Go check out this great and freaky article by Jeff Wells about imaginary friends and tulpas (projected thought forms). Actually though, my favorite bit from it comes out of the comments section in one left by “prunes”:
I wonder if the formation of the ego or personality is essentially similar to formation of tulpas. It seems it would form gradually, first broad outlines, the particulars accumulating over time until it cannot be distinguished from… ordinary… people.
Many traditions teach that we are all the same underneath; psychedelics and mystic experience have the strange property of frequently impressing this idea upon the experienced in such a way that they are absolutley convinced this is true in some sense.
In this model, we would all be each other’s (and our own) imaginary friends.
I love the idea of individualized identity being a projected thought form. It makes that certain kind of freaky sense to me.
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I don’t love that idea at all. What if all WE are are tulpas and when our creator gets annoyed enough or bored enough with us, we vanish.
Well, if we are our creators, then wouldn’t that make your theory interesting? It seems like Buddhist and other metaphysical systems suggest something very similar: that we create the ego-self, and eventually grow bored with it and then seek to extinguish it.
From an RD Laing essay I am going through:
It would make sense then, that if the ego is an “imaginary friend” and it is the tool we use to live in *this* world, then this world too is imaginary…
http://www.laingsociety.org/biblio/transexperience.laing.htm
Perhaps at the awake, solidified, every-day physical level, it’s a cooperative venture, where we’re all busy all the time creating and re-creating each other, over and over, moment by moment. That would explain why waking reality seems so much more stable than the reality of dreams - in my dreams, the tulpas are completely mine, whereas in normal reality, it’s everyone doing it…possibly every thing doing it, if panpsychism is correct. All the world may be little more than a continuum of dreams…and the creatures of the imaginal realms may be partial group efforts, created by some but not all, which would explain why they so often seem to inhabit some kind of midworld, where things are flexible, ephemeral, and physical all at the same time. And, when one person seems to exhibit the ability to manufacture a tulpa all by themselves, perhaps that can be seen as a special category of the lucid dream, brought out into the “real world” for all to see.
I’ve had numerous “psychic” dreams which indicate strongly that this is not the case. I have seen people in detail doing tasks which I later described to them and found out were 100% accurate. For me to have created those dream events then would mean that I also created the outer events of which they were a reflection.
I’m famous!
That RD Laing essay is really something, the guy clearly knows what’s up.
Here is a relevant story by my favorite author, Jorge Luis Borges:
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jatill/175/CircularRuins.htm
i think we might just do that tim………….if one is going to be megalomaniacal, why not go all the way.
Just last night, I had a dream I was back in school, and my homework was eaten by a big blue box…I wonder what that could mean?
My soon to be four-year old has an imaginary friend named Max. That he existed was categorically denied by my son to me for some time now (my wife is a much better interrogator), but I guess he’s ok with talking about “Max” now. I had taken this as some type of failure with regards to my parenting skills and/or lack of quality time spent, but thanks for clearing that up!!!
Apparently Max can either be of a height with my son, or can fit down in an anthole. My son was making a nest for him the other day with grass, and he was ready to defend it quite vigorously.
-tc
I had a dream the other night that seems super-freaky in this context, to me at least. In the dream, I was eating lunch with some friends (tulpa versions of my friends?), when for some reason or another, the universe ripped itself apart. Or maybey I caused it, I don’t know. Anyway, I found that I could make my own little worlds out of the void. (They were kind of like the “Ages” in the Myst computer game, if it helps) I could also fly through the void, which was like a bhuge black and blue calidiscope, and find the egos of people I knew, who I then made little words for them to live in. It was pretty bizzare.