Points of Focus
As it was noted in the previous chapter, the core part of the practice is the focus. This chapter will recap on the statements made previously and advice some ways to apply the focus.
Tulpa-like entities are born and destroyed many times a day. Every time we think of someone and imagine how they would act. When we imagine interacting with someone in the head. When we do guesswork on how they will behave. When we create characters for stories and movies. When we read those stories and empathize.
The brain is apt at creating those "proto-tulpas". It also knows how to discard them quickly and hop over to another thought. Rooting one of those thoughts will let it live and develop into a full personality that can experience the world through its individual consciousness.
It is important to maintain that thought in focus to give it a chance to develop. That is not an easy task with a brain trying to switch to whatever else, this is why meditation was stressed as important (but not required) practice. How to find a thought that will become a tulpa? If you found a character from a book --- the idea of that character can turn into tulpa. Remember, it is not a good idea to create a tulpa just for fun to see how it works, with no planning in the head. But if you are determined to do it --- the determination itself is a good thing to focus on.
A tulpa is like a pearl, starting from a simple grain of the thought, you need to coat it with layers of something to want and something to averse from. This is similar to how the first personality is growing in the brain of a child. Give that thought some freedom of choice, but advise it, what can be good and what an be wrong. Layer after layer, that thought will start to develop personal positions on the things you expose it to. Emotional responses will help to track the progress. If you expose that thought to something that you like, and you feel something else --- this is the point where your opinions on the subject become different. Do not force your tulpa into liking or hating something; the best route is observation. Let it develop its own habits. Your job is to help the thought survive by keeping it afloat in the focus of the mind and by feeding it the information to process.
Information can be anything, like emotions, words, physical world feelings. It is not wise to give a one-year-old child a computer and expect it to play Starcraft; the child would enjoy proper child toys way more. For this reason, do not try to feed complicated high-level thoughts to the tulpa, use something that is straightforward to digest, to reason with. The tulpa needs to figure if it likes that or not, and the simpler the concept is, the easier it is to decide.