Everything You Need To Know About Tulpas In 2024

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🌙 Written by Stefan Zugor, international lucid dreaming expert and teacher. Learn how to lucid dream in 7 days or less.

Tulpas are a slightly strange, even scary concept that people especially in the last year or so (2022) have started getting involved with. Essentially it’s like an imaginary friend, but the stories you’ll hear are far scarier than that.

This is going to be a long article so I’ve added a little contents section to hopefully make it easier for you to navigate through it. If you’re a regular reader of this site and LIKE this new feature, please email me or message me somehow on social media letting me know.

Contents
What is a tulpa?
Reasons you’d want to
How to create a tulpa
Plan it out first
Think about it’s personality
Practice talking to it
Get used to keeping it in the background
Check it’s really there
How long does it take to make a tulpa?
When tulpas go wrong
Are they actually real?
Are they dangerous?
Can they harm you?
Religious implications
How to get rid of a tulpa

What is a tulpa?

The word ‘tulpa’ comes from the Tibetan phrase or words ‘to construct’ or ‘to build or create’.

A tulpa is a manifested ‘imaginary friend’ that can at and think INDEPENDENTLY of your own consciousness. It can seem like you’re interacting (in your mind) with an independent person, spirit, energy or entity.

Everything about tulpas explained

The more energy and focus you put into creating a tulpa in your mind the more independent and powerful it will become. You can manifest a tulpa that can think, advise you on things and seemingly help you get through life, all whilst living inside your head.

You can never really ‘finish’ making a tulpa because just like people, they’re always evolving and can always learn, change, adapt and grow. For this reason, this guide will show you how to ‘create’ a tulpa, but your work will never be finished.

They can come in various forms and don’t always have to be a human. When you go about creating one, you also create a sort of ‘home’ for them to live inside your head. They follow you around in your waking life, but they can also disappear to go to their ‘home’ in your mind. This means you don’t have to put energy into interacting with it all the time.

 

At the start you’ll need to really focus on thinking ‘what would my tulpa say in this situation’ but as time goes on and you put more energy and practice into it, you’ll find it takes almost no effort to hear and interact with your tulpa, it’s like it’s thinking and acting on its own.

They’re able to think and make decisions on their own with their own free will, despite the fact that you’ve created and manifested them in your head. There are certain dangers and warnings about creating a tulpa which are covered in this article, but for now let’s look at how to make one.

A tulpa can communicate with you in many ways. They can verbally say things, physically (seemingly at least) touch your body, apply apparent pressure to your body and parts of it, and also  install certain feelings in you which can also be experienced as ‘gut feelings’.
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Why would you want to create a tulpa?

There are many reasons one might WANT such a friend in their mind. The main one is companionship and friendship. It might sound strange for some, but lots of people already sort of talk to themselves in their head when things get tough, or even when they just fancy a chat.

This is similar, and by creating a tulpa to have as a friend, you’re sort of making a friend that you can never lose. You can always just speak to your tulpa about anything and everything that happens in your life.This can make life seem a bit less lonely and you’ll always have someone to talk to.
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How to create a tulpa FAST

Let’s go over how you can create or manifest a tulpa for yourself. There are many ways you can dot his but we’ll just cover the main one here. It involves thinking very hard about interacting with a third person or a person OTHER than your own mind. Imagine WHAT this person or thing would say, and then reply to it.

To create a tulpa can also be known as ‘tulpaforcing’ or ‘tulpamancing’. These are just other words for the action of manifesting, creating or otherwise inviting a tulpa into your life. Let’s get started.
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Step 1: Plan out your tulpa

Take some time to really think about what and who you want your tulpa to be. You’ll find that after a while they sort of change into what THEY want to be, and that’s fine. But still, take this time at the start to really think about how, who and why you want your tulpa to be.

Consider why you’re wanting a tulpa, and what you’ll ask it when it’s there. Will you just want a friend, or will you want something more serious like a life advisor or even guide? Consider thees things long before you try and manifest one.

Consider what you think or want it to look like. Is it going to be a human? Animal? Maybe it won’t even have a form at all, although most tulpas prefer to have a form of some sort, as they like being seen and interacted with (most of the time).

If it helps, you can physically draw a picture of what you think your tulpa is going to look like, although it’s probably best for now just to keep the image in your mind as that’s where you’ll mainly be interacting with your tulpa when it manifests.
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Step 2: Consider it’s beliefs and personality

Think about what sort of personality you want your tulpa to have. Do you want it to be funny? Someone you can have a laugh with? This is all important to think about and will influence the sort of entity you create.
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Step 3: Practice speaking and interacting with it

Once you’ve got a clear idea of what you think it should look like and how it should act, you can practice talking to it. Give it a name, or open your mind and hear it tell you it’s own name. The more you open your mind with this and be creative, the more you’ll enjoy the experience.

Let it decide it’s own name, and practice sort of hearing it without FORCING it to speak or thinking too much about what it should say. If you find this difficult, that’s perfectly normal as well and so you should practice imagining what you think it SHOULD say before naturally hearing it.
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Step 4: Practice keeping it in the background

This is where you’ll make it more a part of your life. Practice just sort of keeping the thought of your tulpa in the background of your mind and thoughts. Whatever you’re doing, try and keep thinking a little bit about your tulpa, and imagine it’s there with you all the time.

Practice hearing it say things about what you’re currently doing, and practice interacting with it (in your mind) and experiencing the world together as a couple. This will help to strengthen the image and make it more likely that you’ll be able to interact with it without trying to imagine it’s responses.

