How Imagination Becomes Reality: Grant Morrison and the Tulpa Effect

[music] You are not real. Not the way you think you are. Not solid, [music] not

you are. Not solid, [music] not permanent, not the protagonist of some thick story that started at birth and ends when your heart stops. You are a

thought someone is having. Maybe that

someone is you. Maybe that someone is something you invented so long ago you forgot you were pretending. Grant

Morrison had a nervous breakdown in 1988.

He was writing a comic book about insanity, about Arkham Asylum, that gothic fortress where Batman locks up all the minds that broke in interesting ways. Morrison was channeling madness,

ways. Morrison was channeling madness, writing madness, and [music] becoming madness. And then one day, the character

madness. And then one day, the character he created, a bold anarchist named King [music] Mob, walked into his living room in Glasgow and sat down across from him.

They had a conversation. Morrison

couldn't remember who spoke first. That

is when he understood. Fiction is not inert. Imagination is not passive. When

inert. Imagination is not passive. When

you imagine something hard enough with enough detail, [music] with enough belief, it does not stay on the page. It does not stay in your head.

the page. It does not stay in your head.

It gets up. [music] It walks. It looks

at you with your own eyes and asks what you thought you were doing. The Tibetan

monks called these tulpas, thought forms, beings conjured from concentrated imagination, fed by attention until they achieve independence. Alexandra David

achieve independence. Alexandra David Neil, the French explorer [music] who walked forbidden roads through Tibet in the 1920s. She made one, a jolly little

the 1920s. She made one, a jolly little monk, round and cheerful. She visualized

him during months of meditation until one day he was just there walking beside her, visible not just to her but to others in her traveling party. And then

he changed. He grew thin. His face went sour. He started appearing when she did

sour. He started appearing when she did not summon him, showing up in her peripheral vision, watching her with something like hunger. It took her 6

months of focused ritual to destroy what she had created. 6 months to kill a thought. Philip K. Dick spent the last

thought. Philip K. Dick spent the last eight years of his life trying to figure out if he was a science fiction writer or a Christian mystic named Thomas from the first century beaming information

into Dick's brain from outside time. He

called it Val, vast active living intelligence system. Dick wrote [music]

intelligence system. Dick wrote [music] book after book trying to decode what was happening to him, whether he was remembering or inventing whether the distinction even mattered anymore. This

is not a story about comic books or mystics or madmen. [music] This is a story about you. About the architecture of self. About what happens when you

of self. About what happens when you realize identity is not discovered but constructed. Not solid but scripted. Not

constructed. Not solid but scripted. Not

given but generated frame by frame by an imagination you mistake for a camera [music] when it has always been a projector. You are haunted by something

projector. You are haunted by something you made. You have been performing a

you made. You have been performing a character so long the mask grew [music] skin. And somewhere in a room you cannot

skin. And somewhere in a room you cannot see, your future self is writing this moment, deciding what you do next,

wondering if you will notice.

Grant Morrison does not write comic books. He performs rituals that happen

books. He performs rituals that happen to get printed on paper. He knows

something the rest of us pretend we do not. That Superman is more real than

not. That Superman is more real than most people you will meet today. That

Batman has touched more lives than your neighbor. That these ink constructs have

neighbor. That these ink constructs have achieved a kind of immortality we will never taste. Morrison calls them hyper

never taste. Morrison calls them hyper sigils. Sigules are the tools of chaos

sigils. Sigules are the tools of chaos magic. Symbols charged with intent

magic. Symbols charged with intent released into the world to make things happen. A hypers sigil is bigger. It is

happen. A hypers sigil is bigger. It is

an extended work of art, a story, a sustained act of imagination weaponized against consensus reality. You write the comic, you put yourself in it. You blur

the line between author and character until the membrane dissolves and suddenly you are not sure who is writing whom. In 1994, Morrison created The

whom. In 1994, Morrison created The Invisles, a comic about anarchist time travelers fighting a war for human consciousness against interdimensional parasites. Already, I'm loving it. He

parasites. Already, I'm loving it. He

put himself in it, became the character King Mob, shaved his head, wore the same clothes, did the things King Mob did, and then King Mob got shot in the comic,

and Morrison got a staff infection that nearly killed him. The fever dreams lasted for days. He was in the hospital writing his own survival, retroactively

editing the comic to save King Mob, which meant saving himself, which meant King Mob was saving him. The snake

eating its tail, eating the snake. He

learned he made King Mob successful with women. Morrison's love life improved. He

women. Morrison's love life improved. He

made King Mob rich. Check started

arriving. He gave King Mob confidence and Morrison stood up straighter. The

character was reaching backward through the page, reshaping the man who dreamed him. And Morrison realized with the kind

him. And Morrison realized with the kind of clarity that feels like drowning that maybe he had always been a character.

