Talk:Tulpa

this article needs to be rewritten

the topic of tulpamancy and thoughtforms are extremely interesting, but the entire article is filled to the brim with dubious sources, vague statements, and misinformation. is anyone planning on working on this article? it needs a lot more work to be considered good FROWNINGCATS (talk) 01:59, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

Feel free to work on it if you want Kuia34 (talk) 22:01, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

stop with this

i was trying to look up synonyms for tulpa for a writing thing, and one of the results (from here) is "dissociative identity disorder" which is a disorder i have. DID is a severe childhood trauma DISORDER, we(alters) are people, not spirit manifestations, and we didnt choose to have this disorder and we dont choose or MaNiFeSt alters. why the hell is DID even mentioned here, it has not a single THING to do with tulpa and to allude so is hurtful. DID already has enough misinformation and stigma littered everywhere too. edits: typos. 2601:405:4780:D250:60E:DCC7:3372:5EA (talk) 13:29, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

"why the hell is DID even mentioned here, it has not a single THING to do with tulpa and to allude so is hurtful. DID already has enough misinformation and stigma littered everywhere too."

• The "see also" section is NOT for looking for synonyms it's to find related topics to whatever article you are currently reading.
• DID is listed in the "see also" section because it is slightly related to the more modern practitioners that may self-identify as "plural" in that both DID and Tulpas have similar characteristics . EX: The presence of nonphysical mental "multiple identites". DID being included in the "See also" section isn't there to say that tulpamancers believe they have DID (because tulpamancers actually don't believe they have DID and make a point to say they don't if you read some of the sources cited in the article)

Kuia34 (talk) 14:21, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Please specify how, in a single way, DID and Tulpa has anything in common, except for, for example bot possibly being "phenomena" or "concepts"? Let's assume we have a hypothetical average human, a tulpamancer, and someone with DID. In this case, are the two latter any more similar than any of the other two? If so, how?

I suggest you actually read the Signs and symtoms section of the DID article before responding to me.

I advocate for strictly correct information related to mental illness and for a right for all mentally ill and others whom it may interest, to be able to find reliable information on Wikipedia without being even implicitly misled. Thus, I want to state that I definitely also apply this to for example schizophrenia. That said, if the people, of whom I assume many themselves are tulpamancers or supporters of the movement/phenomenon, who maintain this article are so keen on connecting tulpa to DID, how come you do not for example connect tulpas to entities hallucinated by some of those afflicted by schizophrenia? Would that not indeed be closer to tulpa than having several personality states, considering that people with DID do not imagine so called alters to be external or entities separate from themselves, with whom they can interact? Of course, hallucinations do not exist because people with schizophrenia deliberately create them, and also, they are not as a general rule imagined as persons. I am just pointing out how arbitrary and utterly ridiculous it is for the tulpa phenomenon to at all be associated with DID.

In this case, I will WP:BEBOLD and just remove the link to DID. For the sake of all that you may find holy and worth defending:

Please refrain from harming the mentally ill, including by spreading misinformation, pseudoscience, stigma, making fun of mental illness and so on. They have it bad enough as it currently is. BlockArranger (talk) 22:53, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

It is in common, because they are both under the term of Plurality Showier [on alt] (talk) 18:48, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

hi, please read the article first. people who identify as tulpamancers do not believe they have DID, as the user above also mentioned. those are two seperate things that are both under the umbrella of "plural". there is a huge difference between thoughtforms and DID-formed alters FROWNINGCATS (talk) 22:32, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

"Plural" seems like too wide an umbrella to justify the connecting of the two. "Tulpa" is itself an extremely obscure concept in our society/culture, and association with particular psychological phenomena, or actual occurences, tends to be very speculative, and one is left thinking that there are probably other, less dubiously founded, possible paradigms by which to describe them. So I guess I'm saying that one maybe has to be take care, even if it's only a list of related articles. There's not much one can do with this concept except describe the history of an idea - an idea which seems to have gone in some pretty colourful and interesting directions. Meerta (talk) 00:41, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202302/enacted-identities-multiplicity-plurality-and-tulpamancy is referenced on Multiplicity (subculture) Lillia (She/They&) 02:38, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

It's a speculative blog post (as opposed to a scientific paper, say). If read carefully you can see it starts out from the assumption that it might be a good idea to gather these disparate phenomena under one umbrella, and continues to make that assumption. the supporting evidence, such as it is, is suggestive rather than conclusive, and I think it puts together things that have strong distinctions between them. Pierre has identified a section of a sub-culture that is interested in doing so, but that does not make in itself make it a good idea or a clear reflection of reality. It's also clear from this discussion that not everyone affected does think it's a valid direction. We should be very careful I think.

