Word of the day
Jan. 4th, 2025 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kathleen_daileyLast week I was watching one of those paranormal shows on T & E--the one where people send in their vids of allegedly supernatural beings, events, etc. A pundit on the show suggested that the creepy, wispy humanoid thingy skulking around a viewer's driveway (and recorded on the viewer's Nest cam) might be an "egregore." She defined it as an entity created by the collective psychic energy of plant or animal life in a local environment--the theory being that the forests, for example, surrounding the rural house might perceive humans as horrific all-destroying monsters and thus create a visible entity with their angry, terrified energy.
I looked up the word (whose definition wasn't precisely the same as the TV commenter's) and realized that I already knew about a similar but not identical concept--not a gestalt entity, but an individual manifestation: a tulpa, or thoughtform.
I learned about tulpas around the time that TNG was in its heyday, when a Data-obsessed friend informed a group of us that she had encountered a Datalike tulpa while carrying her groceries up the icy stairs to her apartment building. He asked her if she needed help with her parcels, and then he obligingly assisted her. That was it--no further conversation or interaction. I've no idea whether he disappeared in an eerie interdimensional mist or was transported to the 24th century.
I should say that my friend was a serious-minded, left-brained professional not given to delusion or recreational drug use. Although she knew a lot about Buddhist cosmology, she wasn't a practicing Buddhist. When she told the story, the other members of the group were mostly like, "Hmm, interesting. Do you think the spaghetti sauce is done yet?" so the conversation petered out. (Why? You'd think a firsthand report of a tulpa would be Big News.) But I've never forgotten her story, and I'm still half-wondering whether her obsession with Data was powerful enough to make the entity materialize on her doorstep.
Anyway, I know a new word now. The things you learn on trash television ...
I looked up the word (whose definition wasn't precisely the same as the TV commenter's) and realized that I already knew about a similar but not identical concept--not a gestalt entity, but an individual manifestation: a tulpa, or thoughtform.
I learned about tulpas around the time that TNG was in its heyday, when a Data-obsessed friend informed a group of us that she had encountered a Datalike tulpa while carrying her groceries up the icy stairs to her apartment building. He asked her if she needed help with her parcels, and then he obligingly assisted her. That was it--no further conversation or interaction. I've no idea whether he disappeared in an eerie interdimensional mist or was transported to the 24th century.
I should say that my friend was a serious-minded, left-brained professional not given to delusion or recreational drug use. Although she knew a lot about Buddhist cosmology, she wasn't a practicing Buddhist. When she told the story, the other members of the group were mostly like, "Hmm, interesting. Do you think the spaghetti sauce is done yet?" so the conversation petered out. (Why? You'd think a firsthand report of a tulpa would be Big News.) But I've never forgotten her story, and I'm still half-wondering whether her obsession with Data was powerful enough to make the entity materialize on her doorstep.
Anyway, I know a new word now. The things you learn on trash television ...