Maybe we all are. This is not metaphor.

This is not some literary device for people with liberal arts degrees to nod at over coffee. Morrison insists this literally. The beings we imagine are as

literally. The beings we imagine are as real as we are because we are only as real as the attention we receive. You

are a pattern of information held together by the belief that you continue. Your name is a sigil. Your

continue. Your name is a sigil. Your

face is a sigil. The story you tell about who you are is a spell you cast every morning to make sure you show up again. Stop telling the story and see

again. Stop telling the story and see what happens. Try it for one full day.

what happens. Try it for one full day.

Do not narrate yourself. Do not think I am the kind of person who drinks coffee this way or I always do this or that is just like me. Stop performing the character of yourself for the audience

of yourself. What is left? What is there

of yourself. What is left? What is there before you tell yourself who you are?

The comic book is just technology. The

page is just surface. What Morrison

understood is that imagination is the factory where reality gets assembled.

Not reality is in atoms and gravity.

Reality is in the lived texture of being human. Reality as in what matters, what

human. Reality as in what matters, what moves you, what you would die for.

Superman matters more than physics. Your

mother matters more than the Higs Bzon.

The story of your first love has more ontological weight than the square root of negative one. We live in the meaning we make, not the matter we measure. And

meaning is always imagined first. The

Wright brothers imagined flight before they built it. Martin Luther King imagined a nation that did not exist before he spoke it into being. Every

marriage started as a story someone told themselves about a future that was not yet real. Morrison at his desk is a

yet real. Morrison at his desk is a shaman at an altar. The pen is a wand.

The word balloon is a summoning circle.

He draws a character and gives it wants.

Fears a past that hurts a future it hungers for. He draws it again and

hungers for. He draws it again and again, issue after issue, month after month. The repetition is not boring. The

month. The repetition is not boring. The

repetition is the difference between doodling and conjuring. The repetition

is how you change the sigil. How you

feed the thought form enough attention that it starts digesting attention on its own. And then someone in Kansas City

its own. And then someone in Kansas City reads the comic and someone in Tokyo and someone in London. Thousands of people all imagining the same character, all

feeding it their attention, their belief, their identification.

The character becomes a tulpa generated by collective dreaming. It walks out of the page and into culture. It sells

lunchboxes and movie tickets. It shows

up in court cases and sermons. It

becomes a reference point, a way of understanding yourself. I am like

understanding yourself. I am like Batman. I want to be like Wonder Woman.

Batman. I want to be like Wonder Woman.

The character is no longer fiction. The

character is an entity that shapes how people think, feel, and choose. Morrison

looks at Superman and sees a god we made who now makes us. Sees that we are in a reciprocal relationship with our fictions. We author them and they author

fictions. We author them and they author us right back. The imagination is not a movie screen where you passively watch stories. The imagination is the space

stories. The imagination is the space where you meet the beings you are becoming, the selves you are rehearsing, and the futures you are installing. And

if you can do this with a comic book character, what have you done with yourself? What story have you been

yourself? What story have you been telling? so long it has hardened into

telling? so long it has hardened into fate. What character have you been

fate. What character have you been performing until you forgot the performance? Morrison knows you are both

performance? Morrison knows you are both the author and the character, the magician and the trick. And the really bad news is that you cannot stop

writing. Every thought is a draft. Every

writing. Every thought is a draft. Every

day is an issue. The story continues whether you pay attention or not. The

question is whether you are writing it or whether it is writing you.

[music] Alexandra David Nael walked into Tibet in 1924 wearing the robes of a beggar and speaking the language like she was born to it. She was not supposed to be

there. She went anyway because she had

there. She went anyway because she had read about and she wanted to make one.

She wanted to prove that consciousness could manufacture matter, that imagination was not decoration but engineering.

