Thoughtform

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Thoughtform may be understood as a 'psychospiritual' complex of energy or consciousness manifested either consciously or unconsciously, by an individual or a group. Thoughtform are understood differently and take on different forms in different traditions. Stated differently, a thoughtform, is a subtle objectification that may or may not have consciousness and self-determination. Thoughtform may be benevolent, malevolent or of complex alignment and may be understood as a spontaneous or intentional manifestation from a combination of willpower, bioenergy, discipline, chi, prana and/or astral or ætherial substance.

Contents

[edit] History of thoughtform

A tulpa is, in Tibetan mysticism, a being or object which is created through willpower, visualisation, attention and focus, concerted intentionality and ritual. In other words, it is a materialized thought that has taken physical form (a thoughtform).[1]

The tulpa meme or concept was brought to the West in the 19th century by Alexandra David-Neel[2], who claimed to have created a tulpa in the image of a jolly, Friar Tuck-like monk which later developed a life of its own and had to be destroyed. David-Neel has been cited by Wells (2006), follow website metalink in notes or references.

[edit] Spiritual lineage

Thoughtform are evident in Vajrayana Buddhism, Bönpo traditions, indigenous cultural traditions thoughout the world such as Cherokee of North America and the Indigenous Peoples of Australia (who understand the waking, created world to be a thoughtform subset of The Dreaming), shamanic traditions, echoes are evident in ghosts or supernatural agency, folk religion, esoteric philosophies such as Theosophy and what is construed as the New Age.

[edit] Scientific lineage

Thoughtform phenomena, by any other name, are worked with variously in Imaginal Psychology and Process Oriented Psychology and is evident in the work of Gregory Bateson. Jean Houston, a disciple of Campbell and Mead (and in the direct lineage of Jung), was a modern pioneer of engaging thoughtform in what she termed the 'imaginal realm', and in the associated discipline of aspecting or 'carrying' deity, dæmon or other somesuch (Houston, 1996).

[edit] Phenomenal world as thoughtform

Towards the end of his life, the visionary biologist Gregory Bateson intuited the manifested realm to be a thoughtform of the unmanifested. Lawlor (1991: p.43) cites Bateson from Lovelock (1995: p.218):

The individual mind is imminent but not only in the body. It is imminent also in pathways and messages outside the body, and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by God, but it is still imminent in the total interconnected social systems and planetary ecology.

The Gaia hypothesis, Gaia philosophy and Deep Ecology hold that Gaia is a congeries of entities. Forerunners and permutations of Gaian theory hold that the Earth (and by extension all phenomena) is the actualization of thoughtform phenomena.

A principle tenet in the film What tнē #$*! Ďө ωΣ (k)πow!? is that the Universe is envisioned as constructed from thought (or ideas) rather than from substance. The movie is a vehicle exploring the views of JZ Knight/Ramtha. This idea is also explored by Fred Alan Wolf (1994) and Amit Goswami. Goswami, a proponent of lucid dreaming, has affirmed that "during a dream that felt like an admonition...[that he heard]...so clearly: 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead [3] is correct. It's your job to prove it!' Dzogchen, a confluence and complex of practices, philosophies and worldviews of the mystical shamanic Bönpo and tantric Vajrayana Buddhism that yields the view that phenomena is a thoughtform or a dreamform. Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche (2002), a Dzogchen Master, expounds this view (refer Dzogchen#Reality vs dreams).

Thought-form of the music of Charles Gounod, according to Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater in Thought Forms (1901)
Thought-form of the music of Charles Gounod, according to Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater in Thought Forms (1901)

[edit] Working definitions

An image or images held in the mind of a practitioner which aids in the manifestation of Intent. An agency of psychic effect which exists and takes form on the pre-physical realms of existence, which acts in accord with the Intent of its creator(s). [4]

A living spiritual being created by humans. It could be a magical person's helper, or a being created by the belief in it from masses of people. [5]

[edit] Detailed description

Thoughtform are central to the practice of all forms of magick where rite and ritualization is utilised to focus the intent of either a sole practitioner or a group. The thoughtform may be willed or entreated to take on a specific appearance or perform a specific function. A complex thoughtform which is anthropomorphic or zoomorphic in appearance may be referred to by the Tibetan term tulpa. A thoughtform of a deity or dæmon may be referred to as a godform (in the Vajrayana trinity of trikaya, a sambhogakaya manifestation).

