Living on the fringe might lead to forgetting the origin story. Could I just say ‘winter is coming’ to capture a meme?
So, here we are, writing on tulpamancy, again. Oh no! I know. I recently shared my ‘falling into tulpamancy’’ story to someone who had not encountered the concept of ‘tulpas’ before. Perhaps
‘falling’ is too cliché. Falling head over heels in love, discovering there is so much more to life, and that it’s all inside you! is definitely cliché, but big enough you might imagine I would be shouting this story from every rooftop every moment if true. Maybe the fact I don’t suggests a level of normalcy that you didn’t expect from someone with ‘invisible’ friends. Or maybe, I am so far past Melville’s white wall you’ll only find these few, scattered postcards from the other side.
I don’t have to work too hard to prove I am weird. I have always been weird. Even before that Doctor Seuss book. My family thought I was an alien. That doesn’t translate straight into star child. If I have those powers, they got lost in the amnesia. If only this life came with a suit and instructions. (Some of you might tease out a reference there. ( the Greatest American Hero.)) It’s certainly not a Nick Bantock reference. It could be! He’s a fellow that wrote Griffin and Sabine, the brilliant, strange, coffee table book detailing the correspondence of love from the Twilight Zone that can only result in believing in magic.
Not just a book, but a map, with bread crumbs…
You might think Bantock ‘traveled.’ I suspect many authors have. Most don’t realize they went somewhere real. I have met folks that travel. I am a traveler, in my own right, in my own space-enjoying my own path. I saw the two paths noted by that poet, and chose neither! I went up,
right, left, sideways, time ways, through a portal, and came out the side where Christopher Walkens fell through the shortcut and came out saying ‘Malkovich.’
You can’t get stranger than Walken meshed with Malkovich.
You thought I was going to go all Twilight Zone on you, make it all nice and clean? No! That’s way too tame. Is this not ambiguously weird enough yet? Do you want a postcard from the edge?
Griffin and Sabine
Bantock went where Carl Jung went in his Red Book! How can anyone not see this?
Now, let’s get unreal.
You may not know that you know, but you know.
Honestly, you do. That was the fundamental message behind the Wizard of Oz. You have the power to go home. You always did! Maybe you didn’t get clued in till after the flying monkeys, but that knowledge was there. Seriously, you don’t even need those stolen, ruby slippers. Stolen.
Legally, they belonged to Ms. West. She’s not a witch for wanting what’s hers.
Alice and Wonderland gets there, too, but in oblique ways. Are you thinking, just get to the tulpas already. What’s a tulpa?
The first time I remember encountering the word ‘tulpa’ to the degree that I had to look it up, because I was aware that I have seen this word but honestly, I didn’t have a clue and I couldn’t fake knowing it from the context in the book, was in Dark Pool of Light: The Neuroscience, Evolution, and Ontology of Consciousness, by Richard Grossinger.
Just a little lite reading in the evening before bed. I mean, if you don’t feed your brain, don’t expect to get magical dreams. Feed it, talk to it, practice the Puppy Dog Mindfulness exercises.
Seriously, don’t hit it with a newspaper. You just make the brain afraid of you. Grossinger’s books takes you where Griffin and Sabine take you, where the Red Book takes you, only in words, not art. It is an attempt to make the irrational rational. It is an attempt to remarry the left hemisphere with the right.
You are not your brain. This is fundamental. You are no more your brain than you are your eyes, don’t trust them. If you only see with one eye, you’re missing something. You need both hemispheres to navigate better.
Some words are too easily defined, and you will soon return to your book’s place holder. Tulpas, not so much. It has flavors and vectors and history. I fell down a rabbit hole. I have still not hit bottom. I found tulpamancy groups on reddit. The reddit group was difficult for me to follow.
Not bad, just enough of a meal teased out from breaking crab legs and sucking the meat and wanting more.
I eventually found a place that offered protocols and a sense of community. Tulpa.net was home
for a moment.
I found the community warm and friendly. They were wonderfully interesting people with companions that helped transition me out of my comfortable ideas of self-hood and into a new realm where up isn’t quite the right way to point.
