Wikipedia Deep Dive

Tulpa

8 min read

Imagine willing an imaginary friend into existence with such intensity that it begins to think on its own, disagrees with you, and eventually develops a personality you never intended. That's the promise—and the danger—of a tulpa.

The word comes from Tibetan, where "tulpa" (or more properly, "sprul pa") can mean "phantom" or "emanation." But the concept as understood in the West bears only a passing resemblance to its Tibetan origins. What began as a term from Tibetan Buddhism was picked up by European mystics in the early twentieth century, reimagined by Theosophists, and then, in a twist nobody could have predicted, became a subculture on internet forums where people create imaginary companions they believe are genuinely sentient.

The modern practice is called "tulpamancy," and its practitioners—"tulpamancers"—treat tulpas not as supernatural beings, but as psychological phenomena. These aren't gods or spirits. They're something stranger: mental constructs that their creators insist have independent thoughts, preferences, and agency.

The Theosophist Origins

The Western obsession with tulpas began with the Theosophists, a mystical movement from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that blended Eastern religious concepts with Western occultism. Theosophists were fascinated by the idea that thoughts could take form—that concentrated mental energy could create semi-independent entities.

Annie Besant, a prominent Theosophist, wrote extensively about "thoughtforms" in her 1905 book of the same name. She classified them into three types: forms that look like their creator, forms that resemble other people or objects and might attract nature spirits or the dead, and forms that embody abstract qualities like emotions or ideals from what she called the "astral or mental planes."

This wasn't just armchair philosophy. Theosophists believed these thoughtforms were real, observable phenomena—albeit only to those with the proper training or psychic sensitivity.

William Walker Atkinson, an occultist writing around the same time, described thoughtforms as ethereal objects that radiate from a person's aura, generated by their thoughts and feelings. Experienced practitioners, he claimed, could shape these emanations into astral projections or create illusions visible only to people with "awakened astral senses."

The Theosophists conflated several distinct Buddhist concepts—most notably the "tulku" (an emanation body in Mahayana Buddhism, often referring to reincarnated lamas) and the "tulpa." While they tried to maintain some distinction between the terms, their final conception was neither authentically Tibetan nor purely Western. It was something new: a hybrid idea born from cross-cultural misunderstanding and creative reinterpretation.

Alexandra David-Néel's Monk

The most famous account of tulpa creation comes from Alexandra David-Néel, a French-Belgian explorer and spiritualist who spent years traveling through Tibet in the early twentieth century. She claimed to have witnessed Tibetan monks creating tulpas through intense concentration and meditation.

David-Néel called tulpas "magic formations generated by a powerful concentration of thought." More intriguingly, she said that once a tulpa gains enough vitality, it starts to break free from its creator's control. She compared it to childbirth: just as a baby eventually leaves the womb and becomes independent, a sufficiently developed tulpa will develop its own will.

And she claimed to have created one herself.

David-Néel said she formed a tulpa in the image of a jolly, rotund monk—think Friar Tuck from Robin Hood. At first, it was under her control. But over time, it began to act independently. It developed thoughts she hadn't given it. Eventually, she felt compelled to destroy it.

She acknowledged the possibility of self-delusion: "I may have created my own hallucination." But she also insisted that other people could see the thoughtforms she created, suggesting—at least in her telling—that they weren't purely internal.

Was David-Néel's experience real? That depends on what you mean by "real." Even if we dismiss the supernatural explanation, her account raises fascinating questions about the power of sustained imagination and the boundaries between self and other within the mind.

The Internet Tulpamancers

Fast forward to the 2010s. The concept of tulpas re-emerged in an unexpected place: online forums, particularly on 4chan and Reddit.

Influenced by depictions in television and film from the 1990s and 2000s, people began using the term "tulpa" to describe a specific kind of willed imaginary friend. These modern tulpamancers use meditation, visualization, and lucid dreaming techniques to create mental companions they believe are sentient and semi-autonomous.

The practice exploded in popularity when adult fans of the animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic started creating tulpas modeled after characters from the show. What began as a niche experiment quickly grew into a small but dedicated subculture.

Surveys conducted by anthropologist Samuel Veissière paint a detailed picture of this community. Tulpamancers are predominantly white, urban, middle-class young adults and adolescents. They tend to be articulate, imaginative, and socially isolated. Many cite loneliness and social anxiety as reasons for creating tulpas.

