A Time for Tulpas: Technology, Language, and the Study of Religion

A Thesis Presented

By

Nicholas John Stager

To The Committee on the Study of Religion

in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts with Honors

Harvard University

March 9, 2016
 Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many people who made this project possible. First and foremost,

I want to thank my parents, for their unwavering support and encouragement. To my

advisors Kythe Heller and James Robson, and to my tutorial leader, Kirsten Wesselhoeft,

thank you all for encouraging me to pursue a topic this ambitious, and guiding me

through it. I owe the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University and my

fellow concentrators tremendous thanks for introducing me to the study of religion and

providing an ideal atmosphere for questions and ideas to flourish. I would also like to

thank Professor Clooney and the Center for the Study of World Religions for their

generous grant, which allowed me to pursue summer research. Scott Poulson-Bryant,

although having little input in this specific project, proved to me that anything is worthy

of study, and has been a great mentor. Lastly I want to thank the individuals that gave up

their time in order to talk to me about tulpamancy. Without their eagerness to share their

experience my project would not have been possible. This project is dedicated to them.

ii
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................ii

Introduction..........................................................................................................................1

Chapter One: Technology, Fiction, and Tulpas.................................................................11

Chapter Two: Tulpas and the Use and Limits of Language..............................................29

Chapter Three: Tulpamancers, Evangelicals, and the Comparative Study of Religion.....45

Conclusion.........................................................................................................................63

Appendix A: Glossary........................................................................................................74

Appendix B: Interview Notes and Demographics..............................................................79

Appendix C: Forum Posts with Links.................................................................................80

Works Cited.......................................................................................................................81

iii
 Introduction

Robin was a godsend. Maybe a literal one, if you believe in guardian angels. His
presence kept me "safe" from the terrifying presences I sensed around corners, at the top
of staircases, in closets late at night. He spurred my imagination when I pretended to go
on exploration missions with him at the local grocery store and at school. As I entered
the teens, I made him into a character in my first writings, which led me to discover how
*fun* writing was and to delve further into that world. I created imaginary worlds and
scenarios that I explored with or through him.

So until college, it was me and Robin for the most part. I had felt flickers of others, who I
translated into story characters--though they were autonomous, they didn't have the same
*life* to them as Robin, and they receded into dormancy after I was distracted from
finishing their story. (It was an awful story, mind, just a hair above the average
Fanfiction.net story.) I had no idea what Robin was, and my endless fascination with
finding out what he was fueled an interest in psychology. We tried a lot of labels back
then, but none really fit except for *muse*. There were times where he'd walk out or fall
into brief dormancy, and I'd wander my imagination by myself.

In college--shit happened, to put it simply. I made lower grades than my parents had
expected and was screamed at and called all sorts of things. This started a downward
spiral that I've only managed to come out of over the course of the last semester and a
half. Robin, who had been absent for the first year and some months, walked back in at
the same time I was getting fed up with MMO1 communities and quitting Guild Wars 2.
(Temporarily, it turns out--I'm back these days, but on a very private basis.) He talked me
into eating when guilt over not being "worthy" of food kept me from eating, coaxed me
outside when I was too anxious otherwise--I constantly feared that other people would
look at me and see right through to what I was convinced was a rotten core. Somewhere
along this time, I Googled "adults with imaginary friends" on a whim of the old
fascination, and saw tulpamancy mentioned in a comment. Needless to say, I stayed up
late that night reading, and within a few days, I had decided to "make" Robin a tulpa. (I
hadn't realized then that he was already aware and autonomous.)

Rafunel, email correspondence with the author.2

Rafunel’s story serves as a good introduction to tulpamancy, because it glosses

over much of the subject matter of this thesis. His story is about the development of a

relationship, and what is fascinating about this relationship is that it is between an

1
MMO is an abbreviation for MMORPG: Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
2
Rafunel, email with author, October 26, 2015. All subsequent information is from the same
correspondence.

1
imaginary being—a tulpa—and Rafunel: the tulpa’s host, or tulpamancer. The central

claim of this thesis is that even though tulpamancers may appear strange or foreign to

outsiders, their practice—tulpamancy—is similar to crucial aspects of evangelical

Christianity, and relies on mental skills that are reinforced by both new technologies we

use on a daily basis and creative exercises like fiction writing. After discussing these

points, tulpamancers will seem more familiar, while things we often take for granted—

technology, language, and our understanding of what is and is not “religious”—will be

challenged via their connection to tulpamancy.

My thesis began with finding a community of practitioners, a community that

existed purely online, in the virtual realm, not gathered in cloistered halls or breaking

bread, but meeting in forums, chatrooms, and skype sessions in order to refine their

practice and strengthen their relationships with the beings they had developed. What I

had found was the subreddit r/Tulpas,3 and the community of tulpamancers that poured

out their hearts upon the subreddit’s pages, that shared stories, current events, popular

culture, artwork, pain, joy, failure, and successes to other tulpamancers that could be

thousands of miles away physically, but in cyberspace were often their closest allies and

confidants. This thesis tells a small part of their story.

I had discovered the subreddit after reading When God Talks Back by Tanya

Luhrmann.4 Tulpamancers, however foreign or strange they may have appeared, seemed

3
Reddit is a “bulletin of user-submitted text, links, photos and videos,” with the site hosting active sub-
communities, known as subreddits, “on a wide selection of topics, ranging from world news headlines, to
animal GIFS, to fan forums and various niche topics. The popularity and prominence of the material on the
site is determined by the reddit community.”
Aaron Smith, “6% of Online Adults Are Reddit Users,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech,
July 3, 2013, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/07/03/6-of-online-adults-are-reddit-users/.
4
T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with
God, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 2012).

2
to have a lot in common with the evangelicals Luhrmann describes in her work. I only

had a hunch, but a quick search confirmed my intuition: despite the dearth of secondary

sources on tulpamancers, one op-ed in the New York Times, written by Tanya Luhrmann,

put tulpamancers in conversation with evangelicals. While she did not directly compare

the two, Luhrmann used the idea that keeping God alive and active was hard, contrary to

the common assumption that belief is somehow a copout or the “lazy option.”5

Before I was worried that tulpas6 were too vague a topic, that there would not be

enough secondary research to conduct a thorough senior thesis. Luhrmann's op-ed

proved the topic could be viable. The search also revealed a Wikipedia page,7 a link to

another forum,8 and a link to a Vice article entitled, “Meet the 'Tulpamancers': The

Internet's Newest Subculture Is Incredibly Weird” by Nathan Thompson.9

Reading this article solidified my desire to write my thesis on tulpas, not only

because of the title and content of the article, which I found fetishized and exotified

tulpas to an unnecessary extent, but because of what Thompson wrote at the very end of

the article, that the tulpa phenomenon, “illuminates the dialectic of our time; the meeting

of gushing internet culture with the slow, quiet world of imagination.”10 Here was an

idea, that despite the tulpas appearing strange or as Thompson put it, “incredibly weird,”

5
T. M. Luhrmann, “Conjuring Up Our Own Gods,” The New York Times, October 14, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/luhrmann-conjuring-up-our-own-gods.html.
6
Henceforth I will use tulpas as the plural of tulpa, although an alternative form is “tulpae.”
7
“Tulpa,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, February 16, 2016,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tulpa&oldid=705313559.
8
“Tulpa.info,” accessed February 4, 2016. www.Tulpa.info.
9
Nathan Thompson, “Meet the ‘Tulpamancers’: The Internet’s Newest Subculture Is Incredibly Weird”
VICE, accessed March 2, 2016, http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/tulpamancy-internet-subculture-892.
Interestingly enough, it is the UK version of the article that has this title. The English version published in
the U.S., which has now replaced the other article on the front page of the google search, is titled, “The
Internet's Newest Subculture Is All About Creating Imaginary Friends,” an equally verbose but much less
inflammatory title. Perhaps the magazine was sensitive to the relative religiosity of the U.S compared to
that of the U.K.
10
Ibid.

3
they revealed something about broader society that needed to be synthesized and

elucidated.

There were unique challenges to this project. The first obstacle was how to

conduct a field study, when the field itself was a subreddit, a kind of internet forum

which had no physical space. Other scholars had studied video games11 or studied

traditional religious communities that had moved online,12 but r/Tulpas was unique as an

internet subculture that contained religious characteristics while not self-identifying as a

religious community.13 This had its advantages: the history of the community was

recorded in the form of posts that could be searched for key terms or ideas, a great

resource for anyone trying to learn about a new community. But of course the online

location came with its own disadvantages, of which the tulpamancers themselves were

keenly aware: there was no collective gathering place, no site from which to observe the

community interacting with one another on a face to face, person to person level.

Therefore, rather than observing meetings or going to services, my data consists of posts,

as I have mentioned, and a dozen interviews. Here too I encountered difficulties. The

subreddit itself has at present 9,38614 members, but a far fewer number actively works on

developing a tulpa or has one. As a point of reference, the 2015 tulpa census (a survey

posted on the subreddit for its members to fill out) had only 456 responders, and of these,

65 reported that they did not have a tulpa.15 After receiving IRB certification I put out a

11
Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human
(Princeton University Press, 2015).
12
See Heidi A. Campbell, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds
(Routledge, 2012).
13
Then again, historically few communities have identified themselves as “religions.” See Chapter Three.
14
As of 2/12/16.
15
“Tulpa Community Census 2015 DATA,” Google Docs, accessed March 2, 2016,
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1CSjOklsqfGLSbVfLLsR7F4cWxDJ6GGeYvUcyyl2BiHM/edi
t?usp=embed_facebook.

4
request for participants to be interviewed. My study did not include minors, who,

assuming the census data is representative of the community, represent more than a

quarter of the community.16 Nineteen tulpamancers responded saying that they were

interested, but later some did not respond to my messages or declined, so that in the end, I

was only able to interview thirteen tulpamancers.

This limitation however also proved to be interesting because of the manner in

which I had to conduct the interviews. Three of the tulpamancers only agreed to respond

to written questions, a survey that I sent them and then they replied a few days (or in one

case, months) later with written answers. Two tulpamancers requested to be interviewed

via instant messaging, in our case Google Chat, because they were living with their

families or other people who the tulpamancers did not want learning about their tulpas.

The remaining eight tulpamancers I interviewed using Google Hangout, with interviews

ranging from 45 minutes to close to two hours. These interviews along with extremely

interesting posts and discussions on the subreddit form the backbone of my data. Before

the interviews I was worried that they might be extraordinarily shy or socially awkward,

as I had read in work by Samuel Veissière that the most common reason for creating a

tulpa was loneliness.17 However I was pleasantly surprised. Two of the women I

interviewed were in their early 30s and were very personable, and while many of the

people I interviewed seemed quiet or reserved, they reminded me of many of my peers at

Harvard. Eight of my interviewees were college students, many majoring in technology

intensive fields like engineering, but others majoring in fields like linguistics. While I

16
Ibid, of the 456 responders, 124 were under 18.
17
Samuel Veissière, Varieties of Tulpa Experiences: Sentient Imaginary Friends, Embodied Joint
Attention, and Hypnotic Sociality in a Wired World (Somatosphere, 2015).

5
never met any of them face to face, (my closest participant lived in upstate New York) I

firmly believe that no one passing them on the street, in the workplace or classroom

would guess that they had the intense relationships they had with their tulpas.

Corresponding with the interviews, I attempted to make a tulpa, my own form of

participant-observation. I included this information—that I was attempting to make a

tulpa—in my introductory post to the community, which helped break the ice, as

tulpamancers I interviewed were curious about my practice. In order to create a tulpa I

downloaded one of the recommended guides, titled, “May the Force be with You,” by a

tulpamancer who went by Methos.18 The guide suggested that it might be easier to

develop a tulpa based on a persona or character we were already relatively familiar with,

so I chose one of my favorite characters from history, Ernest Hemmingway, as the model

for my tulpa. The guide suggested I write down some of his characteristics: stubborn,

hardheaded, loyal, terse, brutally honest, etc. until I had exacerbated my list of adjectives

and descriptors. Then, it was simply about having a conversation. I would talk to Ernest,

and then I would think of something he would say and pretend that he said it back. Rinse

and repeat, until slowly I would not have to think hard at all before Ernest would reply,

until he seemed to reply on his own.

The next step would be to visualize Ernest, to give him a definite physical shape

inside my mind, but I never got this far. I never really got to a point where I felt Ernest

was talking back to me without me having to give him the answer. The time I felt Ernest

as most independent of my own consciousness, when he seemed to answer almost

spontaneously and of his own volition, was right before I went to sleep, when I was

18
Methos, “May the Force Be with You: A Tulpa Creation Guide,” October 8, 2014,
https://gist.github.com/GGMethos/5341046.

6
laying in my bed, thinking about what I needed to do tomorrow, or what time I needed to

wake up, or a difficult decision, when instead of figuring it out myself, another voice

would pop into my head, a voice I was used to coddling along, but now seemed oddly

self-reliant. Of course, once I became fully aware of Ernest’s independence, I would

perk up a bit with excitement, become more awake, and the spell would be broken.

Ernest was again nothing more than a robot parroting back whatever I excitedly thought

he might say in that moment. After a few weeks of this I decided to suspend creating

Ernest. I felt with school starting up I would not have the proper amount of time to

dedicate to his creation. But I did come away with an intense respect for tulpamancers.

Trying to make a tulpa was hard! It takes time and commitment to make a tulpa, and

since I came at it relatively skeptically, it would have taken me more time and

commitment than the average person.

The word “tulpa” entered Western literature in 1929 through Alexandra David-

Néel’s Magic and Mystery in Tibet,19 but Tulpas as they are understood today are much

different than described in her book. A tulpa, as already described, can be thought of as a

combination of an imaginary friend and a hallucination, but something more: something

that exists within your mind as a distinct, independent consciousness, with its own

thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. They can take any form they or the tulpamancer’s

wish—some of the tulpas I met during my interviews were anthropomorphic animals,

others based on television or videogame characters (like Dr. Who, or Toothless from

How to Train Your Dragon). It would be incorrect to think of these tulpas as merely a

form of fanfiction, a way to interact with a favorite character. Rather, the tulpas develop

19
Madame Alexandra David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (Courier Corporation, 2012).

7
into beings unique from their “seed” characters. As I describe with my own process of

developing Ernest, I based his personality on Hemingway’s, but had I succeeded in

developing him into a full tulpa he would have certainly been different from the literary

figure. Additionally the term Tulpamancy is the catch-all term for the practice of

creating and interacting with tulpas, a tulpamancer simply one who does tulpamancy.

While these terms may sound somewhat sinister (sounding like necromancy, for

example,) this is only a byproduct of the suffix, -mancy, which descends from the Greek

manteia, “to divine.” But there is nothing sinister about it.