Conflating tulpamancy - a little understood phenomenon - with mental health diagnoses seems to me potentially a very bad idea on the face of it. Meerta (talk) 15:27, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

Yes, and it is also very unclear why the people partaking in plurality believe that Tulpa is related to DID or even plurality itself. I do not see how they imagine tulpas as being separate selves; rather, it seems like they are non-self entities in the psyche. This is in sharp contrast to DID, which is not conceptualized as a self interacting with other internal beings. I would like a source exploring this beyond the fact that some people online like to group DID and tulpa. BlockArranger (talk) 16:10, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

There is also http://jcn.cognethic.org/jcnv9i2_Schechter.pdf. Pg. 107 Lillia (She/They&) 20:44, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

I think my previous reply still stands, basically, and certainly in the context of an article about tulpas. Perhaps it's appropriate that there is very brief section on Multiplicity in the long DID article, which there is, and perhaps in the article about the online sub-culture of Multiplicity these tentative connections - and important distinctions - can be discussed at length. But in an article about tulpas or tulpamancy I think we should be quite careful about linking it with established mental health categories that are prima facie distinct. Indeed the cognethic article makes it clear that there are serious distinctions between them.

I notice that a footnote in the article makes a similar mistake as this article did, to make it sound as if the modern tulpamancy practice is somehow drawn from Buddhism. It's not cultural appropriation from Buddhism, because this hasn't been part of Buddhism. If anything, the use of the term is cultural appropriation from the Theosophists!

I'm more or less making the same point as BlockArranger. Just because someone has explored the isomorphism between a doughnut and a coffee cup, it doesn't mean doughnuts should be included in the coffee cup article or vice versa. They can both be included in an article about topology though. The point here is that you can find similarities between lots of very diverse phenomena, but it doesn't necessarily mean they should all be included in their respective Wikipedia articles. Meerta (talk) 00:16, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

note: this type of response is generally called being a sysmed/anti-endo(genic) as the plural community calls it.

The ICD 11's boundaries to normality state that non-disordered plurality exists.

(though it seems like I need to get some resources to extend wiktionary:endogenic to include created systems like Tulpas are after I get home) Showier [on alt] (talk) 15:46, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

References

Major edit needed to dissociate Tibetan Buddhism from this concept.

This has been touched on in various ways in the discussion, but to bring some of it together here. I think it needs a major edit.

The article opens with "In Tibetan Buddhism and later traditions of mysticism and the paranormal, a tulpa is a materialized being or thought-form, typically in human form, that is created through spiritual practice and intense concentration."

I don't think "tulpa" has any particular relationship to Tibetan Buddhism, and happily the term doesn't even appear at present in the "nirmanakaya" article. The Tibetan word for the way the Buddha appears to ordinary beings is "sprul sku" (tulku, the same as the word for incarnate lamas, though it is not completely the same thing.) "Tulpa" is only very rarely used in relation to the nirmanakaya, and any practise in Tibet relating to tulpas - apparitions - doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Buddhism. The word "tulpa" is very likely to predate Buddhism. So the implication of this opener, that "tulpas" are an integral part of Tibetan Buddhism and that the Theosophical use is somehow the same thing, is false. Books about the New Age aren't necessarily very reliable about Tibetan Buddhism (just as early Theosophy isn't) Perhaps it would be better to leave out the reference to Tibetan Buddhism altogether, and deal with the linguistic connection in the next section.

Again: "The concept of tulpas has origins in the Buddhist nirmāṇakāya, translated in Tibetan as sprul-pa (སྤྲུལ་པ་): the earthly bodies that a buddha manifests in order to teach those who have not attained nirvana. The western understanding of tulpas was developed by twentieth-century European mystical explorers, who interpreted the idea independently of buddhahood."

