Hi all,

https://savageminds.org/2016/02/13/paranormalizing-the-popular-through-the-tibetan-tulpa-or-what-the-next-dalai-lama-the-x-files-and-affect-theory-might-have-in-common/

Tulpamancers are people who, through extended bouts of concentration and visualization, produce a special kind of imaginary friend that they call a tulpa. Tulpas are understood to be distinct sentient beings with their own personalities, inclinations and (relative) autonomy. Through various active and passive processes known as ‘forcing’ tulpamancers spend hours solidifying their impressions of their creations as something more than just an ordinary inner voice. (Active forcing means concentrating single-pointedly on the tulpa’s form and features, passive forcing is when the tulpamancer finds ways to bring tulpas into more regular routines, such as through ‘narrating’, where tulpamancers chat with or read stories to their creations). Tulpamancers meet tulpas in imagined environments called ‘wonderlands’, dream or mind-scapes that more fully contextualize interactions and provide a place for tulpas to ‘hang out’ when idle. They also work to perfect ‘imposition’ -seeing, hearing, or feeling tulpas in the ‘real world’ – and may practice tulpa-possession or even ‘switching’, where the tulpa takes over the host’s body and the host temporarily occupies the tulpa’s form in the wonderland.

If this is news for you, you might be wondering where this all comes from. The deceptively simple answer is: Tibet. Tulpa (sprul pa, སྤྲུལ་པ) is a Tibetan word meaning ’emanation’, ‘apparition’ or ‘magical illusion’, and the practices of contemporary tulpamancers are supposedly modeled on the esoteric procedures of Tibetan mystics, who we are often told, have been producing sentient mental-entities through meditation for centuries.

Before the advent of online tulpamancer communities, and notwithstanding its Tibetan name, the concept of the tulpa as a semi-autonomous entity created by one or more individuals’ focused thought or belief was primarily a mainstay in Western esoteric and parapsychological circles. Western occultists inherited their version of tulpas from early non-Tibetan interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism like French explorer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) and American Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965). David-Neel’s description of how she experimented with making a tulpa in the form of a ‘jolly monk’ while in Tibet – and her account of how this ‘mind-creature’ was subsequently seen by others who mistook it for an actual person, and how it became more and more sinister, self-motivated and unruly which obliged her to dissolve it – helped set the tone and terms of subsequent representations of tulpas. Further, as Natasha Mikles and Joseph Laycock have laid out nicely in a recent article, both David-Neel and Evan-Wentz’s understanding of Tibetan tulpas was in turn strongly influenced by Theosophical teachings related to the possibilities and dangers of ‘thought-forms’ and ‘elementals’. These ideas were already in circulation in Europe and America long before either David-Neel or Evan-Wentz ever went to the Himalayas to study with Tibetans. Thus, as Mikles and Laycock put it (paralleling my own earlier arguments here on Savage Minds about both Tibetan aliens and Tibetan singing bowls, popular ideas about tulpas today are a product of complex dialogues or cross-fertilizations between ‘East and West’, and, to be fair, probably owe more to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism.

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