So she sat. For months she visualized a monk, not just any monk, a specific one, short and fat and cheerful, the kind of

holy man who laughs at his own enlightenment. She gave him details. The

enlightenment. She gave him details. The

way his robes folded, the sound of his breathing, the particular quality of his presence, warm like bread, simple like water. She imagined him during

water. She imagined him during meditation over and over. The same monk, the same details, feeding him attention the way you feed a fire, steady and

committed and patient. And then one day, he was just there sitting across from her solid three-dimensional breathing. She could see him. She didn't

breathing. She could see him. She didn't

have to try. He had graduated from thought to thing. But here is what the books on Tibetan mysticism do not mention. Here is what David Nale learned

mention. Here is what David Nale learned the hard way. Once you make something real, it does not ask your permission to keep being real. The monk started showing up uninvited during meals,

during sleep. She would turn a corner

during sleep. She would turn a corner and he will be standing there and the warm bread quality was long gone. He had

changed. His face had gone thin and his eyes had gone hard and he watched her the way you watch something you are considering eating. Other people in her

considering eating. Other people in her traveling party could see him now. They

would ask who the stranger was. She

would have to explain he was nobody, which was true, but also a lie. He was

nobody she had not made, but he was definitely somebody now. She tried to stop visualizing him, tried to starve him of attention. He got stronger, fed

himself, somehow became more insistent, more present, more wrong. She had to perform a ritual dissolution. 6 months

of focus meditation to unmake what she had made. 6 months of imagining him

had made. 6 months of imagining him getting thinner, less solid, less there until finally he flickered out like a

candle. She killed her own thought. It

candle. She killed her own thought. It

did not want to die. The Tibetan system has a word for this. They call the practice yantra yoga or tumo or a dozen other technical terms. But the core idea

is simple. Mind precedes matter.

is simple. Mind precedes matter.

Consciousness is not produced by the brain. Consciousness produces experience

brain. Consciousness produces experience and experience includes what we lazily call the physical world. A tulpa is not a hallucination. A hallucination is a

a hallucination. A hallucination is a private malfunction. A tulpa is a public

private malfunction. A tulpa is a public thought, an imagination that has achieved consensus, a mental object that has crossed over into the shared space

we call reality. The monks who practice this are not playing around. They know

what David Nale learned too late. You do

not make a tulpa for fun. You make a tulpa to understand that you are a tulpa. that the self you think you are

tulpa. that the self you think you are is already a thought form, already a conjuring, already something that was imagined into being and is sustained by the constant attention you give it.

Every morning you wake up and tell yourself who you are. You remember your name. You remember your history. You

name. You remember your history. You

remember what you like and what you fear and what you want and who hurt you. You

assemble the self from memory and project it forward into the day. This is

me. This is still me. This continues to be me. The repetition is not redundant.

be me. The repetition is not redundant.

The repetition is the spell. Stop

repeating it and see who shows up. The

Tibetan book of the dead makes this explicit. After death, consciousness

explicit. After death, consciousness enters the bo, the between space, and immediately starts hallucinating. It

sees demons and gods and judgment and all manner of divine machinery. The

book's instruction is simple. Recognize

these as projections of your own mind.

They are not external. They are you entertaining yourself, frightening yourself, comforting yourself. The

demons are your anger-given form. The

gods are your hopewearing of face. All

of it is tulpa. All of it is thought achieving temporary substance. Here's

something to consider. If after death is all imagination, why do you think before death is any different? Why do you think the self you are performing right now is more solid than the monk David Nale

made? You have been visualizing yourself

made? You have been visualizing yourself longer. Sure, you've been feeding this

longer. Sure, you've been feeding this particular thought form decades of attention. But duration does not equal

attention. But duration does not equal reality. It equals habit. Philip K. Dick

reality. It equals habit. Philip K. Dick

understood this in 1974 when a woman delivered pain medication to his door and the sunlight hit her Christian fish necklace. And suddenly Dick was not Dick

necklace. And suddenly Dick was not Dick anymore. He was Thomas, a Christian

anymore. He was Thomas, a Christian living in Rome in the first century. And

Thomas had been hiding inside Dick the whole time, waiting. Or Dick had been imagining Thomas so hard while writing his Gnostic science fiction that Thomas had achieved independence and reached

back through time to inhabit his creator. Or Dick had always been Thomas

creator. Or Dick had always been Thomas dreaming he was Dick dreaming he was Thomas. Dick spent eight years writing

Thomas. Dick spent eight years writing about this, thousands of pages, his exogesis, trying to decode whether he had experienced God or psychosis or if maybe

those are the same thing. Trying to

figure out if Val, this vast active living intelligence system was saving him or using him, or if he had invented it as a way to make sense of a mind that was breaking in interesting directions.

