If You Go Looking

Tulpas and thoughtforms

META/1–2/O

Made, not met · egregores

Intelligences people say they created by sustained attention.

Theosophy's Thought-Forms (1901) taught that strong thoughts take shape on a subtler plane. Alexandra David-Néel described making a phantom monk in Tibet that grew independent of her, and borrowed the Tibetan word tulpa, which in its home tradition means an emanation and carries a different sense. Western occultism added the egregore, a being formed by a group's shared attention. Since around 2010, online communities have practised tulpamancy, deliberately building an inner companion, and an anthropologist's survey in the mid-2010s found that most practitioners understood it psychologically and said it had helped them. The entry turns the guide's question around: here the being is said to come from the person.

If you go looking

Building an inner companion is a sustained practice of dissociation. Most practitioners describe it as benign, but for anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis or dissociation it is the wrong project.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

META/1–2/O

Outside the system · embodiment 1 to 2 of 5, consciousness with no persistent form to energetic or subtle · source: occult system · key

Dates

Thought-Forms: 1901

David-Néel: 1929

Online tulpamancy: from around 2010

Related

Thoughtforms sit on the same subtle planes as astral entities. Grant's Lam was built up through practice. Channelled collectives raise the same question of where the voice comes from.

Astral entities →Lam →Higher-dimensional collectives →

Terms used on this page

META: outside the system

Origin code

Not a being to sit alongside the others. A framework that reframes the whole catalogue, a tradition that travelled in the opposite direction from the rest, or an intelligence people say they made rather than met.

Degree of embodiment: 1 to 2, consciousness with no persistent form to energetic or subtle

Scale, 1 to 5

5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.

O: occult system

Source code

Produced by an esoteric school that organised inherited material into a scheme: Paracelsus, Theosophy and their descendants.

Alexandra David-Néel

Explorer and writer, 1929

French explorer of Tibet whose Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929) described making a phantom monk that grew independent of her. She allowed that it might have been a hallucination.

Deliberate contact work

Read this first

The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.

Who should be careful

Practice-side

Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.

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