The Purposely Short Guide to Tulpamancy
Purpuse of this guide: get you started on making a tulpa without burdening you with irrelevant or misleading information.
Tulpa definition: A sentient thoughtform that has developed a level of independence and sustainability where it does not dissipate back into the void after the conscious attention is taken off of it. Useful as a companion, for carrying out tasks, for achieving insights into the nature of reality, and doing your will in the universe.
Prerequisites: A strong imagination, the ability to check your assumptions, and a clear enough mind that you don't weave undesirable emotional impulses into your tulpa. Work on developing the imaginal senses (sense concentration exercises) like in the early stages of Initiation Into Hermetics and try to round out your personality and health so your karma (priorities/desires) is good and you have the excess vital energy to sustain the creation of the tulpa.
A tulpa is created out of your own auric substance. It, like all thoughtforms, feeds on emotion. The way of creating a thoughtform is through concentration + emotion + intention.
Step 1: Have a general outline of what your tulpa is for, at least a vague idea of what its personality and form will be, and give conscious attention to any details you want to make sure are there. Whatever you don't explicitly define will be filled in however, not every detail is actually needed at all, and what is more is during this "filling in" process the universal mind can bestow qualities, knowledge, etc. within this being you are condensing that you don't possess. This opens up gateways of learning, information acquisition, etc. only limited by your assumptions.
Note: I prefer the term "condensing" to creating. It's hard to say when you're making a tulpa if you're really creating something or summoning something or drawing together a stream of consciousness or what exactly you are doing. My advice here is to CHECK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS. Remember you're creating a thoughtform; it's woven out of your thoughts and assumptions. It will manifest subjectively if that's what you expect, objectively if that's what you expect, and so on. Unless you've been practising chaos magick for years and know how to entertain different beliefs properly you're going to confirmation bias yourself into a limited view of reality. You don't want that as thought is an incredible power in the universe and to become more spiritually advanced you should strive to realize the power of thought and the nature of universe as infinite mind. The more constrained materialist view of reality is a subset of the greater reality in that the mental reality successfully encapsulates the former but the opposite could not work. Once you get past barriers of perception to know the universe as mind, you have the greater view of reality.
Step 2: Consider what spheres of causality your tulpa is active in. You will probably want to pick the etheric. If you pick the physical instead of creating a tulpa you'll just end up manifesting a visitation with another human being who lives on Earth that you end up synching into. Basically you'll just create a synchronicity / manifest things in the style of Neville Goddard. An etheric being's presence can be felt by others, it can manipulate and reconfigure physical matter, some people will easily pick up and see it, and it can be very helpful. However etheric beings are vulnerable to some things that disrupt the ether. You could create a purely astral being with no etheric components, it will do a lot of cognitive/mental work, information gathering, and other tasks but without much of a connection to the physical world due to a lack of ethereal bridges.
Note: See Montalk.net's glossary for definitions on etheric, astral, etc. to understand what these terms mean to me. I use it in the same sense as it is used on his site.