Therapeutic Tulpamancy

And: The Ideological Habit Of Not Seeing Truths Because Yucky People Do Too

From Etsy

I was delighted to learn that my interview last week with Father Jamie Franklin on the Irreverend podcast — the UK’s top Christian podcast — topped the Christian podcasting charts in Britain last week. Here is a link to the Irreverend site, which has my interview, “The Old Gods Are Returning”.

(For more about the return of the gods, check out my post from last year about the pastor Jonathan Cahn’s eye-opening book about how we are welcoming back ancient Near Eastern gods that Christianity’s triumph exiled.)

What excites me particularly about this response is that almost all of the things Jamie and I talked about are in my upcoming book, Living In Wonder (pre-order, dollinks). This suggests to me that there is a great hunger for this material. Last week, at the Areté Academy, I learned from some young British female Christians that “manifesting” — the New Age practice holding that if you think about something hard enough and want it to be true, it will come true — is massive among women of their generation. I am realizing that not only am I, personally, really unschooled in what’s happening religiously with the younger generations, but many, many Christians of my generation and above (Boomers) are utterly clueless.

Over the weekend, I learned that there’s an academic book out called Believing In Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural, co-edited by Diana Pasulka and Simone Natale. It came out a few years ago, but I just stumbled upon it. It’s a collection of academic essays about the various ways digital culture and the paranormal intersect. Yesterday I jumped to the chapter about tulpamancy, written by a scholar and historian named Christopher Laursen. You’ll recall my item last week about so-called tulpamancers — people who deliberately create what they believe are sentient, independent beings (tulpas) that live inside themselves. Here’s a TEDx talk about them. Turns out that Laursen did a study of them and their world — and oh boy, it’s really dangerous and insane. Let’s dive in.

Laursen dates the emergence of the tulpa phenomenon to 2009, when in online forums, some people began to experiment with the idea that if they directed their imaginations with sufficient concentration, then over time, they could manifest their own tulpas. They did this not just for fun, but also for therapeutic reasons:

Tulpas were perceived to be independent, self-aware, sentient beings within their minds and bodies. Since then, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of online users have created tulpas out of curiosity, for companionship, to develop a more confident sense of self, and to help them cope with life’s challenges.

It won’t surprise you to learn that tulpamancy has taken off among anxious, lonely nerds. I had to stop during my reading of the piece yesterday to reflect on what it felt like to be an anxious, lonely, bullied nerd in ninth and tenth grade. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons with fellow nerds, and it was a wonderful release from the unhappiness of our lives in school. I remember one night, though, trying to fall asleep, but unable to do so because I kept thinking about the next thing my character would do in our adventure.

Then it hit me that I spent a lot of time living out that character in my imagination. Even then, at age 14, I sensed that there was something … off about the amount of time I spent living in this imaginative world. I thought that night lying in bed that I preferred to live in my character’s world than in the miserable world in which I actually lived. Back then, there was a social panic among some people about D&D players getting so into the game that they would lose contact with reality. I believed then (and still do) that that’s mostly nonsense … but it’s not complete nonsense, because the anxiety and loneliness of my early teenage life was so strong that the idea of living in this fake D&D world was very, very appealing.

I tell you this because remembering it made me feel some sympathy with the nerds who get sucked into tulpamancy. Laursen makes two important points: 1) tulpamancy emerged out of a technological space that made it possible to think these thoughts with others; and 2) tulpamancy is gaining therapeutic approval. He writes:

Motivated by personal experiences, new forms of social advocacy are emerging from the online tulpa community, which proposes that human identity is not fundamentally single or unitary. It can be plural—that is, more than one identity can reside in one person. Sometimes there can be many identities. Plural advocates emphasize the healthful and positive aspects reported by many practitioners in online message boards, YouTube videos, blogs, and research surveys. Tulpa creation and plurality arrived precisely because avatars, anonymity, and, perhaps most crucially, inward-focused creativity and collaboration in online environments enabled radical, free-form identity experimentation.

The internet acts as an intermediary to realize people’s desires for companionship, which are practiced online in so many different ways, from dating apps to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). In this case, people discover online that they can create their own companions (tulpas), from which a new way of being (plurality) has emerged. Crucially, online interactions facilitate the establishment of plural identities. This suggests that online spaces that foster tulpa communities go beyond a mere communication platform. They are participatory spaces in which supernatural or trans-human possibilities are evaluated and repurposed.

Most tulpamancers believe what they’re doing is purely materialistic, and therapeutic:

Message board users aim to healthfully enable more than one identity within a single body, a practice that harkens to shamanism, mediumship, and channeling, but is framed by most tulpamancers as a purely psychological tool. Through the internet, in defining and theorizing their practices, tulpamancers attempt to shift the “supernatural” into the “natural” register. Most significantly, they promote their practice as a way to overcome depression, loneliness, and other issues of mental well-being.