And they overwhelmingly report positive outcomes. In one survey, 93.7% of respondents said tulpamancy had improved their condition and led to new, unusual sensory experiences.

What Is a Tulpa, Really?

Modern tulpamancers believe their tulpas are "real or somewhat-real persons." They report that tulpas communicate in ways that feel distinct from their own internal monologue—thoughts that seem to come from elsewhere. Some practitioners even experience hallucinations of their tulpas: seeing them, hearing them, feeling their touch.

The vast majority—76.5% in one survey—attribute this to neurological or psychological mechanisms, not metaphysics. Only 8.5% believe in a supernatural explanation. The rest check "other."

This is a community that has consciously rejected the mystical origins of the concept. Tulpamancers aren't summoning spirits. They're hacking their own brains.

Interestingly, Veissière's research found significantly higher rates of neurodivergence among tulpamancers than in the general population, particularly autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He speculates that people with these conditions may experience greater loneliness or have cognitive styles that make tulpa creation easier or more appealing.

A 2022 study found that people who experienced multiple unusual sensory phenomena—like both autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) and tulpamancy—were more prone to hallucination than those who experienced only one. This suggests that tulpamancers may be people whose brains are unusually receptive to self-generated perceptual experiences.

Controversy and Taboo

Not all aspects of tulpamancy are universally accepted, even within the community. Some practitioners have romantic or sexual relationships with their tulpas. This is controversial and increasingly treated as taboo, though it happens.

The ethical questions are thorny. If a tulpa is genuinely sentient—or even if it's experienced as sentient—what does consent mean? Can a mental construct you created consent to anything? Or is the whole concept incoherent?

These are not idle philosophical debates. For the people involved, tulpas feel real. They have preferences, boundaries, and agency. Treating them as mere fantasies feels, to many tulpamancers, like a profound misunderstanding.

Tulpas and Reality Shifting

Tulpamancy has close ties to another internet subculture: reality shifting. Reality shifters use self-hypnosis techniques to deliberately enter what they call a "desired reality" or "wonderland"—a pre-planned fantasy world populated by chosen characters.

Both practices involve intense imaginative focus, both are used to cope with loneliness and mental suffering, and both raise the same unsettling question: where is the line between imagination and experience?

Researchers Somer and colleagues describe these communities as attempts to escape from reality into carefully constructed internal worlds. But unlike escapism through books or video games, tulpamancy and reality shifting blur the boundary between fiction and perception. The goal isn't just to imagine vividly—it's to experience the imagination as though it were real.

Thoughtforms Beyond Tulpamancy

The idea that collective belief can create quasi-independent entities extends beyond tulpamancy. Some have argued that the Slender Man—a fictional monster created on internet forums in 2009—became a "tulpa-effect," shaped and sustained by the collective thought processes of thousands of people.

Unlike traditional folklore, which evolves over generations, the Slender Man emerged in real time, iterated upon by countless contributors, and eventually took on a life of its own. In 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Wisconsin stabbed a classmate, claiming they did it to appease the Slender Man. The line between fiction and belief had collapsed.

This is the tulpa concept taken to its logical, disturbing extreme: an entity that exists purely because people believe in it, and that belief generates real-world consequences.

The Opposite of a Tulpa

If a tulpa is a mental construct that gains independence, what's its opposite? Perhaps it's an external person who becomes so familiar that they lose their otherness—someone you predict so well that interacting with them feels like talking to yourself. Or maybe it's depersonalization: the experience of feeling like your own self is unreal, a construct you observe from the outside.

Tulpas trouble the boundary between self and other. They suggest that the division isn't as clear as we assume. Your thoughts might not all be "yours." And someone else's presence might be entirely in your head, yet still meaningfully real.

A Final Note

Tulpamancy sits at the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and internet culture. It's a practice that borrows a Tibetan word, reinterprets it through Theosophical mysticism, and reinvents it again as a secular psychological technique. It's used by lonely people to create companionship, by imaginative people to explore the limits of consciousness, and by neurodivergent people to cope with isolation.

Whether tulpas are "real" depends on what you mean by the question. They're not physical. They're probably not supernatural. But to the people who experience them, they're as real as any relationship—and sometimes more understanding, more present, and more consistent than the people in their lives.

That's either deeply comforting or profoundly unsettling. Probably both.