Remember the goal here is to create an entity with which you can interact without being aware of the fat you’re creating it’s answers. It should feel like (eventually) you’re interacting with something or someone that you have no control over.
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Step 5: Check it’s really there

When you’ve been practicing manifesting your tulpa for a while, you’ll want to perform a quick test. This test is to see if it’s really there and can o things without you. If up until this point you’ve been putting effort into thinking about what and how it would react to certain situations, now is the time to stop.

Lay back, close your eyes and let your pulp show you something. Don’t ask it to show you something in particular, just say ‘show me something random’. This is much like when you talk to the area in a lucid dream, but you’re awake this time and you’re letting your tulpa show you something.

The idea here is that when done properly, your tulpa should be able to take her and show you something strange. Maybe it will take you for a walk in its’ home, or maybe it will show you it’s favourite place to hang out.
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How long does it take to make a tulpa?

It doesn’t take very long, especially if you practice often, to make a tulpa. You can practice about 1 hour a day and you should create yourself a tulpa in about a week or two. It can take slightly longer, maybe slightly less time but it’s about that.
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When tulpas go wrong: scary stuff

I feel we should talk about what can happen when tulpas go ‘wrong’, and some of the dangers involved with this sort of exercise. This is all of course a matter of personal opinion and for this post, I’m going to be neutral and not share my opinion but instead share some commonly reported concerns, dangers and warnings about tulpamancy.
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Are tulpas real?

Firstly, this is a matter of personal opinion. Tulpas can feel as real as you want them to. Because they’re in our minds, they can be made to appear as vivid or vague as we want and it sort of comes down to the individuals ability to imagine things and be creative.

there has been a lot of speculation that tulpas are fake, bullshit, or just plain and simple not real. I would argue that they’re real in the sense that the people who create them in their minds know they’re there. They’re NOT real in the sense that you can’t physically SEE or INTERACT with someone else tulpa.

It’s much the same as you can’t share a lucid dream with someone yet, because it’s all existing and being experienced in THAT PERSONS mind, and it’s not something tangible that other people can interact with or experience.

So to summarise, yes tulpas are very real in the persons head, but they’re not real in the sense that you can interact with or see someone else tulpa. You can only ever see your own, and share stories or experienced about it with other people.
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Are tulpas dangerous?

This is a debatable one. Tulpas aren’t dangerous to other people but to YOU as the person creating them, they can be. This is where you’ve got to decide if you REALLY want to create a tulpa. In essence, you’re talking to yourself and doing it to the point where you can’t tell the difference between talking to yourself and talking to another person.

This can be dangerous in the sense that if you do it for long enough, the lines will become very blurred and you might start to go insane. People who talk to themselves are usually locked up in a padded room and so this might be not much different.

By all means, it’s a great thought experiment and it can be very interesting to see just how far you can now with this, but be careful. Don’t go crazy, and make sure you know very clearly what’s real and what isn’t. Don’t get too sucked in to all of this and don’t forget that your tulpa is only real in YOUR head.
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Can tulpas harm you?

They can’t harm you physically, no. The scary stories come form people who have become so enveloped with their tulpa that they’re reported their tulpa telling them to harm THEMSELVES. This is where it gets a bit dangerous, and it’s very hard (or impossible) to determine whether the tulpa ACTUALLY is a real thing inside their heads that wanted to harm them, or the person was just slightly crazy and lost their mind a little bit.

This is I guess the scariest part of tulpaforming, you never REALLY know whether you’re creating a tulpa, or a tulpa is a REAL thing that you’re just inviting into your head to interact with. If they ARE real things that you’re NOT creating then the question becomes ‘are they dangerous’ and ‘do they want to harm me’.

There’s been some speculation about whether or not tulpas are evil, deans or demonic possessions. I don’t think this is the case, or there would be more documented cases of them ACTUALLY possessing people. I think for the most part they’re merely an experiment with imagination.
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Tulpas and religion

In terms of religion, tulpas probably cause a problem. Many religions will see tulpamancy as inviting ‘demons’ or ‘possessions’ into your mind and body. This is the subject of debate, and down to the person in question, and their particular religion and set of beliefs.

As far as the facts go, there’s no concrete evidence that demons, or possessions are a real thing. That being said, religion isn’t always based on fact anyway and largely based on faith and belief. This means that some religions, like for example christianity may have a problem with the idea of a tulpa or manifesting a tulpa.
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How to get rid of a tulpa

If you’ve created a tulpa and you want to GET RID of it, or stop interacting with it, there are some things you can do. Some people create a tulpa at a young age and have it for YEARS in their life. Then at some point they decide to stop talking to it but they find it doesn’t go away.

This is not a problem and there are some easy ways to get rid of a tulpa. The main one is to meditate and think about your tulpa. Imagine it there in front of you but then practice seeing it inside a white shield of light. When the shield is up, you can’t hear it. It can’t interact with you.

Practice every day seeing it inside the shield, and unable to make a sound in your mind the the shield is up. This will help you to remove the bonds between it and you. It could take a while, probably longer than it took you to make it, to remove it.
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Useful resources

You can find some books about Tulpas that might go slightly more in depth here, also you might find these things useful:

  • These scary films about sleep paralysis, because people report seeing very similar things to Tulpas during sleep paralysis
  • To help you focus, try using these binaural beats when you’re going to sleep. They might help you focus on manifesting a tulpa faster
  • You can actually PRACTICE creating a tulpa in a lucid dream if you just want to INSTANTLY see what it’s like. Learn how to lucid dream with this guide.