Glossary (WIP)

Terms crucial to materialist tulpamancy

Tulpa: An imaginary character you share a genuine bond with and (in consequence) your another identity.
Tulpamancy: Practice of building genuine bonds with imaginary characters (tulpas).
Host: Your default identity. The character you impersonate when you don’t explicitly impersonate any other.; Host doesn’t refer to the whole human being but just your default identity.
Tulpamancer: A person practicing tulpamancy. The whole person, not just their default identity (aka host).
Materialist tulpamancy: We say that someone has a materialist perspective on tulpamancy if they find value of tulpamancy in genuine relationships built upon genuine, material interactions with their tulpas.; Alias: pragmatic tulpamancy.
Idealist tulpamancy: We say that someone has an idealist perspective on tulpamancy if they find value of tulpamancy in the idea of tulpa being independent person sharing body with their host.; Alias: traditional tulpamancy, tradmancy
Material interactions: Interactions that were actually experienced.; Talking to your tulpa, fantasizing about doing stuff together is material interaction.; When you assume that your two tulpas are playing with each other while you aren’t watching, there is no material interactions between them. When you expect your tulpa to live their own life in a fictional place, they don’t have any material interactions.; Non-material interactions can be materialized through retrospection. Fantasizing about stuff your tulpa was doing is no different then fantasizing about them doing it now.

Common tulpamancy terms

Blending: Experience of not being sure which of your identities you are at given moment.
Dissipation: When we stop interacting with the tulpa and effectively sever their relationship with us or the external world, they revert to an ordinary original character. This is called dissipation.; You could say that dissipation opposites creation. As creation of a tulpa is about forming a genuine relationship while dissipation is about severing it.
Dormancy: When we don’t interact with tulpas, we say they stay dormant.
Fictive: Tulpa inspired with an existing fictional character.; Inspiration can have various degree. E.g. tulpa can just look like the fictional character or identify with their whole history.
Form: Our imagination of tulpa’s appearance or an appearance our tulpa identifies with. It doesn’t have to be clear image that we can visualize. Can be as specific or as vague as you like it.
Fronting: Alias for switching. From perspective of human, you switch identity. From perspective of tulpa, you front.
Illusion of Independent Agency (IIA): An experience of character “talking back”.; Isn’t characteristic to tulpas and doesn’t make a tulpa by itself.
Imposition: In general, it’s about imposing interaction with tulpa on real world interaction. E.g. we can hug a pillow and imagine it’s our tulpa.; In particular, visual imposition is a practice of seeing visual hallucination of tulpa’s form on top of what you see with your eyes. Few people practice it nowadays.
Merge: Opposite of split. Sometimes two of your identities become identical to the point you start seeing them as one.
Metaphysical approach: We say that someone has a metaphysical approach to tulpamancy if they believe that tulpas exist outside of our head too, e.g. like spirits or some astral nonsense.; Not really associated with metaphysics in philosophy.
Plurality: Pandora’s box of ideas people have about multiple people sharing the same body.; Not all tulpamancers would like to be associated with plurality. In general, tulpamancers aren’t plural folks. It’s a choice of tulpamancer whether to identify with plurality too.; Nevertheless, a lot of ~~mess~~ vocabulary in tulpamancy has been borrowed from plurality.
Proxying: When you can easily hear your tulpa but haven’t mastered switching yet, you can let your tulpa communicate with people by proxying their words into chat. Or saying them loud. It’s called proxying.
Psychological approach: In tulpamancy, we say that someone has a psychological approach if and only if they believe that tulpas exist only in our head.; Not really associated with psychology as a knowledge domain.; Doesn’t imply skepticism, materialism or being rational. Plenty of extraordinary claims can be accepted as psychological in this context.
Split: Opposite of merge. Contradictions in one identity might cause them to split into two distinct ones.
Switching: Impersonating tulpa in conscious thought.
System: Set of your identities. Your system includes your host and your tulpas.
Traumagenic system: Some people have other identities that were made to cope with continuous trauma. While their alters are also identities, there are many qualitative differences between functioning of traumagenic and tulpamancy systems.; In particular, in case of tulpamancy, impersonating another identity doesn’t mess up our memories.; People with traumagenic systems can practice tulpamancy too but it will affect their experience in one way or another.
Walk-in: A tulpa that hasn’t been planned.; Happens e.g. when we experience IIA with an anime waifu and then decide to keep her as a tulpa.; Borrowed from plurality.
Wonderland: Fancy word for an imaginary place.; Aliases: mindscape, inner world, paracosm, headspace, dreamscape.

Deprecated tulpamanc terms

Terms that I discourage to use but you probably are going to encounter them in wider community.

Forcing: Fancy term for spending time with your tulpa with very bad connotations.; Don’t think about forcing yourself (including your tulpa) to do anything in tulpamancy, have fun instead.
Parallel Processing: When people consider tulpas (and host) having their own consciousness, supposed consequence for human is to be able to think from perspective of multiple consciousnesses and e.g. solve multiple thoughts requiring conscious effort in parallel.; Obviously, no one can demonstrate having such an ability. Wonder why.
Parroting: Tradmancers say that deliberately controlling tulpa’s thoughts is called parroting. From point of view of materialist tulpamancy this term is useless. Ultimately, all thoughts have the same source and ownership of them is human’s decision.; Alias: puppeting.
Vocality: Supposed ability of a tulpa to talk. The reality is that hearing a tulpa is ability of human to effortlessly play out a character rather than ability of a tulpa to speak. There is no such a thing as tulpa being or not being able to speak.