For some, thoughtforms are construed as non-material entities or objects, precipitated from a combination of willpower, bioenergy, chi (or prana) and astral substance (sometimes referred to as æther). Some perceive thoughtforms to be invisible (perceived only through clairvoyant sight), others perceive the play of the phenomenal world (or even the Universe) as a collective thoughtform. This equates with the indigenous Australian Dreamtime [6] and evocative of Poe's: “All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream”.

It has been conjectured that crop circles are either thoughtform or a byproduct of thoughtform phantasmagoria. Robert Beer (1999) in his resplendent and scholarly tome, evocatively illustrates how Tanka art encodes 'thoughtform simulacra'[7] and the trailblazer Peter Gold (1994) outlines that simulacrum perceived as deity are venerated by the Navajo as well as the Tibetan peoples. From anthropology and ethnographic case studies we may extrapolate that this symbol and meaning finding propensity is part of the psychosocial fabric of the human and endemic to the human condition.

It is held by some that an undisciplined individual who does not even believe in magick, may unconsciously incite a thoughtform in the event of an eclipsing emotion (e.g. hatred, lust, love, sympathy, etc. and oft-conflated with psychokinesis or poltergeist activity) or when such sustained emotions are directed at a specific person, project, locality, etc. Similarly, it is held in various traditions that a thoughtform may eventually dissipate or disperse (depending on its essence-quality) as it consumes its quota of life-energy or realises its potential. Some thoughtform are considered evolutionary, conscious and sentient that iterate and interact and some may transmute to organic life or other types of being. Some view projects as a manifesting a groupmind thoughtform that will draw appropriate people and resources to themselves to realise completion. Some thoughtform are rendered archetypal and primordial and of common wellspring (energetic signatures of these may be understood as ancient geoglyphs and petroforms). Petrosomatoglyph are a subset of the potentiate thoughtform simulacra. Some thoughtform maintain a symbiotic relationship or sympathetic resonance with their point of origin or the target or mission to which they have been directed.

Though Alice Bailey may have been inspired (and comparable to a tertön), her collaborative work with Djwal Khul, A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, that evocatively described the process for working with thoughtforms, is not formally recognised by the Himalayan dharmic traditions. Thoughtform are not only the energetic phantasmagoria of our consciousness and mindstream, either intentional or unconscious, but may also constitute an emotional filter (refer trance, NLP) or lens that shapes the play of our phenomenal experience; as per the incisive quotation of Bailey et. al.(1951: p.489) in A Treatise on White Magic:

"A thought-form can also act as a poisoning agent, and poison all the springs of life....A violent dislike, a gnawing worry, a jealousy, a constant anxiety, and a longing for something or someone, may act so potently as an irritant or poison that the entire life is spoilt, and service is rendered futile. The entire life is embittered and devitalized by the embodied worry, hatred and desire....and is held back by the poison in his [sic.] mental system. His [sic.] vision becomes distorted, his [sic.] nature corroded, and all his [sic.] relationships impeded by the wearing, nagging thoughts which he [sic.] himself [sic.] embodies in form and which have a life so powerful that they can poison him [sic.]."[8]

It may be valuable to extend the water metaphor of "the springs of life" aformentioned to include the mindstream. We now know from emergent disciplines that thoughts and emotions are chemical as well as electrical processes, refer neuropeptides, and may be potentially toxic. So we may indeed be driven, railroaded and possessed by our thoughtforms and emotions: called in popular currency 'our demons' . This understanding is not to diminish the reality of adverse as well as benevolent possession and trance-forms but to establish a complex of views.

It is contended that a meme is not a thoughtform, though it may be deemed an informative correlation.

In the Vajrayana Buddhist view promulgated by Padmasambhava & Jamgön Kongtrül (1999: p.84), the thoughtform of the six lokas or "six classes of beings" of 'dependant co-arrising' and the obscurations forded by the samsaric view is held to be a dream:

Due to the great demon [9] of coemergent and conceptual ignorance,
From the solidified habitual patterns of grasping and fixation,
And the different perceptions of worlds and inhabitants,
The six classes of beings appeared as a dream. (NB: original text not meta-enhanced.)

[edit] Thoughtform & Annie Besant

Thought Forms is a book, by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, which is a study on the nature and power of thoughts. (ISBN 0-8356-0008-4)

The authors state that thoughts have two effects: "a radiating vibration and a floating form".

Thought forms are divided into three classes:

  • That which takes the image of the thinker.
  • That which takes the image of some material object.
  • That which takes a form entirely its own, expressing its inherent qualities in the matter which it draws round it.

