A thoughtform is a manifestation of mental energy, also known as a Tulpa in Tibetan mysticism. Thoughtform may be understood as a psychospiritual complex of mind, energy or consciousness manifested either consciously or unconsciously, by a sentient being or in concert. 

Thoughtforms may be benevolent, malevolent or of complex alignment and may be understood as a spontaneous or intentional manifestation or emergence. Professor H. H. Price, an Oxford philosopher and parapsychologist, held that once an idea has been formed, it is no longer wholly under the control of the consciousness which gave it birth, but may operate independently on the minds of other people or on physical objects.

Areas of intense thoughtform phenomena are called window areas. Many of them were places of former religious importance that have now waned or fallen from use. The use of an area over hundreds of years creates a type of artificial life form or something that fed on the worship. When the worship is taken away it still needs to feed. 

In Tibetan mysticism, a Tulpa is a being or object which is created through willpower, visualisation, attention and focus, concerted intentionality and ritual. In other words, it is a materialized thought that has taken physical form. In the Dzogchen view, accomplished thoughtforms are sentient beings as they have a consciousness field or mindstream confluence in a dynamic organization of emergent factors from the mindstream intentionality of progenitors. 

In Tibet, where such things are practiced, a ghost of this kind is called a Tulpa. A Tulpa is usually produced by a skilled magician or yogi, although in some cases it is said to arise from the collective imagination of superstitious villagers, say, or of travelers passing through some sinister tract of country.

Mantras, the Sanskrit syllables inscribed on yantras, are essentially thought forms representing divinities or cosmic powers, which exert their influence by means of sound vibrations. 

There are apparitions that make public appearances. Some of these are said to be the perceptible double, the etheric counterpart, of a living person who is undergoing an out of body experience. Even more mysterious are the externalized perceptible manifestations of something whose existence originated in the mind of its creator by virtue of that person’s incredible powers of concentration, visualization, and other efforts of the mind. 

Another idea is that Tulpas are a massive, collective, subconscious, thoughtform. The thoughtform is said to be a three dimensional image created by the power of the mind. Buddhist llamas in Tibet are said to be able to summon up Tulpas during intense meditation. Western explorer Dame Alexandra was said to have created a Tulpa of a monk whilst studying in Tibet. Polish medium Franek Klusk was said to have summoned up cats, birds, and apes during seances. Perhaps, considering the types of beast he called up, he was creating Tulpas. If individuals can create Tulpas imagine what the collective, gestalt mind of humanity as a species could do. Perhaps dragons are a giant worldwide thought form emanating from our innermost fears.

Thoughtforms, in the sense of being systems of awareness with the attribute of self will and self determination, figure in various cognitive and psychological theories. Marvin Minsky, cofounder of the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT, proposes that there are agencies of the mind, by which he means any and all psychological processes. Although he grants that a view of the mind as made up of many selves may be valid, he suggests that this may be a myth that we construct.

Carl Jung’s technique of active imagination involves interacting with thoughtforms of the subconscious mind. Jung identified certain universal thoughtform archetypes such as anima and animus which are characteristic of all humans. Psychological archetypes are thoughtforms. The chief difference between these scientific formulations and spiritual definitions of thoughtforms is that the former are created unconsciously whereas the latter are created deliberately.

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which are unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.

If for example an American and a British musician having never had anything to do with one another arrived at the same musical concept, chord sequence, feel or lyrics at the same time in different places, this is an example of synchronicity. During the production of The Wizard of Oz a coat bought from a second hand store for the costume of Professor Marvel was later found to have belonged to L. Frank Baum, author of the children’s book upon which the film is based.

The French writer Emile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that in 1805 he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Many years later in 1832, Deschamps was at a diner, and was once again offered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to make the setting complete and in the same instant, the now senile de Fontgibu entered the room.

Writer and iconoclast Charles Hoy Fort wrote several books on synchronicity including the Book of the Damned, Lo!, New Lands and Wild Talents. New Lands tells the famous story of the woman who lost her ring in a nearby lake only to recover it years later inside a fish she bought at a local market. He also wrote about the Butterfly Effect years before Lorenz, the famous mathematician coined the term.

The Dirk Gently series of books by Douglas Adams often plays on the synchronicity concept. The main character carries a pocket I Ching that also functions as a calculator, up to a point. In Philip K. Dick’s The Game Players of Titan, several characters possessing precognitive abilities cite the acausal principle of synchronicity as an element which hampers their ability to accurately predict certain possible futures.

