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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 thought-form which is projected outwards and takes on some kind of existence in exterior reality. Tulpas are supposedly also able to take on a life of their own, outside the original intentions or power of the originator.
At first blush, the topic seems pretty exotic, with perhaps little relevance to ordinary life. My friend John, however, recently suggested this - or something close to it - may very soon be a nuts & bolts addition to reality. John has an article about a robotics sculptor who is working on a very weird project. He has crafted an animatronic head modeled after sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, with some stunning abilities:
[…] artificial intelligence and speech software enable it to carry on complex conversations. “It invents new ideas using a mathematical model of Philip K. Dick’s mind extracted from his vast body of writing,”
John asks the question: what if we could create a pseudo-life form like this using the writings or data of any person? What if you had a robotic version of Jesus that you could ask questions to? Or a robotic Abraham Lincoln, or a robotic replica based on letters your departed grandfather sent you? Or of yourself? Imagine being able to ask yourself probing questions - and get answers! For all intents and purposes, you would be dealing with a tulpa - a projected thoughtform manifested in reality which takes on a life of it’s own.
A while ago, a reader named “slomo” offered a really interesting idea that takes this and applies it at an organizational, rather than individual level:
I’ve long thought that a corporation has something like a spirit or a soul. Large corporations certainly behave like intelligent organisms. But since the 19th century in the United States corporations have been considered as “individuals”, with the same rights under the 14th Amendment. (The 1886 decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company set the precedent. See here and here for more information.)
Up until last night I’ve always assumed that the “spirit” of a corporation developed after its legal formation and its subsequent rise to power in the marketplace, as a so-called “emergent property”. But this morning I woke up wondering if the existence of a corporation’s “spirit” actually precedes its temporal manifestation. And whether “corporate personhood” was intentional all along. Accepting for (the sake of argument) an Illuminati/Freemason-type conspiracy, one might wonder whether the legal fiction of corporate personhood was created specifically and intentionally as a vehicle for the incarnation of powerful spirits.
One of slomo’s links is to an article on “corporate personhood” at Straight Dope. They have some interesting things to say - things which start to sound strangely similar to tulpas.
Most people have a general idea what corporations are. Some may even know that, for most of U.S. history, corporations have been considered “artificial persons.” The concept isn’t as nutty as it sounds. From a legal standpoint, corporations can do many of the same things that natural persons do–buy and sell property, hire and fire, sue and be sued, and so on.
What most people don’t know is that after the above-mentioned 1886 decision, artificial persons were held to have exactly the same legal rights as we natural folk. (Not to mention the clear advantages corporations enjoy: they can be in several places at once, for instance, and at least in theory they’re immortal.) Up until the New Deal, many laws regulating corporations were struck down under the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment–in fact, that clause was invoked far more often on behalf of corporations than former slaves.
We can also take concept a step further. What happens when a tulpa creates another tulpa? It only takes a small stretch of imagination to call government a “projected thought form”, and from there we can find many examples of phantasms which it creates. The Department of Homeland Security recently conjured up something called the Universal Adversary which is an all-purpose “abstract entity used for the purposes of simulation” that can include such “real” groups as:
“foreign [Islamic] terrorists” ,
“domestic radical groups”, [antiwar and civil rights groups]
“state sponsored adversaries” [”rogue states”, “unstable nations”]
“disgruntled employees” [labor and union activists].
In other words, Al Qaeda version 2.0. Oh, but Al Qaeda is real, right? SIKE! Check out this bit from the Guardian UK about how Al Qaeda is nothing more than a projected thought form manifested into reality which took on a life of it’s own:
The Power of Nightmares [an excellent BBC documentary] seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have “sleeper cells”. It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.
Curtis’ evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an unbreakable political framework, as half a century of mostly failed, short-lived revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective terrorism. Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.
The whole thing’s pretty kooky if you ask me. I feel like we could probably take this discussion in a thousand different directions from here.
June 23rd, 2005 at 8:31 am
Writer Grant Morrison’s made some interesting observations on the nature of corporate personhood, meme-complex and existence as occultic entities. I think, think being the operative word, that he talked about it at length in his Disinfo interview… and the theme is woven through some of his work, particularly The Invisibles, The Filth and Marvel Boy.
