A post on Fantastic Planet has reminded me of the fascinating concept of the tulpa. He quotes author Nick Redfern on the topic of what a tulpa is:
It’s a thought form and the idea is that if you concentrate and meditate strongly enough and hard enough, you can actually see what you perceive. It’s not a case of you hallucinating so much as that the brain has the power to project something.Now, there is another related theory that if you imbue a tulpa with enough power and strength, it can have a limited or even permanent degree of awareness and actually exist outside the person that created it. So it becomes like a troublesome spirit, like a little kid gone wild because it’s free of its creator, or something along those lines.
Supposedly it comes from Tibetan Buddhism. The idea entered the west through somebody named Alexandra David-Neel. Wikipedia has more information on it:
When Alexandra David-Neel journeyed through Tibet, one of the many mystical techniques she studied was that of tulpa creation. A tulpa, according to traditional Tibetan doctrines, is an entity created by an act of imagination, rather like the fictional characters of a novelist, except that tulpas are not written down. David-Neel became so interested in the concept that she decided to try to create one.
The method involved was essentially intense concentration and visualization. David-Neel’s tulpa began its existence as a plump, benign little monk, similar to Friar Tuck. It was at first entirely subjective, but gradually, with practice, she was able to visualize the tulpa out there, like an imaginary ghost flitting about the real world.
In time the vision grew in clarity and substance until it was indistinguishable from physical reality-a sort of self-induced hallucination. But the day came when the hallucination slipped from her conscious control. She discovered that the monk would appear from time to time when she had not willed it.
It allegedly reached the point where the tulpa became a problem, and David-Neel had to undergo the meditations and techniques to re-absorb the thought-form into herself. A thread on the excellent Barbelith website suggests that David-Neel actually invented not only the thought-form, but the concept itself, and that it’s not really part of Tibetan Buddhism. More on that can be found here. According to this, it’s an anglicized version of the Tibetan word “sprul pa” or “sprulpa” which has several overlapping meanings. It seems most references to tulpas nowadays come from David-Neel’s book “Magic and Mystery of Tibet” (excerpts from which can be read here, including info on tulpas). I’d have to look into it more, but even if she did conjure up the concept it has parallels in other Western traditions. That Barbelith thread also suggests a correlation to the terms servitor, egregore and shoggoth. The concept of a spiritual double also occurs all over the world, from ancient Egypt to gnostic thought, to the magical teachings of don Juan, to the doppleganger, and many other places.
There was also a fascinating experiment in the 1970’s by the Toronto Society for Psychical Research to see if they could intentionally “create” a fictitious ghost. They spent some time as a group preparing a wholly invented and historically inaccurate biography of a character named “Philip“. They then spent several weeks holding seances to contact the false spirit, with no success. Finally though, they made contact with something which then communicated with them for many sessions through a series of knocks and scratches on the table, along with other psychokinetic phenomena. The whole thing’s really rather creepy, no matter what explanation you choose to apply to it. Several years later, another group also attempted to recreate the experiment with a fictional female spirit named Lilith, with even greater success.
I’d love to gather other related information to this type of phenomenon if anybody knows of any.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Our Own Imaginary Friends
- Intentional Burnout
- Podcast 15: How to Fake Your Own Death
- Too Many Tulpas
- The Problem With Pokemon
11 Comments
SImilar to the concept of a servitor or an egregore
it allegedly reached the point where the tulpa became a problem***
A bit like Aquinas’ complaints about Albertus’ noisy golem?
duh, too quick to post
keep an eye on those brooms, buddy
Heh heh.