John Constantine, the main character in the Vertigo Comics series Hellblazer, is sometimes seen riding the synchronicity highway, to meet certain goals or even just to one up those around him. In the D20 Modern roleplaying game Urban Arcana, Synchronicity is a magic spell that subtly rearranges reality, allowing the subject to avoid the minor inconveniences and hassles of everyday life.

Terence McKenna used the term ‘cosmic giggle’ to mean “a randomly roving zone of synchronicity and statistical anomaly. Should you be caught up in it, it will turn reality on its head. It is objective and subjective, simultaneously ‘really there’ and yet somehow is sustained by imagination and expectation.” The phenomenon is also explored, though not named, in The Red Notebook by Paul Auster, and is considered a major theme of his entire bibliography, appearing in some form in almost every work.

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships which are not causal in nature. Instead, causal relationships are understood as simultaneous such that the cause and effect occur at the same time.

Synchronous events reveal an underlying pattern or conceptual framework which encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems which display the synchronicity. The suggestion of a larger framework is essential in order to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

Jung coined the word to describe what he called temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events. Jung variously described synchronicity as an connecting principle, meaningful coincidence and acausal parallelism. Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s then in 1952 published a paper in a volume with a related study by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Synchronicity is descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history, social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Events that happen which appear at first to be coincidence, but are later found to be causally related are termed as incoincident.

Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs. Many critics believe that any evidence for synchronicity is due to confirmation bias, and nothing else.

Wolfgang Pauli, a scientist who in his professional life was severely critical of confirmation bias, lent his scientific credibility to support the theory, coauthoring a paper with Jung on the subject. Some of the evidence that Pauli cited was that ideas which occurred in his dreams would have synchronous analogs in later correspondence with distant collaborators.

EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomena, are sections of static noise on the radio or electronic recording which some listeners believe sound like voices speaking words, and which paranormal investigators interpret as the voices of ghosts or spirits. Recording EVP has become a technique of those who attempt to contact the souls of dead loved ones or during ghost hunting activities. In addition to deceased spirits, various paranormal investigators say that EVP could be produced by psychic echoes from the past, psychokinesis unconsciously produced by living people, and aliens. According to parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive, who popularized the idea, EVP are typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase.

Those who believe in the existence of EVP as a paranormal manifestation have a number of beliefs as to what EVP may possibly be. Common explanations include living humans imprinting thoughts directly on an electronic medium through psychokinesis and communication by discarnate entities such as spirits, nature energies, beings from other dimensions, or extraterrestrials.

As the Spiritualism religious movement became prominent in the 1840s–1920s with a distinguishing belief that the spirits of the dead can be contacted by mediums, new technologies of the era including photography were employed by spiritualists in an effort to demonstrate contact with a spirit worl. So popular were such ideas that Thomas Edison was asked in an interview with Scientific American to comment on the possibility of using his inventions to communicate with spirits. He replied that if the spirits were only capable of subtle influences, a sensitive recording device would provide a better chance of spirit communication than the table tipping and ouija boards mediums employed at the time. However, there is no indication that Edison ever designed or constructed a device for such a purpose. As sound recording became widespread, mediums explored using this technology to demonstrate communication with the dead as well. Despite the eventual decline of Spiritualism through the latter part of the 20th century, attempts to use portable recording devices and modern digital technologies to demonstrate life after death continued to be promoted in popular culture and by a cadre of dedicated believers.

In 1980, William O’Neil constructed an electronic audio device called The Spiricom. O’Neil claimed the device was built to specifications which he received psychically from George Mueller, a scientist who had died six years previously. At a Washington, DC, press conference on April 6, 1982, O’Neil stated that he was able to hold two-way conversations with spirits through the Spiricom device, and provided the design specifications to researchers for free. However, nobody is known to have replicated O’Neil’s results using their own Spiricom devices. O’Neil’s partner, retired industrialist George Meek, attributed O’Neil’s success, and the inability of others to replicate it, to O’Neil’s psychic abilities forming part of the loop that made the system work.

Since EVP has been ignored and derided as fiction by the scientific community and is not generally studied by academic researchers, there is no singular consensus on what all EVP are. However, there are a number of straightforward scientific explanations that can account for why some listeners to the static on audio devices may believe they hear voices, including radio interference and the tendency of the human brain to recognize patterns in random stimuli. A percentage of recordings may be hoaxes created by frauds or pranksters.