Thom Hartmann writes regularly on the political/legal aspects of corporate personhood and how it came into existence… worth checking out too, imho.
June 23rd, 2005 at 9:19 am
I wrote a little about this stuff a while ago while reading Walter Wink’s discussion of how our institutions have an interior, psychic reality that isn’t reducible to the people that comprise them, how institutions take on a reality above and beyond what even their founders may desire.
I would partly agree with slomo’s comment but would also argue that any collection of people naturally create psychic structures — egregores as one of your other commenters said. It’s an organic outgrowth of people getting together, sort of the “astral body” of a set of relationships. But individually the denial of our individual spiritual needs translates collectively into mass denial of the spirituality and the psychic needs of these institutions. That’s when they start expressing themselves as Shadow institutions and descend into all this high weirdness and conspiracy.
June 23rd, 2005 at 10:50 am
i think we need to include governments in the corporate view.cities are incorporated entitiies,in the legal sense.i wonder if states and provinces are also.certainly countries act as individual entities,and in many ways counter to the public interest.i get the sense in some instances as if government in the “individual”sense sees us as a contagion or other organic threat to the system.
humans have been called a virus before,i believe.
June 23rd, 2005 at 1:47 pm
The US government seems to be an occult creation. Look at the symbolism on the dollar bill or the symbolism all around Washington, DC. DC is a highly occult city.
As you point out, these creatures can get out of control, which is what has happened to the US gov (beginning with the rejection of the Articles of Confederation imo).
The question “what if we could create a pseudo-life form like this using the writings or data of any person?” made me wonder about another question:
what if we are pseudo-life forms created using the writings or data of another person(s)?
and what if the same applies to that person(s) and so on in infinite regress - so that all reality is information?
This question strikes me as being at the root of many occult ideas.
June 23rd, 2005 at 1:51 pm
Also, didn’t Christ say something like “where two or more gather in my name, there am I”? This seems to imply that a group of people can use data (Christ’s name) to create/summonan entity (Christ) by gathering together. Of course, in this situation it is assumed that the tulpa (Christ) is the master.
June 23rd, 2005 at 1:53 pm
WHOA that’s a crazy and awesome reading of that Jesus saying, Jason. I love it! I’ll try to develop that out further.
Thanks also for bringing up the possibility that we ourselves are actually creations of other people’s data. Philip K. Dick runs with this idea pretty extensively. I’ve often thought that culture, especially religion, the intention of it is to essentially create a blueprint for a mind - a robot that operates according to set parameters. I’ll also develop this more. Both are great fuel for more ideas. Thanks again!
June 23rd, 2005 at 2:50 pm
i always took jesus to mean that when we have a discussion about him(that is two or more people)his spirit is evoked.
could christ have been a tulpa the first time,or are we only reporting part of a sequence?
regarding us being formed out of data.absolutely,why not.and it does tend to regress infinitely.i have seen some simple robots programmed with two lines of code emulate some pretty complex tasks.why not a human?we do tend to act as if programmed and we certainly have the potential to recieve programming.
June 23rd, 2005 at 2:55 pm
PKD wrote:
June 23rd, 2005 at 5:06 pm
I read somewhere that Charles Tart, teaching a class, would have people sit in a circle and contemplate a paper bag in the middle, identifying as much as possible with the bag. Then all of a sudden he would stomp on the bag. Some people had very visceral, hostile reactions to this.
If people can do that with paper bags, why not … anything else? Lots and lots of projections floating around everywhere. Why wouldn’t some of them organize into familiar shapes … archetypes … institutions … conforming to people’s expectations and shaping those expectations and desires too.
June 24th, 2005 at 2:57 pm
[…] ed characters. But really, all you’re doing is manipulating projected thought forms, tulpas. And instead of confronting someone else directly, you each project an idea […]
July 3rd, 2005 at 1:09 pm
[…] at I was originally looking for, endlessly parroting the same old lines. To borrow from my earlier discussion of tulpas, it seems like you can do this thing with your thought […]
July 8th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
[…] y single act of “terror” and murder, in every different permutation, be it the tulpa we’ve created called “al-Qaeda,” deep political covert ops […]