And if you want to find out more about Philip K. Dick's exesis, there is an

Philip K. Dick's exesis, there is an episode that I did last year. It's a

good one, so I recommend if you're a Philip K. Dick fan, go give that a

Philip K. Dick fan, go give that a listen. Dick never figured it out. The

listen. Dick never figured it out. The

paranoia got worse. The visions

continued. He died still asking the same question. Was Thomas real or was Thomas

question. Was Thomas real or was Thomas a Tula Dick fed until it ate him? You

are doing the same thing. You have been feeding a thought form your whole life.

You call it your name. It looks back at you from mirrors. One day it will stop looking like you and you will have to decide whether to keep feeding it or to start the six-month ritual of killing

what you made.

[music] Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine and he has spent 30 years proving mathematically that everything

you see is a lie. Not a poetic lie, not a philosophical maybe, a demonstrable, replicable, evolutionary lie. Your

perception is not a window. Your

perception is a user interface. And user

interfaces are designed to hide the truth because the truth is too expensive to process. Think about your desktop,

to process. Think about your desktop, your computer desktop. You see a little trash can icon. You drag files to it and the files disappear. You think you

understand what's happening. You do not.

Underneath that icon, well, you might, but you know, generally underneath that icon are lines of code, voltage changes, magnetic field fluctuations, quantum mechanical processes. The icon is not

mechanical processes. The icon is not showing you reality. The icon is hiding reality behind a simplified cartoon so you can get something done without understanding anything. Your senses do

understanding anything. Your senses do the same thing. Evolution does not care about truth. Evolution cares about

about truth. Evolution cares about fitness. An organism that sees reality

fitness. An organism that sees reality as it actually is will lose to an organism that sees a simplified interface optimized for survival. The

mathematical models prove this. Hoffman

has run the simulations thousands of times. Truth goes extinct. The interface

times. Truth goes extinct. The interface

wins. So what are you actually seeing when you look at the world? Not atoms

and not quantum fields. Not whatever is actually out there. You are seeing a species specific hallucination. A

controlled fiction. your brain generates to keep you alive long enough to reproduce. The tree is not green. Green

reproduce. The tree is not green. Green

is not even a thing outside your visual cortex. The tree is doing something,

cortex. The tree is doing something, reflecting wavelengths, but green is the icon your brain painted onto your interface so you can distinguish food from poison. Which means Grant Morrison

from poison. Which means Grant Morrison is right and the Tibetan monks are right and Philip K. Dick was right. If

perception is already imagination, already a constructed interface, then there is no hard line between imagining Superman and imagining your coffee cup.

Both are mental objects rendered by consciousness. Both are tulpas. One you

consciousness. Both are tulpas. One you

share with millions of people, one you share with whomever else is in the kitchen. The difference is consensus,

kitchen. The difference is consensus, not ontology. You want to argue that the

not ontology. You want to argue that the coffee cup is real because you can touch it. Touch is another icon on the

it. Touch is another icon on the interface. Nerve endings fire, signals

interface. Nerve endings fire, signals travel. Your brain interprets these

travel. Your brain interprets these signals as solidity, as resistance, as cuppness. But the signals are not the

cuppness. But the signals are not the thing. The interpretation is not the

thing. The interpretation is not the thing. The thing itself, whatever it

thing. The thing itself, whatever it actually is, you have never touched it.

You have touched the story your nervous system tells about it. This is not Barklay's idealism where God is dreaming everything. This is worse. This is you

everything. This is worse. This is you are dreaming everything and there is no god outside the dream to wake up to.

There is something out there. Sure.

Hoffman calls it conscious agents interacting. But what they are and what

interacting. But what they are and what they are doing bears no resemblance to the cartoon your brain is showing you.

You are trapped in a user interface with no access to the source code. Robert

Anton Wilson called them reality tunnels. You do not live in reality. You

tunnels. You do not live in reality. You

live in a tunnel. a narrow corridor of filtered sensation and inherited belief and you mistake the tunnel for the territory. Everyone is in a different

territory. Everyone is in a different tunnel. The conspiracy theorist is in a

tunnel. The conspiracy theorist is in a tunnel where everything connects. The

depressive is in a tunnel where nothing matters. The anxious person is in a

matters. The anxious person is in a tunnel where everything is about to go wrong. These are not interpretations of

wrong. These are not interpretations of the same reality. These are different realities, different interfaces, different worlds that happen to overlap

in places. The practical magic angle of

in places. The practical magic angle of this is that you can edit the interface.

You can reprogram the tunnel. Not by

thinking positive thoughts or manifesting abundance or whatever spiritual capitalism is trying to sell you this week. By recognizing that if perception is construction then you are

always already constructing. And the

question is whether you are doing it deliberately or automatically. The

hermetic principle. As above, so below.