Read on:

As mentioned, a major idea emerging from the online tulpa communities is that one human mind can voluntarily and healthfully host multiple identities or consciousnesses. Tulpas are intentionally created to be close and trusted companions, beings in whom hosts can confide. Hosts believe that through their imagination, within their minds and bodies, they are creating new forms of consciousness—new life that is both sentient and sapient in that they are self-aware and they bring insights that positively reshape the lives of their hosts.

For example, there is a technique called possession in which the tulpa takes control over parts of the host’s body, such as using the host’s hands to type messages onto the message boards or in the chats that enable tulpas to interact with the world at large. Not all hosts learn or permit possession. Many solely intermingle with their tulpas in an imagined world, dubbed the mindscape.

Either the tulpa is a wholly psychological phenomenon generated by the mind, or it is an unusual way of allowing a demonic spirit to take possession. Or perhaps both. It is at best a sign of great mental disturbance, and at worst a sign of evil spirits inhabiting a person’s body. Whatever the case, it ain’t good.

More:

Imposition is a challenging practice in which hosts sense the tulpa in the real world, “hallucinating them into sensory perception.” That is, the hosts begin to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch their tulpa in the real world.

You are probably thinking: these “hosts” who can encounter tulpas with the senses have become truly delusional — that is to say, mentally ill. Bigot! Don’t you know this is healthy? That this is a way the Internet helps us heal ourselves, and to extend the celebration of diversity? Read:

The new media scholars Katie Davis and Howard Gardner note that in this globalized, networked era, “youth enjoy greater freedom to adopt and rejoice in identities that were either unknown or scorned in decades past”— sexual orientations, racial and cultural backgrounds and blends, and, as this study shows, plurality. Online message boards have provided forums for geographically separated, similarly marginalized individuals to work through those complex identity and social issues themselves.

Yes, that’s the new frontier in diversity: affirming “plurality” — the existence of multiple selves. And why not? Tulpamancers report that these entities help them live better lives:

Vampire [online pseudonym of a tulpamancer] writes that his tulpas Samuel, Raven, and Ivy can see his most intimate memories and listen to his thoughts, and therefore they know him “better than anyone else can, sometimes even yourself.”

The possessed-by-tulpas community want you to know that they are happier this way:

Experiential testimonials support Veissière and Isler’s findings, showing how self-improvement is consistently reported among plural systems.

One more line:

Beyond paranormal conceptions and pathological assumptions, through online communities and advocacy, plural systems are positioning themselves to redefine human identity.

We know the script, don’t we? This is going to become the next frontier of identity politics. Tulpamancers and those with “plural identities” are going to become the new transgenders, demanding recognition and rights. Psychiatry is going to tell us that there are therapeutic benefits to tulpamancy, and that we must all recognize that tulpamancers and other pluralists are living their “true selves.” The future writes itself in this decadent culture.

It is becoming undeniable that digital technology is destroying what Charles Taylor calls the buffered self. This is good in one sense, as it makes us better able to perceive and participate in spiritual reality. But it is very bad in another sense: if we de-buffer the self unwittingly, or without recognizing the need for filtering structures, we invite in all kinds of nasty things. Yesterday I added some material to the manuscript of Living In Wonder to point out that all the things that anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann discovered that one should do to “make God real” can also be used to make false gods (either wholly delusional beings, or demons) real. If you seek out re-enchantment, you will find it — but it might be evil re-enchantment.

I’ve cued this 2013 interview with Tanya Luhrmann to the point where she talks about how, early in her training as an anthropologist, she fell in with a witch community in Britain. Click here to watch it. She wanted to understand how this community — which included some Cambridge degree-holders — framed and experienced the world. She talks in the interview (and in the book she wrote about it) about how she took their nine-month witch course, which required doing certain imaginative exercises. After some time, she saw a horned god, and saw ghostly druids. Luhrmann tells her interviewer that she is not making an ontological claim about what truly exists; but she does say that she experienced these things. Not only that, but she realized that the practices that the witches use to make their spiritual world “real” are a lot like what Evangelical Christians she studied do. One thing I remember from reading Luhrmann’s recollections of her time with the witches: she said that once she started to “see” like the witches, then the world was filled with meaning.

This is re-enchantment. You can do it the Christian way, or some other way — but it’s coming. You all know where my commitments lie. If Christian clerics and laity don’t understand the radical nature of this cultural moment, and the role that digital technology is playing in demolishing the citadel of the buffered self (which includes the received model of modern Christianity), we are going to be lost.

About that “received model”: back in 1994, I was sitting on the front stoop of my apartment on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC — on A Street, NE — drinking beer with my housemate and the two young women who lived next door. One of the women was an ardent progressive, and the daughter of a prominent Presbyterian clergyman. I had been down in Louisiana reporting a story of a haunted house and its cleansing through the work of a psychically gifted Cajun Catholic grandmother and an exorcist. I mentioned that part of the problem were two wooden idols that the widowed homeowner and her late husband had purchased in rural Indonesia, or a journey there. It turned out that books would fly off the shelf where the idols sat. When, at the exorcist’s order, the widow burned the idols and buried the ashes, the bookshelf once again became calm.