The very first EVP recordings may have originated from the use of tape recording equipment with poorly aligned erasure and recording heads, resulting in previous audio recordings not being completely erased. This could allow a small percentage of previous content to be superimposed or mixed into a new silent recording.

Interference, for example, is seen in certain EVP recordings, especially those recorded on devices which contain RLC circuitry. These cases represent radio signals of voices or other sounds from broadcast sources. Interference from CB Radio transmissions and wireless baby monitors, or anomalies generated though cross modulation from other electronic devices, are all documented phenomena. It is even possible for circuits to resonate without any internal power source by means of radio reception.

Capture errors are anomalies created by the method used to capture audio signals, such as noise generated through the over amplification of a signal at the point of recording.

Artifacts created during attempts to boost the clarity of an existing recording might explain some EVP. Methods include resampling, frequency isolation, and noise reduction or enhancement, which can cause recordings to take on qualities significantly different from those that were present in the original recording.

Portable digital voice recorders are currently the technology of choice for EVP investigators. Since these devices are very susceptible to Radio Frequency (RF) contamination, EVP enthusiasts sometimes try to record EVP in RF and sound screened rooms. Nevertheless, in order to record EVP there has to be noise in the audio circuits of the device used to produce the EVP. For this reason, those who attempt to record EVP often use two recorders that have differing quality audio circuitry and rely on noise heard from the poorer quality instrument to generate EVP.

A few German enthusiasts coined the term Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) to refer more generally to communication through any sort of electronic device such as tape recorders, fax machines, television sets or computers between spirits or other discarnate entities and the living. One particularly famous claimed incidence of ITC occurred when the image of EVP enthusiast Friedrich Jurgenson, whose funeral was held that day, was said to have appeared on a television in the home of a colleague, which had been purposefully tuned to a vacant channel. ITC enthusiastists also investigate TV and video camera feedback transmission loops.

Some EVP enthusiasts describe hearing the words in EVP as an ability, much like learning a new language. Skeptics say that the claimed instances are all either hoaxes or misinterpretations of natural phenomena. Neither EVP nor ITC are researched within the scientific community and, as ideas, are generally derided by scientists when asked.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy investigating principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. It is concerned with explaining the ultimate nature of being and the world. Metaphysics also attempts to clarify the notions by which people understand the world, including existence, space, time, causality, and possibility.

The term metaphysics has also been used to refer to subjects that are beyond the physical world. A metaphysical bookstore, for instance, is not one that sells books on philosophy, but rather one that sells esoteric books on spirits, faith healing, crystal power, occultism, and other such topics which the 

The nature of the mind and its relation to the body has been seen as an issue as science has progressed in its mechanistic understanding of the brain and body. Proposed solutions often have ramifications about the nature of mind as a whole. Descartes proposed substance dualism, a theory in which mind and body are essentially quite different, with the mind having some of the attributes traditionally assigned to the soul. This creates a conceptual puzzle about how the two interact. Another proposal discussing the mind body problem is idealism. Idealists claim that material objects do not exist unless perceived and only as perceptions. Idealism is a common theme in Eastern philosophy. 

The world seems to contain many individual things, both physical, like apples, and abstract such as love and the number three. Such objects are called particulars. Now, consider two apples. There seem to be many ways in which those two apples are similar, they may be approximately the same size, or shape, or color. They are both fruit, etc. One might also say that the two apples seem to have some thing or things in common. These properties are known as universals to metaphysicians.

Idealist metaphysicians claim that space and time are mental constructs used to organise perceptions, or are otherwise unreal. Suppose that one is sitting at a table, with an apple in front of him or her. The apple exists in space and in time, but what does this indicate? Could it be said that space is like an invisible three dimensional grid in which the apple is positioned? Suppose the apple, and all physical objects in the universe, were removed from existence entirely. Would space as an invisible grid still exist? Some metaphysicians believe it would not, arguing that without physical objects, space would be meaningless because space is the framework upon which we understand how physical objects are related to each other.

Time presents some special problems of its own. The direction of time, also known as time’s arrow, is also a puzzle, although physics is now driving the debate rather than philosophy. It appears that fundamental laws are reversible and the arrow of time must be an emergent phenomenon, perhaps explained by a statistical understanding of thermodynamic entropy.