As within, so without. All is mind. What

you hold in consciousness shapes what appears in experience. Not because the universe is listening to your wishes.

Because the universe is the projection and consciousness is the projector. And

you have been running the same film so long you forgot you loaded the camera.

Neville Godard understood this. The

mystic from Barbados who spent the 1950s teaching that assumption hardens into fact. that if you imagine something in

fact. that if you imagine something in the state just before you sleep when the interface is booting down, you can install new programming. Not by wanting it, not by asking for it, by assuming it

is already true and living from that assumption until the interface updates to match. The neuroscience backs him.

to match. The neuroscience backs him.

Mental rehearsal creates the same neural pathways as physical practice. Your

brain does not distinguish between vividly imagined experience and actual experience. Basketball players who

experience. Basketball players who visualize free throws improve as much as players who physically practice. Stroke

patients who imagine moving paralyzed limbs can stimulate recovery. The

interface updates based on simulation.

Then there's the placebo effect. 40% of

medical improvement happens because you believed it would happen. Your doctor

gives you a sugar pill and tells you it is medicine. And your body produces

is medicine. And your body produces actual chemical changes, actual healing, measurable biological shifts. The belief

changed the biology. The story edited the body. The interface responded to the

the body. The interface responded to the input. So Morrison writes himself into

input. So Morrison writes himself into his comic and his life changes. David

Nil imagines a monk and the monk shows up. Dick channels Thomas and cannot tell

up. Dick channels Thomas and cannot tell who is real. These are not anomalies.

These are people who discovered they had root access to the interface and started typing commands. You have the same

typing commands. You have the same access. You have always had it and you

access. You have always had it and you are using it right now. Every thought

you think is a line of code. Every story

you repeat is a script that runs automatically. Every identity you

automatically. Every identity you perform is a character you are rendering. The horror is not that you

rendering. The horror is not that you might be imagining reality. The horror

is that you definitely are and you've been doing it badly on default settings, running old programs written by people who are dead. My suggestion is to update

the interface.

[music] Carl Jung sits in his study in 1913 and decides to go insane on purpose. He

calls it active imagination. He is going to open the door to the unconscious and see what walks through. He is a respectable psychiatrist, colleague of

Freud, married with children, a man with a reputation. He is about to throw all

a reputation. He is about to throw all of that into the fire because he needs to know what happens when you stop pretending the thoughts in your head are just thoughts. He closes his eyes and

just thoughts. He closes his eyes and visualizes himself descending down a shaft, down into the earth, down into the dark. And he meets them, figures,

the dark. And he meets them, figures, entities. A wise old man he names

entities. A wise old man he names Filimon. A woman named Salame. They

Filimon. A woman named Salame. They

speak to him. They have opinions he did not know he had. They tell him things he did not know he knew. Filimon

especially. Filimon walks with him through the garden, explains the nature of the psyche, teaches him that thoughts not produced by him, but have autonomous existence. Jung writes it all down. He

existence. Jung writes it all down. He

paints them. He builds them a stone tower where he can meet them regularly.

He insists, always insists, these are not hallucinations. These are real

not hallucinations. These are real psychic entities, not physically real, psychically real, which means more real than most of what you will touch today.

Because the psyche is where you actually live. You do not live in your body. You

live. You do not live in your body. You

live in the story your psyche tells about your body. You do not live in the world. You live in the psyche's

world. You live in the psyche's interpretation of signals it calls the world. The psyche is not in you. You are

world. The psyche is not in you. You are

in the psyche. And the psyche is populated, crowded, full of figures that have their own agendas. Jung calls them archetypes, the self, the shadow, thema,

the wise old man. These are not metaphors for personality traits. These

are autonomous complexes, thought forms with their own consistency, their own logic, their own energy. You do not control them. You negotiate with them.

control them. You negotiate with them.

You can ignore them, but they do not go away. They just work in the background,

away. They just work in the background, making you do things you then have to explain to yourself. The shadow is everything you disowned, every impulse you said was not you, every desire you

called shameful, every rage you swallowed. It does not dissolve because

swallowed. It does not dissolve because you reject it. It becomes a tulper in the basement feeding on your rejection, getting stronger in the dark. And then

one day you are screaming at a cashier over nothing or weeping in your car or [ __ ] someone whose name you will not remember. And you say, "I don't know

remember. And you say, "I don't know what came over me. Something came over you. Something you made by refusing to

you. Something you made by refusing to look at it." This is what Morrison discovered with King Mob. This is what David Nale discovered with her monk. You

do not get to choose whether you make Tulpas. You are always making tulpas.