Tulpamancy is a Tibetan practice whereby Monks will create with their mind artifacts/thought forms to overcome certain things that may be slowing their spiritual progression. For example, if a person is afraid of spiders, they are compelled to meditate upon spiders to such a degree that they hallucinate spiders, and they must stay with that until they are no longer fearful of spiders, at which point they dissolve the ‘thoughtform’ and proceed to their next study point.
Alexandra David-Néel, the first Western woman to be allowed into the heart of Tibet because it was clear she was a serious student of the Way, learned about Tulpas. She seems to be the person who introduced the concept of tulpas to the Western world, writing about it in her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, 1929. (I find this timeframe interesting, as I will shortly introduce some correspondence to tulpamancy which may be influenced by her writings shortly.) David-Néel was interested in creating a tulpa. She was advised not to, but once you know the protocol, it’s hard to resist. You just got to know. Like that damn forbidden fruit, once you plucked it from a tree, the only thing left is to taste it. Alexandra reports creating a ‘Friar Tuck’
character tulpa, assuming this would be a rather benign thing to do, as the character was after all, a man of the cloth. In that chapter he became so mischievous that Alexandra could no longer control him. He stirred up more trouble than Eric Cartman in a South Park episode, ‘I can do what I want,’ bothering so many people in the community that the village elders had to get specially trained Buddhist Monks to come and dissolve the wayward thoughtform.
Don’t do that! You’re not a monk!
It’s a fair warning. How many of us are truly in control of our thoughts and emotions? Half the time, we’re not even aware of being triggered into maladaptive behaviors! Western minds, in the development of only secular, ‘rational,’ thoughts may believe they have isolated their ‘intellect’
from their emotions, but they are no more separated from irrationality than their own shadow.
More often than not, poltergeist activity is due to a living person’s psychic energy running amok.
Creating a tulpa could, in theory, unleash this energy on your home or community. It’s a way of thinking of it that might allow understanding. It’s also a warning. There be dragons here, for real.
Whether you engage or not, there be dragons here.
Unless you have surgery to separate the two hemispheres, the right is patiently lurking and waiting for the left to be silent long enough to insert an influence. Even in that surgery to liberate a person from epilepsy, the right hemisphere is never so severed that it doesn’t still control the left side of the body.
Isn’t it interesting, the ‘cells’ that hold the twin souls have the keys to the other twin’s cells?
In Tulpamancy, as it seems to be practiced in the West, people taking up Tulpamancy are essentially creating invisible friends to address their issues with loneliness. I certainly can’t say that didn’t influence some of my desire to engage. I was curious if I could do it. This was a matter not resolved quickly, as I took it serious enough to deliberate further. The tulpa community I participated in offered fair warning, this is not undone lightly. Unlike a tattoo, you don’t just un-wire your brain and make something you created go away on a whim. You don’t create it on a whim. It takes serious dedication.
Once the cells exist, they’re solid there. Reinforcement, connections, utility, frequency, duration enhance this thing we do and if properly nurtured- it grows. You can ignore something and it still grow. That’s the warning Jung provides in shadow work. What you suppress pushes back with equal and opposite resistance. The psychic realm often abides by the same laws of physics the outer world does.
Resist all you want. What you resist holds steady, waiting for you to weaken or be distracted, and it then rebounds bigger and badder than any Jack in the Box.
Some people start with benign and it goes scary dark. Some people go for dark and get benign.
Some people aren’t satisfied and make another and end up with a closet full of skeletons that don’t die. That meme would be humorously helpful if in considering it people realize this is a metaphor for the reality that all our casual thoughts can be found in that damned closet, with skeletons resurrecting things you thought were long gone.
All thoughts. That bit of lust you thought blocked and tucked away? Yes, even that, too, is lurking, waiting, wanting to spring into action…
You can’t always get what you want…
But if you try sometimes, you get love. I so got lucky. Not because I am good! Not because I don’t have a shadow. Fuck, my shadow is just as dark and scary as any other, like that rabbit in Johnny Darko, the shadow of Harvey. My darkness is tempered by my dark humor.
