“Since the 1970s, tulpas have been a feature of Western paranormal lore. In contemporary paranormal discourse, a tulpa is a being that begins in the imagination but acquires a tangible reality and sentience. Tulpas are created either through a deliberate act of individual will or unintentionally from the thoughts of numerous people. The tulpa was first described by Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) in Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929) and is still regarded as a Tibetan concept. However, the idea of the tulpa is more indebted to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism. This article explores the murky origins of the tulpa to show how the concept emerged from a dialogue between East and West in which Theosophical metaphysics were combined with terms adapted from Tibetan Buddhism.”
Tracking the Tulpa by Natasha L. Mikles and Joseph P. Laycock
Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions
Monster Talk (via Skeptic.com) Slenderman & Tulpas with guests Joe Laycock and Natasha Mikles (7/30/2014)
“Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas. Joe Laycock has written extensively on topics that overlap MonsterTalk’s area of interest, including the publication of a book titled Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism.”
“Natasha Mikles is a Doctoral student at the University of Virginia focusing on Tibetan Studies.”
Bearden, Thomas – [Physics, Tulpas, UFOs, Cattle Mutilations]
Steiger, Brad – [Cycles, ESP / PSI, GeoPsyche, Paranormal, Tulpas, UFOs] February 19, 1936 ~ May 6, 2018
Perkins, David – writer / researcher, October 18, 1945 – August 20, 2023
David Perkins (starting at the 33:16 mark)
“… i said well this is where the idea of tulpas comes in yes for a while that was kind of like the word that we use for these so-called manifestations and i’m glad you are the first one to use that word because very it’s a very key word in this business right now but uh talking to him i said uh i asked the obvious question okay so the collective unconscious uh it pushes down through those layers shown in that chart and it’s it’s the collection point for human anxiety and um fearfulness i guess in our case it was our fear of the russians and that pushes out some some other symbol up to this other pneumatic tube of psychisms and it comes out as a cattle relation and that it’s basically a warning that they’re out to the the cow represents say the motherland and the milk and the you know the the pleasant part of uh feeding america and uh that it’s our it’s our lifeblood it’s the cow after all so he’s i said well there’s got to be what is the actual physical mechanism of this topoidal uh entity he says there is no mechanism it’s instantaneous there is no mechanism and i was like oh okay he said i he said well i described just like you mean the matter the atoms and the cow and everything just rearranges itself instantaneously uh into what we call account emulation he went yeah whoa okay now that’s a huge leap that is a huge leap but just on the subject of tulpas excuse me i have the occasion to meet the dalai lama one time and uh it’s really weird because i was introduced to him and shook his hand and we looked at each other in the eye and he just started laughing hysterically and i didn’t know if he was laughing that at me or what then i started laughing hysterically and then all the lungs started aughing hysterically and we just stood there i don’t know for two or three minutes just laughing hysterically and then we finally just said nice to meet you and i walked off i never quite understood what that was about i thought was good but in the course of that i met one of the top monks uh his his right-hand man really and i asked him what’s the story on the tulpas because this is more or less a tibetan concept from the works of alexander david neal in 1930s in tibet and she describes having created learned how to create a tulpa to consciously create this entity which is a fat little monk that she created who was carried her stuff through the mountains and eventually it was great because he was really helpful but then it started developing a mind of its own yeah and then became troublesome and quarrel quarrelsome and finally she had to mentally disperse it and so this was this is apocryphal at best but i asked the democracy what’s the story in the tulpas and he went what i said you know the top is the entities that you guys create that uh you know do these things i don’t know what you’re talking about and i said oh come on i mean this is a tibetan thing you’ve never heard of a tulpa anything called a tub nope nope so whether that it’s just a closely guarded secret and he just didn’t want somebody like a punk like me inquiring about such a thing uh could well be so they didn’t really answer anything but the the key part of the alexander david neal thing was that the thing develops a mind and a life of its own and has a physical presence so um it may carry over it’s certainly something that i consider that somehow these manifestations do maybe develop the life and mind of their own an intelligence of their own independent of us and or guy unconsciousness well and this is why i mentioned uh in my presentation um the work of albert budden his electro staging hypothesis…”
“In his fortean classic The Mothman Prophecies, John Keel describes the home and work of a writer named Walter Gibson, a prolific novelist whose subject was a character named “the Shadow.” As Keel relates it, the Shadow was “fond of lurking in dark alleys and wearing a wide-brimmed hat.” Interestingly enough, an apparition matching the appearance and behavior of the Shadow now appears in Gibson’s former residence, the very place in which he dreamed of and wrote about the character so often. Keel suggested that this Shadow-like apparition might be a “tulpa”: a thought-projection, a being brought into existence by the concentrated mental energy of human belief. [3] Keel postulated that Gibson’s years of thinking about the Shadow in that space eventually brought a Shadow-like apparition into existence there. He then went on to wonder whether some of the other apparitions people were seeing might be something like a tulpa.
Keel drew the idea of tulpas from the Belgian-French explorer Alexandra David-Neel’s 1929 book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, in which she describes their tendency to eventually develop their own agency, entirely separate from the pure will that generated them:
“Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker’s control. This, say Tibetan occultists, happens nearly mechanically, just as the child, when his body is completed and able to live apart, leaves its mother’s womb.” [4]