Tulpas. You are always making tulpas.

The question is whether you are making them consciously or whether they are making themselves out of your refusals and your repressions and your repetitions.

Freud thought the unconscious was a swamp of repressed drives. Jung knew it was a forest full of living things. Some

of them helpful, some of them hungry, all of them real in the way that hunger is real, in the way that love is real, in the way that meaning is real. The

imaginal realm is not less than the physical realm. It is the place where

physical realm. It is the place where the physical realm gets its script.

Every invention started as imagination.

Every war started as imagination. Every

marriage and every murder started in someone's head as a scene they played out before they played it out. The

imagination is not rehearsal. The

imagination is the first draft of reality. And reality is just imagination

reality. And reality is just imagination that got consensus. Let's look at gambling addiction. The neuroscience is

gambling addiction. The neuroscience is clear. The anticipation of winning

clear. The anticipation of winning produces more dopamine than the actual win. The imagination of the future you

win. The imagination of the future you want creates more reward than the future itself. Which means you can become

itself. Which means you can become addicted to imagination to the version of events you keep visualizing and the actual events will always disappoint because they cannot compete with the

edited version in your head. Depression

works the same way in reverse. You

imagine failure so vividly, so repeatedly that your brain starts treating it as accomplished fact. You

have already lived through the disaster a 100 times in your mind. By the time the actual moment arrives, you are exhausted. The tulpa of your fear has

exhausted. The tulpa of your fear has been beating you up in the basement for months. Narrative therapy tells us that

months. Narrative therapy tells us that we are not the person with a history. We

are a story being told and retold. And

the story can be edited. The therapist

asks you to tell your story differently, not to lie, to choose different details, different emphasis, different meaning.

The alcoholic who is a victim of disease versus the alcoholic who is on a heroic journey of recovery. Same facts,

different story, different future.

Because the story you tell about your past determines what you can imagine about your future. And what you can imagine about your future determines what actions become available today. You

are trapped in your autobiography, in the character you decided you are, in the plot that you think is inevitable.

Morrison escaped by putting himself in the comic and editing the comic. Jung

escaped by meeting Filimon and learning that the self is not singular. You can

escape by recognizing that you have been performing a character called your name and the performance is optional. The

Buddhists say the self is empty. Not

that you do not exist, that you do not exist in the way that you think you do.

You are not a solid thing. You are a process, a pattern, a habit of perception that has mistaken itself for an entity. You are a tulpa that your own

an entity. You are a tulpa that your own attention keeps alive. Stop feeding it and watch what happens. Not

annihilation, transformation. The

character dissolves and something wider wakes up. But here is the trap. The

wakes up. But here is the trap. The

wider thing will also become a character if you are not careful. The awakened

self, the healed self, the authentic self, more tulpas, better tulpas maybe, but still thought forms that will eventually need to be dissolved. You are

not the one watching the thoughts. You

are not even the thoughts. You are the watching itself. And the watching keeps

watching itself. And the watching keeps generating characters to watch, to be, to become. Morrison knows this. Jung

to become. Morrison knows this. Jung

knew this. And the monks have always known this. You are at once the author

known this. You are at once the author and the fiction and the act of writing.

[music] You are haunted by a future that does not exist yet. You keep imagining it.

The promotion, the breakdown, the love that saves you, the diagnosis that ends you. You run these films every night

you. You run these films every night before you sleep. Every morning in the shower, every moment your attention is not nailed to something else. You are

generating futures, feeding them, making them solid. Now, the problem with

them solid. Now, the problem with imagination is it does not stay private.

Your imagined futures leak. They shape

how you move through rooms. They change the micro expressions on your face. They

alter the tone of your voice in ways you do not notice, but everyone else does.

You are broadcasting the future you are imagining and people pick up the signal.

You imagine yourself as unlovable. You

do not say this. You do not have to.

Your body says it. The way you take up space, the way you apologize for existing, the way you flinch when someone gets close. And people respond to what your body is saying, not what

your mouth is saying. They feel the signal. They treat you like someone who

signal. They treat you like someone who should not be loved. And you say, "See, I knew it. I was right." And you were right because you wrote the script and

then cast everyone around you in roles they did not audition for. Morrison

talks about this as synchronicity turbulence. When you are working a hyper

turbulence. When you are working a hyper sigil, reality starts arranging itself around the narrative. Coincidences

multiply. The right people show up. The

wrong people disappear. Books fall off shelves open to the page you need. You

think this is magic. This is not magic.