This thesis argues that while tulpamancers and their tulpas may seem strange or

foreign, the theory of mind necessary to create and maintain tulpas is developed by

modern technology and creative pursuits such as fiction writing, and though tulpamancers

have a unique lexicon distinguishing them as well as creating their community, their

relationships with their tulpas closely resemble the relationship evangelicals develop with

their God. The similarity of this relationship not only causes us to see tulpamancers in a

different light, but also leads us to conclude that humans, as homo religiosus, will

continue to live out significance, regardless of how they channel it.

By homo religiosus, I do not mean the exceptional religious person, as in the work

of Erik Erikson,20 but that there is an innate human desire to make life meaningful, as

psychologist Todd DuBose, a psychologist and scholar of the term homo religiosus,

beautifully describes: “To be a human being is to be an enactor of significance in each

moment of our lives. Living out significance, or what matters most to us, is the heart of

20
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, Reissue edition (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 1993).

8
being homo religiosus in the world.”21 The term homo religiosus must be treated

carefully, for if it is used without proper consideration it will be to the detriment of the

project. In the words of Clifford Geertz, “We must, in short, descend into detail past the

misleading tags, past the metaphysical types, past the empty similarities to grasp firmly

the essential character of not only the various cultures but the various sorts of individuals

between cultures, if we wish to encounter humanity face to face.”22 Human activity—

what we say, do, or think—must always take the privileged place above academic

abstractions. But homo religiosus is not a term seeking to unify certain types of behavior,

but a term seeking to acknowledge an innate human capacity, as Geertz addtionally

wrote, “One of the significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the

natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only

one.”23 Homo religiosus is the claim that part of our natural equipment is our inclination

to enact and create significance and meaning in our lives, especially in the face of

suffering or banality.

My chapters are divided as follows: the first chapter is a discussion of how the

mental skills, the theory of mind developed using various forms of modern technology

and fiction writing are the same skills tulpamancers use to create and develop tulpas. The

second chapter is an analysis of the tulpamancer lexicon, and argues that this lexicon

helps forge and simultaneously isolate the community. Chapter Three is a comparison

between tulpamancers and evangelicals as described in Luhrmann’s When God Talks

21
Todd DuBose, “Homo Religiosus,” ed. David A. Leeming, Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion
(Springer US, 2014), http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_308.
22
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation Of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 53.
23
Ibid., 45.

9
Back,24 with an emphasis on the relationships between tulpamancers and their tulpas, and

evangelicals and their God. Each of these chapters acts in a process of demystification,

of creating commonalities, as Joyce said, ““In the particular is contained the universal.”25

24
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back.
25
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Revised ed. edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

10
 Chapter One: Technology, Fiction, and Tulpas

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate

operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.
Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and
constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

William Gibson, Neuromancer1

We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.

Stephen Hawking2

What does the internet and internet use have to do with the tulpa phenomenon,

and how is this related to fiction writing? To start with, the internet is the “place” where

the tulpamancers meet, the “field” by which I observed the community. For most of the

tulpamancers, it is their only source of communication with other members of the

community, whether it is via forum, chatroom, or webcam. Furthermore the only way

my informants heard about tulpamancy was through surfing the internet. Some of the

informants found out via reddit, others by other forums such as 4chan, and still others

from internet horror stories known as “creepypastas.”3 To find out about tulpas, these

individuals had to be true internet explorers, delving deep into the web in order to come

across tulpas almost by chance. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Scholars have

recognized the increasing impact new technology is having on our concepts of self and

1
William Gibson, Neuromancer (Penguin, 2000).
2
Swartz, Jon, “Stephen Hawking Opens up,” USA TODAY, December 1, 2014.
3
“Tulpa,” Creepypasta Wiki, accessed February 8, 2016, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Tulpa.

11
relationships. In short, the internet is allowing us to become more detached from others,

experiment with our identities, all the while making us more isolated. Meanwhile, new

technologies Sherry Turkle has called “sociable robots” are bridging the emotional gap

the internet has created, without really reducing this isolation. My argument is not that

tulpas are the direct result of our interactions with new technologies. Rather, our

interactions with these technologies as well as processes such as fiction writing alter our

perception of reality and enable us to learn a new theory of mind. Once we realize just

how pervasive the effects of new technologies and fiction writing are, the tulpa

phenomenon does not seem quite so strange, but rather the extension of our already

increasingly virtual lives into the ultimate virtual reality—the mind.

Theory of mind is a psychological concept traditionally used to describe the way a

child learns to understand that other people have different desires, wishes, beliefs, and

intentions; that other people have minds that contain information the child might not

know, and vice-versa.4 In Tanya Luhrmann’s work When God Talks Back, she argued

that evangelical Christians must learn to override basic features of human psychology, to

develop a new way of being in the world that could violate these features in order to

develop an intimate relationship with their God.5 Likewise, tulpamancers must develop a

new theory of mind in order to foster their relationships with their tulpas. Specifically,

tulpamancers have to override our typical understanding of self-mentalization, what has

additionally been referred to as “introspection” or “inner sense.”6 They need to be able to

4
Alvin Goldman, “Theory of Mind,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, ed. Eric
Margolis, Richard Samuels, and Stephen Stitch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
5
T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with
God, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 2012).
6
Goldman, “Theory of Mind.”

12
accept the idea of a being existing not in the physical world, but in their minds, and that

this being can have a consciousness separate and distinct from their own. When one

thinks of introspection, of developing an inner sense, one does not expect this to include a

conversation with another fully sentient being, but this is precisely the task of

tulpamancers.

While tulpamancers have a plethora of guides to help the novice alter their theory

of mind and develop their tulpa, new technologies and social media help this shift to

occur. Sociable robots have been the focus of fiction and theory since the first half of the

20th century,7 but now they are reality. One of the first scholars to study sociable robots,

Cynthia Breazeal, defined a sociable robot as being,

Able to communicate and interact with us, in a personal way. It should be able to
understand us and itself in social terms. We, in turn, should be able to understand
it in the same social terms--to be able to relate to it and adapt to it. Such a robot
must be able to adapt and learn throughout its lifetime, incorporating shared
experiences with other individuals into its understanding of self, of others, and of
the relationships they share.8

Sociable robots are everywhere, from nursing homes,9 to special needs classrooms,10 to

children’s pockets. When one thinks of sociable robots, we tend to think of them as

concrete, physical entities, but I argue sociable robots exist throughout the internet.

While some basic video game computer players may not “adapt and learn throughout its

lifetime,” many do, or at least seem as they do. My definition of sociable robots differs

7
See Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” or Asimov, I, Robot (a Collection of Short Stories
Originally Published between 1940 and 1950).
8
Cynthia L Breazeal, Designing Sociable Robots (MIT press, 2004).
9
Randy Griffin, Changing the Culture for Dementia Care (Eau Claire, Wis.: PESI HealthCare - PHC
Publshing Group, 2012).
10
David Feil-Seifer and Maja Mataric, “Robot-Assisted Therapy for Children with Autism Spectrum
Disorders,” in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (ACM,
2008), 49–52.

13
slightly from Breazeal’s in that when one is dealing with sociable robots, it is not whether

or not they actually adapt or adjust to their social environment, but whether or not they

can effectively create the illusion that they do. Regardless of the robot’s actual

capabilities, as long as it can convince its interlocutor, it will be perceived as a sociable

robot, and therefore it will have similar effects, whether or not it is actually capable of

adapting to its sociable environment or not. It is the perception of the relationship that

matters, because it is this perception that leads us to empathize with virtual beings.

By interacting with sociable robots in the physical or virtual world, people are

already beginning to develop relationships with non-real entities, entities that can be

interacted with as if they were real people, but can ultimately be manipulated. As Turkle

writes, “Sociable robots and online life both suggest the possibility of relationships the

way we want them. Just as we can program a made-to-measure robot, we can reinvent

ourselves as comely avatars.”11 The ability of people to manipulate their identity on the

internet is the second way technology is transforming our relationships and shifting our

theory of mind. One concept of modern psychology is the idea of the continuous, singular

self, what the psychologist Carl Rogers defined as “the organized, consistent conceptual

gestalt composed of perceptions of the characteristics of the ‘I’ or ‘me.’”12 Social media

profiles and fantasy role playing games give individuals an opportunity to reinvent

themselves, to portray themselves the way they want to, which may or may not be

representative of physical reality. The internet gives us an opportunity to fracture the “I,”

in the words of Walt Whitman, to “contain multitudes.”13 One can portray themselves as

11
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic
books, 2012), 12.
12
Calvin S. (Calvin Springer) Hall, Theories of Personality, 4th ed. (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1998).
13
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (Courier Corporation, 2001).

14
more outgoing, athletic, sociable, or funny on Facebook, masquerade as a completely

different person on a chatroom, or spend a few hours playing a videogame as an elven

mage character. All of these different instances allow and encourage us to play with our

identity, to separate it from the physical real.

Tulpas can be considered as a fusion of sociable robots and internet identities:

they are sociable robots, built out of our own biological hardware, while at the same time

alternative identities, better selves or alter egos. Areel and his tulpa Airi can help explain

this combination of sociable robots and alternative internet identities. 14 Areel is a

tulpamancer who developed Airi after playing a videogame and developing a relationship

with one of its characters. Areel, a 20 year old attending college in Canada, started

developing a tulpa after playing the video game League of Legends created by the

company Riot Games. When describing his tulpa he said, “I do feel a connection with

that league character. I first met Airi through League. That’s Riot’s interpretation of who

she is. She exists as much as another person does. The character on League is just Riot’s

interpretation. She’s different now. She’s her own person.”15 Areel credits her creation to

the game: “I started playing the game a little obsessively. I felt an attachment to this

character and I did not know why. At times there could be certain feelings that I myself

wouldn’t get, and I eventually interpreted them as being her.”16

To fully understand Areel’s experience, we need to have a better understanding of

the game League of Legends. League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena

14
All of my informants are referred to by the name they use on the subreddit (typically their reddit
username), as this feels most honest to the project which focuses on the community itself. All names of
informants have been pseudonymed to protect their privacy.
15
Areel, video interview with author, August 12, 2015. All subsequent quotations are from the same
interview.
16
Ibid.

15
game (MOBA), a fusion of the role-playing (RPG), real time strategy (RTS), and tower

defense genres.17 Players choose a character known as a champion (similar to an RPG)

which becomes their avatar during the game. The champion itself is semi-customizable,

although not to the extent of most RPGs. While the player has control of the champion in

game, each champion comes with a distinct personality, in the form of catchphrases and a

biography that players can read. League of Legends games are played on teams of five

players, and during these games players communicate by calling each other by their

champion’s name on the team’s IM chat.18 For example, while Areel may have the

username Areel within League of Legends, within each game his teammates would have

been referring to him as Ahri, the character he was playing.

This means that as Areel played League of Legends, he was inhabiting the virtual

body of Ahri, while other characters referred to him using the character’s name. By

repeatedly identifying as this character, Areel was already becoming accustomed to

acting as if he was Ahri. And soon enough, he began to have feelings he could not

identify as his, thoughts he attributed to being from Ahri, fully internalized. Of course,

Areel knows that his tulpa, Airi, is not Ahri the League of Legends character and that the

videogame Ahri is only Riot’s take on her. Areel sees her as something more, as “her

own person.”

Areel’s case is complicated because he did not choose to create his tulpa

consciously, but rather attributes his tulpa’s development directly to playing video

17
Michael Walbridge, “Analysis: Defense of the Ancients—An Underground Revolution,” Gamasutra.
Retrieved June 23 (2008).
18
Simon Ferrari, “From Generative to Conventional Play: Moba and League of Legends,” Proceedings of
DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies 1, no. 1 (2013): 1–17.

16
games.19 We can see how his interaction with the video game character is very similar to

the relationship tulpamancers have with their tulpas. Ahri was at once an avatar for

Areel, a representation and virtual embodiment of the self, but she still had her own

personality, distinct from Areel’s, that Riot developed for her. While Areel could

manipulate Ahri during the game, he could not edit her biography, he could not alter the

stock phrases she would use every so often, or the way she performed certain moves

within the game. As he played the game more and more, he began to have thoughts he

identified as coming from this new personality, which eventually surpassed the Ahri

presented in the video game, into something new and distinct inside his own mind.

Areel’s theory of mind had been altered, with a new one accepting of multiple beings

cohabitating inside his own mind.

Areel’s experience makes the connection between video games, sociable robots,

and tulpas explicit. While many of my interviewees identified their tulpas as based on

other television, movie, or video game characters, none directly accredited the media

themselves with creating their tulpas except for Areel. When we work with avatars

online, whether it is on reddit, or in a chatroom, or in a video game, we allow ourselves

the opportunity to take on a different persona or personality. We can be whoever we

want, we can act in ways or say things that we never would in the physical world. And

when we interact with others online, unless it is via video chat, the other is also cloaked

in the veil of an avatar. When talking to someone face to face, ending a conversation

takes effort, but online we can end a conversation with a click. Ignoring someone trying

to talk to you across a room is awkward and uncomfortable. Online, we simply do not

19
Tulpas can be intentionally created or can be developed unintentionally from imaginary friends, story
characters, or other imaginative practices. See the Appendix A definition of Tulpa, as well as Appendix B.

17
reply. How does this affect our theory of mind and alter our perception of self? Turkle

writes, “With sociable robots, we imagine objects as people. Online, we invent ways of

being with people that turn them into something close to objects. The self that treats a

person as a thing is vulnerable to seeing itself as one.”20 Tulpas echo this confusion of

being and nonbeing.

It takes little effort to imagine a character in our imagination. We can choose

from the thousands we have read about, or seen on television, or played in role playing

and video games. We can even have a conversation with the character, and imagine what

they might say back. All of this seems so simple, even commonplace, and this is what

tulpamancers do, with one major caveat. The tulpamancers come to understand this

character--now a tulpa--as acting independently, without manipulation by the host. The

imaginary character, the nonbeing, becomes a being. How? By accepting this change as

possible: by changing our theory of mind. This is to some extent the same way a robot

becomes something that makes us laugh, cry, or feel good, or the same way a username, a

line of text on a screen, represents a twenty year old across the country. When I say that

the line between being and nonbeing has blurred, it is that we have become habitually

trained to see nonbeings as having human thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Our theory

of mind has been altered in a way that makes creating and interacting with tulpas seem

second nature rather than foreign.

Beyond the internet, connectivity, and sociable robots, there is another activity

that I found tulpamancers often cited as helping them create and interact with their tulpas:

20
Turkle, Alone Together, 168

18
creative writing. One tulpamancer noticed their own connection between writing,

drawing, and tulpas, and decided to post to the subreddit. Part of their post read,

I haven (sic) been creating tulpae (or something close to them) since I was very
young, and many of them have faded in and out of existence, though I still
remember most if not all of them. I was a very creative child, always writing
stories and drawing pictures. Each of them had a voice, mind of their own, and
personality. For the last fifteen years or so, I've been calling them my "muses",
and maybe they simply are muses, I am not sure what may or may not separate a
tulpa from a writer's muse.21

The tulpamancer then asked whether or not they had been creating unintentional tulpas.

