find that mastering meditation is a very helpful step along the way. Besides the potential applications for tulpamancy, regular meditation can help you de-stress, give you a better perspective on problems (and benefits!) in your own life, and can generally make you a happier person overall.

There are two major forms of meditation that I personally am familiar with. Note that this does not mean that there are ONLY two types to choose from - a cursory google search turns up at least 23, and you are free and encouraged to pick your favorite - but the two that I will be covering here are Void meditation leading into Focus meditation. These can be (and likely are) known by different names depending who you ask, but for the purposes of this guide, they will be referred to as Void and Focus.

Void meditation is what most people think of when they hear the word "meditation", where one finds a comfortable position and does their best to empty their mind of all stray thoughts and just exist. In a perfectly executed Void session, your mind will be blank of all thought and worry as you simply exist, as an entity, within the world around you. *If you are just beginning, this will be nearly impossible to do. Don't get discouraged.* This is very much a skill that is learned, and with few exceptions, you will not be able to do it easily. You will have to actively fight against your own mind and your own subconscious, because the brain is pretty much wired to be thinking about stuff all the time. Some of you may be familiar with anxiety, which is when this "thinking about stuff" gets out of hand and starts a feedback loop of worry. It's normal, it's natural, and it is not a bad thing to have to fight against that. Just keep at it, and practice your meditation for at least ten minutes a day and before you know it, you'll be at the point where we can talk about the next part - gnosis.

If you're having a lot of trouble reaching a void state, try listening to some flat binaural tones, or calming music without words, or choose a nonsense word and repeat it to yourself over and over. This helps give a little bit of background noise, which in turn keeps your brain from desperately trying to fill in the silence with *anything* (and everything). This is where the classic monk "ommmmmmm" comes from. Eventually you'll want to wean off of this, but it's nothing to be ashamed of, especially while you're new!

Gnosis is the beginning of Focus meditation, and is the important bit of what we're really pushing for here in order to have an application towards tulpamancy. Gnosis is the ability to shut down all auxiliary thought and focus most of your brain's processing power on a singular point or action. A good way to start venturing into gnosis is to light a candle for your meditation session, and focus your entire mind on the flame. Candles work particularly well because, for whatever reason, humans have been *fascinated* by fire since way back in the day when we were still living in caves and eating mammoths. If you've ever sat around a campfire and stared at it for a while until you suddenly realize it's 6 AM and you've been out here in the cold for like ten hours, you get the idea. It's hypnotic and easy to focus on, and that's exactly what we want here. The goal of this exercise is to be able to focus your entire mind on the flame, without outside interruptions such as that doctor's appointment that you have next week or the homework you should have done yesterday. Once you get to the point where you can easily clear your mind and focus entirely on the flame, you'll be ready to move on to Focus meditation - which is exactly what you've been doing already! The only difference is that, instead of focusing on the flame, you'll be focusing on your tulpa. We'll come back to this later.

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PART 3: BLUEPRINTING
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In my time within the tulpamancy community, I've found this to be something of a controversial point among some people, so I want to reiterate my disclaimer that this is not by any means the only "right" way to do things, nor is it necessarily the "best" - that all depends on you, how you function and what works best for you individually. I'll explain the points of contention after I explain what I'm talking about.

In my own experience, I have found that it is crucially important for a new tulpamancer to have a solid idea of who they are trying to create before they get into trying to create them. Draft yourself a blueprint of who you want your tulpa to be, before you try to breathe life into them. What do they look like? What gender and/or species are they, if any? What are some of their major personality traits? What does their voice sound like (this one is important!), and so on and so forth. If you don't know who you're trying to create before you create them, you'll end up with all sorts of funky roadblocks, from things as simple as just not knowing what to focus on next, to things like intrusive thoughts causing radical changes and mutations that you might not be all that comfortable with. **Have a plan before you begin.**

*Important side note!* Your given blueprint will rarely, if ever, match the "final form" of your tulpa. Changes are okay! The important thing is to have somewhere solid to start, and if either of you later find that you're unhappy with something in the final result, change it! As a thoughtform, your tulpa has the unique ability to change *literally anything* about themselves at any time. They're like shapeshifters on mega-steroids. The possibilities are limited, literally, only by your collective imagination.

