planet of lost children part one

Planet of Lost Children (Part One)

But between you and me they were really dupes of the Wicked King

Who wanted to rob the children of their dreams - T Bone Burnett

When I was a young boy, before I could have a hand in my room's

decoration, there was a strange piece of art hanging on the wall

opposite my bed. It was a copper-like bas relief, about a foot high,

of a stereotypical Chinese labourer, grinning in mid stride. When the

door was open, I couldn't see it from my bed.

I thought about it a lot. I wondered whether, behind the door and out

of sight, he was still striking the same pose. I began to imagine

another life for him, and other purposes. I thought, when I would

leave a messy room and return to find it tidy, it must have been the

man on the wall picking up after me. (When I shared the theory with my

mother she was understandably annoyed that I hadn't first considered

that it might be her.)

Now the thing is, on at least one afternoon, while I lay on my bed, I

saw this figure as a life-sized man, step out from behind the door and

stare at me. (He waved.) And I accepted this, since I'd already

imagined more for him, and he seemed kindly enough. And of course, I

was just a child.

I hadn't thought of this for many years, because like so many wonders

it just didn't fit, and it didn't do anything for me now. But then I

thought about tulpas, "imaginary friends" and the naturally altered

states of children, and how they have always been regarded as totems

of strong magic. And at last it did something.

Explorer and initiate Alexandra David-Neel introduced to the West the

Lamaist practice of thought-form creation in her book Magic and

Mystery in Tibet. She writes, regarding her own efforts at tulpa

creation:

Besides having had few opportunities of seeing thought-forms, my

habitual incredulity led me to make experiments for myself, and my

efforts were attended with some success. In order to avoid being

influenced by the forms of the lamaist deities, which I saw daily

around me in paintings and images, I chose for my experiment a most

insignificant character: a Monk, short and fat, of an innocent and

jolly type.

I shut myself in tsams and proceeded to perform the prescribed

concentration of thought and other rites. After a few months the

phantom Monk was formed. His form grew gradually fixed and lifelike

looking. He became a kind of guest, living in my apartment. I then

broke my seclusion and started for a tour, with my servants and tents.

The Monk included himself in the party. Though I lived in the open,

riding on horseback for miles each day, the illusion persisted. I saw

the fat tulpa; now and then it was not necessary for me to think of

him to make him appear. The phantom performed various actions of the

kind that are natural to travelers and that I had not commanded. For

instance, he walked, stopped, looked around him. The illusion was

mostly visual, but sometimes I felt as if a robe was lightly rubbing

against me, and once a hand seemed to touch my shoulder.

The features which I had imagined, when building my phantom, gradually

underwent a change. The fat, chubby-cheeked fellow grew leaner, his

face assumed a vaguely mocking, sly, malignant look. He became more

troublesome and bold. In brief, he escaped my control. Once, a

herdsman who brought me a present of butter saw the tulpa in my tent

and took it for a living lama.

I ought to have let the phenomenon follow its course, but the presence

of that unwanted companion began to prove trying to my nerves; it

turned into a "day-nightmare". Moreover, I was beginning to plan my

journey to Lhasa and needed a quiet brain devoid of other

preoccupations, so I decided to dissolve the phantom. I succeeded, but

only after six months of hard struggle. My mind-creature was tenacious

of life.

(Also, and mentioned previously here, Philip K Dick talks about tulpas

and Disneyland, and a supposed ghost in Greenwich Village resembled

"the Shadow," the fictional creation of the deceased author whose

house it "haunted.")

Now, with respect to imaginary friends, on "Baby Center's Ask the

Experts" a mother writes:

"My four year old has an imaginery friend called Cheeney who is 16 and

lives in England (apparently). Strange seeing we live in New Zealand

i.e. the other side of the world. Sometimes what she comes out with

scares me too, but mostly I just put it down to an active imagination,

and she certainly has that! Sometimes my husband does get annoyed

holding the car door open for a long time so all her "friends" can

come out. He has even closed the door on a few - oops!"

Of course, so long as the imagined friend remains unexperienced by

others, there is not much to concern us here. As David-Neel wrote

regarding her tulpa, "There is nothing strange in the fact that I may

have created my own hallucination. The interesting point is that in

these cases of materialization, others see the thought-forms that have

been created."

For what they may be worth, here are a couple of recent and possibly

relevant posts on the "Unexplained-Mysteries" forum which similarly

elevate the mystery.

From "chaoszerg":

When i was a child my mom and dad apparently heard a voice talking to

me while i was asleep at the time i had a imaginary friend so this

frightened my mom because of the voice so we moved and it never

happened again.

And "ShadowLady":

When my little brother was between the ages of 3 and 6, he had an

imaginary friend named "Bill". I actually heard my brother talking to

his "friend" and then his "friend" answering back. We had all kinds of

weird things happen in our house and we always blamed Bill. My brother

is 24 now and he still swears that Bill was real, that he could see

him and hold conversations with him. FREAKY!

Finally from I Used to Believe ("the childhood beliefs site"), this

contribution from "Frances Ames":

I was a very lonely little girl when I was 5 years old and lived on

Toronto Island at Hanlan's Point. I wished real hard for some new

friends, my age, to play with when we all went to the beach, a few

hundred yards from our house. An old man came and said here is 2

friends for you to play with. They will grow as you grow. They will

stay with you as long as you don't tell anyone their names. Well, I

was so happy. I would build things in the sand and they would too. I

used to talk to them and my mother would pester me and asked who I was

talking with. I finally told mom who they were. Dingus and Tardar.

They went away and never came back. My 5 yr. old cousin saw them too.

He let me know that after we became age 60. He told me the old man's

name was Pookie. True story.

In The Field, Lynne McTaggart writes that EEG studies of the brains of

children under five show that they "permanently function in alpha mode

- the state of altered consciousness in an adult. Children are open to

far more information.... In effect, a child walks around in a state of

a permanent hallucination." Alpha waves appear to bridge the conscious

and the subconscious. For much of our waking adult life, we don't have

a decent bridge.

If childhood is a naturally liminal state, then perhaps much of what's

called High Magick amounts to the attempt to recreate its conditions.

(You say Tulpa, I say Imaginary friend.) Or in other words, a subset

of occult science may amount to the recovery of power nascent to

childhood. And what, I wonder, does this have to say about the child

victims of mind control and ritual occult abuse?

It's late, and I'm afraid it's sketchy, but I'll have to finish this