On a related note, I’ve always felt that ghost phenomena was an unintentiional manifestation of this sort…that ‘the famous ghost olf such and such’ is more or less given animation by the imaginations of residents of visitors, and the further contributions of ghost hunters and curiosity seekers. Eventually, this astral creation gets a life of its own and becomes a self-fulfilling ghost story, which just further perpetuates it. I think this is why ghost sightings tend to be ‘generational.’ (iow, all but the ‘celebrity’ ghosts lose potency)
do other people,other than the creator of the tulpa,see the created form?if not,then we have a pervasive delusion.mind you delusions can be convincing enough to spur people to great things…………..and madness,of course.
according to david-neel, other people in her camp began seeing it - if you accept her testimony
i don’t know if i’d call it a delusion. if these things are ‘real’ and someone doesn’t see them, that strikes me as more delusional . . . .
then of course there’s jung’s whole ufo theory, about how they’re this weird phenomena that basically escaped from the collective unconscious and took on a life of their own.
i have to accept david-neel`s testimony.her perception is real,to her.those in her camp began to see this thing too.i can see that as valid also.the next question is,did people outside the camp see the tulpa as well?could this tulpa appear at starbucks?
i think if you believe in something strongly enough others will begin to see it too.visually,or otherwise.
regarding u.f.o.s,i haven`t seen evidence that they have escaped the collective unconcious.we need some phyisical evidence,y`know,sitting on letterman`s desk or landing on the whitehouse lawn or whatever else we need as proof.the field attracts so many nutcases that it is easy to dismiss the whole phenominon.
I had heard that Bob Hoskins, while working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, was using visualization techniques for the scenes in which he was acting with noone, so he could keep track of where he should be looking and help his acting as well. But after the film was finished, he ended up seeking psychiatric help because he was still seeing people and things that weren’t there. I’m trying to find some confirmation of this.
I found this interview:
http://www.angelfire.com/celeb/bobhoskins/interviews/animated.html
No psychiatry, just a vacation to clear the weasels out of his head. He based his visualization on his daughter’s imaginary friends.
5 Trackbacks
[...] in some more detail this idea of the divine twin (that I brought up earlier in relation to tulpas) across a variety of religious traditions. I highly recommend checking this out. Anyw [...]
[...]
Too Many Tulpas
The other day, I started talking about something called tulpas, a concept with roots in Tibetan Buddhism. A tulpa is, more or less, an occult though [...]
[...] It’s kind of hard not to use a word like “cult” after hearing such things. This whole thing about Ana, Bella and Mia makes me think immediately that perhaps they are tapping into some kind of actual spiritual entities (or maybe have created their own). Maybe they are beautiful skeletal beings who thrive on the offerings of food these girls (and men) are giving to them, instead of eating for themselves. Some of the obsessive and unhealthy behaviors associated with these disorders may in fact be keeping with classic characteristics of spirit possession or fixation. I also heard recently that La Santisima Muerte, the Mexican folk saint appears to people as a beautiful woman’s corpse drained of blood. So, hey who knows? I wonder how people’s attitudes towards these things would change if they understood that they were possibly feeding a malicious spirit with their life energy? [...]
[...] Look, I have friends who have done or still do work in marketing. And they’re nice people. That’s right–I acknowledged it: they are people. Most of them enjoy their jobs because they get to analyze patterns (like a conspiracy theorist does) and be creative (albeit in a very limited scope) and get paid to indulge all the things that their marketing tells them they should–travel, good food, good liquor, a gym membership. But they know not what they do–and that’s scary. The companies they work for and their clients, while “containing” people much like themselves are not people: no, large corporations are gluttinous, abstract gods–false idols–and worse. They are hungry ghosts, egregores/tulpas-gone very bad. [...]
[...] Maybe someone is trying to create tulpas…. In his most recent post, Jeff Wells suggests (via an anecdote from Jacques Vallee) that perhaps the universe as we know it isn’t organized based on measurable space/time as understood in physics. Perhaps “reality” is organized like a database best accessed via keywords, a concept long understood in the circles of religious mystics. What, after all, is the point of praying, or chanting divine names or meditating on aspects of the divine, if not ’searching’ for some kind of living information by inserting key concepts or phrases into a reality structure? So, suppose an organization exists somewhere (either here or “there”) that wants to tear down the Wall, and is doing so by feeding us keywords, or feeding them into a self-perpetuating community of individuals who want “proof” to such an extent that they’re willing to use the search terms “recommended” by said organization? [...]