The effect of music, emotions, and colors on thought forms is also studied in the book.

The effect of the music of Mendelssohn (No. 9 of his "Songs without words"), Gounod (Soldiers Chorus from "Faust") and Richard Wagner (Overture to "The Meistersingers") is studied. The music of Wagner produced a "marvellous mountain-range" on the thought forms.


[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Eileen Campbell, J.H. Brennan and Fran Holt-Underwood, Body Mind & Spirit: A Dictionary of New Age Ideas, People, Places, and Terms, Tuttle Pub, ISBN 0-8048-3010-X
  2. ^ Source: http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/07/planet-of-lost-children-part-one.html (accessed: Friday January 19, 2007)
  3. ^ The Bardo Thodol, Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State is erroneously attributed the title The Tibetan Book of the Dead) describes the experiences of bardo.
  4. ^ Source: http://www.eoni.com/~visionquest/library/glossary.html (Accessed: Monday, 26 February 2007)
  5. ^ Source: http://mysticcauldron.com/dictionary2.html (Accessed: Monday, 26 February 2007)
  6. ^ As Lawlor (1991: p.36) evocatively codifies:

    The great ancestral beings were vast, unbounded, intangible, vibratory bodies, similar to fields of energy. They created by drawing vibratory energy out of themselves and stabilizing this energy and by specifying or naming - the inner name is the potency of the form or creature. The comparable image is the creation of sounds, words, or songs from the vibration of breath. Aborigines refer to the Dreamtime creation as the world being "sung" into existence.

  7. ^ The concept of the simulacrum (simulacrae is plural) is attributed to Plato and first meant a copy for which no original exists or a significantly degraded copy. It denoted this for Plato. In the conceptual realm, it may be considered that all things originate in their ideal form. As they manifest in actuality, in material form, they are deemed to be imperfect due to the medium or , matter-conduit.
  8. ^ No endorsement or perpetuation unchecked of gendered language herein.
  9. ^ The ' geat demon' mentioned herein is cognate with Mahamaya. Essentially, Mahamaya (great illusion) both blinds perception to the realm of samsara and liberates the view in the realisation of non-duality.

[edit] References

  • Unknown Compiler (Undated). Quotes from the Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul on Thought-forms (the title of website. Source: http://home.thirdage.com/Spirituality/rainbowbridge1/thougtforms.html (accessed: Friday January 19, 2007)
  • Bailey, Alice (1951). A Treatise on White Magic or The Way of the Disciple (Hardcover). Lucis Pub. ISBN 0853300232 & ISBN 978-0853300236 Source: http://home.thirdage.com/Spirituality/rainbowbridge1/thougtforms.html (Accessed: Friday January 19, 2007)
  • Beer, Robert (1999). The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs (Hardcover). Shambhala. ISBN 157062416X, ISBN 978-1570624162
  • Gold, Peter (1994). Navajo and Tibetan Sacred Wisdom: The Circle of the Spirit (Paperback). Inner Traditions. ISBN 089281411X, ISBN 978-0892814114
  • Houston, Jean (1982). The Possible Human: A Course in Extending Your Physical, Mental, and Creative Abilities.
  • Houston, Jean (1987). The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Mythology and Sacred Psychology.
  • Houston, Jean (1996). A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story.
  • Houston, Jean (2000). Jump Time: Shaping Your Future in a World of Radical Change.
  • Wolf, Fred Alan (1994). The Dreaming Universe: a mind-expanding journey into the realm where psyche and physics meet. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-74946-3
  • Perkins, John (1994). The World Is As You Dream It: Shamanic Teachings from the Amazon and Andes. Rochester, Vt.: Park Street. ISBN 0-89281-459-4 [4]
  • Lawlor, Robert (1991). Voices Of The First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal dreamtime. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, Ltd. ISBN 0-89281-355-5
  • Lovelock, James (1995). The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth ISBN 0-393-31239-9
  • Schmidt, Marcia Binder (Ed.) (2002). The Dzogchen Primer: Embracing The Spiritual Path According To The Great Perfection. London, Great Britain: Shambhala Publications, Inc. ISBN 1-57062-829-7 (alk. paper)
  • Padmasambhava & Kongtrül, Jamgön (transl. Erik Pema Kunsang) (1999). The Light of Wisdom (Vol. 1). Boudhanath: Rangjung Yeshe Publications. (A translation of the Lamrim Yeshe Nyingpo)
  • Eileen Campbell, J.H. Brennan and Fran Holt-Underwood, Body Mind & Spirit: A Dictionary of New Age Ideas, People, Places, and Terms, Tuttle Pub, ISBN 0-8048-3010-X
  • Norbu, Namkhai (2002, revised). Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. Snow Lion Publications. ISBN 1-55939-007-7
  • Haselhoff, Eltjo H.(). The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles: Scientific Research and Urban Legends ISBN 0-285-63625-1. Full text version on Google Books [1]
  • Thomas, Andy (2001). Scientific Studies “Confirm Crop Circles Are Made By Balls Of Light” - 31/07/2001. Andy Thomas is a principal part of Swirled News

