They say that if enough people believe something, it’s true. Well, politicians say that. Those of us who try to work with real things in the real world aren’t as convinced, but we have to admit that it’s possible to create something just by believing in it hard enough. In the Tibetan mystical tradition, highly advanced lamas and naturally gifted laymen could give their thoughts and imaginings an actual physical existence. They’re called tulpas, and they’re tricky to handle.
A tulpa is, pure and simple, a being created by the act of someone imagining it. When the two of us were kids, we never had imaginary friends because the real world was just too damn weird, and we didn’t want to make it any weirder. But—understatement alert—most kids aren’t like we were, and every once in a while, the kind of process that creates an imaginary friend goes a little farther.
It’s not just Tibetans who believe this, either. We found these two quotes side-by-side in Dad’s journal and were never sure what they meant until we ran into the tulpa:
Determined will is the beginning of all magical operations…. It is because men do not perfectly imagine and believe the result, that the arts [of magic] are uncertain, while they might be perfectly certain.
—Paracelsus
All things are possible to him that believeth.
—Mark 9:23
Later, Dad runs through some thoughts about tulpas. Thoughtforms are central to many magical practices. One in particular, eidolonic necromancy, is almost all about creating thoughtforms through magically intensified visualizations of certain spirits. Helena Blavatsky and other Theosophists—who were a bunch of wackos, by the way, but they stumbled across some truth because, as Bobby Singer said to us one day, even a blind pig gets an acorn once in a while—believed that they had created thoughtforms of all kinds of different astral beings. The Crowley school of occult practice is full of instances of created beings, too. About the tulpa specifically, Dad notes:
TULPA created through intense ritual visualizations known as DUBTHAB. Variation known as DRAGPOI DUBTHAB is specifically aimed at creating a thoughtform with the idea of harming another person. Physical form of TULPA becomes apparent to the senses after the mind can begin to sense its spirit presence. TULPA thus created, no matter the creator’s intent, will gradually turn on the creator.
We’ve gone back and forth over the question of whether poltergeists are a kind of tulpa. We’re still not sure. Poltergeists are often created when traumatized kids externalize their trauma; seems to us that you’ve got a thoughtform there. But sometimes other spirits act like poltergeists, so it’s hard to nail down the differences. What we do know is that a tulpa isn’t anchored to anything the way a spirit is. There’s no bones to burn or haunted objects to destroy.
In the case of the particular tulpa we dealt with, a guy named Mordechai Murdock, we found out that he was created, in a way, by the Internet. Some yahoos in Richardson, Texas, faked up a haunted house/murdering spirit story, and then some I-want-to-believe types had bought the story and put it up on a Web site. Enough people believed it that—presto!—the fictional killer became real. Once we knew that, we went back and looked at some of the loony graffiti painted all over the house and found a Tibetan spirit sigil used in mystical traditions to focus thought and belief. That’s how we got our tulpa, we thought, and decided that maybe if we destroyed the sigil, we’d get the tulpa.
No such luck. Once created, tulpas have a life of their own. But what we figured out was that since the tulpa is a product of intense and focused belief, if you change what its creator (in this case creators) believe, then you change the tulpa. So we put out a nerd-grapevine memo that old Mordechai had shot himself and was still so scared of guns that a consecrated iron bullet would kill him. That almost worked—the bullets slowed him down for a minute, anyway—but the server crashed and so did everyone’s belief in that particular bit of the Mordechai story.
So what did we do? We went back to basics. Burned the goddamn place down around his ears.
Once a tulpa achieves physical form it starts acting like a rebellious teenager. More often than not, it wants to get out from under the control of its creator, and you can guess where that goes. In this case, its creators were distributed all over the world, so that wasn’t a problem, but take the lesson to heart. If you’re sitting at home right now thinking really hard about creating a tulpa with those certain qualities you find missing in your current friends and loved ones, remember: Life isn’t like Weird Science. It’s more like Frankenstein.