Some thoughts on thoughtform-creation

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (Albus Dumbledore in the last Harry Potter book)

(TW: warning for some weird occult stuff that can be pretty dark. )

Long ago, in what can be seen as a previous incarnation of my current  occultmergent-series, I had a post that should have kicked off a serieus called ‘reclaiming supernaturalism’, that in the end only lasted a few posts. But that first post was an interesting one, that got responses from some people in the ’emerging church’ dialogue even. The question I explored in that first post  was something like ‘where do spiritual beings like angels and demons come from in an evolutionary creation’, a question I will go back to more comprehensively in a future post, but part of the answer might be an idea that I then didn’t even know about and which I will explore in this post: the creation of thoughtforms.

What are thoughtforms
It’s not that easy to provide a good defintion of thoughtforms, also because some sources do have their definition built upon rather specific views of the universe, which is often the case with new-age and occult stuff. The explanations can be sometimes contradictory, and the jargon can be quite diverse and sometimes just unreadable or weird (see here,  here, here, here, & here for example. If you feel the urge to read those links, don’t get too weirded out and don’t follow instructions for creating them please!) I will try to give a simple understanding of the idea that isn’t tied to a very specific tradition and that could work in my own worldview…

Most basically a thoughtform is a being that ’emanates’ from strongly projected human thoughts. Or in other word, a being created (consciously or unsciously) by human very strong human will. (hmm…) If you’re still reading now we will look together at what this could mean…

Thoughtforms can be created by one person on purpose (like a tulpa or a servitor) or sometimes accidentally, or come up from a collective thought (an egregore). They can still need the person or group that created them and only exist for them, or in some cases get a life on their own and even become ‘gods’ (note the small letter ‘g’ here, we’ll speak about that later) according to some occultists.
(Let’s not here once more  that the terms can be quite diverse in their use, and they sometimes do get mixed-up in different writings… It’s not an exact science with standard definitions and SI-units…) But the basic idea is that the thouhtform is more or less a spiritual being that’s created by humans, and not a conjured demon or other spirit. Thouhtforms created for a purpose are sometimes destroyed after they did what they were made for btw.

But let’s start with the beginning to see what exactly what I mean…

tulpa
The first example of thouhtforms is the so-called ‘tulpa’, a word that comes from  Tibetan Buddhism and according to wikipedia stands for a “magic formation generated by a powerful concentration of thought, or a materialized thought that has taken physical form. It is created through meditation and a process of intense concentration and visualisation. The story of Alexandra David-Neel who saw the monks doing this and did her own experiments and created a tulpa that was hard to get rid of later is an example.

But not only buddhist monks are in the business of creating tulpas. The website www.tulpa.info , which describes tulpas as just a ‘psychological phenomenon‘ can teach you hou to create your own tulpa, and defines them like this:

A tulpa is a consciousness that is very much like your own, in that has its own opinions, preferences, personality and so on. It can communicate with you, can have its own form, and can understand you like no one else could. It can give you second opinions on things and come up with original ideas of its own. A tulpa lives inside your brain, very much like you do.
(here is a longer description)

Now, what is interesting here is that tulpas, while they are described as a ‘psychological phenomenon’, don’t always seem to stay just in the imagined world of one person, but sometimes seem to interact with other people too. Using this technique to make an ‘imaginary friend’ might end up with a being that seems neither and is hard to get rid of, as Alexandra David-Neel experienced if we believe her story.

Smurfette was created by Garamel to punish the smurfs, but the original recipe is too misogynist to publish here…

servitors
The word servitor launches us back into the occult jargon, and more specific in the shady realm of chaos magic. A servitor is more or less a created spirit-being that is created to aid the magician in a certain way. What shocked me is how easy it is with the internet to find a lot of ‘how to’ manuals to create such things. (To which I will not link now, I linked enough weird stuff already) A servitor is created, and sometimes destroyed when it fulfilled its purpose, but it sometimes can break free from its creator and get a life on its own. (hmm, reminds me of another story, of God creating humans beings…)

A note can be made here on the creation of thoughtforms on purpose. Usually a very strongly projected will and visualisation are used as we have seen already, in combination with an altered state of consciousness or trance, as the meditation of the Tibetan monks provides. In Chaos magic this is called a state of ‘gnosis’, and the used rituals have not much more purpose than getting into this state.
(Unconsciously made thoughtforms are probably made in a trauma or other very extreme experiences, and will not just come up under normal circumstances)

Lower progenitors of thoughtforms
If we use the classification of chaos magic, we can go up from here to egregores (thoughtforms emanating from a group that we’ll talk about next) but also go lower. A servitor is supposed to have some kind of personality or at least agency, but there are lower forms of ‘projected thought’ that do not create such things at all, like sigils (I don’t advise you to go experimenting with those) and actually just strong habits. The (re)programming of habits in NLP (sometimes used in the advertisement industry) could be seen as a very rudimentary progenitor of thoughtform-creation then, or at least a primitive form of chaos magic.  In the same way can a meme (yes, a concept invented by Richard Dawkins himself) seen as simple non-occult rudimentary form of an egregore.

Egregores
An egregore (sometimes spelled egregor or egrigor) is, according to wikipedia, “ an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. The symbiotic relationship between an egregore and its group has been compared to the more recent, non-occult concepts of the corporation (as a legal entity) and the meme.”  It’s not that wikipedia is generally the best source for information on the occult, but I do think this is a good definition.

The simplest form is just the group mind, collective thoughts of a group, corporation of church, or the strange ‘atmosphere’ some groups can have. So we can use the word more generally in a way that does not have to imply that a ‘psychic  entity’ is formed, but the word is also used for the psychic entity that can behave like a thoughtform going wild and doing its own will, and modern magicians have their own views on egregores, and how to use them for their own purposes.

Godforms
If we go further in the line of thought followed by chaos magic, we get a being that’s powerful enough to function as a god with small letter g. A god is thus seen as a a very powerful thoughform created by a tribe for example, and all rituals and worship do indeed make it stronger. It does not seem so unrealistic for example to see the tribal gods of the OT Canaanite people as such. (This also might explain why in some fiction deities (or Japanese kami) need followers and worship to be powerful.)

Now that we’ve gone through all of this you should be able to read this weird story about the time-stretching servitor Fotamecus (I recommend reading it as fiction, although it certainly wasn’t meant to be written as such. ) and see how the hierarchy of thoughtform-like beings from sigil to servitor to egregore and finally godform functions in the thought of chaos magic. And even though this seems not the darkest example of modern magick, I still don’t recommend experimenting with it, kiddo’s…

So, that was my exploration of the thougghtform, which stayed neatly in the theoretical realm. Note that all of this has just been a exploration of how those things are seen in certain occult traditions and how it COULD work, not a ‘. It seems very plausible to me that such things can exist in some form, but do I believe that thoughtforms are the sole explanation for all spiritual creatures, including the one we call the Christian God? Not at all, when it comes to the Creator the roles are switched, and we and all of creation could be seen as thoughtforms created and sustained by Gods thoughts… I also don’t see this explanation as an explanation of anything spiritual, even if it could explain a lot of things from certain ‘ghosts’ and ‘imaginary friends’ up to some cases of encouters with aliens(?) and certain ‘gods’. We humans are not the creators of everything that’s out there. Spiritual beings could be an emanation of other energy sources in nature for example, or independent creatures from God (no matter if the bioloical part of the universe did evolve or not), or even something completely different…

So, what do you people think?
Pure nonsense or is there something to is?

peace

Bram