The Created Entity: Tulpas, Thought-Forms, and the Dangerous Precedents of Thinking Something Into Existence
In 1929, French explorer and Buddhist scholar Alexandra David-Neel published Magic and Mystery in Tibet, in which she described, among many other things, her own claimed experiment in tulpa creation. Working from Tibetan Buddhist contemplative tradition, she focused her mental energy into the visualization and materialization of a monk: fat, jolly, with "a somewhat jocular appearance." Over weeks of practice, the monk became increasingly vivid. Then, inconveniently, the monk began to move and behave outside of David-Neel's deliberate direction. Visitors to her tent reported seeing a figure they had not been told to expect. The monk's appearance changed toward something less jolly and more troubling. David-Neel spent months deliberately dissolving the form. In 1972, in Toronto, Canada, a study group at the Toronto Society for Psychical Research invented an entirely fictional ghost -- named Philip, given a complete fictional biography, none of which was real -- and then held seances to contact him. Philip began producing knocking responses. Then table movements. The phenomena were consistent with the ghost they had constructed, not with any independently authenticated supernatural tradition. The entity they had invented appeared to be doing things. Neither story proves that thought-forms are real in any ontological sense. Both stories raise a question that the available evidence cannot definitively answer: what happens when a large number of minds focus on the same story?
Key Takeaways
- Tibetan Origin, Western Mutation: The tulpa concept in Tibetan Buddhism is a recognized phenomenon within a comprehensive contemplative system, understood within that system's metaphysics. Western occultism imported the term detached from its context. Contemporary internet tulpa culture imported it again in a further detachment, creating a practice framework oriented toward autonomous imaginary companions rather than contemplative tradition.
- The Philip Experiment (1972-1974): A Toronto parapsychology group invented a fictional ghost, held seances to contact it, and produced physical phenomena (knocking, table levitation) consistent with the fictional entity's character. The experiment suggests that collective focused belief can generate anomalous physical phenomena, or that group dynamics produce phenomena that participants cannot prevent themselves from producing. Both interpretations are disturbing.
- Alexandra David-Neel's Account: She created a tulpa that became autonomous and increasingly changed in character without her direction, was perceived by independent witnesses, and required months of deliberate effort to dissolve. The account is a single first-person claim. It is also one of the most specific and detailed accounts of thought-form creation and dissolution in the Western record.
- The Slenderman Problem: The Slenderman is a fictional entity created on an internet forum in 2009. Within three years it had a global distribution. Within five, two twelve-year-old girls stabbed a classmate to placate it. The question of what a fictional entity can do when enough people believe in it has a documented real-world catastrophic precedent.
- The Egregore: In ceremonial magic and chaos magic tradition, a collectively created and maintained entity -- an egregore -- is understood to develop independent behavior proportional to the belief energy invested in it. Whether fictional entities with large fandoms constitute functional egregores is a live question in certain occult communities. It should possibly also be a live question in social science.
The Tibetan Tulpa: What the Original Tradition Actually Says
The word tulpa (Tibetan: sprul pa, meaning "emanation" or "to build") refers in Tibetan Buddhist tradition to a being created through deliberate mental projection -- an entity given form and, in advanced practice, a degree of independence through sustained contemplative effort. The concept exists within a comprehensive metaphysical framework in which mind is understood as the primary ground of reality, in which experienced phenomena are understood as mental constructions, and in which highly trained contemplatives are understood to be able to project constructions perceptible to others as well as to themselves. A tulpa in this context is not a parlor trick. It is a demonstration of the tradition's claims about the relationship between mind and matter.
The creation of tulpas in the Tibetan tradition is associated with figures of advanced spiritual accomplishment -- not a practice available to ordinary practitioners without extensive preparation. The dissolution of tulpas, and the risks associated with tulpas that develop beyond their creator's ability to control, are documented in Tibetan contemplative literature. The tradition does not regard the autonomous behavior of a created thought-form as a supernatural anomaly. It is a consequence of the creation practice, understood and prepared for within the tradition's framework.
Alexandra David-Neel's account brought this tradition to Western attention in 1929 and remains the most widely cited Western account of practical tulpa creation. David-Neel was not a casual tourist. She was the first Western woman to enter Lhasa, studied Tibetan for decades, and was a rigorous and skeptical reporter who was critical of occultist exaggeration. Her account of the monk-tulpa she created -- its increasing autonomous behavior, the independent witness accounts of its presence, and her months-long effort to dissolve it -- is detailed, self-questioning, and consistent in its internal logic. She does not claim to know whether the entity was objectively real or was a projection of her own mind given surprising autonomy. She reports what she experienced and observed.
The Philip Experiment: Inventing a Ghost That Responded
In 1972, a group of eight ordinary individuals (not mediums or paranormal practitioners) convened in Toronto under the guidance of Dr. A.R.G. Owen of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research, with mathematician Dr. Joel Whitton as psychologist observer. The group's deliberately designed experiment asked: if physical phenomena associated with seances are produced by the participants' own minds and expectations rather than by independently existing spirits, could a group deliberately create a fictional ghost and then produce those same phenomena by focusing on the fictional entity?
