Tulpa

Origins

The word tulpa comes from the Tibetan term sprul pa, which can mean 'phantom' among other meanings. European mystical explorers developed the Western understanding of tulpas independently of its original Tibetan uses. A researcher named Hale connected tulpamancy to religious prayer due to similar techniques, noting that replacing 'God' with 'Tulpa' in the book 'When God Talks Back' would be 80% applicable to tulpamancy.

Theosophy and thought-forms

In the early 1900s, theosophists connected the Mahayana Buddhist idea of the emanation body, known as a tulku, to the concepts of the tulpa and the thoughtform. They kept a difference between tulku and tulpa, but they blurred the line between a tulpa as a religious emanation and one created by a magician as a worldly phenomenon. Their final understanding of the tulpa was distinct from both of these earlier ideas.

Annie Besant, in her 1905 work Thought-Forms, sorted thoughtforms into three groups: those shaped like their creator, those that look like objects or people and can be inhabited by nature spirits or the dead, and those that show inherent qualities from the astral or mental planes, like emotions. The word thoughtform also shows up in Evans-Wentz's 1927 translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and in Western magic. Some people have described the Slender Man as a tulpa-effect, resulting from the combined thoughts of many individuals.

William Walker Atkinson, an occultist, wrote in The Human Aura that thoughtforms are simple ethereal objects that come from a person's aura, created by their thoughts and feelings. In Clairvoyance and Occult Powers, he explained that skilled occultists can produce thoughtforms from their auras to serve as astral projections or as illusions only visible to those with awakened astral senses. The spiritualist Alexandra David-Néel said she saw Buddhist tulpa creation in 20th-century Tibet. She called tulpas magic formations made by intense concentration of thought.

Alexandra David-Néel

She believed a tulpa could gain its own mind, comparing the process to a child leaving its mother's womb. She claimed to have made a tulpa in the form of a jolly Friar Tuck-like monk that later became independent and had to be destroyed. She also admitted her experience might have been an illusion, saying she may have created her own hallucination, though she insisted others could see the thoughtforms she made.

Tulpamancers

Influenced by 1990s and 2000s television and cinema, the term tulpa came to refer to a type of willed imaginary friend considered sapient and autonomous by practitioners. Online communities on 4chan, Reddit, and Discord, calling themselves tulpamancers, gained popularity when adult fans of My Little Pony began discussing tulpas of characters from that series, using meditation and lucid dreaming techniques to create imaginary friends. Surveys by Samuel Veissière explored the community's demographic, social, and psychological profiles, finding that practitioners believe a tulpa is a 'real or somewhat-real person'. Active participants number in the low hundreds per community, with few known in-person meetings, and belong primarily to urban, middle-class, Euro-American adolescent and young adult demographics, with most citing loneliness and social anxiety as incentives.

93.7% of respondents said involvement with tulpas had made their mental condition better and led to new sensory experiences. Some practitioners have sexual and romantic interactions with their tulpas, though this is controversial and typically regarded as taboo. Practitioners believe tulpas communicate in ways they sense do not originate from their own thoughts, and some report hallucinations of seeing, hearing, and touching their tulpas.