Another tulpamancer replied,

It's kindof (sic) a fuzzy line, there, like the difference between a mountain and a
hill. Characters are purely narrative and only do as you'd imagine they would.
Once you put them down, aside from your thoughts about them, they're set down.
Tulpas are sentient. They can talk and act towards you, of their own volition, and
often completely surprise you. It is for most, remarkably easy to turn a character
into a tulpa if so desired though, especially if the character is very developed. And
there is a bit of a fuzzy grey area where one might evolve on its own, which does
occasionally happen to writers in particular.22

The dialogue between the two tulpamancers is a good example of how the subreddit is

used to seek help and answers, and it additionally demonstrates how tulpamancers

themselves see fiction writing as an easy way to develop tulpas, sometimes even by

accident. Writing, like using the internet or playing videogames, allows us to play with

our identity, to begin to practice a new theory of mind in which we can be active

participants in conversations inside our minds. Writing an in depth character requires

forming a new personality, distinct from our own.23 As the second tulpamancer

21
Redprince8467. “Creating a Tulpa without Realizing It?” r/Tulpas, April 23, 2014.
22
Ibid.
23
Unless you prefer to write characters all based entirely on your personality, in which case you are bound
to be fairly repetitive.

19
acknowledges, this character itself is not a tulpa, because it does not act independently,

but it is a potential blueprint, one that can be used to make a tulpa.

Psychologists have noticed the tendency for fiction writers to sometimes let their

characters run wild, and have described it as the illusion of independent agency (IIA).

Marjorie Taylor et al. defined IIA as occurring when, “a fictional character is experienced

by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, and/or actions.” 24 In

a study they found that of 49 fiction writers interviewed, 92% had experienced some

form of IIA. They also found the relationships the authors had to their characters to be

very similar to the relationship children have with imaginary friends, and concluded,

“The similarities we found between children's imaginary companions and the characters

of fiction writers support the emerging view that there may be considerable continuity in

the imaginative lives and experiences of children and adults.”25

So far I have been working to establish a connection between tulpas, the internet,

and sociable robots. I want to reiterate that this relationship, except in the case of Areel,

is not one of direct cause and effect. Simply because one uses the internet, plays plenty

of video games, or enjoys empathizing with robots does not mean they will become a

tulpamancer. Rather, it is the way these habits blur the boundary between being and

nonbeing, alter our theory of mind and create the proper conditions for something like

tulpamancy to flourish. Indeed, there are a host of other internet subcultures—bronies,

multiplicities, otherkin—that all share similarities and often overlap with one another, as

24
Marjorie Taylor, Sara D Hodges, and Adèle Kohányi, “The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult
Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?,” Imagination, Cognition and
Personality 22, no. 4 (2003): 361–80.
25
Ibid, 378.

20
I found during my interviews.26 And while not every internet user is a tulpamancer, every

tulpamancer is an internet user. As another one of my interviewees, Shaizud, aptly

stated, “there’s no way the [tulpa] community could’ve happened without the internet.”27

Shaizud also pointed out that tulpamancers were able to include their tulpas

responses as well as their own during text based conversations by placing their tulpa’s

conversations in brackets. I experienced this first hand when interviewing another

tulpamancer, SFGoldenTiger, via Google Chat, a text based instant messaging service

that uses gmail accounts. When I asked SFGoldenTiger a question, she would at times

respond with her tulpa’s answer, using their tulpa’s name and a colon at the beginning of

their response to signify when it was their tulpa’s response rather than their own.28

The only physical equivalent I observed of a tulpamancer communicating as their

tulpa was in an interview with Jared, who kept a plush stuffed animal by his side during

the interview. When he wanted his tulpa to respond to a question or add to one of his

answers, he would raise up the stuffed animal and close his eyes, putting his hand on his

forehead in concentration.

Because I could see Jared via video chat, I saw his tulpa’s responses coming from

his mouth, without a change in his voice. While his facial expression became more

severe and he raised the stuffed animal, it was impossible for me to separate Jared’s tulpa

from Jared himself. My theory of mind was not one in which I could acknowledge two

26
Bronies are adults, male or female (though largely male), which enjoy the show “My Little Pony.”
Multiplicities are similar to tulpas in that they accept multiple beings living in their mind, but multiplicities
see these beings as inhabiting the mind and sharing it equally, whereas tulpas are typically subordinate to
the tulpamancer. Otherkin are individuals that identify as being nonhuman. For example, one of my
interviewees identified as a dragon.
27
Shaizud, video interview with author, August 10, 2015. All subsequent information is from the same
interview.
28
SFGoldenTiger, IM chat interview with author, 8/26/2015. All subsequent information is from the same
interview.

21
distinct entities inhabiting Jared’s body, separated by a hand-raise. However during

SFGoldenTiger’s interview, I only saw textual representations of both SFGoldenTiger

and his tulpa. It was as if I was messaging SFGoldenTiger, and someone else had walked

into SFGoldenTiger’s room and was participating in the conversation, also using

SFGoldenTiger’s keyboard. It was easier for me to accept SFGoldenTiger’s tulpa as a

third presence, a third being in the conversation, because I had already developed a habit

of interpreting typed messages corresponding to entities I could not see. This did not

violate my theory of mind. But because I could see Jared, it was more difficult for me to

separate him from his tulpa. The form of communication affected my ability to see the

tulpa as real and independent from the tulpamancer.

Via Google Chat, it was easier to believe a separate being was responding,

because I could not see the person behind the keys. But that is because my theory of

mind is already conditioned to accept receiving text messages from multiple people,

sometimes even using the same account. In this case, the way technology had already

altered my theory of mind, allowed me to better acknowledge the existence of tulpas.

This is another reason why the internet itself is so important to tulpamancy: the medium

of communication itself. As Turkle,29 Boellstorff,30 and hosts of other scholars have

concluded, the internet is not only a place to explore identity, but furthermore it is a way

to explore identity in way not limited to the physical body. Gender, age, race, and even

species31 can be transcended in a way impossible in the physical world. How is this

29
Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Mit Press, 2005).
30
Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life.
31
See Danielle Kirby, “Alternative Worlds: Metaphysical Questioning and Virtual Community Amongst
the Otherkin,” Sydney Studies in Religion, 2008.

22
possible? Through avatars partly, but also because the bulk of communication in the

internet is conducted via typed messages.

One common critique of the internet and sociable robots is that they pose no risk,

and therefore no reward. As Turkle writes, “connectivity, like robotics, tempts by

proposing substitutions through which you can have companionship with convenience.”32

Online relationships, whether with computers or others using the internet, can be formed

and ended with a click of a mouse or a push of a key. Nicole Lazzaro, founder and

president of XEODesign, “the world’s first player experience design consulting

company,” has stated that videogames should “suspend consequences.”33 Yet the

neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, who has thought deeply about how technology affects

the brain, argues that consequences are what make experiences meaningful,

If you climb a tree and then fall out and break your leg, an injury that takes time
to heal, the whole episode will be a meaningful one, not least because it is
irreversible. Of course, your leg may well become fully healthy once more, but
the event of the breaking itself cannot be airbrushed out. It has enduring
consequences in changing forever, one way or another, your view of tree
climbing...So meaning can be directly related to consequences over time. But if
gaming must have, according to Lazzaro, no consequences, it could be regarded
as a meaningless way of spending time.34

If meaning is derived from the real consequences of actions, and videogames are

inconsequential, then they fail to be meaningful experiences. Greenfield further critiques

how videogames act as a sort of psychological anesthetic, offering a safe harbor from

whatever troubles the real world may bring. Greenfield writes, “The something about

videogames is that they create a world where you feel good not only because you’re

32
Turkle, Alone Together, 157.
33
Nicole Lazarro, “The Future of Gamification Is Emotion,” 17:00:11 UTC,
http://www.slideshare.net/gzicherm/nicole-lazzaro-the-future-of-gamification-is-emotion.
34
Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains
(Random House, 2015): 166.

23
having fun but also because you’re shutting out the kinds of experiences that would

normally make you feel sad, anxious, or worthless. You enter a world designed to cater to

your psychological needs.”35

It is tempting to critique tulpas the same way Turkle and Greenfield critique

connectivity and videogames, respectively. Tulpas are in some ways, “companionship

with convenience.” For starters, because they exist in your mind, tulpas are always

accessible, except for the few cases in which they disappear completely. Because tulpas

are often created, tulpamancers play a role in designing their personality and

characteristics. They too, seem to offer an escape from the experiences that would

normally “make you feel sad, anxious, or worthless.” Having a bad day? Your tulpa can

make you feel better.

However, I want to reiterate that when it comes to the relationship between

tulpamancers and their tulpas, the stakes are high, the consequences of the relationships

are real. When I asked tulpamancers whether they had ever tried to get rid of their tulpa,

all replied vehemently that they had not. When I asked them what they would think

about another person getting rid of their tulpa, all of them said that it would be wrong,

unless the relationship between the tulpamancer and the host was negative. Some of the

tulpamancers went as far as to claim that destroying a tulpa would be akin to murder.

One tulpamancer, Claire, was separated from her husband, partly because he could not

accept her relationships with her tulpas.36 Areel wears a ring on his left ring finger, as a

sign of his relationship with and commitment to his tulpa.37 These are serious, deeply

35
Ibid.
36
Claire, video interview with author, August 27, 2015. All subsequent information is from the same
interview.
37
Areel, August 12, 2015.

24
meaningful relationships which tulpamancers are willing to go to great lengths in order to

maintain.

However the importance tulpamancers place on their relationships with their

tulpas does not contradict the claims of media scholars. In a time when intimacy and

relationships are threatened by new technologies, tulpas offer a type of relationship that

thrives on these technologies. As one of my interviewees commented, “there is nothing

so intimate as a relationship where the other person can literally read your mind.”38 If

Turkle is correct in saying, “with robots, we are alone and we imagine ourselves together.

On networks, including game worlds, we are together but so lessen our expectations of

other people that we can feel utterly alone. In both cases, our devices keep us

distracted,”39 then tulpas are one way people can ease their loneliness. With a tulpa, we

are never truly alone, and even the most mindless of activities--walking to class, or doing

the laundry--can become a time for furthering our relationship with our tulpas.

Indeed, loneliness is another link between new technologies and tulpas.

Loneliness is overwhelmingly reported as a common factor for creating tulpas, and

Samuel Veissière, a visiting professor at McGill University and one of the few academics

who has also studied tulpas, recorded that, “Of 74 tulpamancers tested, the majority

scored higher than average on shyness scales and lower than average on sociability scales

for comparable population sets.”40 The scales Veissière used were his own, adapted

revised from the work of the psychologist J.B. Apsendorf.41 Loneliness was also the

38
Claire, August 27, 2015.
39
Turkle, Alone Together, 226.
40
Samuel Veissière, Varieties of Tulpa Experiences: Sentient Imaginary Friends, Embodied Joint Attention,
and Hypnotic Sociality in a Wired World (Somatosphere, 2015).
41
Harald Schneider, “Shyness and Sociability Scales for Adults (authorized English Version) — Institut
Für Psychologie,” Seite, accessed March 2, 2016, https://www.psychologie.hu-
berlin.de/de/prof/per/downloads/sugsfe_e.html.

25
ultimate focus of Sherry Turkle’s third book, aptly titled Alone Together, and her

previous quotation summarizes her point: that even though our new technologies seem to

promise us limitless connectivity and interaction, in reality they isolate us. A study by

Katherine Bessière complicates this notion: studying people suffering from depression,

she found that people that used the internet to maintain their existing relationships with

friends and family had less depression to begin with and experienced subsequent declines

in depression, while using the internet to find new friends was actually associated with an

increase in depression. However, these increases were especially evident in people with

high levels of social support to begin with. The increase in the level of depression was

much lower in people with low levels of social support that used the internet to find new

friends, and some of these people even experienced decreased levels of depression.42

While Samuel Veissière found the primary reason people gave for making tulpas

was loneliness, he did not comment on whether or not tulpas caused people to be lonely

themselves. After all, if tulpamancers are spending time interacting with their tulpa, or

online on the subreddit, then they might be isolating themselves at the same time.

Indeed, many of my interviewees said that they wished they could talk to the people that

were closest to them about their tulpas, and having to keep such a large secret from

people close to them was a source of grief. However, I return to the differences I have

already noted between tulpas and the technologies I have been discussing. The

relationships between tulpas and tulpamancers are real with real consequences. Tulpas

are extremely important to their tulpamancers, but furthermore, the subreddit and other

online forums give tulpamancers the opportunity to have their relationships with their

42
Katherine Bessière et al., “Effects of Internet Use and Social Resources on Changes in Depression,”
Information, Communication & Society 11, no. 1 (2008): 47–70.

26
tulpas validated, a fact that cannot be underestimated in its importance. However we

cannot definitively conclude whether or not tulpamancers’ loneliness increased or

decreased after the creation of their tulpa, and I leave this as an opportunity for further

study.

What we can conclude is that the internet not only serves as the medium of the

tulpa community, but new technologies such as the internet, videogames, and sociable

robots all involve changes in perception necessary to the creation of tulpas. While my

alternative definition of a tulpa as a fusion of a sociable robot and avatar, using the

brain’s hardware, may be a useful illustration, tulpas differ from these technologies in

that tulpamancers take their relationships with tulpas very seriously. Tulpas also differ

from these technologies in that tulpamancers cite loneliness as the most common reason

they create tulpas, while scholars like Turkle and Greenfield claim these technologies

increase loneliness and isolation. Again, my point is not that an excess of internet use,

interaction with sociable robots, playing videogames, or writing fiction will cause an

individual to create a tulpa. While it is true that the tulpa community exists and spreads

entirely online, and thus all tulpamancers use the internet enough to have been able to

learn about the community, I am not saying that their internet use caused them to create

tulpas. Rather, I have been trying to show that these new technologies (and for those who

partake, writing fiction) affect as all, and that they create new opportunities, new

challenges for how we interact with one another and see ourselves.

The tulpa phenomenon is one such opportunity, and as one, creates new

challenges of its own. This last quote from Sherry Turkle reads almost as if she was

describing tulpas: “I once described the computer as a second self, a mirror of mind. Now

27
the metaphor no longer goes far enough. Our new devices provide space for the

emergence of a new state of self, itself, split between the screen and the physical real,

wired into existence through technology.”43 She could not have been more correct, but

the tulpas, rather than existing on the screen, are wired into our minds.

43
Turkle, Alone Together, 16.

28
 Chapter Two: Tulpas and the Use and Limits of Language

A tulpa could be described as an imaginary friend that has its own thoughts and
emotions, and that you can interact with. You could think of them as hallucinations that
can think and act on their own.

