I know a real, live, tenured professor who believes in tulpa. He once told me how a friend wrote a fiction story, only to have an improbable event from the story happen after it was finished. It was not something over which he had any control. Tulpa is a concept from eastern religions that suggests a being of pure thought or imagination might take on reality. Writers, who create characters all the time, are perhaps engaging in tulpa. We are creating, literally, as well as figuratively. I like the concept. Many writers know the sensation of the character who refuses to behave. A person that you make up does not what you want her to do, but what you know she shouldn’t do. It’s like having an adult two-year-old. This same professor friend once told me that ideas may be created by a collective consciousness, and writers are those sensitive enough to capture those ideas that are floating freely in the ether. (To be fair, he didn’t ...
Blog of a struggling writer.