Read almost any post where somebody is trying to describe their tulpa, and you'll see very obvious attempts to show how unique their tulpa is or how it falls into some unprecedented category or how they created it in some special way.
Given that tulpa are probably strongly influenced by the hosts beliefs I wouldn't expect all tulpas to be exactly the same. I would expect most tulpa's to be unique in some sense.
I also would expect that given the effort that involved in creating a tulpa that people do vary the protocol.
None of the sources posted offer any sort of good evidence that people who claim to have tulpas have any sort of advantages.
"Good evidence" depends on your priors. For me the evidence that exists is good enough to find the phenomena interesting and worthy of further attention.
There have been a number of discussions here on LessWrong about "tulpas", but it's been scattered about with no central thread for the discussion. So I thought I would put this up here, along with a centralized list of reliable information sources, just so we all stay on the same page.
Tulpas are deliberately created "imaginary friends" which in many ways resemble separate, autonomous minds. Often, the creation of a tulpa is coupled with deliberately induced visual, auditory, and/or tactile hallucinations of the being.
Previous discussions here on LessWrong: 1 2 3
Questions that have been raised:
1. How do tulpas work?
2. Are tulpas safe, from a mental health perspective?
3. Are tulpas conscious? (may be a hard question)
4. More generally, is making a tulpa a good idea? What are they useful for?
Pertinent Links and Publications
(I will try to keep this updated if/when further sources are found)
(Bear in mind while perusing these resources that if you have serious qualms about creating a tulpa, it might not be a good idea to read creation guides too carefully; making a tulpa is easy to do and, at least for me, was hard to resist. Proceed at your own risk.)
Footnotes
1. "Conjuring Up Our Own Gods", a 14 October 2013 New York Times Op-Ed
2. "Hearing the Voice of God" by Jill Wolfson in the July/August 2013 Stanford Alumni Magazine
3. "The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?"; Taylor, Hodges & Kohànyi in Imagination, Cognition and Personality; 2002/2003; 22, 4
4. Thanks to pure_awesome
5. "Sentient companions predicted and modeled into existence: explaining the tulpa phenomenon" by Kaj Sotala