Tulpas

This week, Tom and Laura are getting into tulpas — the ancient Tibetan practice of conjuring a living being purely through the power of concentrated thought. They explore how the concept traveled from Buddhist monasteries to 4chan forums (via a very unexpected My Little Pony detour), and discuss the modern "tulpamancer" community that's been trying to will fictional characters into existence ever since. They also dig into the Philip Experiment, a 1972 Toronto study in which a group of regular people invented a fictional 17th-century ghost and then tried to hold a séance with him — with some genuinely strange results. Plus, the Global Consciousness Project's claim that random number generators went haywire before the first plane hit on 9/11, Philip K. Dick's season pass to Disneyland and his very unexpected lunch companion, Alan Moore spotting John Constantine in a sandwich shop, and a comics writer who may have accidentally manifested an armed robbery straight out of a scene he'd just finished writing.

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