[edit] Further reading

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Many authors and artists have since used tulpas in their works, both in the context of fiction and in writing about mysticism. Horror author Clive Barker, for example, envisioned his famous "Candy Man" killer to be nothing more than a myth gone terribly awry in his original story.

[edit] The Tulpa and Popular Culture

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Many authors and artists have since used tulpas in their works, both in the context of fiction and in writing about mysticism. Horror author Clive Barker, for example, envisioned his famous "Candy Man" killer to be nothing more than a myth gone terribly awry in his original story.

[edit] Television

  • In the X-Files episode Arcadia (6X13), the president of the homeowners' association for an exclusive gated community uses a tulpa to enforce the neighborhood rules; those who repeatedly violate the guidelines meet a grisly fate at its hands.
  • The Supernatural episode Hell House (1.17) features a haunted house in which the resident malevolent spirit turns out to be a tulpa, created when the beliefs of thousands of website visitors are focused through a Tibetan sigil painted on one wall of the house.
  • In the So Weird episode PK (or Tulpa). Fi meets a little boy who is troublesome and it is caused because of a Tulpa he creates. He thinks it is an imaginary friend but Fi tells him it's some type of energy he created and helps him solve it.
  • In Tears of Kali by Andreas Marschall, an entity becomes an evil murderer that can't be controlled.

[edit] Literature

  • In Nightingale's Lament by Simon Green, a tulpa in the image of John Taylor's client is sent after him at one point, tracking him by a hair the client left on his jacket; it disappears when the hair is destroyed.
  • In Every Which Way But Dead by Kim Harrison, 'Tulpa' is the focus word used to create a three-dimensional circle in someone's imagination, used to hold an overflow of power.
  • In American Gods by Neil Gaiman, various deity-like beings are created through cultural belief, a certain society's perception of, say, Odin, creating a form of that god particular to that society.
  • In It by Stephen King, the eponymous entity's various manifestations are given form and power by the belief of the townspeople.
  • In Outcast by Lynne Ewing, the main character, Kyle, is confronted and pestered by a tulpa of his own creation, that convinces him that he is his lost twin brother.
  • In Grant Morrison’s Marvel graphic novel ‘Fantastic Four 1234’ (2002) Reed Richards muses on a fictitious journey to Tibet where, with the help of Bön priest, he creates a Tulpa, a “thougtform”. After Richards names it ‘Victor’ the Tulpa takes on a life of its own, becoming Richards’ opposite number. This was an alternative, fantastical, origin for Richards’ arch enemy Dr Doom (aka Victor Von Doom).
  • According to the book The Teachings of Don Juan Matus, a Mexican shaman by the name of Don Juan Matus, who had taught his student Carlos Castaneda, the books author, about the true nature of the physical universe and how intense concentration can summon, apport, and even materialize objects out of thin air. It was said that Carlos Castaneda was able to materialize a living squirrel on the palm of Don Juan's hand based on the latter's instruction.[11] Many of his claims have been disputed by members of the anthropological profession.[12]
  • In Secrets & Mysteries of the World by Sylvia Browne , chapter 7: Tulpas, explains brief story of old Tulpas and new Tulpas from England.
  • In The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel, the author alludes to several ghost and UFO sightings as likely being tulpas.
  • In Las Ruinas Circulares by Jorge Luis Borges, the hole tale is about the creation of a tulpa that become evil and dangerous.
  • Smith, Russell James (2003). Tulpa. Writers Advantage. ISBN-10: 0595274900 / ISBN-13:978-0595274901 (a work of fiction)

[edit] Video games

  • In the RPG (Role-Playing Game) Over the Edge, Tulpas are used as background characters (NPC's). They are also have natural enemies, sociopathic individuals called Sandmen, who prey on them to create either "Nightmare" (a drug) or "Dreamweb" (gossamer webs that can capture dreams from people). Dreamweb are typically used to capture the nightmares of neurotic individuals, which are also sold as something like a drug.
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