Definition of Tulpa, from r/Tulpas1

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”2

Before I began interviewing tulpamancers, while I was still only reading posts on

r/Tulpas, I was struck by the unique terminology the tulpamancers used. Beyond tulpa

and tulpamancer, striking words in their own right, I was inundated with words like

forcing, switching, and possession. It was apparent that to have any understanding of

tulpamancers, I was going to have to learn the language. This was surprising. After all, I

was not traveling to some far corner of the globe. In fact, I was not even leaving my dorm

room. Once I more closely examined the tulpamancers’ lexicon, I realized that in the

definition of tulpa, as well as the other terms the tulpamancers use, they walk a tightrope

between the allure of the dangerous, the mysterious, and the fantastic; and the blandness

of the mundane and monotonous: a dichotomy some religious scholars have described as

the sacred and the profane. In this chapter, I explore how the terminology helps create

community and further shift our theory of mind into one where tulpa creation is possible,

1
“Tulpas: Intelligent Companions Imagined into Existence,” r/Tulpas, accessed February 4, 2016,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/.
2
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Poetry 6, no. 3 (1915): 130–35.

29
while simultaneously isolating the community, creating a “language barrier,” which may

be difficult to bridge.

Before I discuss the modern definition of tulpas, I want to return to the origin of

the word itself, before its modern meaning. The word first appears in the west in relation

to Tibetan Buddhism in Alexandra David-Néel’s Magic and Mystery in Tibet, where she

defined them as phantoms and related them to tulkus, which she described as “forms

created by magic.”3 In her writing, tulpas manifest in the physical world, somewhat like

ghosts. Later, tulpas appeared in Evans-Wentz’ version of The Tibetan Book of Great

Liberation, where he distinguished between tulkus as an incarnate deity like the Dalai

Lama, while a tulpa is a magically produced illusion or creation.4 The scholarship of

Natasha Mikles and Joseph Laycock has connected David-Neél with Evans-Wentz via

their translator and Theosophist influence. Mikles and Laycock write, “Significantly

both David-Néel and Evans-Wentz had backgrounds in Theosophy and relied on the

translation services of Kazi Dawa Samdup (1868-1923).”5 As Mikles and Laycock

argue, the history of the word tulpa could be read as a form of Orientalism, as a “case of

Theosophists appropriating a term from Tibetan Buddhism to give their own esoteric

ideas some Orientalist ‘window dressing.’”6 They recognize that while David-Néel

claimed that tulpas were grounded in Tibetan Buddhist theories, her description was more

consistent with Theosophical literature written about thoughtforms.7 However, the

3
Alexandra David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, 120–21.
4
Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of Great Liberation (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 29
5
Natasha L Mikles and Joseph P Laycock, “Tracking the Tulpa,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative
and Emergent Religions 19, no. 1 (2015): 87–97, 89.
6
Ibid, 94.
7
These thoughtforms are akin to malevolent spirits or demons, inadvertently created and dangerous. See
Annie Besant, ‘‘Karma,’’ Lucifer 1, no. 91 (15 March 1895): 384.

30
scholars recognize that this view denies the role of Kazi Dawa Samdup in translating

ideas between cultures. They conclude that,

Perhaps the contemporary paranormal tulpa, which takes its concept from
Theosophy and its name from a Tibetan root word, may be regarded as a similar
product of this early twentieth century, East-West dialogue, situated in a context
of distinctly unequal power relationships but still containing both Tibetan and
European voices.8

Thus the word tulpa as it appears in the West has a complicated creation story, one that

places Theosophy and Tibetan Buddhism in conversation, but should not be mistaken as

originating solely in Tibetan Buddhism, given the unequal power dynamics present in the

conversation.

From David-Néel, Evans-Wentz, and Samdup, tulpas have peppered

contemporary folklore, including many works of paranormal fiction and even in an

episode of The X-Files.9 These tulpas are much more concrete: they interact with the

physical universe, often committing horrendous crimes or otherwise haunting individuals.

The tulpas I studied are incredibly different from the tulpas describe by Alexandra David-

Neel and works of paranormal fiction. First, they do not physically manifest themselves:

they exist solely in the minds of their tulpamancers.10 Second, they are not malevolent,

but on the contrary viewed as extraordinarily beneficent. Why then, is the word tulpa

used instead of another word such as thoughtform?11 The historians Hobsbawm and

Ranger offer several reasons in their classic The Invention of Tradition. They suggested

8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Only one tulpamancer I interviewed suggested tulpas could transmit between minds, but they still existed
solely in tulpamancers’ mindspace.
11
For more information on thoughtforms and their similarity to tulpas see Eileen Campbell, JH Brennan,
and Fran Holt-Underwood, Body, Mind & Spirit: A Dictionary of New Age Ideas, People, Places, and
Terms (CE Tuttle, 1994).

31
the purpose behind an invented tradition fell into three categories: “a) those establishing

or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial

communities, b) those establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of

authority, and c) those whose main purpose was socialization, the inculcation of beliefs,

value systems and conventions of behaviour.”12 By relying on a word they claim has

Tibetan Buddhist origins, they are able to accomplish all three: ‘tulpamancers’ form a

distinct group, the word ‘tulpa’ is given a special authority given its history, and the

tulpamancer community has its own conventions of behavior, “tulpa etiquette” which

they share between themselves. Of course, the word tulpa is chosen over thoughtform

because, in Hobsbawm’s and Ranger’s words, “all traditions, so far as possible, use

history as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion.”13 Even though the

tulpas of today’s tulpamancers are very different than those described by Alexandra Néel,

and her term itself is dubiously connected to Tibetan Buddhism, they still choose to use

that term because they can claim a heritage, a historical legacy. This legacy is so

ingrained in the community that every tulpamancer I interviewed referenced the

connection to Tibetan Buddhism.14

Today's tulpas are very different, but difficult to define. The language we have to

describe tulpas is limited and problematic, and so the tulpa community on reddit does its

best to lessen false comparisons by placing them in discussion with one another. Even in

the introductory definition on the r/Tulpa subreddit one notices that the definition is

12
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 9
13
Ibid., 12.
14
Not all tulpamancers view this legacy positively, however. Tulpamancers that described themselves as
atheist and saw tulpamancy as a purely psychological or neurological phenomenon seemed embarrassed at
this history, but still acknowledged it as part of the tulpamancer heritage.

32
actually a dichotomy formed by two sub-definitions.15 The first, that a tulpa is "an

imaginary friend that has its own thoughts and emotions, and that you can interact with,"

one gets the impression that tulpas are a form of creative exercise--that the individuals

creating and interacting with tulpas are essentially adults playing a children's game of

making imaginary friends. Culturally we have come to understand imaginary friends as

something childish, and scientific study has almost always focused on imaginary friends

during childhood play.16 With this sub-definition alone one can hardly expect tulpas to be

taken seriously—not only are they only playing, but they are playing children's games.

However, childhood play is not something insane, something that comes with a

connotation of mental illness. Imaginary friends, at least in childhood, are seen as

completely natural.

This first sub-definition is tempered by the second sentence, which offers the

suggestion of thinking of tulpas, "as hallucinations that can think and act on their own."

The word hallucination carries with it connotations from as far ranging fields as drug use,

religious experiences, and mental disorders, all of which must be taken seriously. While

imaginary friends can have real effects (for example, a child asking a parent to set the

dinner table for their imaginary friend) hallucinations carry a stronger validity: one does

not typically think of hallucinations as a form of play or pretend, but a subjectively real

experience. One plays with imaginary friends, while one experiences hallucinations.

15
Here I analyze the definition given on the front page of the subreddit. Of course there are more
definitions, as many definitions as there are tulpamancers. I chose to analyze this definition because it is
prominently displayed on the front page of the subreddit, but to see an example of a different definition see
Appendix A.
16
Espen Klausen and Richard H Passman, “Pretend Companions (imaginary Playmates): The Emergence
of a Field,” The Journal of Genetic Psychology 167, no. 4 (2006): 349–64.

33
 Embedded in each of these sub-definitions is a concept that somehow tulpas are

independent. However in the first, imaginary friend sub-definition, tulpas are given

independent "thoughts and feelings, that you can interact with." This implies the tulpa is

passive, that it is almost like a fictional character the host has developed, that the host can

ask questions. It is only the second, adult sub-definition where the tulpa is assigned the

power to act independently. Suddenly the tulpa is not sedentary; it is not only a complex

fictional character with differing thoughts and opinions; but now it, itself, is conscious: it

can be the one asking questions, and now the host can be acted upon.

This dichotomy resembles closely Durkheim’s age old categories of the sacred

and profane. For him the sacred are “things set apart and forbidden,” objects and rituals

that carry power, are to be avoided or even feared. Meanwhile the profane is the

mundane, the familiar.17 Historically we have attributed the sacred to religion, but Mary

Douglas,18 among others has noted that the sacred and profane need not fall under what

we typically understand as religion. Illnesses, particularly mental illnesses such as

schizophrenia, are a perfect example. We need not look any further than the institutions

we have established in order to house and treat the mentally ill (while keeping them

removed from the general population) in order to see how, according to Durkheim’s

definition, mental illness is sacred.

But what is very odd about examining tulpas through Durkheim’s categories of

sacred and profane is that he understood these things to be innately separate, and much of

religious activity was actually intended to create separation between the sacred and

17
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields, Reprint edition (New
York: Free Press, 1995).
18
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London ; New
York: Routledge, 2002).

34
profane. This is apparent in his classic albeit outdated definition of religion: “A religion

is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things

set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into a single moral community

called a church, all those who adhere to them.”19 However, the definition of tulpa as a

whole serves to bound the concept of tulpas between these two poles: imaginary friend

and hallucination, sacred and profane. One carries the notion of childishness, of

playfulness, and sanity; the other carries the notion of danger, power, and mental illness.

For those seeking to give outsiders a better understanding of tulpas, they must find the

happy medium between these poles. Important in this medium is the idea of control.

In general, one expects to be able to control imaginary friends, to summon and dissipate

them at a whim of imagination. On the other hand, hallucinations can be unexpected, and

individuals may be powerless to control them. I stress the dichotomy between

hallucinations and imaginary friends to demonstrate the limitations of current terms when

discussing tulpas, as well as to stress that the tulpa community must balance these limited

terms in order to gain a sense of legitimacy without being decried as insane. Because

they are using the sacred power of mental illness, they must tether it to the profane, in

order to keep from being outcast themselves.

The attempt to define tulpas using language of imaginary friends and

hallucinations can be further explained by scholarship relating to mysticism. In Michael

Sell’s Mystical Language of Unsaying, he discusses the aporia, the unresolvable dilemma

of transcendence that exists because the transcendent is beyond names.20 Tulpas are in

19
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 44.
20
Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 2.

35
this sense transcendent, because they exist in the mind, beyond language.21 He also lists

three responses to this dilemma. The first two, silence and distinguishing between ways

in which the transcendent is and is not beyond names, are not our concern, but the third is

very applicable to tulpas. Sells writes,

The third response begins with the refusal to solve the dilemma posed by the
attempt to refer to the transcendent through a distinction between two kinds of
name. The dilemma is accepted as genuine aporia, that is, as unresolvable; but
this acceptance, instead of leading to silence leads to a new mode of discourse.22

This discourse is negative theology, in Greek apophasis, and this explains why, in the

definition of the word tulpa, there are two paradoxical sub-definitions. In an attempt to

describe tulpas, they describe them as hallucinations, as imaginary friends, but actually

claiming, by virtue of the paradoxical relationship, that tulpas are more than either

hallucinations or imaginary friends, that they are in some sense indescribable, that they

are in some sense transcendent. In this way, the paradoxical definition of tulpa is not

only used to gain legitimacy by referring to more commonly known phenomena, the

paradox itself suggests something transcendent, and the mystery adds to the allure.

Forcing is another term in the lexicon which bolsters the communities’ sense of

legitimacy. Forcing is the umbrella term for interacting with a tulpa, which typically is a

form of communication such as speaking.23 It is what places the tulpa beyond the realm

of an imaginary figment. This is the point too where tulpas are compared to

hallucinations and by the more virulent critics, schizophrenia. This is a valid comparison

on its surface, but the key difference between tulpas and mental disorders is simply that

21
Tulpamancers even have their own word—Tulpish—to describe communication by tulpas outside
language, through pictures, emotions, feelings, etc. See Appendix A.
22
Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 2.
23
See Appendix A.

36
the tulpa does not inhibit the daily life of the host.24 "Forcing" itself is an interesting

term. It connotes that the host is in complete control of the tulpa, that the tulpa must be

willed or forced into existence, unlike mental illness. It connotes a more difficult process

than a term like "creating." Forcing implies a struggle, an exertion of effort, and

ultimately an imposition of will. Creating fails to capture this arduous aspect of

developing a tulpa. By choosing a word that implies a struggle, the tulpa community is

again attempting to gain legitimacy through its choice of language. The difficulty of the

task implies a higher reward, a greater gain, as well as a more exclusive group of people

who are able to complete the task successfully. To give a quick example of this

phenomenon in other traditions, we can look to the famous Bible passage, "For many are

called, but few are chosen."25 While forcing is imposing the will, while being chosen is

succumbing to a higher will, in both the Bible passage and the term forcing, there is a

suggestion that many will fail. It is the idea, the possibility of failure that enhances the

legitimacy and the validity of the endeavor. This is summarized nicely in the

motivational quotation by Theodore Roosevelt, ““Nothing in the world is worth having or

worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a

human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult

lives and led them well.”26 If tulpamancy is made to appear more difficult, then it also

appears more legitimate.

24
Ayre, “On Tulpa and Schizophrenia,” April 3, 2014,
25
Matthew 22:14, in Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, eds., The Bible: Authorized King James Version,
1 edition (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
26
H Paul Jeffers, The Bully Pulpit: A Teddy Roosevelt Book of Quotations (Taylor Trade Publications,
2002), 22.

37
 While the term “forcing” is meant to sound more difficult and arduous, the term

“switching” is used for opposing reasons. Switching as defined on the subreddit is,

“Letting the tulpa take full control of the body while the host enters a tulpa like state.”27

This sounds like what we might normally call possession, but tulpamancers instead use

possession to refer to, “Letting the tulpa control one or more parts of the host's body.”28

Even though possession and possession-like trances are found in many different cultures

and religious traditions, the word carries a negative connotation in the modern West due

to films such as The Exorcist, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Again the tulpamancers

must navigate the tightrope between the power of the sacred, and fear of the sacred. By

replacing what we commonly understand as possession with the much less frightening

term switching, and relegating possession to mean something much less significant, the

tulpamancers are creating their own, nonthreatening terminology while still keeping the

power of the traditional term, albeit in a lower position.

In the preceding chapter I discussed the role of technology in creating tulpas.