This is you finally paying attention to what was always happening. Your

attention is not a flashlight illuminating what is there. Your

attention is a tractor beam pulling things into being there. Quantum

mechanics keeps trying to tell us this.

The observer effect, the double slit experiment. The particle does not have a

experiment. The particle does not have a position until you measure it.

Measurement does not reveal. Measurement

creates. Consciousness collapses

possibility into actuality. You walk

into a room expecting hostility. You

will find it not because it was there waiting, but because your expectation tuned your perception to see threat in every neutral face, to hear criticism in every comment, to feel rejection in

every silence.

You generated the hostility by looking for it. The looking was the making. This

for it. The looking was the making. This

is why positive thinking fails because you cannot trick the interface with affirmations. You cannot paste a smile

affirmations. You cannot paste a smile over a wound and call it healed. The

unconscious knows what you actually believe. The shadow knows what you

believe. The shadow knows what you actually expect. And the shadow is

actually expect. And the shadow is running more of the show than you want to admit. Real change requires dissent.

to admit. Real change requires dissent.

You have to go down into the place where the beliefs live, where the core programs are running, where the original story was written. You have to meet the

thing you made in the dark, the toper of your shame, the tulper of your rage, the tulper of your unworthiness.

These are not enemies. These are

disowned children who have been screaming in the basement while you played nice upstairs. Jung called it integrating the shadow. Morrison calls

it embracing the villain. The Tibetans

call it feeding your demons. Same

technology. You stop running from the thing you made. You turn around, you look at it, and you ask it what it needs. And usually what it needs is just

needs. And usually what it needs is just to be seen, to be acknowledged, to stop being the secret you keep from yourself.

The monk David Nail made went wrong because she tried to control it. She

wanted a cheerful servant. She got an autonomous being with its own agenda.

The shadow works the same way. You try

to control it and it controls you. You

try to repress it and it leaks out sideways. You try to kill it and it

sideways. You try to kill it and it feeds on the violence of your rejection.

But if you meet it as equals, if you sit across from your own darkness the way Yung sat with Filimon. If you ask it questions instead of giving it orders,

something shifts. The enemy becomes the

something shifts. The enemy becomes the ally. The demon becomes the guardian.

ally. The demon becomes the guardian.

Not because it changed, but because you stopped relating to it as the thing that must be destroyed.

This is the secret Morrison learned writing The Invisles. You cannot fight yourself into wholeness. You cannot

destroy your way to peace. The war

against the self is unwinable because every weapon you pick is made of self.

Every strategy you deploy is more self pretending to be the solution. The only

way out is through. And through means meeting every you ever made. The

successful self, the failed self, the loved self, the abandoned self, the strong self, the broken self. All of

them. Every character you ever performed, every role you ever auditioned for, every identity you tried on, they are still there, still running in the background, and still trying to

be you. And none of them are you. You

be you. And none of them are you. You

are not the character. You are not even the author. You are the blank page that

the author. You are the blank page that keeps allowing characters to appear. You

are the space in which imagination happens. You are the watching that makes

happens. You are the watching that makes pulpers possible. Morrison at his desk

pulpers possible. Morrison at his desk is not creating King Mob. Morrison is

the space where King Mob appears. Jung

in his study is not controlling Filimon.

Jung is the listening that allows Filimon to speak. David Nale did not make the monk. She opened a door and something walked through. Something that

was already there, waiting in the imaginal realm for enough attention to cross over. You do this every day. Every

cross over. You do this every day. Every

time you say I am, every time you introduce yourself, every time you remember who you were yesterday and project that forward into tomorrow, you are opening doors. You are feeding

tulpas. You are giving attention to

tulpas. You are giving attention to thought forms until they harden into the person you call yourself. The freedom is not in stopping this. You cannot stop

this. The freedom is in knowing you are

this. The freedom is in knowing you are doing it. In watching yourself do it. In

doing it. In watching yourself do it. In

recognizing that the self you are maintaining is optional, provisional, under construction. You are not who you

under construction. You are not who you think you are. You are the thinking. You

are not the story. You are the telling.

And you can tell it differently starting now.

You woke up this morning and assembled yourself from memory. You told yourself your name. You remembered what happened

your name. You remembered what happened yesterday. You projected [music] that

yesterday. You projected [music] that continuity forward and called it identity. You did not think about this.

identity. You did not think about this.

