unbroken vision

introduction & my initial notes

Written: 28 December 2025

I was originally introduced to the concept of "tulpas" and "tulpamancy" back in the early 2010s, as part of the brony fandom (IYKYK). I genuinely didn't understand it for the longest time, and for the most part I just dismissed it as a bunch of weird roleplaying bullshit. It then randomly reappeared to me in mid-December 2025, and I've kinda been down the rabbit hole ever since (I can't even recall what the specific trigger was but I assume it was some random post or offhanded mention).

For those who are unfamiliar, the basic idea of a tulpa is to create an being from your own thoughts, with the goal of it being autonomous and essentially a second person for you to interact with. Classically I noted that the final goal of a tulpa was "imposition" (imposition being the process of imposing your tulpa on the physical world around you -- in other words, forcing a hallucination), but in modern guides a lot of people seem to have the end goal of possession (temporarily allowing your tulpa to use your body) and/or switching (having your tulpa as an alter who can front, akin to DID systems).

As a result, these days there seems to be a lot of controversial overlap with plurality, but I'm not going to get into that as it is beyond my scope and not really my goal at this time.

I think it's also worth noting that there are a lot of similar concepts as well, usually with different goals:

  • Daemonism - Unlike tulpamancy where you are intentionally creating a being with a specific form and personality that might not be your own, daemonism seems to focus more on forming your existing thoughts into a secondary being, with its form being fluid and discovered over time
  • Soulbonding - From what I can understand, this is where a pre-existing character (usually a fictional crush) develops as an autonomous presence and/or alter within your mind. There seems to be a lot of overlap with believing in alternate realities and universes, so it tends to get a bit too esoteric for me tbh. If you've ever heard of The Final Fantasy House, you may have heard of soulbonding prior lol
  • Thoughtform - "an umbrella term for a headmate who was created in some way. It is sometimes used as an alternative term for tulpa, but can refer to other experiences."
  • Servitor - Seems to be similar to a tulpa in that it's an intentionally created being, but lacking sentience. More of occult occurrence, but I've seen the term used in tulpamancy to refer to beings that just haven't achieved sentience.

Isn't this a load of bullshit?

Well, yeah. But a key part of forming your tulpa is throwing aside your disbelief and willingly choosing to embrace them as a separate being -- if you're hung up on doubt or the logic/"truth" behind it all, you'll just dismiss everything as your own thoughts and never make any progress. Suspension of disbelief is part of the process.

To preface, I am not a spiritual person. I don't really believe in any sort of magic or otherworldly connections going on here. I view tulpamancy and related practices as purely psychological phenomenons -- I don't believe there to be any sort of real spiritual connection, it is really "all in your head" so to speak.

The thing that changed my perspective of tulpas from being complete bullshit to something plausible was this section from a guide I read on imposition:

So how crazy is it that we can see things that aren’t really there? Well, not actually that crazy at all. You see things not because they’re there, but because your brain and your eyes tell you they are. When you look at a blue bouncy ball, it isn’t actually blue. Light hits the ball, causing a specific wavelength to reflect off the surface. Your eye catches them, reacts specifically to that wavelength, and sends it to your brain. Now, your brain doesn’t get this information directly. It uses an alternating system of chemical and electrical messengers before it gets the information, and then it uses that information to process the message the eye has sent it. You get… blue!

But as you can see, there is no “color” floating around through the air waiting to turn the ball blue; and even if there was, you certainly don’t get it overnight shipped to your brain. Every step the message that will become blue is translated, and then only your brain really knows what blue is. Your eye has no idea. It just collects light. So this “blue” only exists in your brain, because your brain is the one that made up the idea of colors like blue.

This demonstrates the disconnect between what your environment is, and what you actually perceive. Reality is nice and all, but just because it’s there doesn’t mean we can see it for what it is. Have you ever heard of an optical illusion? That’s what happens when only one step of that whole process gets messed with; because we do not perceive the world perfectly. Our eyes and our brain have to figure out how to use what the environment gives us, and sometimes that’s hard. Sometimes, like with optical illusions, we incorrectly interpret what the environment is. Sometimes, like with dreams, we don’t even have an environment, and we just kind of… make up sight and sound and touch as we go.

So when you think “it’s crazy to see things that aren’t really there,” just remember all the other wavelengths you never even got because they didn’t bounce to your eye in the first place. Is it crazier not to see things that are there, or to see things that aren’t? (Don’t answer that. Both of them are crazy, because science is cool like that.) Just remember that your brain is a fallible organ. It can be messed with, and I’m going to teach you how to mess with it to your benefit.

(From Malfael's Guide to Visual Imposition)

And really, they're not wrong. Our senses can also be affected by things like drugs, alcohol, and other substances, or even just through mental causes like disorders and stress. We are easily influenced by the world around us -- our "reality" isn't as black and white as it appears.

And so I was convinced, and I stopped reading guides out of curiosity and started with an intent to learn.

What I'm doing here

For me, my goal is to make my Digimon OC into a real partner that I can interact with, in almost an evolution of self-shipping. I had actually originally started writing his character in March or April 2025, and since then I have spent a lot of free time thinking about him and fleshing out his personality, which makes it incredibly easy to visualise him. If you ever see me reference Phalanx, this is who I'm talking about!

Hell, the only reason I even considered making a tulpa of him at all was because I felt like I already had his form and personality figured out, and visualisation is pretty effortless for me (though I still get headaches from visualising him in the real world, as it's apparently still a lot more work to figure out the logic of him interacting with reality...). If I had to start from scratch, I probably just would've moved on and continued with my days as normal.

This may actually make him more soulbond-like as the occurrence of an OC becoming sentient is moreso seen as a soulbonding experience, but it's less "he became sentient on his own" and more "I opened the door to allow it to happen," so I consider him more of a tulpa as it still requires conscious effort on my part. I'm not really sweating the details of the terminology though, I'm just letting whatever happens happen!