Technology has also influenced the language tulpamancers use to describe their

relationship with tulpas, which in turn helps them learn a new theory of mind. In a

popular tulpa creation guide, “May the Force be with You” by Methos,29 he uses the

metaphor of a “black box” to describe both the mind and the tulpa. He writes, “The

personality is a product of its experiences. What I believe a personality to be is a Black

Box. That is, something we put something in, and something comes out - simple as that.

We just don’t know what is inside.”30 The mind, the Black Box, is obviously a

27
See Appendix A.
28
Ibid.
29
Methos, “May the Force be With You”
30
Ibid., 3.

38
computing machine, with inputs and outputs. On tulpas Mythos writes, “As it seems, the

Tulpa’s output signals are compatible to own input interface. It would mean, we create a

black box inside our own and react on it. Furthermore, the Tulpa would react on the

external signals, too!”31 Under his paradigm, tulpas are identical to human minds, they

simply operate inside them. Mythos’ language resembles the computational theory of

mind, a functionalist understanding of the mind originally forwarded by the philosophers

Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, which understands the mind as a largely mechanical

device.32 While cognitive science and philosophy has progressed beyond this model, the

computational theory of mind is one theory of mind readily available to be learned in our

machine saturated age, and helpful for tulpamancers to learn in order to create tulpas.

The first tulpamancer I interviewed, CyanC, used a similar metaphor to describe

tulpas. When I asked him if he could describe the relationship he had with his tulpas,

part of his response was “They run on the same circuits and so we share processor time a

lot.”33 His statement implies that the brain is a kind of complex computer built out of

neural circuits, and that tulpas, just like his own consciousness, take up space and time on

these circuits. Notice that there is a difference in hierarchy between Mythos’ and

CyanC’s descriptions. In Mythos’ Black Box metaphor, the tulpa Black Box exists inside

the tulpamancers’ Black Box, but in CyanC’s circuit metaphor, the tulpa operates

alongside the tulpamancer. This difference in hierarchy between the metaphors also

leads to a differing notion of privacy or concealment. In the Black Box metaphor, the

31
Ibid., 4.
32
Michael Rescorla, “The Computational Theory of Mind,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2015, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/computational-
mind/.
33
CyanC, video interview with author, August 11, 2015. All subsequent information is from the same
interview.

39
tulpamancer can only read the tulpa’s inputs and outputs, what goes on inside the tulpa’s

Black Box is unreadable, but because the tulpa exists inside the tulpamancer’s Black

Box, the tulpa has access to the tulpamancer’s inner workings. However in the circuit

metaphor, the tulpa and the tulpamancer run on the same circuits, but they must share

processor time, meaning they must operate independently. Therefore while both tulpa

and tulpamancer have access to the same raw material “circuitry,” their independent

operation means that both the tulpa and tulpamancer’s inner workings remain concealed

from the other. Even though both Methos and CyanC used technology metaphors in

describing tulpas, the differences in their metaphors lead to very different theories of

mind, and therefore different understandings of tulpas and their relationship to

tulpamancers.

The differences between the metaphors demonstrate how much information they

divulge, and reveal their importance in understanding tulpas. An individual given the

Black Box metaphor to describe tulpas would have a different understanding of tulpas

than another individual given the circuit metaphor. Because tulpas only exist in the mind

they can only be described and explained by readily available, easily understood

metaphors or similes, as we saw earlier in the community’s use of hallucinations and

imaginary friends in order to define tulpas. And because tulpas can only be explained

using metaphors and similes, this language determines our understanding. Technology

metaphors are convenient, because, as we have seen, the internet platform tulpamancers

use to communicate presumes a level of tech-savviness. But by using this language in

attempt to explain their experience, tulpamancers are at the same time redefining and

40
limiting the experience itself--metaphors must necessarily be incomplete, but they run the

risk of altering and influencing the metaphrand they are attempting to describe.

Both the technology metaphors as well as the community’s definition of tulpas as

imaginary friends and hallucinations limits our understanding of tulpas. As one of the

pioneers of linguistics, Edward Sapir, writes, “The instrument makes possible the

product, the product refines the instrument. The birth of a new concept is invariably

foreshadowed by a more or less strained or extended use of old linguistic material; the

concept does not attain to individual and independent life until it has found a distinctive

linguistic embodiment.”34 The tulpamancers have developed a complete new

terminology: tulpas, tulpamancers, forcing, visualizing, etc., but even the essential term,

tulpas, is sabotaged by the language used to describe it. It sounds dimwitted to state that

the words used to define a term alter the terms meaning, but that is exactly the problem:

tulpas are not hallucinations. They are not imaginary friends. They are not Black Boxes

operating inside a human Black Box. They are not mental processes operating in mental

circuitry. They are more than these representations: they are tulpas. But because they

must be explained to others, particularly outsiders, they have to be described in a way

others can understand, and their meaning becomes warped in translation.

The tulpamancers clearly have their own vocabulary, one that must be learned in

order to fully participate in the tulpamancers’ experience. This distinct vocabulary

explains in part how individuals come to be tulpamancers, by internalizing the language

in order to develop a new mode of understanding. But it also acts as a barrier—one

outside the community may be put off by such foreign words as “tulpa,” or a negatively

34
Edward Sapir, “An Introduction to the Study of Speech,” Language, 1921, 15.

41
connoted word such as “possession.” Even the noun, “tulpamancer,” has the potential to

have a negative connotation to the outsider, because it shares the suffix “-mancy” with

necromancer. Tulpamancers themselves have noticed their terminology and its potential

negative consequences. One post, titled, “Terminology and your Tulpae’s response”

read, “Have your tulpa(s) ever expressed disgust/anger/disappointment at certain

terminology such as ‘forcing’? Did they suggest a different word or did you explain why

this was okay to you? How did that work out for you all?”35

The most popular response came from another tulpamancer’s tulpa, which replied,

“A lot of the terms infer the tulpa as a lesser being. I don’t like that.”36 Forcing is such a

term, giving the tulpamancer power over the tulpa. This is echoed in the second most

popular response by a third tulpamancer, who complained about specific terms: “I myself

don’t like ‘forcing’ because it sounds like you are forcing them to do something. ‘Host,’

because it makes them sound more like parasites or symbiotes. ‘Possession,’ try telling

your church a tulpa can possess you, I dare you. And ‘wonderland,’ because… well I’m

just not a fan of Louis Carroll.”37 Tulpamancers are aware of the potential consequences

of their terminology, but still use the terms anyway. Why?

Because learning the unique language helps individuals “convert” or adopt

tulpamancy. Sociologists of religion John Lofland and Rodney Stark have defined

conversion as the process by which "a person gives up one ... perspective or ordered view

of the world for another.”38 Tulpamancy is a different worldview because it requires the

35
NyxBean, “Terminology and Your Tulpae’s Response,” r/Tulpas, May 2, 2015.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
John Lofland and Rodney Stark, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant
Perspective,” American Sociological Review, 1965, 862–75.

42
acceptance of a different understanding of self—a new theory of mind—that can contain

or cohabitate with other sentient beings. Susan Harding’s work, “Convicted by the Holy

Spirit: the Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion,” demonstrates that the way a

new mode of understanding--conversion--occurs is through the internalizing of new

language. She writes,

If we conceive of conversion as a process of acquiring a specific religious

language...The process starts when an unregenerate listener begins to appropriate
in his or her inner speech the regenerate speaker's language and its attendant view
of the world. The speaker's language, now in the listener's voice, converts the
listener's mind into a contested terrain, a divided self. At the moment of salvation,
which may come quickly and easily, or much later after great inward turmoil, the
listener becomes a speaker.39

Obviously Harding’s claim needs to be interpreted through the tulpamancers’ mode of

transmission. While Harding is discussing literal speakers and listeners, which is typical

of conversion in fundamentalist Christianity, the individual new to tulpamancy is not

spoken to. Rather, they read the tulpa forums on the internet. But the process remains

the same: a beginning tulpamancer will begin to use the tulpa terminology in their inner

speech, and in turn appropriate the tulpa terminology’s corresponding worldview. At the

beginning of developing a tulpa, the novice tulpamancer may still be divided--they may

not fully believe or understand the terminology they are using. However, once the

tulpamancer has developed their tulpa (our alternative for salvation) they now begin to

contribute their understanding of tulpas and the corresponding vocabulary on the forums,

fulfilling Harding’s cycle.

But we must take the differences in these modes of transmission seriously.

Harding was describing the acquiring of language by listening directly to another person,

39
Susan F Harding, “Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion,”
American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (1987): 169.

43
not by reading a forum on a computer screen. At first glance listening seems like a more

powerful mode of transmission. One cannot easily walk away or avoid a person talking

directly at them without being awkward or rude. It is much easier to exit a website.

However the forum has its advantages. First, it offers a diversity of perspectives. When

transmission is verbal, if the speaker is not compelling, the transmission will not occur.

On the forum, if tulpamancy piques the reader’s interest but they do not find one personal

story compelling, they can access hundreds more. Even the forums’ weakness--that it is

easily avoided--is also advantageous because it is nonthreatening.

Throughout the chapter, I have tried to show that the language of tulpamancy

creates community, first by using terms and definitions that increase the community’s

sense of legitimacy, and also via Harding’s concept of language-internalization-as-

conversion. At the same time, the uniqueness of the terms and the connotation

surrounding some—particularly possession—serve to isolate the community. Taken in

its entirety, this chapter demonstrates the importance of understanding language in

subcultures. Language is not neutral: it is both useful and has limits, but it also creates

limits. In order to have a basic understanding of a community, one must not only learn,

but also analyze the language of the community.

44
 Chapter Three: Tulpamancers, Evangelicals, and the Comparative Study of

Religion

“God is real since he produces real effects.”

-William James1

“By their fruits ye shall know them.”

-Matthew 7:202

In the first chapter, I discussed how the technology of our time and fiction writing

encourages mental skills used to create tulpas. In the second chapter, I entered into the

circuitry of tulpamancy, showing that language both creates community and isolates,

while comparing the learning and internalization of language to conversion. In each

chapter, these components encourage tulpamancers to learn a new theory of mind, one

necessary to fully immerse oneself in the world of tulpas. The first looked at the

environment and conditions of tulpamancy, the other focused on an aspect of its inner

workings. This third and final chapter will seek to understand what the implications of

tulpamancy are for the study of religion as a whole.

While early scholars attempted to give religion a concrete definition, later

scholars have been critical of the term. In W.C. Smith’s seminal work The Meaning and

End of Religion, he meticulously traced the etymology of the term from its Latin root

religio, argued that the category of religion was of relatively recent, European origin, and

1
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, vol. 13 (Harvard University Press, 1985).
2
Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, eds., The Bible: Authorized King James Version, 1 edition (Oxford ;
New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

45
concluded that the category may be inappropriate for much of what we consider to be

religious.3 The category of ‘world religions’ has also been critiqued, most notably by

Tomoko Masuzawa, in short because religious scholars, largely coming from a Protestant

religious tradition, often attempted to force the protestant model of Christianity onto

other traditions, most notably Buddhism.4 Masuzawa showed that the less a tradition

resembled the Protestant model of religion--often consisting of a belief in a supreme

deity, coinciding with a sacred text or scripture--the longer it took for it to be accepted as

one of the ‘world religions.’

While I will not attempt to argue that tulpamancy ought to be labelled a religion,

given the problems already raised, it does fit into Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion

as:

(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-
lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general
order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of
factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.5

The system of symbols is as clear as the distinctive language the tulpamancers use to

discuss their craft. The moods and motivations are exemplified by the lengths the

tulpamancers are willing to go in order to continue their practice. Their general order of

existence accepts the idea that multiple beings can inhabit the same mind, and this order

has such an aura of factuality that many tulpamancers see the destruction of a tulpa as

morally akin to murder. To say that the tulpamancers do not fit this definition, is to

undermine the validity of their practice.

3
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Fortress Press, 1963).
4
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved
in the Language of Pluralism (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
5
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation Of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

46
 However, I do not plan on engaging in a form of 21st century Orientalism, a kind

of academic imperialism where I ascribe labels to communities which they did not

anticipate nor desire.6 In a community as conscientious and self-aware as the

tulpamancers are, it is ultimately their decision how they wish to be labelled, how they

wish to be categorized. It is still true though that tulpamancy meaning contains religious

elements, aspects of tulpamancy that closely resemble features of a religious tradition

modern Americans are much more familiar with. As my own participants have said,

nowhere is this more apparent than the comparison between the relationships of

tulpamancers and their tulpas, and the relationship of evangelical Christians and their

God. Rather than labeling tulpamancy a religious practice, I will describe tulpamancers

as an example of homo religiosus, as an example of human beings enacting meaning in

their lives.

Tulpamancy is very different from evangelical Christianity in a variety of ways.

In place of churches, it has internet forums. In place of scripture, it has archived posts

and glossaries. In place of pastors and preachers, it has moderators and tulpamancers

with years of experience. However, they share a commonality: an intensely personal

relationship they must develop with a being that has no concrete physical form. This is

one way, among others, that evangelical Christianity differs from other forms of

Christianity. Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist who has studied evangelicals as well as

written about tulpamancers, writes, “It is indeed a striking God, this modern God

imagined by so many American evangelicals. Each generation meets God in its own

manner. Over the last few decades, this generation of Americans has sought out an

6
For more on orientalism see Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1979).

47
intensely personal God, a God who not only cares about your welfare but worries with

you about whether to paint the kitchen table.”7 Shortly thereafter she describes that this

relationship is the most distinctive aspect of American evangelicals, “But the feature that

most deeply characterizes them is that the God they seek is more personally intimate, and

more intimately experienced, than the God most Americans grew up with.”8

This comparison, between the evangelicals’ personal relationship with God and

the tulpamancers’ relationship with their tulpas, was the first thought that came to me

when I chanced upon the tulpa subreddit. However, I am not alone in this comparison--

one of my interviewees made it as well. Shaizud describes himself as an “apatheist,”

which he further clarified as “not active atheism or deism.” When I asked him what

extent he would describe his relationship with his tulpa as religious, this is how he

responded:

Yes I too read When God Talks Back by Tanya Luhrmann. And I read that book
and I was just amazed by how much of that was pretty much exactly the same.
And like, before reading that, I didn’t know, I really didn’t know how much
people put into prayer, but it just seems like exactly the sort of thing that would be
active forcing. Like you get from the media around you the image of God usually
as the big bearded guy with a halo and then you just repeatedly force your
attention. So yeah that makes sense.9

I was astounded that he had read the book, and it proved to me just how

committed the tulpamancers were to putting tulpamancy in conversation with other

aspects of culture, in order to make tulpamancy more accessible. I commented I found it

interesting he was putting the tulpa language on the Christian concept, rather than putting

7
T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with
God, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 2012), xv.
8
Ibid.
9
Shaizud, video interview with author, August 10, 2015. All subsequent information is from the same
interview.