As I say above, tulpas as apparitions or phantoms or something like that, probably predates Buddhism in Tibet. It isn't derived from the word for nirmanakaya - more likely that word was partly derived from it, and conceptually it is very distinct. From the Buddhist point of view, tulpas would usually be a worldly phenomena. The standard word for nirmanakaya is "sprul sku" - "transformation body". I suggest this:

"The word tulpa (sprul pa - སྤྲུལ་པ་) originates from Tibetan, where it was and is used in a number of contexts. The western understanding of tulpas was developed by twentieth-century European mystical explorers, who interpreted the idea independently of it's uses in old Tibet."

The Tibetan term doesn't need an encyclopaedia entry. It's covered in Tibetan-English dictionaries.Chandra Das has: "a phantom, a disembodied spirit, ghost from the bardo; emanation". A trulpa khyenpa is "an adept in the art of producing miraculous apparitions", but that might have nothing to do with Buddhism (I don't know what it would have to do with it, at least.) Meerta (talk) 17:03, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

If there's no objections then, I can go ahead with the edit. Meerta (talk) 16:50, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

@Meerta I am not knowledgeable on how Tulpa has to do with Buddhism, but I suggest you still make sure this article makes the difference clear. Maybe a hat note for disambiguation, and a link to the Buddhist concept, if appropriate? Anyway, anything that goes awry can also always be fixed. Good luck! Just big thanks in advance for not further associating this with D.I.D; I'm here solely for the purpose of keeping psychiatry out of this, and because I became curious after some reading :) BlockArranger (talk) 19:14, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

You're welcome. I cetainly wouldn't want to do that.

I have made the edits. finally. I did modify things slightly after the reading the Mikles-Laycock article references. The theosophist Alexandra David-Neel does seem to have distinguished between 'tulku' and 'tulpa', but she and Evens-Wentz were perhaps less clear about the difference between the ability of an advanced spiritual practitioner to emanate, and tulpas created by magicians and so on. It seems safer to start by treating the terms as separate but etymologically related.

I changed the re-direct at the top of the article to say "tulku" rather than "tulpa". I don't think the word "tulpa" will be found anywhere in that article. But perhaps it would be more appropriate just to delete that re-direct? (This is directed at all who are interested of course, not just BlockArranger.) Meerta (talk) 22:09, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

Twin Peaks

This has the potential to be a very interesting article. It already is, but it's maybe very difficult to get right. I've tried to strengthen the distinction between the word's origin in the Tibetan language and the Theosophists' use of it. (I wouldn't call it appropriation in the strong sense, by the way.) The section about modern internet-focused tulpamancers is very interesting, although very condensed and I'm a bit lost with it so far. I'll have another go at it.

The beginning of the section mentions depictions in television and cinema from the 90s and 2000s, but we have no idea what they are. Perhaps the article would really benefit from a "depictions in television and cinema" section or something similar.

I came to this article because of "Twin Peaks: The Return", the third series of what is commonly described of the greatest TV series of all time, and a crowning achievement of one of the greatest film directors of our time. Tulpas are placed clearly within the programme's overarching mythology, and it would certainly feature in such a section. I don't know of any other film or series featuring tulpas by name, so wouldn't know where to begin with the section. Meerta (talk) 01:06, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

In whose beliefs? (POV)

The lede of the article is currently formulated as if the phenomenon were a real thing ('A tulpa is a materialized being or thought-form, typically in human shape, that is created through spiritual practice and intense concentration'). However, as per WP:NPOV#Undue Weight, it should clearly be described as something as unreal as vampires and werewolves. I.e. there should be a qualification like 'In folklore', 'In Greek mythology', 'In Buddhist belief' etc. Otherwise we get the POV of the adherents of these beliefs, which are a small minority. I would have added such a qualification, but the problem is that I am not sure what belief system(s) it is part of - only theosophy or some others as well? 62.73.72.101 (talk) 12:50, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

I have just found a source that kinda removes the POV from this imo.

https://journals.colorado.edu/index.php/next/article/view/2685 says that this has a massive connection to religous Praying 24.155.147.109 (talk) 19:13, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

I think what's described in the quote you give is mainly a modern thing descended from Theosophy and focused through an internet sub-culture.Meerta (talk) 17:48, 5 October 2025 (UTC)