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mysteries |
Thought Forms |
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Can thought take on physical form and acquire an independence of their own? Examining the tale of the tulpa. Writer and anthropologist Carlos Castaneda tells the story of how he and his sorcerer teacher Don Juan Matus were sitting on a bench in downtown Mexico City in the early 1970's. Don Juan was attempting to explain the ancient Mexican shamanic idea that true creativity originates in the magical realm of the 'nagual'. Castaneda was finding it all hard to grasp, and asked Don Juan to define exactly what he meant by creativity. Curious Creation. 'Creativity is this,' replied Don Juan, cupping his right palm and bringing it up to the level of Castaneda's eyes. Castaneda found it extremely difficult to focus on Don Juan's hand and struggled until beads of sweat ran into his eyes. Finally there was a 'pop' and Castaneda's eyes and head jerked free. On Don Juan's palm was a strange-looking rodent, resembling a squirrel, but with quills on its tail. like a porcupine. 'Touch it,' said Don Juan softly. Castaneda ran his finger over the rodent's furry back and, as he did so, he noticed something that threw him into nervous spasms; the 'squirrel' was wearing spectacles! It was so unbelievable that Castaneda began to laugh hysterically. The rodent started to grow in Don Juan's palm, until eventually it got so huge that it went completely out of Castaneda's field of vision and disappeared. According to Castaneda, Don Juan had created a real live, flesh and blood creature using only the power of thought and imagination. This may appear far-fetched, but sorcerers the world over claim they can do just this. Tibetan yogis, for instance, claim that they can create physical objects and even living beings, known as tulpas, by imagining them in their mind's eye. The 'reality' of tulpas is, however, far from cut and dried, even for those who create them. Tibetan mystics believe that all the phenomena we perceive, including the apparently solid world around us, are products of our imagination. To the Tibetan adept, the reality or unreality of the tulpa is simply not an issue: 'solid' matter and thought forms both exist on the imaginal plane, so neither can be considered 'real' or 'unreal'. To prove their understanding of this, initiates of Tibetan dream yoga subject themselves to a ritual known as the 'Dance of Chid', which involves conjuring up, or visualizing, a horde of grotesque tulpa demons, along with a tulpa double of themselves. The magician then has to will the demons to attack his double, and remain completely calm and composed as the hideous thought forms rip it apart and eat it. If the magician succeeds in staying calm, then the demons can not harm him, because he has truly accepted the dream-like nature of reality, and accordingly, has no fear of such creatures. If, though, he still sees reality in 'nuts and bolts' terms, then he empowers the demons and risks insanity or death from fright. The Dubthab Rite. One of the most famous examples of the creation of a tulpa concerned the redoubtable French traveler Alexandra David-Neel. She spent 14 years in Tibet and, out of curiosity, set about performing the Dubthab rite, which reputedly ends with the tangible manifestation of a thought form. In Magic and Mystery in Tibet, she recounts how she chose to create a monk who was 'short and fat, [and] of an innocent type'. After a few months performing the rite, which consisted mainly of disciplined visualizations, she started to catch glimpses of the phantom monk. 'His form grew gradually fixed and life-like looking,' she remembered. 'He became a kind of guest in my apartment.' It got to the point that even when she was not consciously thinking of the monk, he would appear anyway. 'The illusion was mostly visual,' she claimed, 'but sometimes I felt as if a robe was lightly rubbing against me and once hand seemed to touch my shoulder.' In the end, the monk's presence became troublesome; it took on a life of its own and became sly and malignant. David-Neel had lost control of the tulpa. To her dismay, it took about as long to dissolve the phantom creation as it had to create it. Some occultists claim that thought forms can be created inadvertently, by a combination of thought and emotion. In Psychic Self-Defence, the English occultist Dion Fortune describes how she was thinking negative thoughts about someone who had wronged her. Laying in bed in a semi-dozing state, she thought of the Fenris wolf-demon from Nordic mythology, whle at the same time contemplating revenge. 'Immediately I felt a curious drawing-out sensation from my solar plexus,' she reported, 'and there materialized beside me in bed a large wolf. I knew nothing of the art of making [artificial] elementals at that time, but had accidentally stumbled upon the right method - a brooding state, highly charged with emotion... and the condition between sleeping and waking.' Although she was very frightened, Fortune managed not to panic, and forcefully ordered the beast out of the house. She would have dismissed the experience as a nightmare, except that, that same night, someone else in the house reported dreaming of wolves, and seeing the eyes of a wild animal shining in the darkness. The realization that her creation had been in some sense tangible, and the fact that she did not wish to follow what she described as the 'left hand path' of magic, led Fortune to 'reabsorb' the creature back into herself. The idea that you can simply think something into existence is dismissed as impossible by most rational people, yet 20th century theoretical physics suggests it may well be possible. As far back as 1932, the English astronomer Sir James Jeans asserted that: 'Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.' Today, the majority of quantum physicists accept this as a basic truism. Creating Universes. Theoretical physicists Werner Heisenberg and John A. Wheeler, for example, speak of an 'observer-created universe', admitting that the act of observation and so the consciousness of the observer determines the behaviour of the sub-atomic world observed. Many psychologists have also taken such notions on board. Professor Stanislav Grof, one of the founders of Transpersonal Psychology, goes as far as saying that 'if one makes an honest assessment of quantum physics, consciousness research, Oriental spiritual philosophies and shamanism, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that consciousness can modify phenomena in the material world.' In short, many eminent thinkers believe that matter as least to some degree can be molded by thought and consciousness, and that it may be possible to create tulpas or thought forms with the power of the mind. Ultimately, though, whether such creations have a tangible existence independent of their creator's imagination is open to debate. Much of the evidence that this is the case is anecdotal and therefore hard to verify. Chaos Magic. The practice of creating tulpas and thought forms is still very much alive today among contemporary practitioners of magic. The British chaos magician Dave Lee claimed to have created a 'healing servitor' (or thought form) that could be used by anybody who knew of its existence. 'One particular group started working with it and they specialized in working healing magic in rave clubs,' explained Lee, 'At the beginning of the evening they'd, do an invocation, and leave a sigil [magical symbol] on the dance floor which would get dance off as the night wore on. Then, using the collected energy of the dancing to develop magical focus, the group would direct the power, via the servitor, against the retro-virus HIV, hepatitis C, and so forth.' Apparently, this magical group has reported a spectacular number of remissions from AIDS-related conditions. 'One guy's face was covered in Kaposi's sarcoma [malignant skin tumors] and that's gone,' said Lee, 'and a whole bunch of people's T-lymphocyte [cells central to the body's immune response] levels have gone through the roof since this work.' If the claims of Lee are to be believed, it would appear that the creation of thought forms which have tangible effects in physical reality, is indeed, a possibility. The fact that theoretical physics is also coming round to this idea is another reason why these unlikely entities should not be dismissed lightly. |
Sources: The X Factor By: John Shreeve |