Originating in the systems of Tibetan Buddhism, tulpas are a well known, but less well understood, part of the Western esoteric tradition. It may seem a little weird to some, but to that I would counter the following:

What part of what we do is normal in the eyes of the outside world?

What the hell is a tulpa? An imaginary friend?

A tulpa, put in the simplest of terms, is a consciousness that you create that is separate from your own.

However you want to rationalize this is totally up to you. Whether you’re a long time occultist who believes wholeheartedly in thought forms and energy constructs that, over time, can gain spiritual sentence, or follow a more Jungian approach and see it as a compartmentalization of self, the end result is the same. When you make a tulpa, you will wind up with another “person” living in your head with you. If this thought makes you uncomfortable, that’s okay.

My personal experiences with tulpas

When I look back on my life in retrospect, I’ve been working with tulpas and very similar constructs for a long time. Probably most of my life. I’ve come to learn that this is not at all uncommon of an experience with neurodivergent individuals. Press an autistic person or someone with ADHD, alone and in a state of trust, and almost every single one will have some variation on a story about an “imaginary” friend of theirs who was inordinately helpful to them. I suppose this is why it took me so long to actually search out what tulpamancy was. After all, when something is part of your baseline, you often don’t think to ask the questions that would lead you to further information.

It was my studies into energy work, magic, and the occult more broadly that eventually brought me to the subject of tulpamancy. It didn’t take long for me to come to a startling conclusion, that being that I had already been interacting with “proto-tulpas” since very early childhood.

Though I wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood, I’m autistic. And like the majority of autistic people will tell you, life can be incredibly isolating when you have no one whom you can reasonably call a friend. I coped with this by throwing myself into fictional worlds – consuming them with an appetite that could only be described as voracious, and making ones of my own with equally obsessive fervor. Some faded into obscurity over the years, to be sure, but others have stuck with me. And some very special ones indeed formed out of seemingly nowhere with a texture, quality, and overall complexity that has made it very much feel, when I write about them, like you could reach out and touch a real person.

Over the years, sometimes my characters would argue with me. They’d tell me to stop, mid chapter, and erase half of it because they “wouldn’t do that!”. The non occultist might raise an eyebrow or laugh at that statement. The practitioner sees it for what it is – pouring so much energy and emotion into something that, on some level, it comes alive.

At some point, I simply leaned into it.

I know how insane that sounds.

All the same, I’ve found it to be personally helpful for secular and magical reasons. It can come in handy to have a separate consciousness, compartmentalization of the mind, energetic thoughtform, whatever word you wish to use for it in your understanding. Like being lost in the parking lot of a concert with 12,000 attendees and being utterly unable to remember where you parked – but your tulpa does. Having an “other” to talk to about your problems and help you to break down and analyze them in healthier ways than simply obsessively ruminating with no solutions at hand. Tulpamancy is both a tool and an outlet, albeit not one that should be taken lightly.

Do you find the idea of making a tulpa intriguing? Would you like to learn more about then psychological and magical implications, as well as how to make one?

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