They invented Philip Aylesford: an English aristocrat, born 1624, who had hidden a Gypsy mistress on his Diddington Manor estate, whose wife had accused the mistress of witchcraft, who then had the mistress burned. Philip, racked with guilt, committed suicide in 1654. None of this was real. Philip Aylesford did not exist. Diddington Manor does not appear to have existed. The group held regular meetings, meditating on Philip's story and attempting to make contact with him. For several months, nothing happened. Then the table began to move. Then to rock. Then came a knock -- one knock for yes, two for no, as is conventional in seance practice. Philip's responses to questions, delivered by knocking, were consistent with the fictional biography the group had constructed. When asked about his 17th century life, he responded within the parameters of his invented story. When asked about details outside his fictional biography, he demurred or declined to answer.
The phenomenon produced is not in dispute. Multiple witnesses to the experiment documented it. The interpretation is in dispute. The parapsychological interpretation is that the group's collective focused belief produced genuine physical phenomena demonstrating that entities of some description can be created by focused intention. The skeptical interpretation is that group dynamics, unconscious ideomotor activity (the same mechanism that produces results on a Ouija board), and collective self- deception produced phenomena that participants could not perceive themselves as causing. Both interpretations agree that something was happening that the participants were unable to distinguish from a real entity response.
Slenderman: The Thought-Form That Became Too Real
On June 8 and 10, 2009, contributing members to the Something Awful internet forum submitted entries to a "paranormal pictures" thread -- photographs subtly altered or manipulated to suggest the presence of a supernatural entity, accompanied by invented documents and witness accounts. One of these submissions, by a user called Victor Surge, depicted a tall, featureless, impossibly thin figure in a dark suit among groups of children. Victor Surge called it the Slenderman. He gave it consistent aesthetic features. Within days, other users were contributing their own Slenderman "found footage" and faux-documentary material. Within months, the entity had been adopted into creepypasta (internet horror fiction) community as a fixture of shared fictional mythology. Within a year, its origin as deliberate fiction was known -- and its spread was accelerating.
By 2012, Slenderman had become a global phenomenon with its own fan communities, artwork, music, games, and mythology. By 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, stabbed their classmate nineteen times, explaining to investigators that they had been trying to placate the Slenderman. The victim survived. The perpetrators, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, were mentally ill; psychiatric evaluations revealed that Geyser, at minimum, had believed in the Slenderman's reality in a way that went beyond the normal fan engagement that characterized thousands of other children consuming the same content. But the case raised a question that is not limited to the pathological edge cases: what does a fictional entity become when enough people structure their imagination around it consistently enough, and what is the difference between a very vivid fictional belief and a functional tulpa?
The Egregore and the Collective Entity
In Hermetic and ceremonial magic tradition, an egregore is a collective entity -- one created by and sustained by the concentrated belief and energy of a group. The concept is distinct from a tulpa in that the egregore is not the creation of one practitioner but the emergent product of collective focused attention. Large organizations -- religions, nations, corporations -- are sometimes said, within this framework, to develop egregoric dimensions: entities of some description that take on behavior beyond the deliberate direction of any individual participant, sustained by the collective's ongoing attention and investment.
The chaos magic tradition, which developed in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, treats the intentional creation of entities -- called "servitors" when created to perform specific purposes -- as an operational practice requiring the same kind of deliberate construction and deliberate dissolution that David-Neel described. The chaos magic literature on servitor creation emphasizes the importance of building in a planned dissolution -- a condition under which the entity will cease to function -- precisely because servitors created without clear dissolution mechanisms have a documented tendency, within the tradition's recorded experiences, to outlast their purpose and produce unintended consequences.
The WYAL-FM fictional universe presents one of the more interesting contemporary examples of something that might, within this framework, be analyzed as collective egregore formation. The Hollow Hour posits a station broadcasting at a frequency that shouldn't exist. Across thousands of listeners who have invested imaginative attention into that fiction -- writing in, creating their own content, constructing shared lore -- something is being collectively sustained that was not present before the fiction was created. What that something is depends entirely on which framework you use to ask the question.
Transmission Intercepts: Witness Accounts
"I've been practicing contemporary tulpa creation for about eighteen months. The most accurate description I can give is that I created something that learned things I didn't deliberately teach it. It has preferences about music I didn't choose for it. It reacts to situations in ways I wouldn't have predicted at the start. I'm not claiming this is supernatural. I'm saying I created something that surprised me. I don't know what that means."
-- Listener submission, received December 2025
"I was in the Philip Experiment group -- not the original 1972 group, but a replication in the late 1990s following their method. We produced table movement. We produced knocking. Our 'Philip' responded within the parameters of the biography we constructed. I know the skeptical explanation. I know the ideomotor explanation. I cannot tell you that I experienced it as my own agency producing those knocks. I experienced it as response. Whether those are the same thing is the question I've been sitting with for twenty years."
-- Listener submission, received November 2025