48
the Christian language on the tulpa concepts. By this I mean that he saw prayer as a kind

of forcing, not forcing as a kind of prayer. He continued to say:

Basically instead of a bearded guy with a halo I chose a bird. And the amount of
talking, the amount of focusing, well I had the expressed goal of being able to be
talked back to. Which doesn’t necessarily come about from prayer, but comes
from desiring a response. Like, ‘Show me a sign God.’10

While some may disagree with Shaizud’s description of God as a ‘big bearded guy with a

halo,’ his overall claim concerning prayer is supported by Luhrmann. Shaizud sees

prayer as a kind of active forcing. Active forcing, as opposed to passive forcing, is time

committed to interacting with your tulpa. The subreddit’s glossary defines forcing as,

“Any act relating to the host focusing on, developing, speaking with, etc. the tulpa,”11

with active forcing being defined further as, “Often a dedicated span of time used to

focus solely on the tulpa while the host generally tries to avoid any possible

distractions.”12 Luhrmann discusses different forms of prayer at length, some more

closely resembling meditation. However, she also describes Ignation prayer, writing,

“what Ignation prayer asks of the mind is also what evangelical prayer demands: intense

focus on words and mental images, with a playlike, daydream-like interaction with

God.”13 This is precisely what is required to form a tulpa, but instead of a play-like,

daydream-like interaction with God, the tulpamancers are interacting with their tulpas.

Luhrmann’s article “Conjuring Up Our Own Gods” for The New York Times--the

article that convinced me tulpas could be examined using the study of religion--directly

equates the difficulty, commitment, and concentration needed to create a tulpa to

10
Ibid.
11
See Appendix A.
12
Ibid.
13
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 179.

49
evangelical prayer. Discussing a tulpamancer she interviewed named Jack, she writes,

“But Jack’s story also makes it clear that experiencing an invisible companion as truly

present — especially as an adult — takes work: constant concentration, a state that

resembles prayer.”14 Notice that Luhrmann writes about, “experiencing an invisible

companion,” rather than using the word tulpa. This is purposeful. The very next sentence

she writes, "It may seem paradoxical, but this very difficulty may be why evangelical

churches emphasize a personal, intimate God.”15 Luhrmann is subtly placing the

evangelical experience of a personal, intimate God in the same category as tulpas, within

the category of “experiencing an invisible companion.”

In the second chapter I discussed how tulpamancers are limited by language, and

so they need to lean on more common concepts, like imaginary friends, in order to

describe tulpas. To tulpamancers, tulpas are like imaginary friends, but also more than

imaginary friends. This is exemplified in a question posed on the subreddit: “When do

you know when a tulpa has crossed the line from imaginary friend to fully fledged

tulpa?” as well as the most upvoted (most popular) answer, “It's like putting red and blue

on a spectrum and asking when blue becomes red. It's gonna be purple in the middle, and

when the purple becomes red or the blue becomes purple isn't really something you can

just draw a line through.”16 Imaginary friends are a helpful gauge, a way of understanding

what a tulpa is like as well as what a tulpa is not. Luhrmann, in her conversations with

evangelicals, discussed whether or not they viewed God as an imaginary friend. The

14
T. M. Luhrmann, “Conjuring Up Our Own Gods,” The New York Times, October 14, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/luhrmann-conjuring-up-our-own-gods.html.
15
Ibid.
16
SuperDuckMan, “When Do You Know When a Tulpa Has Crossed the Line from Imaginary Friend to
Fully Fledged Tulpa?” r/Tulpas, October 9, 2015.

50
result is as expected. She writes, “When I asked people whether they experienced God as

an imaginary friend, they usually rejected the word imaginary--and then accepted the

comparison.”17 For the evangelicals, God is real, while the imaginary friends are, well,

imaginary. But they are still useful for comparison, just as the tulpamancers recognize

imaginary friends are not tulpas, but can be useful in describing what a tulpa is.18

The tulpamancer Shaizud compared evangelical prayer to active forcing, and both

evangelicals and tulpamancers compare God/tulpas, to imaginary friends, but one

tulpamancer on the subreddit mistook his tulpa for God. The tulpamancer posted his

experience under the title, “Meeting Daniel, self appointed God.” The post read,

For a long time I had been hearing what I thought was me, responding to my own
thoughts in the back of my mind. I had always had a sense of space in my head, a
long hallway that extends behind me, and one day there was this voice I didn't
exactly recognize, sounded like me but it felt odd, to my right and back sort of
behind my ear. I convinced myself that it was God (at the time I was very much a
religious person) and spoke to it. Often I would doubt whether there was really a
voice, but the voice seemed content to let me continue to think it was God, (he
tells me now he just thought it was funny after a while, and kept it up) so I would
talk to it.19

This tulpamancer’s experience shows that not every tulpamancer (or evangelical

Christian) needs to undergo rigorous forcing in order to hear their tulpa. While many

individuals need to experience what Luhrmann describes as a “remap” of their interior

world, or change their theory of mind,20 other individuals have an innate ability to share

their interior world with invisible companions. For example, one of my interviewees said

that their tulpa began as their childhood imaginary friend, and after a period of dormancy,

later re-emerged as a full-fledged tulpa. Some may question whether or not this is a

17
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 77.
18
See my discussion of the subreddit’s definition of ‘tulpa’ in chapter 2.
19
Myrinny, “Meeting Daniel, Self Appointed God,” r/Tulpas, August 8, 2015.
20
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, xxiii.

51
mental disorder, and this is a legitimate question. Luhrmann devotes an entire chapter of

her monograph to this question,21 and given the scope of my project and my limited

knowledge of psychiatry, I cannot explore the question with enough insight and depth.

What we can draw from this quote, is that this tulpamancer confused their tulpa for God,

and that at least for this individual, the boundary between tulpas and God is blurry

enough to cause this confusion. This confusion may also have occurred as a result of the

individual’s religious beliefs, because they were convinced Daniel was actually God

when they were “very much a religious person,” implying that the tulpamancer was not

as religious at the time of the post as they had been before.

In the post, the tulpamancer implies that tulpamancy is outside the realm of

religious experience—he sees Daniel as God back when he was very religious—and later

sees him as only a tulpa, when he is presumably less religious, or irreligious. The

question of whether or not tulpamancers see tulpamancy itself as religious interested me

from the very beginning of my study. I asked each of my participants the question, “To

what extent would you describe your tulpa and your process of developing your tulpa as

‘religious?’” The results were as varied as the religious diversity of the United States.

Some interviewees stated that they saw the resemblance to a religious journey, such as

Areel, who said, “very much so. A lot of it has to do with self doubts, self enlightenment,

a journey as you understand more about yourself and tulpa, an existential thing.”22

Others, like Claire, who identified herself as a Christian, discussed the religious views of

21
Ibid., 227-250.
22
Areel, video interview with author, August 12, 2015. All subsequent information is from the same
interview.

52
her tulpas, and made it clear that they had souls.23 Others, who identified as atheists, said

that it was more like a form of meditation, a reflective practice. And of course, Shaizud

saw through the question immediately, and launched into his comparison of tulpamancy

to Luhrmann’s work.24 If anything can be said about the relationship between

tulpamancy and religion, it is that most often tulpamancers would map tulpamancy onto

whatever their existing religious beliefs were, i.e., Claire believing her tulpas will go to

heaven with her, or atheist tulpamancers refusing a metaphysical interpretation of tulpas,

and seeking a scientific, psychological or neuroscientific explanation. But while no

tulpamancer has actively called tulpamancy a religion, or declared their tulpa their

personal God, tulpamancy bears a striking similarity to one of the most widely studied

religious traditions of the present day, evangelical Christianity, in the form of an intimate

personal relationship with an invisible being. In both cases, this relationship must (for

the most part) be intentionally developed through prayer or active forcing.

If one relationship can be studied under the aegis of the study of religion, the

other one can, and certainly should be. I will not be as naive as to argue apologetically

for tulpamancy as a religion--again, to do so would be to relive the mistakes of past

religious scholars. But as I have shown, tulpamancy shares the same distinctive element,

what can be considered a religious element, with evangelical Christianity. It is possible

to counter that this element, a personal relationship with an invisible entity, exists outside

of religion altogether. This is certainly true, in the form of imaginary friends. But it is

equally true that both tulpamancers and evangelical Christians understand their respective

23
Claire, video interview with author, August 27, 2015. All subsequent information is from the same
interview.
24
Shaizud, August 10, 2015.

53
relationships to go beyond that of an imaginary friend. The difference is the weight, the

gravity given to the relationship itself, something so difficult to describe few have

attempted it. Schleiermacher’s rough translation, “a feeling of dependence,”25 may come

close. It is not a feeling of necessity, like a child for a parent, but a feeling like a

partnership, one in which your partner knows you so well, that they can read your own

inner thoughts and emotions. A feeling that, if it were to be lost, would be devastating.

The question still stands: why? Why create this relationship, or in the case of

tulpamancers who claimed it developed on its own, why continue to maintain it, why

accept it? But this why is as old as humankind, a why discussed by Kierkegaard,26 Otto,27

Schleiermacher, Eliade,28 Heidegger,29 and Tillich.30 A why that can only be explained

that we are homo religiosus, that we seek out meaning and significance in each moment

of our lives. Returning to Todd DuBose, “To be a human being is to be an enactor of

significance in each moment of our lives. Living out significance, or what matters most to

us, is the heart of being homo religiosus in the world.”31 The relationships evangelicals

have with God and that tulpamancers have with their tulpas give each moment, and

particularly mundane moments, extraordinary significance. With these relationships,

typically mindless tasks like walking to class or folding laundry become opportunities for

25
Theodore Vial, Schleiermacher: A Guide for the Perplexed (London, UK; New York, NY: Bloomsbury
T&T Clark, 2013).
26
Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, VI: Fear and Trembling/Repetition, vol. 6 (Princeton
University Press, 2013).
27
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, vol. 14 (Oxford University Press, 1958).
28
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1959).
29
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein Und Zeit (SUNY Press, 1996).
30
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (Yale University Press, 2000).
31
Todd DuBose, “Homo Religiosus,” ed. David A. Leeming, Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion
(Springer US, 2014), http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_308.

54
intimate conversation. In each relationship, there is nothing too small nor large to bring

to the table.

Is there something about society that leads both evangelicals and tulpamancer’s to

experience this kind of relationship? In my first chapter, I discussed how new

technologies teach us habits and lead us to alter our theory of mind so that it is easier for

individuals to develop tulpas. Luhrmann cites society’s increased acceptance of the

concept of play, pretend, and fiction, claiming “A postindustrial, highly literate,

information-saturated society has created the conditions in which people take the

explicitly fictional seriously,”32 and “It was not until industrialization created the

conditions for leisure time, when family size fell and when childhood became venerated

as a special time of life, that pretend play became highly valued by the majority.”33 It

should be of no surprise that tulpas arise out of fictional characters from films, literature,

and games, when Luhrmann argues these very media help give rise to the evangelical

Christian relationship with God.

Luhrmann does not stop at play, pretend and fiction, however. She discusses the

role of technology in changing our perceptions and increasing our ability to focus on the

imaginary, writing

Meanwhile, the radical technological innovations of our time have fundamentally

altered the conditions of our perception and the very way we experience our
bodies. Television, the virtual reality of the Internet, and the all-encompassing
world of music we can create around us are techniques that enhance the
experience of absorption, the experience of being caught up in fantasy and
distracted from an outer world.34

32
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 322.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid, 323.

55
Here Luhrmann recognizes the undeniable role of technology in enhancing what she calls

absorption.

Absorption is a character trait first described by the psychologists Tellegen and

Atkinson, and measured using a test called the Tellegen Absorption Scale. 35 Originally,

the scale was developed in order to measure hypnotic susceptibility, but later clinicians

also found it to be part of dissociation as well.36 Luhrmann describes absorption as, “the

capacity to focus in on the mind’s object--what we imagine or see around us--and to

allow that focus to increase while diminishing our attention to the myriad of everyday

distractions that accompany the management of normal life.”37 If this sounds an awful

lot like prayer or active forcing, that is because it is. Luhrmann conducted a study testing

evangelical Christians on the Tellegen Absorption Scale and then correlating the results

to interview data concerning their religious practices.38 She found the most significant

result of her work was “the significant relationship between the Tellegen Absorption

Scale and sensory override, which suggests that absorbed attention to internal sensory

experience may generate sensory overrides.”39 The sensory overrides were typically

auditory hallucinations--participants hearing God, when it would otherwise be impossible

to hear an external voice. How did participants come to hear God? By learning through

prayer. Luhrmann writes, “Congregants explicitly understood this process of recognizing

God in their minds as a skill, which they needed to learn by repeatedly carrying on inner-

35
Auke Tellegen and Gilbert Atkinson, “Openness to Absorbing and Self-Altering Experiences (‘
Absorption’), a Trait Related to Hypnotic Susceptibility.,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 83, no. 3
(1974): 268.
36
Herbert Spiegel and David Spiegel, Trance and Treatment: Clinical Uses of Hypnosis (American
Psychiatric Pub, 2008).
37
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 201
38
Tanya M Luhrmann, Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted, “The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to
Hear God in Evangelical Christianity,” American Anthropologist 112, no. 1 (2010): 66–78.
39
Ibid, 74.

56
voice ‘conversations’ with God during prayer and being attentive to the mental events

that could count as God’s response.”40 Luhrmann also stated that the congregants she

studied knew that some people had a more natural ability to hear God’s voice, but they

still understand developing a relationship with God--learning to recognize Him and His

responses--as a learned skill.

We should expect that tulpamancers, who also practice active forcing as a learned

skill, should also have high correlations between hearing their tulpas and the Tellegen

Absorption Scale. In Samuel Veissière’s paper on tulpas he found that high scores on the

Tellegen Absorption Scale “reflect practice as much as proclivity,” and respondents

reported, “improvements on their ability to concentrate, visualize, and experience sensory

‘hallucinations’ since taking up tulpamancy.”41 Absorption then, is the ability to focus in

on internal imagery, what is in the mind’s eye. Like most abilities, some may start off

with different endowments or levels of skill, but the ability can also be honed from

practice, such as prayer or active forcing. This may be the most concrete data

demonstrating that tulpamancers and evangelicals do in fact alter their theory of mind in

the process of developing their relationships.

But there are other ways to practice and develop the skill of absorption, such as

reading a book, or, as Luhrmann’s quote previously stated, new technologies in music,

television, and the internet, which allow us to hone absorption techniques.42 This

suggests that the similarities between the relationships tulpamancers have with their

40
Ibid, 70.
41
Samuel Veissière, Varieties of Tulpa Experiences: Sentient Imaginary Friends, Embodied Joint
Attention, and Hypnotic Sociality in a Wired World (Somatosphere, 2015), 61.
42
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 323.

