Tulpamancy as Agent Cognition in Cognitive Companion Construction

For this panel, I offer Tulpamancy as an example of Cognitive Companion Construction (CCC). CCC provides a basis for discussing encounters with agents without specific spiritual or religious contexts while also deviating from the potentially pejorative connotation of discussions of ‘supernatural agents’. In Tulpamancy, both rhetorical moves serve well in describing the circumstances of imagined agent encounters as not necessarily spiritually significant and as feeling, at least, phenomenologically real if not also ontologically. In the paper proposed for this panel, I would start by introducing the unusual history and practice of Tulpamancy. This exposes the peculiarly secular aesthetic and cognitive framing of Tulpamancy relative to other instances of meditative training traditions and contexts in which immaterial, or ‘supernatural', agents are encountered. Tulpamancy’s distinct traits align it with a theoretical approach to the discussion of immaterial agents using the CCC model. In the latter portion of this paper, I will attempt an analysis of Tulpamancy that showcases the capacities of framing agent encounters using this panel’s proposed approach. I suspect that the cognitive training specifically prescribed in Tulpamancy practice describes a process occurring to varying degrees in other instances of agent encounters. This panel’s paper ends with an argument to this effect.

I begin by describing the relatively unknown practice of Tulpamancy. A concise history of the tradition begins around the year 2010. The original guide was a chaotic mix of Western Occultism and Tibetan Buddhism with the unique flair of the anonymous internet messaging board 4chan. In a couple of hundred words and a dozen bullet points, the guide outlined a process to create an immaterial being housed in the mind for “friendship, memory recall, [or] a different perspective on life.” This guide illustrated how one can create what they called a ‘tulpa,’ a term originating from the Tibetan language. Following this manual, a subculture of tulpamancers formed and soon migrated to other parts of the internet as a predominantly internet-based movement.

Tulpamancy practice occupies a niche between amateur psychology and spiritual tradition. Predating the 2010 internet phenomenon, beings like tulpas were abundant in Western Occultism, Theosophy, and occult-inspired fiction. This origin with occultism seems to suffuse Tulpamancy with mystical goals tempered by a desire for empiricism and replicability. In practice, this means tulpamancers are fascinated with the process of tulpa creation. Dozens of guides describe every stage of the practice. From my etic perspective, it seems possible to simplify these stages along created categories we may call ‘narrative rehearsal’ and ‘sensory rehearsal.’ Tulpamancers often begin by deciding and describing specific character traits of their intended being. This is not dissimilar to how a fiction author develops a character. Following this process, Tulpamancy prescribes several (or more) techniques designed to practice sensing the tulpa internally and externally. With sufficient time in each of these categories, the tulpamancer begins to experience their tulpa as a continuous, autonomous, and (occasionally) tangible being.

The prescribed practices of Tulpamancy resemble a Tavesian building-blocks approach to religious experiences. In Anne Taves’ approach to event cognition in religious contexts, an event may be broken down into three parts. ‘Cultural priors’ represent all information sources such as communal stories, education, and other social factors that inform us what kinds of events might occur and how to interpret them. The second part would be the event itself. This is typically a set of stimuli from the environment. Following the event is the ascription process during which an individual draws upon cultural priors to inform their understanding of the event context. An ascription model is Taves’ suggestion for how events are deemed religious rather than assigned any number of other descriptors. In Tulpamancy, one seems to ‘train’ cultural priors as the tulpamancer pretends — essentially telling stories to oneself — that the tulpa is a probable agent for them to encounter. Additionally, they use the practices under the category I described of ‘narrative rehearsal’ to specify how the tulpa will behave, including its degree of autonomy and personality characteristics. The category of techniques I describe as ‘sensory rehearsal’ also seems to generate cultural schemas by allowing the tulpamancer to imagine how the tulpa will look, sound, feel, and even smell. These cultural priors are drawn upon in the moment of event cognition to allow the tulpamancer to ascribe the meaning of unreliable stimuli to the agency of the inchoate tulpa. In Tulpamancy this is an iterative practice in which the tulpamancer gains increasingly persuasive evidence of the tulpa’s agency. One could examine the kind of perceptually-driven agency detection that occurs in Tulpamancy (ie. the sensory presence of a mature tulpa) as an example of predictive coding in the perceptual process heavily biasing the tulpamancer toward a phenomenological experience reliant on cultural priors to the point of totally cognitively based perceptual experience.

The paper culminates in a reflection on the strengths of the CCC model in illustrating the preceding and prescriptive cultural priors in agent encounters as a kind of agent cognition. Cultural priors intuitively precede the event ascribed as agent cognition. The prescriptive component of cultural priors is perhaps most evident in Tulpamancy, where practices are developed specifically to rehearse the anticipated future agent encounter. This suggests that narratives in religious contexts preceding agent encounters play a crucial role as the substance informing the exact phenomenology of those events. In Tulpamancy, such narratives would include explicit examples in sensory and rehearsal narratives. One can also understand the Tulpamancy community and principle texts as informing a kind of implicit narrative that helps provide un-cognized expectations for how a tulpa will behave or transform over time. Tulpamancy serves as a crucial example of CCC, a model that may represent how agent encounters are a kind of agent cognition. Talent and training play an important role in the magnitude of cultural priors’ impact on event cognition. Culture informs the capacities of encountered agents, whether they be companionate or maleficent.