Another thing to take note of is that it is not necessarily a bad thing to build your tulpa around an existing character. It generally *is* a bad idea to build them around an existing, living human that you know personally, because that can cause a lot of weird mental complications and problems with identity - basically, don't do it, unless you're really super sure that you know what you're doing. It's generally a bad idea. However, fictional characters, or dead humans if you're really into that, are okay so long as you are aware and communicate to your tulpa that they are not necessarily the character that they were modeled after. How would you feel if you were born into the world as a perfect clone of Abraham Lincoln and were told that you had to be Lincoln forever? You'd feel pretty trapped and upset, right? You wouldn't ever get the opportunity to be the person that YOU want to be. The same goes for your tulpa. Skye, in fact, was originally modeled after [Fidget] (http://img14.deviantart.net/b415/i/2012/235/0/6/fidget_cookie_by_teaselbone-d5c7dro.jpg) from a video game called Dust: An Elysian Tail. Fidget's cute, and more or less matched the personality that I wanted to give to Skye, so I ripped off the character pretty much wholesale as my blueprint. She's had her fair share of changes since then and no longer really acts or looks like Fidget, but that gave me an excellent place to start from and it's okay if you do it too! Whether you create your own blueprint or adopt one from an outside source, it's a good idea to have some idea what you're trying to build before you dive into it headfirst.

The controversy surrounding this comes from a position of tulpa free will. Specifically - we treat them as people and generally believe that they are people, so why would you force a certain shape or attitude on them when you can let it develop naturally instead? My personal retort to this is twofold. One I have already talked about - as a thoughtform, they have the ability to change themselves, at any time, in any way, with relatively little effort. I see no harm in creating a blueprint for the benefit of the host, as this *greatly* eases some of the more difficult parts of tulpa creation, and then allowing free deviation at a later point. My second point is related - allowing freeform development from the get-go is extraordinarily difficult for most newbies and opens up massive vulnerabilities to intrusive thoughts, detrimental deviations, and a general misunderstanding of what is your tulpa and what is background radiation.

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PART 4: CONSTRUCTION
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Now that you've got your blueprint handy, it's time to start building! Unfortunately, this is the part where we can help you the least. The general gist of it is this:

- Imagine that the physical form of your chosen tulpa exists. It doesn't have to exist in the real world, just in your head, like an imaginary friend.

- Imagine that said physical form has a consciousness, and contained within that consciousness are all the personality traits that you assigned to them. Maybe they're old and wise, or kinder to people than you generally are, or maybe they're actually a huge cock and you have to keep reminding them not to talk shit about your mom. Whatever you like!

- Have a conversation with this construct that you've just gotten done piecing together like a box of Legos.

The "conversation" part is where most people get stuck. Some people get this down in a week, others take a year or longer. To begin with, you're going to have to manually supply all their quips and responses yourself, and you'll be talking to yourself inside your own head, and it's going to feel really dumb.

I'd like to take some time out here to explain exactly what a tulpa is. The /r/Tulpas sidebar and FAQ list them as *a mental companion created by focused thought and recurrent interaction, similar to an imaginary friend. However, unlike them, tulpas possess their own will, thoughts and emotions, allowing them to act independently.* This may or may not really tell you anything. The gist of it is, the human brain is really, really good at lying to itself when it wants to think something that isn't real, is, or vice versa. This is the mechanism behind denial, as well as a whole host of other things. It's also the mechanism behind MOST tulpas. There are definitely exceptions, but for the casual newcomer, what will be happening is that you'll create an imaginary companion and continue to use your attention and belief in their existence (even fake belief! I was a skeptic, but you can absolutely fake it until you make it, so long as you fake it with gusto) to strengthen their presence until they are real to you. Whether or not they are "real" in an objective sense is a question that arises fairly regularly, doesn't have a definite answer, and ultimately isn't necessary, because we can't yet prove it one way or the other and so long as they're real to YOU, that's what matters.