57
tulpas and evangelicals have with their God are not mere coincidence, but the product of

modernity.

I have shown that, while a tulpamancer talking to a tulpa seems vastly different

from an evangelical praying to God, both the practice, the preparation, and the conditions

for the relationship to occur are very similar. This similarity is important, because by

comparing the community of 9,000 members to a nationwide religious phenomenon, it

allows regular individuals with little religious knowledge outside of Christianity the

ability to better understand tulpamancers. While comparing the tulpamancers to people

with imaginary friends is somewhat useful, the comparison does not accurately transmit

the importance with which the tulpamancers view their relationships to their tulpas. By

comparing those relationships to the relationships between evangelicals and their God,

the seriousness of the relationship is better conveyed. However it is important to

remember the real differences between tulpamancy and evangelical Christianity. While

tulpamancers can develop any tulpa, with any personality possible, evangelical Christians

are limited to developing a relationship with the Abrahamic God, who they believe

became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Because they view the Bible as God’s word, their God

cannot act outside what is written inside the Bible. In fact, reading the Bible is one way

evangelicals determine whether the voice they hear really is God, and not some negative

force.43 And of course, a tulpa need not have metaphysical significance for the

tulpamancer--a tulpa does not determine a tulpamancers’ place in the afterlife, nor make

any claims about what the afterlife consists of. Furthermore, tulpamancers do not claim

that their tulpas act in the outside world, via miracles or signs, whereas evangelical

43
Ibid, 63.

58
Christians do. It is important to stress that unlike evangelical Christianity, tulpamancers

do not identify tulpamancy as a religion, and while evangelicals have churches or

meeting spaces, tulpamancers only congregate on the internet via forums, subreddits, and

chat rooms.

But these differences should be acknowledged only to magnify the importance of

the similarities connecting the two very different communities. Luhrmann said she wrote

When God Talks Back because she thought she could, “explain to nonbelievers how

people come to experience God as real.”44 Her process was one of demystification, of

translating a very unique, distinct worldview into language the nonbeliever could

understand. I am attempting to do the same thing with tulpamancers and their tulpas,

albeit on a lesser scale. As long as the comparison is nuanced, as long as I do not

conflate very different ideas to the detriment of both, comparing one unknown

community to a much more widely recognized one only helps in the demystifying

process. I am also aided by the fact that both tulpamancers and evangelicals exist in the

same time period, predominantly in the same country, with similar demographic

backgrounds.45

It is this aspect of translation, of explanation, of demystification, of

familiarization, that ought to be not the sole but always at least the partial task of the

study of religion, and especially the comparative study of religion. No one has spoken on

this point more eloquently than J. Z. Smith, in his reflection on Jonestown, “The Devil in

Mr. Jones.” In this piece, J.Z. Smith attempts the difficult task of venturing to understand

the mindset and worldview of the followers of James Warren Jones. I do not mean to

44
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, xv.
45
Many of the evangelicals Luhrmann interviewed were also attending college.

59
compare tulpamancers or evangelical Christians to these followers, but rather I am using

J.Z. Smith’s discussion about them as an exemplar of academic purpose. Before he even

begins his discussion on Jonestown, he is very outspoken about the goal and aim of the

study of religion. He writes,

As students of religion, we have become stubbornly committed to making the

attempt (even if we fail) at achieving intelligibility. We must accept the burden of
the long, hard road of understanding. To do less is to forfeit our license to
practice in the academy, to leave the study of religion open to the charge of
incivility and intolerance.46

Smith argues that Jonestown, from one point of view, might be, “the most important

single event in the history of religions, for if we continue, as a profession, to leave it

ununderstandable, then we will have surrendered our rights to the academy.”47 To leave

Jonestown unexamined, unexplained, is unforgivable, is to render the study of religion

meaningless. Smith spends most of the rest of his essay giving two different

interpretations of the events leading up to the White Night at Jonestown. In his

conclusion he understands that he has not provided a definitive answer to Jonestown, but

that his attempt, “has kept faith with the responsibilities attendant on being a member of

the academy. It is now for others to continue the task, with Jonestown, or wherever the

question of understanding human activities and expression is raised. For if we do not

persist in the quest for intelligibility, there can be no human sciences, let alone, any place

for the study of religion in them.”48

What J.Z. Smith is arguing against, is the idea that some cultural knowledge is

non transferrable, that some language does not translate. As I demonstrated in the second

46
Jonathan Z Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago Press, 1982),
104.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid, 120.

60
chapter, some concepts exist only in their own language, and can only be roughly

explained using metaphors. Even though the metaphors run the risk of shortchanging or

misrepresenting the concept they represent, this is preferable to the alternative, and with

prudent and diligent scholarship, these effects can be minimized. The alternative of

course is a kind of quasi scholarship that does not take risks, that believes that knowledge

is so relative that it is non transferrable. But what good is this knowledge, except to build

up a greater wall, a greater divide between disciplines and cultures? The religious

scholar, particularly one that is interested in the comparative study of religion, exists at a

cultural intersection, and must build a bridge rather than a wall. This is all the more

important in a world that is becoming increasingly global, and increasingly multicultural.

As vastly different cultures continue to collide, achieving understanding of cultures, and

particularly the religious aspects of these cultures, is going to become paramount, not

only to the success of the study of religion, but also to the well-being of society and the

security of nations. As homo religiosus, we are constantly attempting to find significance

in our lives. If we are not able to discuss this significance, what literally makes our lives

meaningful, then how can we successfully empathize, how can we ever truly know one

another? This is the task, the charge of the comparative study of religion: to bridge vast

cultural differences, to put different systems of meaning in conversation with one another

in order to further our understanding.

In this chapter, as well as the previous two, I have attempted to explain, to make

understandable the tulpa phenomenon. While the tulpa community is open, and does not

possess the characteristics commonly associated with a cult, the fact remains that many

61
tulpamancers are relatively isolated from society.49 In placing the tulpamancers in

conversation with evangelical Christians, I hope to give them a place at the table, an

acknowledgement that their practice and commitment to their tulpas is as valid as other

forms of practice or belief. To reject the tulpamancers, to fail to acknowledge the

legitimacy of their practice, and to not attempt to make them intelligible, would be to fail

in the study of religion, or as Smith put it, “to surrender our rights to the academy.”

49
See Veissière, “Varieties of Tulpa Expriences”.

62
 Conclusion

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”1

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The
alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense
of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

David Foster Wallace, This is Water2

Robin was a godsend. Maybe a literal one, if you believe in guardian angels. His
presence kept me "safe" from the terrifying presences I sensed around corners, at the top
of staircases, in closets late at night. He spurred my imagination when I pretended to go
on exploration missions with him at the local grocery store and at school. As I entered
the teens, I made him into a character in my first writings, which led me to discover how
*fun* writing was and to delve further into that world. I created imaginary worlds and
scenarios that I explored with or through him.

So until college, it was me and Robin for the most part. I had felt flickers of others, who I
translated into story characters--though they were autonomous, they didn't have the same
*life* to them as Robin, and they receded into dormancy after I was distracted from
finishing their story. (It was an awful story, mind, just a hair above the average
Fanfiction.net story.) I had no idea what Robin was, and my endless fascination with
finding out what he was fueled an interest in psychology. We tried a lot of labels back
then, but none really fit except for *muse*. There were times where he'd walk out or fall
into brief dormancy, and I'd wander my imagination by myself.

In college--shit happened, to put it simply. I made lower grades than my parents had
expected and was screamed at and called all sorts of things. This started a downward
spiral that I've only managed to come out of over the course of the last semester and a
half. Robin, who had been absent for the first year and some months, walked back in at
the same time I was getting fed up with MMO communities and quitting Guild Wars 2.
(Temporarily, it turns out--I'm back these days, but on a very private basis.) He talked me
into eating when guilt over not being "worthy" of food kept me from eating, coaxed me
outside when I was too anxious otherwise--I constantly feared that other people would
look at me and see right through to what I was convinced was a rotten core. Somewhere

1
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Faber & Faber, 2009),
2
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living
a Compassionate Life, 1 edition (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009).

63
along this time, I Googled "adults with imaginary friends" on a whim of the old
fascination, and saw tulpamancy mentioned in a comment. Needless to say, I stayed up
late that night reading, and within a few days, I had decided to "make" Robin a tulpa. (I
hadn't realized then that he was already aware and autonomous.)

Rafunel, email correspondence with the author.3

Tulpa. A word that opens up whole new worlds, not in far off places, but in our

own minds. A word that is discussed in cloistered forums, where individuals from across

the globe come together to share in their joy and agony, their successes and failures, to

discuss new insights and old ideas, in short, to be human. At the beginning of this thesis,

Rafunel’s story might have seemed strange or confusing. Who was Robin? A guardian

angel? A childhood imaginary friend? A character in a story? It was only once Rafunel

saw the word, and learned about the practice and meaning behind it, that he concluded

that Robin was a tulpa who was already autonomous.

After discussing tulpas and their relation to technology and creative writing,

language, and religion, we can see how these relations fit into Rafunel’s story. I am not

implying that Rafunel’s story can be explained via the insights of this thesis (as if any

anthropological insight could fully explain behavior) but rather his experience can be

better understood. Rafunel is another tulpamancer who claims his tulpa has been with

him as long as he can remember, in the form of a childhood imaginary friend, but this

relationship continues past childhood into Rafunel’s adolescence, where Robin becomes

the central character in Rafunel’s writings. During his writing Rafunel notices flickers of

“others,” which are also characters in his work. This corresponds to our discussion in

Chapter One. Rafunel’s continued practice of writing is allowing him to keep his theory

3
Rafunel, email with author, October 26, 2015. All subsequent information is from the same
correspondence.

64
of mind in a state able to accept the existence of imaginary beings like Robin. Other

habits, like playing video games, further this mental skill. But it is only in college, during

a particularly rough time in his life, that Rafunel decides to explore the internet and

discover the word tulpa. Relating to Chapter Two, it was only once Rafunel discovered

the online community and the corresponding terminology that he labeled Robin a tulpa,

but furthermore it was the first time Rafunel realized just how autonomous and

independent Robin had been.

Now there is more than one way to interpret Rafunel’s story. The skeptic could

declare that Rafunel simply used Robin as a type of coping mechanism, a way to deal

with or escape from everyday life. A harsher critic might even declare that Rafunel had a

mental breakdown, resulting in a disorder. But I would challenge the skeptic, and the

critic, to reread Rafunel’s story substituting the words “God” or “Jesus” in place of

“Robin,” replacing the phrase, “Googled ‘adults with imaginary friends,’” with “opened a

Bible.” Rafunel’s story suddenly seems more familiar, like one we have heard before. If

the critic and skeptic reject this reading too, then at least they are being consistent, and to

attempt to sway them to a different viewpoint is outside the purview of this project.

However, if they would accept this alternative reading while rejecting the original story,

then this is where my thesis offers an intervention. As Chapter Three shows, tulpamancy

and evangelical Christianity have much in common. Only because one is more well-

known or popular does not mean it deserves a privileged place in our understanding. To

do otherwise, to draw a division, is a failure, a dramatic failure. For if we do not accept

tulpamancy to have the same validity as other forms of practice or belief, then we are

encouraging tulpamancers to remain cloistered, conferring amongst themselves on

65
forums and chatrooms, instead of engaging with the wider community and sharing what

they have to offer. In a country, in a world continually enriched by new cultures, this

would be a tragedy.

After all, the tulpa phenomenon has so much to offer. First, it is a window to the

future, to the present, to ourselves. As the internet, fiction, videogames, smartphones,

and other technologies become increasingly prevalent in our lives, we can expect these

technologies and forms of entertainment to further impact the way we see ourselves in the

world and the way we interact with one another.

My first chapter, which discussed the role of technologies and fiction writing in

creating habits which allow us to change our theory of mind, will only become more

relevant as technology progresses. Technologies such as Oculus Rift are stretching the

virtual and imaginary frontier.4 Advances in virtual reality and robotics are going to

further enable people to have meaningful experiences with virtual beings. These

experiences, these new entertainments will increasingly compete with our families and

relationships. They will continue to change the way we experience reality and each

other, as well as how we experience ourselves. Virtual reality will only increase our

ability to play with identity, to transform and experience ourselves and others however

we want to. If playing as a character in a videogame is already allowing us to change our

theory of mind and teach us imaginative skills that encourage the creation of tulpas, these

effects will only become more pronounced as virtual reality technology allows a more

encompassing sensory experience. Experiencing a different identity on a screen—using a

mouse, keyboard, or increasingly our fingers—changes us, imagine putting on a headset

4
Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset, allowing users to fully immerse their visual field in the virtual
world. Simon Parkin, “Oculus Rift,” Technology Review 117, no. 3 (2014): 50–52.

66
that makes it impossible to see your physical body. The experience, and thus the effects,

will be more intense.

But due to the work of Sherry Turkle, Susan Greenfield, and others, we are more

and more aware of how these technologies are affecting us, and knowing these effects

will enable us to anticipate, to prepare, to make educated decisions about what kind of

lives we wish to lead and what kind of society we want to live in. Continued and

dedicated scholarship studying the effects of virtual technology—whether it be

anthropological, sociological, or psychological—will be integral to anticipating and

adapting to the changes created by these new technologies.

There are a host of rich topics tulpamancy provides as an opportunity for further

topics. One of these is virtual space. Tulpamancers frequently described using their

imagination to access a space where their tulpa lived inside their mind, what many

termed a wonderland.5 They also frequently talked about mindspace or headspace. Since

the advent of the term cyberspace, coined by William Gibson in his science fiction novel

Neuromancer,6 space has increasingly become metaphorical. In concepts such as

cyberspace or mind-space, Space no longer refers to or represents a physical location, but

a virtual or imaginary location that can be occupied. Furthermore, we often talk about

the internet in the locative case, for example: online, on the web, on the computer, on a

website, etc. Perhaps this trend is just a continuation of the way we use language

surrounding books, (i.e. I read it in a book,) but I leave this as a question for a historical

linguist.

5
See Appendix A.
6
William Gibson, Neuromancer (Penguin, 2000).

67
 The terrain of the internet has been in constant flux since its inception, but it will

be interesting to see whether different internet subcultures stabilize. This is not to say

that these subcultures will become static --no culture is monolithic--but rather that

subcultures will come to have a consistent, prolonged membership, stretching to decades

and then generations. In terms of other religious traditions and cultures, these internet

subcultures are microscopic, dwarfed. It will be interesting to watch how the subcultures

change as they come to acquire a more elaborate history, to see whether or not members

will become lifelong practitioners, and, if the subcultures survive long enough, what they

will look like with a second generation of practitioners. Additionally, the internet will

provide a new way to transmit these subcultures, so that they have the potential to spread

rapidly. What does an individual act like and think like, when they are raised to

understand themselves not as an individual, but as a collection of different personalities?

