On long-term tulpa creation failures

On long-term tulpa creation failures. Proposed causes and solutions.

A few unfortunate individuals force and visualize and plan and narrate for months on end, without any sign of success. I think their issues arise because there are critical processes in tulpamancy that many popular guides leave implicit, and which are not necessarily 'obvious' to all readers. This is my attempt to state these 'hidden pieces' explicitly.

Structure-of-mind theorymongering ahead. You've been warned.

Key ideas:
-The Mind is a hierarchy of agents and functions, of which Consciousness is a peak in the chart.
-Consciousness' function is to take in sensory information, create narrative (tell a story,) and mediate between sub-personal agents lower in the hierarchy.
-It is necessary to allow your subconscious thoughts to deviate away from your control for a tulpa to 'take root.'
-It is necessary to direct a sensory stream to the budding tulpa in order for it to gain consciousness, and begin gaining independence.
-A tulpa is another peak of the hierarchy chart, parallel and split from the host, joined in the base of the hierarchy.

A tulpa's beginning
Most people start with a form. This is well and good; gives you a concrete locus to focus your later attentions on. It is also not an issue in this discussion.
Many, MANY people personality force. This is also well and good; developing concrete expectations of behavior can be a shortcut in the process. At the same time, it is not necessary: It's well established that the subconscious mind can flesh a personality out from just a few starting traits; it can also create a personality from nothing!
This is also the first place that people can get stuck.

What Goes Wrong?
The personality, the seed, the beginning of a tulpa, is the sum of YOUR EXPECTATIONS OF THEIR BEHAVIOR. Personality forcing is the process of elaborating these expectations to yourself until they become subconscious. A tulpa's growth begins properly during narration when your subconscious ACTS OUT these expectations; your mind wanders and wonders and pulls together intimations and guesses of how your tulpa would react to the story. Over time these guesses become coherent, self-consistent, remember themselves: this is how a personality fills in the gaps, or even grows from nothing. Failing to allow this process is what goes wrong.

Perhaps subconscious isn't quite the right word here. Maybe PREconscious would suit out needs better. Exactly what goes wrong, is that you fail to let your preconscious, no, prevocal thoughts diverge. Your preconscious mind is a chaotic place; part of consciousness' function is to filter that chaos into sensibility. But modern cultures tend to take the process to an unhealthy extreme. We're ego-centric, obsessed with self-image, the story we tell eachother and to ourself, about ourself. Chaotic preconscious thoughts don't necessarily play nice with that story, and when that happens, we clamp down. From a young age we begin to self-censor until it becomes habit, push those not!Me thoughts out of our own view (Jung's Shadow is another examination  of this psychological process.) Unfortunately, tulpa thoughts are very much not!Me.

This censorship of our own prevocal thoughts is what first stifles tulpa growth. We grip our subconscious mind, and the thoughts it churns out, in too tight a grip. We fail to let the new network form.

How to Let Go (if only a little):
Meditation, surprised? Specifically we want mindfulness or 'listening' meditation. Watch your thoughts as they come and go. Eventually you'll see that each is preceded by an impulse from below; begins before it gains explicit shape. Once you see that, you may be able to perceive the thoughts you otherwise block out, try to ignore. Some of them might be tulpa-shaped.

There's also a more conscious side to this, but it's more widely addressed in the community: 'Parrotnoia.' You get responses, but you're just not sure: it still feels like it might be me! Really, it kind of is. Your tulpa is speaking up but isn't as separated as much as you expect yet. Ignoring the 'might just be parroting...' responses is another form of this same censorship issue. The advice given is always 'just assume it's them, bro!' Don't deny them when they come. A stunning parallel, no?

A tulpa's Growth
Some people skip form and/or personality all together, and jump right to the meat of it: Narration. Narration is water and sunlight to your tulpa's sprouting personality; utterly necessary for life. As you narrate, any gaps in your initial personality blueprint fill in, a persistent connection to sensation begins to grow, and with it awareness.

This is the second locus of long-term failure.
So you've prepared your subconscious, tilled the soil, planted the seed of personality, narrated on and on and on... but still nothing. What gives?
I believe the function of narration is to establish the tulpa's first sensory network. Before they can see into the wonderland, before they can see through your eyes to the real world; they have the story. It's their bridge to awareness, and does absolutely no good unless it's CONNECTING WITH THEM.
What goes wrong here, is that the host does not talk TO the tulpa, but instead is telling the story merely to themselves.
How do I fix it?
The failure isn't in the talking; it's in the failure to talk whilst keeping your tulpa in mind. The key is that you want their presence in working memory while you narrate. Like a new skill or habit, a tulpa isn't active at first without effort and focus.

Appendix: Walk-ins
Heavily related to all this nonsense is the bizarre phenomena of the walk in tulpa. They appear, usually some time after a host's first tulpa is created, with a fully-formed personality and often claims of past memories to boot. What the fuck is happening here?

Lets go back to agency. The mind behaves in a selfish/goal-directed manner, at all levels of the network. At the 'top,' you steer life towards success, happiness, family, pleasure. A little lower down, each impulse competes for expression on it's own. Each sub-network is an agent; neurology seems to indicate that even NEURONS THEMSELVES behave like agents, in competition for metabolic resources. The network lives, and WANTS to live.

Once you've made one tulpa, that string of processes is networked together. It's not a STRONG network, because it's only gone through the motion once.. but it's there.
So now you've got a tulpa-making agent. With luck it'll stay nice and sleepy unless you call on it to do it's job.

But some people aren't so lucky. Their subconscious processes are hyperactive. They suffer from intrusive thoughts, are impulsive, creative. And now that energy has a new mode of expression, via the tulpamancy agent.

So now you've got a tulpa you didn't ask for; it's been lurking in the background and emulating you and your first, making up it's own story and hungry for your love. What's a system to do?

Anecdotally, many people accept their first walk-in or two, if with a little trepidation at first. Others tell them sorry, you can't stay; it seems like walk-ins are aware of the possibility of rejection and accept it. I've not read of a walkin that fought to hang on.

How do you stop the madness? I think you need to go back and re-police your filter. Keep an eye on the mind froth; mind your rogue agents. Make a symbolic rule, state it to all the wonderland: Walk-ins not welcome. This seems to be enough, in many cases, to discourage an overactive tulpaprinter.