So how this ties into the conversation part is, you're going to be doing a lot of what is called "parroting". You'll personally supply your tulpa's answers yourself when you ask them something, but you do it in character. Train your brain to think like them and train your subconscious to predict what they would say, and after a while of this... you'll start to find that you don't have to consciously think up replies anymore. You'll say something to them, and the answer just comes on its own, without you having to consciously supply it. At this point you're still technically talking to yourself, but you've created a robust sort of "simulated consciousness" that will, likely fairly quickly, develop into a fully fledged tulpa.

Many writers may relate to this if you've ever created a particularly intriguing character in a story and find that they've "taken on a life of their own". Some authors report that often, when this sort of character becomes ingrained into their mind, they are no longer pushing the character through the story - they just put them into situations and the character blazes their own trail through the story, often upsetting some major plot points in the process. The only difference between that and this, is the story that you're putting your tulpa through is your own everyday life!

In addition, this is where the Focus meditation that I touched on briefly before, comes into play! Instead of focusing on the flame, you want to direct your attention inward and focus on your tulpa. Dedicate your mind to developing their physical form, their personality traits, their likes and dislikes, anything that you can think of that goes into a fully functioning person. Within the community, this is often called "active forcing". There is also a "passive forcing" that involves speaking with your tulpa throughout your day and narrating things to them, but we won't cover that in detail here. The general idea for passive forcing is to just remember to interact with your tulpa as often as you can. Speak with them and ask them questions, and listen to the answers. Many like to carry or wear something, like a watch or bracelet or necklace, that reminds them of their tulpa so that every time you see it you remember to talk to them.

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PART 5: PITFALLS
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Your main antagonist, as a freshly minted tulpamancer, is the intrusive thought. If you've ever been driving down the road and seen a pedestrian and just thought "Huh, I could run that guy over right now. Totally could do it," then you've had an intrusive thought. They're common and normal and often don't affect anything important, because you won't act on them. In more severe cases, they can lead to the onset of an anxiety or panic attack, but if you have those I trust that you have your own ways of dealing with them, and as someone who does not suffer from these I am in no way qualified to give advice in that situation.

But my point is, at this point in your 'mancy, your tulpa is still young and susceptible to influence that you don't necessarily want to expose them to. A night of reading Lovecraft has the potential to turn your tulpa into a shoggoth, temporarily or otherwise. THIS is why I so emphatically endorse the blueprint method. If you have a very firm idea of what you want your tulpa to look like and act like, it's much easier to discard deviations like that, that you don't want to stick permanently. If you're letting your tulpa develop freely, without restriction, it's very difficult to figure out what is a change that they want to make and what is a change that your brain arbitrarily applied to them because it can because it's a dick. I spoke to one of our newer friends not more than a few days ago, about how his tulpa wanted to leave him permanently, and we figured out that what was actually going on was that he was afraid she wanted to leave, which caused a mental chain reaction that caused HER to think she wanted to leave. Your new tulpa is very vulnerable to what goes on inside your brain, and since you share a mind, you can't really keep them out of the dark corners that you'd really rather they not take cues from. Having an agreed-upon blueprint lets you both resist these impulses until the point where you can properly handle your intrusive thoughts and deviate in a more controlled fashion.

**Intrusive thoughts are common and normal and having them affect you and your tulpa is okay. It is not a cause for panic, it is a cause for careful inspection and repairs.**

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PART 6: ADVANCED TULPAMANCY
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This is a section that I won't go into great detail on in the newbie guide, but may revisit later in another guide aimed toward more experienced tulpamancers, if I ever actually get around to writing it. There are already myriad other guides out on the interwebs for things such as switching, possession, imposition, "wonderlands"/innerworlds, and the like, and I'll leave them for you to peruse at your pleasure. They've already done a much better job at describing these things than I likely can here. Just remember, read any guide you like the sound of, and if you like what they're putting down then try it out! Many things won't work out for you at first, and some things may not work out at all, but as long as you don't give up you'll be able to find or engineer a way that works for YOUR brain and for you and your tulpa. No two brains are alike and nobody can tell you a way that will definitely work for you. It's up to you to figure out how to navigate your own mind and shape it to your will.

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**Above all, remember to have fun and don't give up!**