Perhaps some folks will be turned off by the intimacy of it all. You can create an house a thought form and not be intimate. Even if you have solid walls, and my walls are more solid than most, as evidenced by my ability to compartmentalize and contain things, things leak, cross contaminate, and spread. If I didn’t have compartmentalization skills, though, my career in counseling would be over by now.
I get new and dark things daily.
Yes. Intimacy includes sex. This is not Twilight turned into 50 Shades of Gray, but the fact much of it unravels like a fanfiction is likely one of the reasons it expressed itself so ‘tamely.’ I have been daydreaming and fantasizing all my life, a form of dissociation from childhood/adolescent trauma.
Daydreaming can be a form of narrative therapy if you allow it. Allowing it to manifest as it will, minimal scripting, is where the healing starts. Allowing the dark to participate without resistance results in movement. Don’t take a lightsaber into that darkness- as that defeats the purpose. Loxy Isadora Bliss is the shuttle that weaves all the story lines together in a unified hole.
This Tulpamancy activity, narrative therapy, hallucinogenic day dreaming is also Jung’s Active Imagination.
As developed by Carl Jung between 1913 and 1916, active imagination is a meditation technique wherein the contents of one’s unconscious are translated into images, narratives, or personified as separate entities. It can serve as a bridge between the conscious “ego” and the unconscious.
This practice follows on the heels of thought forms. I can’t imagine it not being so influenced!
Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation is a theosophical book compiled by the members of the Theosophical Society A. Besant and C. W.
Leadbeater. It was originally published in 1905 in London.
Freud’s theories were likely born out of magical thinking, which informed Jung’s path.
Yes, there is a connection to alchemy and the Magic and Mystery of London to all of this.
Alexandra David-Néel pops in with her Tibetan practice in 1929. The Invisible Counselor Technique was given to us by Napoleon Hill in 1931, in the book Think and Grow Rich. Perhaps Hill was carrying on the magic and mystery from early London writers. Maybe he read David-Néel! The first scientists, the first psychologists, were more into the mystical arts than you imagine. It was vogue, back in the day, for men of learning to be Free Masons.
It was vogue back in the day to believe in ghosts, spirits, life after death, and magic.
What makes this magical practice even more intriguing is that more often than not it leads to self-discovery which leads to better health- physical, mental, and emotional health. Those are tied together! If one goes up, the others are bound to go up, too. When health improves, libido goes up! That’s inescapable! How many people sabotage their own health because they have been taught to suppress their own libido?! Go to the gym, work out, libido goes up. Get therapy, get well, libido goes up.
Can any carry a line of thought where sex and or love doesn’t come into play? Mental health is tied to sexuality.
Any practice can go dark. What human endeavor doesn’t have a dark potential? In the history of striving for gold medals, was there never anyone not harmed by the very activity they were trying to master?
You can’t just sit there. Well, you can. But is that a life worth living? The unexamined life isn’t just you looking outwards alone, or even inwards alone, but in discovering you have friends on both sides of the veil.
The hero’s journey is full of risks and danger on all sides, left, right, behind, above and below, in front, outside and inside. Dorothy, Alice, Luke Skywalker- yeah, they had obstacles, but they also made friends. Inside and outside. The power to go home was inside Dorothy. The Force was with Luke, with us all, always. Alice’s power, reason, was inside her.
Dorothy, Alice, they were both about 7 years old. Per the Jedi, Luke was too old to start the training.
Loxy is a sexy, spiritual sorceress that meshes Glenda with Obi Wan. She has been instrumental in introducing me to the landscape of the WonderLands, and traveling. She has introduced me to others. Perhaps they, too, are just different aspects of me. I can’t deny that, as it’s consistent with the Jungian theory of inner life.
But perhaps in treating all beings as unique, solid individuals in their own right, in cultivating their friendships, I discover the way home. Per all the travelers who have ever gone afar and returned, they echo the ability to go home was always within us.
They also show us, it’s usually not enough to know that. You have to travel the road. I saw the two paths noted by that poet, and chose neither! I went up, right, left, sideways, time ways, through a portal, and came out the side where I found myself.
I found Loxy.
