Blog of a Chaosian witch

I listen to music a lot when I do rituals, helps me get in the right headspace and drown out background noise. I usually go for instrumental or ambient music because lyrics can be distracting but not always. If you don’t find it distracting it can be a nice addition but I don’t think it makes a huge difference one way or the other.

Honestly cultural issues aside, messing around with tulpas is bad fucking news. You’re basically intentionally giving yourself DID. 

The ideas surrounding Tulpas all pretty much go back to Alexandra David-Neel. She brought over the idea based on some ideas in Tibetan mysticism and magic. The idea most closely corresponds to western “Thought Forms”. Fear of DID is definitely an issue. 

For some background:

https://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/tulpa-creation/alexandra-david-neel-comments.htm

One of the reasons it was used in Buddhism is that it trained you into having the insight that the “mind-stuff” you associate as “self” is not actually you. By building a deity, and experiencing this deity as one’s self you come to two realizations:

1. The thoughts, sensations and experiences you have are not fundamentally *YOU* and in fact are just arising and passing away of experiences, sensations and thoughts. This is seen in Kabbalah as all things being created from Kether moment to moment. The next realization which comes from that is that if all of these experiences moment to moment arise from the source of creation then, well, so does your inner experience, therefore you must exist in a non-dual world, a world where you are one with all creation/creator. 

2. You can change thoughts, sensations and experience through the power of concentration. So much so, that it can effect the world around you.

Here is Shinzen Young describing the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WtPrOE1JSk

The tulpa isn’t so much the end goal. The tulpa is the project you work on to come to a realization or pass the final course. The destruction of the tulpa/thought-form is in realizing that this is the way all thought-forms work that you are allowing dozens or hundreds of these little bastards to tell you who you are, what to do and what to experience all the time, and then not allowing them any more of your creative-vital-power.

Never said magick couldn't fuck you up. Never said it couldn't put you in hospital. Like you, I've seen that.

Honestly cultural issues aside, messing around with tulpas is bad fucking news. You’re basically intentionally giving yourself DID. 

The ideas surrounding Tulpas all pretty much go back to Alexandra David-Neel. She brought over the idea based on some ideas in Tibetan mysticism and magic. The idea most closely corresponds to western “Thought Forms”. Fear of DID is definitely an issue. 

For some background:

https://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/tulpa-creation/alexandra-david-neel-comments.htm

One of the reasons it was used in Buddhism is that it trained you into having the insight that the “mind-stuff” you associate as “self” is not actually you. By building a deity, and experiencing this deity as one’s self you come to two realizations:

1. The thoughts, sensations and experiences you have are not fundamentally *YOU* and in fact are just arising and passing away of experiences, sensations and thoughts. This is seen in Kabbalah as all things being created from Kether moment to moment. The next realization which comes from that is that if all of these experiences moment to moment arise from the source of creation then, well, so does your inner experience, therefore you must exist in a non-dual world, a world where you are one with all creation/creator. 

2. You can change thoughts, sensations and experience through the power of concentration. So much so, that it can effect the world around you.

Here is Shinzen Young describing the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WtPrOE1JSk

The tulpa isn’t so much the end goal. The tulpa is the project you work on to come to a realization or pass the final course. The destruction of the tulpa/thought-form is in realizing that this is the way all thought-forms work that you are allowing dozens or hundreds of these little bastards to tell you who you are, what to do and what to experience all the time, and then not allowing them any more of your creative-vital-power.

I am actually really disappointed to discover that apparently most people who promote a psychological model of magick seem to use it to invalidate magick as a phenomena. I am a trained scientist and psychologist and it was studying psychology that added sense and validation to the magickal experiences I had already had. (This is just a bare bones description btw, I honestly don’t have the time to write my whole thesis on the matter and encompass everything).

I learnt that all reality is perception. With enough time and tools a person could literally put an electrode into my brain and change the way I experience the world, changing my identification of colour, taste etc. As shown by brain damage studies, even a slight shift to the grey matter can change a whole person.

I also learnt that we do not experience the same things as anyone else. Cognitive bias, the amount of cones in your eyes, social and cultural upbringing and chemical balance (plus pretty much every other extraneous variable) mean that you and your friend can be looking at the same thing and experiencing it completely differently. The only reason we seem to experience the same things is down to communication and the use of common language. It is through language and society that we construct general realities on various scales and levels. None of them universally true, everything just the constructed stories of the people experiencing it.

So considering that your reality is literally whatever you brain perceives and that can be manipulated, and it is entirely different for each person, your personal reality isn’t real. There is no universal truth. I don’t mean this in a nihilistic way, I mean that you are ultimately in control of what you choose your reality to be. Change the way you think about a thing and it creates new pathways in the brain. Make it a habit and you get strong connections of neurons. These connections feed your confirmation bias. Want the world to be a nicer happier place, start believing it is and you will start to pick up on all the good things. There are studies that show that when depressed, access to positive memories is difficult and confirmation bias is skewed heavily towards negative experiences. Want more magick in your life, start practicing and it will come.