K., the neighbor, said that she and her housemate, who was also sitting there drinking beer with us, had been recently having drinks in a hotel lobby somewhere downtown, when a man who presented himself as an African diplomat came over and started talking to them. He left them with two wooden tribal masks as gifts. The women had placed them on the mantel of their house. A few minutes later, K.’s housemate, S., went into her place to get more beer, and screamed. The two wooden masks had flown off the mantel and were lying across the room.

The women were scared to death. With their permission, I took the masks and threw them in the sewer opening at the end of our street. They were pretty shaken up. Later, though, K. remembered her liberal Protestant convictions, and accused me of taking advantage of them to get rid of art that they liked. She pretty much ended our friendship then, not wanting to be too close to a “fundamentalist Catholic.” Oh well, I thought — but I did not think I had done the wrong thing. K. did not want to live in a world in which wooden objects used in animist rituals could be the bearer of malign spiritual power. For one frightening evening, the inexplicable movement of those tribal masks had demolished the materialist liberal Protestant model that buffered K.’s world. She had to quickly build it back, or other things in her life would lose meaning.

Once you have experienced the world of spirit — either the Holy Spirit, or one of His emissaries, or evil spirits (though you may not recognize them as such) — it is hard to go back to normality. I guess K. did it, but in order to accomplish that, she had to deny the reality of what happened that night, and exile me from her life — because I would not agree with her that it had not happened.

I said this up above, but let me emphasize it here: I believe that over the next decade, we are going to see the emergence of therapists who both affirm tulpamancy (a form of dissociative identity disorder) and even recommend it as a form of therapy for troubled clients. This will follow the same track as transgenderism. If it doesn’t, it will only be because transgenderism was able to latch on to the power and the authority of the Sexual Revolution, whereas tulpamancy can’t. On the other hand, if self-created, self-curated identities continue to grow in popularity, then how will society defend itself against their spread, given that the grounding in reality (biological reality) that served as a barrier to the normalization of gender dysphoria will have been demolished.

To put it bluntly, if you have already agreed that a human being with male chromosomes and a male body is a woman, because he says he is, how do you deny a tulpamancer his multiple identities — especially if psychologists say these identities are helping the person deal better with life?

Final point: the tulpamancers are not entirely wrong about “reality” being to some extent socially constructed. Again, Luhrmann explains, from her field work, the ways that communities make their spiritual beliefs “real”. I experienced in a very minor way last week, at the Areté Academy, how powerful it can feel to be in a room full of people in worship, knowing that they all share belief in the God of the Bible. I’m not sure why that moment for me was more viscerally powerful than church most Sundays, but it was. It was not the form of worship — that particular form (“praise and worship song”) is off-putting to me normally. Maybe it was just the way I was feeling that morning. Maybe it was having talked to some of these young people, and knowing how sincere they are in their faith. Or maybe the Holy Spirit was present in a potent way. Whatever it was, I experienced during that prayer service a strong sense of confirmation and belonging to a Christian community. It was a grace, and it reminded me of Luhrmann’s point about how important it is to be part of a community that shares a “faith frame”.

Yesterday I spent some time with an atheist friend. We talked about morality. I really like this friend, and in talking to her, I realized how she is as “fundamentalist” about atheism and the Myth of Progress as I am about Christianity. (I don’t like the word “fundamentalist,” which is usually used as a pejorative description of someone who really believes what a religion teaches.) As we talked, I kept thinking about Luhrmann’s protocols, and how my friend’s “community” is composed of people who share her “faithless frame,” you could say, and reinforce each others take on reality. This is not to say that she is wrong (though I believe she is), but simply that what she believes is objective reality is actually a subjective take that has been reinforced not only by her community of close friends and colleagues, but also by the broader culture in which she finds herself (she lives in a highly secular country). I look forward to our next discussion, not only because I enjoy her company, but because our exchange taught me something about how we construct our worldviews.

I’m pretty sure that both my friend and I would think the tulpamancers are crackpots. She would say they were merely mentally ill, while I would allow for the possibility that they have invited a form of spirit possession. However, both my atheist pal and Christian me are operating from a framework that regards “plural identities” as pathological. But what makes us right about that? I can make an argument from a Christian basis, but if you are a strict materialist, especially one who has accepted the legitimacy of transgenderism (meaning that you believe a man who says he is a woman, and who lives as a woman, really should be regarded ontologically as a woman), on what basis do you deny tulpas? Or, let’s say you don’t believe that trans women are truly women, but you believe that as a matter of justice, society should treat them as if they are women. On what basis do you draw the line at tulpamancy? After all, it wasn’t that long ago that gender dysphoria was regarded by medicine as a pathological condition. I’m not saying that secular materialism obliges you to validate tulpamancy — it doesn’t — but I am saying that if you validate trans, why not tulpas?

The Internet is running through liberal, individualistic Western civilization like a hot knife through butter.