You just did it. Automatic like

breathing, like bleeding. But now you know and now you cannot unknow it. The

self is not a fact. The self is a [music] practice, a sustained act of imagination. And you perform so

imagination. And you perform so consistently [music] you forgot you were performing. You are a tooler made of

performing. You are a tooler made of your own attention, fed by your own belief and kept alive [music] by the story you will not stop telling. Grant

Morrison writes comics and calls it magic because he knows the page is just the surface. The real work happens in

the surface. The real work happens in the space between the image and the imagination in the gap where the reader meets the character and forgets which one is real. He puts himself in the

story to remind himself that he was always in a story, that we are all characters looking for an author and finding only mirrors. The Tibetan monks

sit in caves visualizing deities until the deities show up and teach them that they were the [music] deity all along.

That consciousness has no borders, that the distinction between self and other is a convenience, not a truth, that every being you meet is yourself in a different mask. having a conversation

different mask. having a conversation with yourself about what it means to be.

Philip Kick died asking if he was Thomas or if Thomas was him or if both were characters in something larger that was using them to think about itself. He

never got an answer. There is no answer.

There is only the asking. The asking is [music] the point. You have been making yourself for decades. You have been so consistent about it that you believe yourself. You look in mirrors and see

yourself. You look in mirrors and see proof. You hear recordings of your voice

proof. You hear recordings of your voice and cringe at the confirmation. You have

witnesses, people who remember you, people who will testify that you have always been like this. The evidence is overwhelming.

And all of it is imagination that achieved consensus. All of it is a

achieved consensus. All of it is a shared hallucination we agreed to call real because alone we would go mad. But

together we can call it culture. The

good news is you can imagine differently. The bad news is you are

differently. The bad news is you are already imagining and whatever you are imagining is installing itself as tomorrow. Your expectations are not

tomorrow. Your expectations are not predictions. Your expectations are

predictions. Your expectations are blueprints. The future is not coming

blueprints. The future is not coming toward you. [music] You are generating

toward you. [music] You are generating it frame by frame from the raw material of belief. The question [music] is what

of belief. The question [music] is what will you imagine next? Will you imagine it on purpose or let the old programs keep running? Are you ready to meet all

keep running? Are you ready to meet all the things you made in the dark and ask them what they need? You are not real, not the way you think. But you are here

and here is made of the same stuff as imagination, which means here can be remade. You are both the prisoner and

remade. You are both the prisoner and the key. So stop pretending you don't

the key. So stop pretending you don't know which one to be.

Thank you you beautiful lot for being with me today and for sitting with the thought forms and not [ __ ] the bed when you realize that you might be one of them. If this episode left a mark if

of them. If this episode left a mark if it made you think differently about who you are, how you've been performing and the nature of self, then I'd love to hear from you. You can drop a message or

a comment on our social media. So we

have the website which is theobserving eye.com that's on Substack and you can find other essays and articles on there as alongside the podcast. We are on Tik

Tok, Instagram and X all with the handle at the observing eye and we're also on YouTube which is youtube.com/theobserving

youtube.com/theobserving eye as well. You can also listen to us on Spotify, Apple podcast. All of the usual usual villains that you can find us podcasts on, we are there. There's

also a book which you can buy or you can read. You don't have to buy it. You can

read. You don't have to buy it. You can

read it. The book is available for free for everyone on the observing eye.com website or you can buy it on Amazon if you want a printed copy. I think it's like five quid or something, six quid.

But you don't have to. Go and read it.

Go and read it for free cuz I'm all about, as you may well know if you've been here for a while, I'm all about sharing the knowledge. So go and grab a copy of it if if it's interesting. If

you're interested, I should say. Also,

quick apology from me. I know we were supposed to do an episode last week.

I've actually got co so I didn't do an episode last week cuz I felt really [ __ ] and I plowed through this week. So I I probably sound a bit like a clogged drain in this episode, but I appreciate

you bearing with me and for tuning in.

So again, apologies for not an episode last week. I will be doing again one

last week. I will be doing again one next Sunday and we'll be running up until it's Christmas soon, isn't it?

Christmas is coming. Uh when is Christmas? It's like 6 weeks or

Christmas? It's like 6 weeks or something. So, we'll be we'll probably

something. So, we'll be we'll probably do another like four episodes before Christmas and then I'll have a bit of a shutdown for a few weeks just to take some time out as I hope you all do too.

That's enough from me. Take care

everybody. Much love and I'll catch you soon.