The following is for Aaron, who bought me a coffee and gave me an interesting prompt: “explore the similarities/differences between tulpas and roles (in the Finite and Infinite Games sense of the term)”

“A tulpa is an entity created in the mind, acting independently of, and parallel to, your own consciousness. They are able to think, and have their own free will, emotions, and memories. In short, a tulpa is like a sentient person living in your head, separate from you. It’s currently unproven whether or not tulpas are truly sentient, but in this community, we treat them as such.” – What is a Tulpa? tulpa.info

“A tulpa, as David-Neel explained it, is a sort of illusion created by spiritual energy; it can look like anything, and can be mistaken for real. In extreme cases, these illusions can be solid and, if of a living being, can take on a life of their own and possibly outlive their creator. Tulpas are created either by a spiritual entity or by a human who can properly envision the object they wish to represent as if it was real to begin with. In Tibet, it was believed that various spirits and deities used tulpas to create manifestations of themselves for people to interact with; it was also believed that some very well trained Lamas (holy people) could also create these illusions with varying degrees of skill. Past that, even common people could occasionally create a tulpa inadvertently when they focused on a thought too much.” – 1929 (pre): Alexandra David-Neel and the Tulpas of Tibet

I have a friend who has a tulpa – an incredibly vivid, interesting, compelling, complex tulpa – so I’m absolutely convinced that tulpas are real. He’s had it for decades at this point, and his Tulpa has a personality entirely different from his own – and the Tulpa really seems to speak and act independently of him. It’s really fascinating to witness. So there is no doubt in my mind about the existence of such entities.

That said, off the top of my head, it doesn’t seem like Tulpas are all that common. There’s a niche community of people, but it’s pretty niche. There’s about 20,000 people subscribed to the /r/tulpas subreddit. The name “tulpa” is Tibetan in origin. And… it does seem like the modern, online conception of Tulpa might be a little different from the original Tibetan meaning…? I don’t intend to make a big research project out of this so I don’t think I’ll go very deep into that particular rabbithole, but it seems like tulpas might be a sort of vivid hallucination.

Which isn’t to imply that it’s “not real” – as @vgr put it, normalcy is simply the majority sect of magical thinking. In a sense almost everything is hallucinated, including the idea that ordered squiggles on a screen make up words that carry meaning. (The word “hallucinate” has Latin origins with the meaning “to wander about in the mind”, so it’s interesting that it now has this primary meaning of “seeing something that’s not there”. [1]

In contrast (re: niche), “roles” are absolutely ubiquitous – we all play them, and most of us play many roles, “wear many hats”.

In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse talks about how people take on “roles” – the role of a lawyer, or a rodeo performer, or mother. He asks us to consider the elaborate, wonderful game of theatre – the actor keeps her own person distinct from the role, and yet she’s aware that she’s acting. We the audience are in complicity with her mask. We allow her performed emotions to move us, but we don’t forget that she’s an actor.

I don’t have a single, specific Tulpa in my own head with a clear name and identity. But I have experienced something of a sense that there is “someone” greater than myself within me – I’ve described him (not sure why he’s gendered, but that’s how it felt) as a “Demon God” within me, great, grand, soaring and powerful, unimpressed by my trivial human concerns.

A Tulpa is supposed to be a sentient being. What does it mean, to be a sentient being? The word “sentient” shares the same root as “sentiment” – latin “sentire”, “to feel”. You can build a machine that “thinks” – ie takes input and processes it into output – but I think it’s harder to build machine that “feels” – that processes everything around it, not just the input that you feed into it. To perceive, to touch. [2] So yeah I think a tulpa is something that can have a different response to a stimuli than its host. 

What about with roles? Instinctively I think it’s quite intuitive to consider the idea that different roles come with different feelings and different responses. A lot of the human struggle is about the conflicts we feel between different roles. A person might feel a conflict between her impulses and feelings as a wife vs as a mother. Conflict between being a judge and being a compassionate human being. I think once you’ve substantially invested yourself into a role, really immersed yourself into it, it’s kind of like a micro-tulpa.

I find myself thinking now about something I read or heard about Anthony Hopkins – a Nerdwriter video. Apparently he reads scripts 200 times or so to the point where the dialogue is completely internalized, and then when he arrives on set, he “let’s the part play through him”. Which sounds somewhat Tulpa-esque, doesn’t it? “His ability learned across many decades to convey such a web of feeling and suggest such a universe of feeling within about a character we know little about… that’s what a great actor can do”. I’m thinking also of The Inner Game of Tennis, and how a lot of “high functioning” is really about getting out of your own way. It takes a lot of practice to get to that point.

While writing this I saw a tweet with a link to an essay: “fascism over yourself is called autonomy“. I feel like that’s tangentially relevant to all of this. At the heart of all these ideas about tulpas and roles are questions of control, autonomy – Seeing Like A State, being like a State. A tulpa is like an independent state-within-a-state. 

So… do I have any sort of conclusion here? What is the point of exploring all of these ideas and perspectives? I think the question at the heart of it is – what is identity? Who am I? Am “I” simply the primary tulpa in my head? Am I the roles I choose to play? Are there lessons to be learned here re: how to live well? Can I live well without being fascistic towards the various aspects of myself?

There are some quotes that are quasi-spiritual that go something like, “Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. / I will meet you there.” Where the streets have no name. Where there are no tulpas and no roles, and all the universe is resplendent. It’s a lovely idea, and I think something to contextualize our daily lives against.

But we do still leave each day moment by moment, and in the trenches of every day life, we do use scripts and shells to function in our roles. Being aware of the nature of the game doesn’t mean we’re excused from it. But it does mean, I think, that we can play it with a certain lightness, a certain joy, a sense of humor about it all. One must imagine Sisyphus LOL-ing.

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[1] “Seeing something that isn’t there” is, I think, something very much defined by the majority sect of mainstream thought. So much of life is actually imaginary. Money is imaginary. Nations are imaginary. Just because something is imaginary doesn’t mean it isn’t real. This is a concept that’s quite hard for some (most?) people to grasp.

[2] writing this is making me think at a meta level even about words like “feel” – and how even the idea of having feelings is something that varies from person to person, from culture to culture, differing across time and space.

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This vomit was prompted by Aaron Lewis, who bought me a coffee. Feel free to send me a prompt yourself!