August 2011 Archives

O! My gilded brain
locked within its paltry frame
It displays itself
in gleaming hints of brilliance
now revealed
now obscured
but most of all
a soup of neurons
about the size
of a middling ham.

~Lord Alfred "The Bastard" Wembsley

[You can read this yourself, or you can hear me read it to you: click here for audio in your earholes. I mean, if that's okay. I think we know each other well enough for that now, don't we?]


It's not so much that I go out of my mind, it's that my mind stops working. As though I flick on a light in the garage and POFF! out it goes. Which is, quite honestly, preferable to the manifold alternatives. I'd rather have that sort of inactive process than end up crawling around the parking lot one night looking for bugs to eat and mumbling something about "Eyes everywhere."



It remains, however, disconcerting when I attempt to engage with a task and instead realize that my normally compliant 1400 grams' worth of neurological machinery just isn't online. No neurons firing, no chemical messages leaping across synapses in their little molecular dance tights. Just a collection of small confused voices going bop...dop...delopp...sandwich?



It's quite different from being actually, you know, crazy. Modern Crazy has a certain cachet, doesn't it, especially for creative types. It's an offshoot of the 17th-century English cult of melancholia, which prompted people of means with pretensions of depth to have their portraits painted using skulls as props while looking very very sad. Sort of a post-Elizabethan proto-Emo.



Not long ago I complained about what I called The Flywheel: a brain that just wouldn't shut up, that kept up a constant chattering analysis, wielding a scalpel to dissect every relationship, and every action. This, now, is the opposite of that. Anti-anxiety. A heavy, chromed-steel wheel within my skull, at rest, with no gyroscopic force to keep me upright. I topple over to one side, top-heavy, thunking to the earth.



Then Memetic Tess brings me wine. Memetic Tess--she of the long thighs and the shapely calves--has been a sometime companion of mine for quite a long while now, although I didn't know her name until very recently. Beautiful creature, really, and entirely imaginary, which is a god-damned tragedy. She's lovely, in her tall but practical boots, her tight white pants, her voluminous blouse and her pith helmet, with wavy red hair spilling from beneath its brim. Always there to give me what I want even if it's nothing like what I need. She's an enabler, of course. All the best ones are, but we only regard them as the best because they don't push back. They don't make us uncomfortable, and they tell us we're doing all right while we're deep in the depths of our wretchedness and our dysfunction.



She is what various Buddhist traditions call a tulpa, and what Walter Evans-Wentz called a "thoughtform" in his 1954 English translation of The Tibetan book of the great liberation, which you might know better as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Of tulpas and thoughtforms, Evans-Wentz wrote:

In as much as the mind creates the world of appearances, it can create any particular object desired. The process consists of giving palpable being to a visualization, in very much the same manner as an architect gives concrete expression in three dimensions to his abstract concepts after first having given them expression in the two-dimensions of his blue-print. The Tibetans call the One Mind's concretized visualization the Khorva (Hkhorva), equivalent to the Sanskrit Sangsara; that of an incarnate deity, like the Dalai or Tashi Lama, they call a Tul-ku (Sprul-sku), and that of a magician a Tul-pa (Sprul-pa), meaning a magically produced illusion or creation.

I'm no Dalai or Tashi Lama, so I'm most probably a magician of my own psyche, which makes Tess a tulpa. Karl Jung enrobed the Tibetan concept within his own conception of universal archetypes, animus and anima, but Memetic Tess is mine, I think. She's not for sharing. And Jung, like his heirs who went on to develop systems such as Imaginal Psychology and Process Oriented Psychology, conceived of thoughtforms as unconscious creations. Tess was that way once, but she's not anymore. She's sitting across the room from me now, in my mother's lift chair recliner, every inch a sexy demon who's sprung from my own imagination. And she's got another glass of Chardonnay for me.


Tess isn't a particularly exotic creation. In addition to the Tibetans and Jung, such creatures were known to indigenous cultures throughout the world. The Cherokee, the Australian Aboriginals, and shamans everywhere know about this sort of thing. In the West Theosophists and New Agers alike have picked up on the same reality. The trouble, in these supposedly rational times, arises when we insist on treating these manifestations as ephemeral nonsense with no power, which tends to piss them off and make them stronger. I say it doesn't matter where my pith-helmeted demon has come from, she's here now and it would be rude to pretend that she isn't.



However, in another sense which utterly contradicts what I've just said--which I can do because I'm ever-so-slightly bonkers at the moment--it's vital to know her origins. I might be accused of shedding personal responsibility here, of displacing it onto some fictional phantasm so that I can go on doing things I know I shouldn't be doing. I say bullshit. Memetic Tess is my creation. I have total responsibility for her. I don't blame her for anything; her actions are my own. At some point--and she's giving me a coquettish look right now that is just killing me--I'm going to have to send her on her way, dissolve her, do whatever it is that one does to disperse a tulpa. Because as much as I adore her, as easy on my mental eye as she is, I know that she's something I made to hold my hand through the times when I'd run out of resources and my spirit was depleted. She doesn't judge, she only provides. That, and she looks gorgeous in a pith helmet, which is tough to pull off. I think the fact that she's very tall helps that a lot.



So. This is a bit confessional, isn't it? My world is full of demons! You can get locked up for that sort of thing. Tess isn't the only one, either, there are others, mostly nameless, but she's the most well-developed, and certainly the best-looking. In a very real sense, I love her. I also know that I've outgrown here. Tulpas don't change, they only become greater expressions of their essential nature. They're rather one-dimensional creatures, really. In the worst cases, they can destroy lives. In 1934's A Treatise on White Magic, Alice Bailey wrote:

A thought-form can also act as a poisoning agent, and poison all the springs of life....A violent dislike, a gnawing worry, a jealousy, a constant anxiety, and a longing for something or someone, may act so potently as an irritant or poison that the entire life is spoilt, and service is rendered futile. The entire life is embittered and devitalized by the embodied worry, hatred and desire....and is held back by the poison in his mental system. His vision becomes distorted, his nature corroded, and all his relationships impeded by the wearing, nagging thoughts which he himself embodies in form and which have a life so powerful that they can poison him.

Now, Tess herself is no poison. She cares for me, and she gives me the only medicine she can. But it's the medicine itself that is the poison. Sooner or later, I'll have to stop taking it. And then Tess, with nothing else to offer and no way to help me, will fade back into her nature, which is to say: back into the soup of consciousness from which she arose.



I'll miss her.

And then—I’m sorry, darling, don't pout--I'll manifest something new.

For podcasting purposes: Memetic Tess.

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