The advantage that I find in the theory that all reality is subjective is that it doesn’t matter if other people think that magick or my God is real, all that matters is how I interpret my experiences of them. I do magick, it works, I believe, I continue to practice. I am touched by my Deity, I believe, I worship, I get gifts and knowledge. Doesn’t actually matter if my God is a positive delusion, or my higher self, or a transdimentional alien or me from the future or the actual God of Magick. What matters is how I choose to interpret them as I am the one experiencing it. It is my life, my perception, my reality. I can turn fear into glorious enlightenment, sadness into lessons, anger into wisdom and peace simply by changing my perception. It leaves no room for doubt but loads of room for questioning and exploration.

You experience everything through your brain and thoughts, change them and you change your whole reality. For me, God is real, magick is real and I have met others who experience these things. We don’t experience stuff in the same way, and the use of language for such paranormal experiences is often diverse and lacking universal conformity, but description of experience is similar enough for me to know that these are things within the realms of human reality as well as personal reality.

For me this is the true psychological model of magick. I never said that living this way was easy though and I have had a lot of therapy and a lot of shadow work to get to this point. I am not neurotypical and I am also a spoonie as well as an abuse survivor, so I do understand the struggles of rewriting how you think. But I find that spiritual practice aids in that, it gives purpose and hope and is very empowering. I do love Jung and would suggest the Red Book to everyone, even if in the end he tragically rejected the deep magick within himself.

For anyone looking for more info on the concept described here go to Google Scholar and type in things like Social Constructionism, Cognitive Bias, Personality and brain trauma, etc. If you really want then DM me and I will go dredge up some references.

Fantastic points! Perception of reality, cognition and physiology all help build and sustain a narrative within the mind. When I was in college for psych I learned quite a bit on how useful psychological systems are for behavior change. Changing the experience, the narrative or the mind in some way changes your personal experience of reality. We only get to experience our personal reality as everything is experienced within awareness. All true, all verifiable.

More under the line…

I certainly agree with your car analogy. Perception is how we interpret experiences that are filtered through the physical and yet the physical is not all there is. Within my model although I use the mechanics of the brain, when I talk of thought and the thing that is interpreting reality I am talking of consciousness, of us as the ghost in the shell. We do not exist solely as the body. The body is a casing for the energy/ spirit/ consciousness. But we are hardwired into that casing and always return to it until it is truly gone. So despite the spirit being able to perceive we still tend to try and interpret our reality though our previous physical experiences and the language associated with it. Even if adventuring in the astral most people talk of using the physical senses and tend to take on a human shape. Considering how our brains work this is not surprising as it makes coping with existence easier as we have less to worry about if we retain the shape and physical rules. This does however mean that once we are severed from the physical our experience of reality will be entirely different.

And on that point, other entities that exist to us only in energy / spirit form will probably never be accurately perceived or interpreted by us due to the physical vs non-physical experience. How we see other entities is filtered through our understanding of reality, and that understanding is based on the shared reality of being a human. Having experienced entities and spirits they become part of my reality. Knowing others have experienced them makes them part of variously labelled shared realities. These things exist for us in ways we can perceive and presumably they exist for themselves in ways we can’t even comprehend. A lot of our ability to interpret things is caught up in language and that grew from the physical.  

Look - this is what they never tell you.

He is pulling me. To my ribs, to my spine, to my very soul.  I can feel the threads of him in my nervous system. It is a song that cannot fade, that will not relent. It is a siren symphony that DEMANDS I follow.  I belong to him. I cannot resist. I long ago said “yes”, and therefore, “No” is nonexistent.

He’s the one who wears the crown of horns. He is the one who dies and is reborn in our flesh - the flesh we feed on his remains. The flesh devoured by the wolves of winter. He is the Ever-new Stag, the forest-god, the high king. The Lord of Living and Dying. Every tale you have ever read of every king you have ever been willing to kneel to is an echo of his vast, perfect, nature. I die before his gaze, I am enriched by death.

These are the words of the Horn-wearer, who long ago was known by many names. By Cernnunnos, by Dionysus, by Pan, by Osiris, by Set. These are the words of the fleshless, for he stripped them to bone. The Words of Papa Guede, of Holy Death Himself.  Isn’t he perfect? Isn’t he lovely?

I may not come back. Drunk, ecstatic, inflamed on his passion. I may go into the woods, and I may not come back. I may rip off my skin and die in the leaves. He may take me, and may keep me. I can’t stop my fingers, this is not me. It is him. Please, please, those who are meant to hear… hear him.

And I don’t care. As I lay me down to sleep, I pray my soul my Lord to keep, and should I die before I wake, I pray my Lord my soul to take.

I love him, and this, and what happens after (for I am overly fond of it). He clears my veins so that I can type to you, piss-drunk on enough alcohol to choke a mule. He is the fire that burns, and the light that illuminates. He is the Devil and the Lover, and The Power in Sacrifice.

I rock back and forth with the kinetic FURY of his power.  I cannot be still. He calls me. I am slipping, I can FEEL him. I AM him.

Don’t you understand? I cannot stay. I cannot sit still. This is the darkness that gave birth to light, and the shadow which defines it. The savagery behind the femme guise.  He will take me. If not in body, then through spirits. I am become the god who comes.

When you bray into the night what you want to be, that is what you ARE. They are listening, my god they are listening. Any word you speak they will hold you to as Oath. Please tread only where you must - where you have to or else your soul cannot thrive.