Jul 20, 2016 06:38 PM
Jul 21, 2016 01:10 AM
Quote:David-Néel wrote of the tulpa's ability to develop a mind of its own: “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."
Fiction authors sometimes speak of characters that take on a life of their own, trying to deviate from the original outline of the story. It might figuratively be like a new software program running on a brain, sharing space with the original or dominant personality. Doubtless some long-lived sock puppets on the web are akin to one of those literary character templates leaving the static state of traditional print to dynamically interact with the online world itself, parasitical on its author host's body. Dissociative identity disorder might be an extreme level of the "parallel software" actually taking over a body temporarily.
Quote:David-Néel 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-Néel raised the possibility that her experience was illusory: "I may have created my own hallucination," though she reports that others could see the thoughtforms that have been created.
Children can be commiserative with whatever identities and fantasy world their fellows are assuming and acting out. Like boys reacting to being shot at with pretend machine gun fire or running from a bear that's invisible to all but them. But it's certainly not confined to that age range. Comedians that improvise in groups either hang onto that tendency or resurrect it in adulthood: "Go along with whatever your fellow actor introduces into the scene; accommodate and add to it rather than reacting against his/her idea."
In a sense: As an intellectual entity or information pattern, the "meme" of the tulpa might be migrating to other minds to be temporarily parasitical on their imaginations.