tulpas

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 25 Jun 2022 02:05
Open in Logseq
    • Tulpas are imaginary beings that nevertheless have real agency. Originally a concept from esoteric spiritual traditions; the concept has been "popularized and secularized through fiction, such as The X-Files television series".
    • There's some confusion about the term – are tulpas something only highly trained magicians can create for themselves, or something ordinary people do as part of practical everyday cognition (eg, when you are having imaginary arguments in your head with an acquaintance – is that a tulpa? It is, after all, an animated representation). Is rubberducking a form of tulpamancy?
    • Or do tulpas, properly so-called, have to have a degree of autonomy? Not necessarily an independent or inherited purpose, but more like independence of action. They do things without being told; that's their reason for being.
    • What's the relationship between tulpamancy and multiple personality disorder or schizophernia (see particularly Operators and Things). Or meeting the DMT elves?
    • Veissière, Samuel (2016), Amir Raz; Michael Lifshitz (eds.), "Varieties of Tulpa Experiences: The Hypnotic Nature of Human Sociality, Personhood, and Interphenomenality", Hypnosis and meditation: Towards an integrative science of conscious planes, Oxford University Press
      • Despite the flaky titles, this seems rather sensible:
      • Tulpamancy, I offer, presents us with more than a fascinating case of non-pathological multiple re-wiring of the self. I claim, rather, that the practice sheds light on fundamentally human, cultural-neurophenomenal mechanisms through which highly transient, hypnotic, asymmetrically collective, but somatically grounded experiences of personhood invariably arise—and can be altered.