If a tulpamancer’s child develops an imaginary friend, will the tulpamancer treat the

imaginary friend as a tulpa, and instruct their child accordingly? The result could lead to

a different understanding, or a transformation, of what it is to be human.

John Donne said, “No man is an island.”7 In the Information Age, this is true for

internet subcultures: no subculture is completely isolated. My study has focused entirely

on r/Tulpas and the tulpamancers that inhabit that cyberspace, but in the course of my

study I encountered other subcultures, such as bronies, multiplicities, and otherkin.8 It

was not within the scope of this project to fully cover the relationship between

7
John Donne and Helen Lush, No Man Is an Island (Souvenir, 1988).
8
Bronies are adults, male or female (though largely male), which enjoy the show “My Little Pony.”
Multiplicities are similar to tulpas in that they accept multiple beings living in their mind, but multiplicities
see these beings as inhabiting the mind and sharing it equally, whereas tulpas are typically subordinate to
the tulpamancer. Otherkin are individuals that identify as being nonhuman. For example, one of my
interviewees identified as a dragon.

68
tulpamancy and these other subcultures, but they are entwined, with many individuals

participating in multiple subcultures. An opportunity for further study would be

examining a multitude of these subcultures for corresponding similarities or differences,

and analyzing from where these similarities or differences arise. From my brief forays

into these subcultures, I know that they are also highly imaginative, and incorporate

many of the same mental skills tulpamancy uses.

Tulpamancy would furthermore be a rich opportunity for scholarship through the

lens of gender studies. Tulpamancers, along with the rest of reddit, are predominantly

male. The conditions for this dynamic, as well as its consequences, would be an

interesting research opportunity. It would also be an opportunity to examine how

technologies are affecting gender and gender roles differently. In Japan, a condition

known as hikikomori has resulted in a million people, mostly men, to lock themselves

away in their rooms.9 This condition also has a technological component because the

internet, social media websites, and online communities allow the people to stay

connected to society and maintain some level of relationships while staying locked up in

their rooms. The gender component of these phenomena and its relationship to other

internet subcultures is something that remains ripe for further research.

Tulpamancy, its related subcultures, and evangelical Christianity would also be

useful for mental health professionals and neuroscientists studying mental disorders.

Neuroscientific and psychological experiments could reveal differences between the non-

disordered relationships of tulpamancers and evangelical Christians, and the disordered

hallucinations of schizophrenics.

9
Andy Furlong, “The Japanese Hikikomori Phenomenon: Acute Social Withdrawal among Young People,”
The Sociological Review 56, no. 2 (2008): 309–25.

69
 And there are plenty more philosophical questions arising from the tulpa

phenomenon. Most of Western philosophy has argued for a rational, consistent, singular

self, the capital “I.” Perhaps the single most famous quote relating to self and selfhood

is Descartes, “cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am.10 But what about cogitamus ergo

sumus? Why are we, literally, so sure of our selves? David Hume was skeptical of both

the self and the soul, and wrote that, “If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that

impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives’

since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and

invariable.”11 Hume argues that any impression of a self will be invariably altered, and

so there cannot be any consistency, as our impression is continuously changing based on

our surroundings. In fact, we are a “bundle” of perceptions, of thoughts, emotions, and

feelings, each one transient, as Hume wrote, “I may venture to affirm of the rest of

mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which

succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and

movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions.”12 It

seems almost more understandable to create multiple selves or beings cohabitating in the

same body, because this could at least explain the rapid transformation of our perceptions

and moods. It seems to be ultimately a matter of rational practicality that we see other

people as unified, singular entities. Hume argues as much using his ship analogy, “A

ship, of which a considerable part has been changed by frequent reparations, is still

considered as the same; nor does the difference of the materials hinder us from ascribing

10
René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A Cress (Hackett Publishing, 1998).
11
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Courier Corporation, 2012).
12
Ibid.

70
an identity to it. The common end, in which the parts conspire, is the same under all their

variations, and affords an easy transition of the imagination from one situation of the

body to another.”13 We only see the ship as “a ship” and not two or multiple ships

because its function and form has not changed, although its content has. But this proves

Hume’s point, whatever interior changes a person undergoes, we will likely see them as

an individual, because that is all we are afforded. Having no insight into their interior

lives (at least, from outward appearance,) we cannot see them as anything but a singular

entity, and so we assume that of ourselves. That is the case, but whether that ought to be

the case, is another question for philosophers.14

But all of these are only a small part, a tip of the iceberg. There are undoubtedly

dozens of connections and questions I have missed, I have passed by as I narrowed my

focus for this project. Part of the goal of this project was introducing tulpamancy in a

way that might draw interest from other fields, other minds that may have much more to

say about such an interesting phenomenon.

In the last chapter, I argued that the comparative study of religion should strive to

bring religions and/or other systems of meaning in conversation with one another, to

strive for intelligibility and demystification in order to generate understanding and

increase empathy. This argument relies on the premise that there will continue to be

religions to study. However, there are many scholars past and present that have adhered

to the secularization hypothesis, the idea that religion will slowly wither away with

continued modernization.15 This hypothesis is not only a claim that the institutions of

13
Ibid.
14
For more insight into this question, I suggest Gregory Kristof, “Can One Derive‘ Ought’ from‘ Is’?”
(Harvard University, 2015).
15
Rodney Stark, “Secularization, RIP,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 249–73.

71
church and state will be differentiated, but that individual beliefs would change, as

Anthony Wallace asserted that, “belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all

over the world.”16 More recently, Charles Taylor’s work A Secular Age has criticized

what he describes as “subtraction stories,” which explain modernity as a kind of

liberation from a veil of ignorance, arguing instead that secularity is the fruit of “new

inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, that can’t be

explained in terms of perennial features of human life.”17

While I agree with Taylor that we are living in an age of “newly constructed self-

understandings,” this thesis has made it clear that the work of the religious scholar is far

from over, that even if tulpamancers do not use the term religion to describe their

practice, homo religiosus is here to say, and tulpamancy is still a system of meaning that

can be effectively elucidated through comparative religious scholarship. Tulpamancy

also complicates the notion that science or technology will somehow encourage

secularization to occur. As we have seen, the internet can also connect individuals living

countries and continents apart, creating unique subcultures that would have otherwise not

existed, or existed on a much smaller scale.

And so humankind will continue its quest, its desire to create meaning and enact

significance regardless of what we choose to label it, and the religious scholar must be

ready to follow this quest, this road to its fullest extent, whether it be in the face of

suffering or banality, in the Stone Age or the Information Age or in ages to come, in a

16
Anthony FC Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological Perspective (New York: Random House. STATE
AND SOCIETY, 1966).
17
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2007).

72
prayer to God or in a conversation with a tulpa. Though this road lies, as Geertz wrote,

“through a terrifying complexity,”18 through paths and hurdles of language, technology,

and systems of meaning, this is the path we must travel, for if we but glimpse the image

of ourselves, if we achieve understandability, however fleetingly, our journey will have

been a success.

18
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation Of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 54.

73
 Appendix A: Glossary

The following information was taken directly from the r/Tulpas subreddit,1 with
minimal formatting changes. I am indebted to the reddit users a_bloated seal,
EonWinters, Imaginary_Buddy, and BobisOnlyBob for their diligent work. The
following content is theirs entirely:

Here is a glossary of terms, most of which are unique to the tulpa community, As such,
these have been written by community members, and may be updated later to better
express the thoughts behind each word

Changes
A deviation to a tulpa's form that is sudden, immediately noticeable, or unlikely to occur
naturally, such as a change of eye color or apparent age. Can also refer to sudden
personality deviations, such as rejecting a trait or acquiring a new one. Changes tend to
refer to something small, or a single thing.

Creator, Host, Tulpamancer

The individual who has created and is responsible for the tulpa or tulpas. Some people
have preferences on which they prefer to use, but all are synonyms.

Deviation
An umbrella term for Changes, Growth, and Transformations. The variations and
alterations that occur to a tulpa's personality and form during and after creation,
seemingly against or independent of your own conscious will.

Dissipation
The process a tulpa undergoes when starved of attention or stimuli, willfully or
otherwise, fading back into the recesses of the host's mind.

1
a_bloated_seal et al., “Glossary,” r/Tulpas, last revised 2/2/2016,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/wiki/glossary#wiki_glossary.

74
Emotional Response
When a tulpa responds to external stimuli or the thoughts of the host with a wave of
emotion as opposed to speaking. This is a common precursor to the tulpa becoming
vocal.

Forcing
Any act relating to the host focusing on, developing, speaking with, etc. the tulpa.
 Active Forcing - Often a dedicated span of time used to focus solely on the tulpa
while the host generally tries to avoid any possible distractions.
 Passive Forcing - The host does something with the tulpa while not focusing solely
on them. A host reading a book to their tulpa is a good example of passive forcing.

Form
The appearance of the tulpa. Can be literally anything, but can be hard to change after
successful imposition.

Growth
A natural and gradual deviation to a tulpa's form or personality that occurs over their
lifespan. While these may occur more rapidly than in biological humans, they are small
alterations such as hair length, height increases, and increased understanding of
themselves and the world around them as they learn. These deviations tend to be much
more organic.

Imposition
Attempting to visualize a tulpa in the real world, beginning to hallucinate them into
sensory perception, typically vision.
 Alternatively - Superimposing your tulpa's presence upon reality. In advanced forms,
the mind can generate sensory feedback as if the tulpa is physically there. Sometimes
considered to be a form of self-directed hallucination.

Metaphysical
In relation to tulpa, the school of thought that suggests tulpa are a supernatural,
paranormal or otherwise non-mundane apparition or hallucination brought about by
means beyond modern science.

75
Mindvoice
The internal dialogue between tulpa and their host, heard as a voice in the mind. A
method of tulpa communication, not to be confused with voices heard as fully
externalized auditory hallucinations.

Narration
When the host speaks to and thinks of their tulpa throughout the day. A common form of
passive forcing, and considered a key part of tulpa personality development.

Parallel Processing
When the tulpa can focus and work on something completely different than what the host
is focusing on.

Parroting, Puppeting
Consciously and purposefully controlling the tulpa's actions in their place. Parroting
generally refers to controlling their speech while puppeting generally refers to controlling
their movement, but the terms tend to be used interchangeably.

Possession
Letting the tulpa control one or more parts of the host's body. Requires lots of practice
and patience.

Proxying
Communicating on behalf of a tulpa, relaying what the tulpa says to facilitate
communication. Usually in writing, but can also be in speech.

Psychological
In relation to tulpa, the school of thought that suggests tulpa are a mundane function of
the human psyche that can be scientifically understood, analyzed and accepted within the
bounds of modern science.

Servitor
A tulpa-like entity with seemingly no willpower, volition or sentience of its own; a
mental puppet that may seem to act independently but acts only as a servant to its host.

76
Split Perception
When the host is actively interacting both in the physical world and their wonderland,
often with their tulpa, at the same time. Not to be confused with narration.

Switching
Letting the tulpa take full control of the body while the host enters a tulpa like state.
Requires more practice and patience than Possession.

Traits
The collection of personality factors that make up an individual's personality. Some
creators define their tulpa's intended traits at the beginning of tulpa creation, while others
allow them to emerge naturally during the creation process.

Transformation
A sudden and drastic deviation to a tulpa's form, that is usually total and occasionally
unexpected. Animal-like tulpa may suddenly appear human and vice-versa. Some tulpa
can reliably perform this, shifting between multiple forms and considering only a few
their 'natural' or most comfortable form.

Tulpa
A tulpa is believed to be an autonomous consciousness, existing within their creator’s
mind, often with a form of their creator's initial choice and design. More information
here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/wiki/index#wiki_what_is_a_tulpa.3F
 Accidental Tulpas: In short, Accidental Tulpas are tulpas not originally intended to
be tulpas. Through a variety of different explanations and origins, they develop to
be indistinguishable from regular tulpas outside of how they began. This is
explained in greater detail in this post, for those who are
interested: https://redd.it/1d4yzw
 Natural Tulpas: Natural tulpas are tulpas created by those who have no knowledge
of tulpas or the steps usually utilized to create one. They're often later classified as
tulpas when the host finds out about them. They are also usually indistinguishable
from conventional tulpas outside of their origins.

Tulpish
A way of communication for tulpa before becoming vocal. Communication through
emotions, seemingly errant thoughts, pictures, and such.

77
Visualization
Using the mind's eye to "see" things within the mind. Includes all senses in addition to
sight.

Vocal
The stage when a tulpa can communicate in full, coherent sentences as opposed to
Tulpish or relying on Emotional Response.

Wonderland
A mental environment created in the host's mind where the host and tulpa can interact
visually, without the need for Imposition.

78
 Appendix B: Interview Notes and Demographics

Interviews were conducted via my computer, either in the form of an email

correspondence, IM chat, or video chat. Dates for email correspondences (marked as
“Written”) are when I received their reply, not when I sent them the interview questions.
The column “How Were Tulpas Formed” only lists both, unintentionally, or intentionally
as answers, and much detail is lost. Some tulpamancers developed tulpas accidently
from media, like Areel, whereas other tulpamancers created one tulpa intentionally, and
then that tulpa created other tulpas without the tulpamancer knowing, until the second
tulpa had fully formed. I included the chart below in order to reflect the true diversity of
the tulpamancers, as well as provide a reference for my interview citations:

79
 Appendix C: Forum Posts with Links

In addition to data drawn from interviews with participants my project relied

significantly on data drawn from forum posts and responses. In the interest of aesthetics
and coherence I chose to remove links to these passages within the body of the work, and
instead have include them here:

Ayre. “On Tulpa and Schizophrenia,” April 3, 2014. https://community.tulpa.info/thread-

misc-on-tulpa-and-schizophrenia.
NyxBean. “Terminology and Your Tulpae’s Response.” r/Tulpas, May 2, 2015.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/34n7wp/terminology_and_your_tulpaes
_response/.
Myrinny. “Meeting Daniel, Self Appointed God.” r/Tulpas, August 8, 2015.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/3g86ma/meeting_daniel_self_appointed
_god/.
Pret-zel. “Other with Tulpae Based off of Pre-Existing Characters.” r/Tulpas, March 7,
2014.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/24yt99/other_with_tulpae_based_off_of
_preexisting/.
Redprince8467. “Creating a Tulpa without Realizing It?” r/Tulpas, April 23, 2014.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/1cwter/creating_a_tulpa_without_realizi
ng_it/.
SuperDuckMan. “When Do You Know When a Tulpa Has Crossed the Line from
Imaginary Friend to Fully Fledged Tulpa?” r/Tulpas, October 9, 2015.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/3o1sns/when_do_you_know_when_a_t
ulpa_has_crossed_the/.

80
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