Found this among blog drafts from a while back, involving an unusual book, A Gathering of Selves, by Alvin Schwartz. Thought, why not post it now? The book is a nonfiction adventure story involving numerous nonordinary events, revolving around the author’s relationship with a tulpa. The tulpa, named Thongden, is a man of extraordinary consciousness and abilities, who was initially created directly from the honed imagination of a monk in Tibet.
That’s right; Thongden wasn’t born; he was manifested as a flesh and blood adult, the product of a human mind in focused meditation, and is now functioning in the world like anyone else. As long as a human thinks about this tulpa, the tulpa continues to exist! (It’s no secret those isolated monks in the Himalayas often have incredible skills; is a tulpa a monk’s proxy in society?) This is just the tip of the iceberg of experiences Schwartz writes about in this tale. If you’re up for a mindbending account of parallel lives, life-threatening adventures in the remote, frozen altitudes of Tibet, identities and reality systems that fluctuate in accordance to the flow of thought, and events that are not organized in “time” but rather magnetized into occurance via interdimensional coordination, this book could be for you.
The story begins with Schwartz’s concerns about his tendency to lose money. He’s successful enough making it, but the problem is with keeping it, investing it wisely, etc. It comes up that perhaps therapy might help him understand the source of this situation. He is refered to a therapist who might be a good fit for him, because he has had quite a few unusual ‘mystical’ experiences in his life, and this particular therapist is a bit of a mystic himself. Turns out, this therapist is the tulpa. So, even though the “therapy” takes place in metropolitan Florida, the practices Thongden employs are more “Don Juan-ish” than traditional. Schwartz’s wild ride really takes off in Thongden’s mysterious office.
It’s not my intention to recap this whole story (doubt I could if I tried!)… but something in it struck me as a thread worth considering regarding abundance in its various forms. (What better time to entertain a greater sense of possibility than the beginning of a new year… and a new administration?) Schwartz is told by a monk along the way that habitual anger creates walls. (Actually, there are numerous vignettes in the book about consciousness causing actual material events beyond all normalcy.) The suggestion was that Schwartz’s unresolved anger (which he poured into his fictional writing, but didn’t take on directly to heal in himself… did I mention he wrote both the Superman and Spiderman comic strips for decades?) erected walls between himself and financial security. The anger provided fodder for good storytelling, but was never processed in any useful way for Schwartz personally. (Could I have crammed any more parentheticals into this paragraph???)
I pondered this idea of obscure, unconscious anger blocking the ability to create what we want… and it expanded into considering any habitual negative emotion or personality trait blocking the flow of anything desired. Is there a core “anger” (or fear, or — conversely — arrogance or selfishness) that derails that delicious alignment, making what we want challenging to maintain, even when we’re able to “finesse it in,” in the first place?
BTW: A new page up today as well: a power-packed affirmation you may wish to try.
Winging with Whitehawk 