Common sense tells us that objects persist across time, that there is some sense in which you are the same person you were yesterday, in which the oak is the same as the acorn, in which you can step into the same river twice. Philosophers have developed theories for how this happens. Broadly speaking, they maintain that a whole object exists at each moment of its history and the same object exists at each moment. They believe that objects are four dimensional entities made up of a series of parts like the frames of a movie.

Precognition is a form of extrasensory perception where in a person is said to perceive information about places or events before they happen. A related term, presentiment, refers to information about future events which is said to be perceived as emotions. These terms are considered by some to be special cases of the more general term clairvoyance.

J. W. Dunne, a British aeronautics engineer, undertook the first systematic study of precognition in the early twentieth century. In 1927, he published the classic An Experiment with Time, which contained his findings and theories. Dunne’s study was based on his own precognitive dreams, which involved both trivial incidents in his own life and major news events appearing in the press the day after the dream. 

When first realizing that he was seeing the future in his dreams, Dunne worried that he was a freak. His worries soon eased when he discovered that precognitive dreams are common. He concluded that many people have them without realizing it, perhaps because they do not recall the details or fail to properly interpret the dream symbols. 

Joseph Banks Rhine and Louisa Rhine began the next significant systematic research of precognition in the 1930s at the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. Rhine used card-guessing experiments in which the participant was asked to record his guess of the order of a card deck before the deck was shuffled.

London psychiatrist J. A. Barker established the British Premonitions Bureau in 1967, which collected precognitive data in order to provide an early warning system of impending disasters. Barker succeeded in finding a number of subjects who tuned in regularly to disasters, but were unable to accurately pinpoint the times. 

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab is one of the more recent examples of attempts to study precognition, beginning in 1979, with precognitive experiments conducted in a variety of formats by various parapsychologists. This facility was closed in 2007.

An issue related to precognitive events includes paradoxes due to causality. One form of paradox includes events that are prevented due to the actions of those that know of it through precognition. In this case, the event doesn’t happen, which would prevent the viewer from seeing the event in the first place.

A subtler form of paradox is the circular cause and consequence problem of events that are actually caused by the foreseeing of the event. Though in and of itself this chain is logically consistent, it is a chicken or egg problemFor instance, if the event did not happen the viewer would not have seen it, which would have prevented it from happening.

Those skeptical of the existence of precognition and other forms of ESP believe it to be the result of self delusion and contend that selection bias is the cause of the belief that one has precognition where individuals remember the significant events and forget about everything else. Skeptics contend that the human memory naturally has a tendency to remember coincidences more often than other noncoincidences and thus individuals tend to remember more frequently when they were correct about a future event and forget the instances when they were wrong.

It is said that when a spiritual master is cremated, beautiful pearl-like crystals are found among his ashes. Tibetans call these crystals Sarira and believe they hold the living essence of the spiritual master. The pearl-like deposits are a manifestation of the master’s inner purity.

These objects are considered relics of significant importance in many sects of Buddhism since they are believed to embody the spiritual knowledge, teachings, realizations or living essence of the spiritual masters. They are taken as evidence of the master’s enlightenment and spiritual purity. Some believe that the Sarira are deliberately left by the consciousness of a master for veneration.

Although the term Sarira can be used to refer to a wide variety of Buddhist relics, it is generally used to refer to the crystal-like bead-shaped objects. Sarira come from masters who have devoted their whole life to spiritual practices that are dedicated to the welfare of all. Every part of their body and even their relics carry a positive energy to inspire goodness and reduce negativity. 

The Buddhists believe that these relics provide an opportunity to make a spiritual connection with the universe. Viewing these sacred relics can inspire us to develop loving kindness and contribute to peace in the world.

It is believed that individuals, regardless of their faith, will be overcome with emotions of joy, love, peace, inspiration, or even spiritual transformation when in the presence of the ringsel. There have been testimonies of healings and visions attributed to seeing these relics.

Sarira are typically displayed in a glass bowl inside small gold urns as well as enshrined inside the masters statue. The pieces of sarira are also believed to mysteriously multiply in number while inside their containers if they have been stored under favorable conditions. 

As it turns out, there is an elegant empirical theory on this matter. Some scientists believe that Sariras are the holy gallstones of the venerated masters. This is pure speculation as far as evidence is concerned. There has been no chemical analysis done on Sariras due to their rarity and highly sacred, highly venerated status.

We picture reality and its meaning through language. The inspection of the languages of different cultures reveal that each lives in radically different worlds. The languages of the western world contain pictures. They contain specifications of what a human is and contain specifications of what each human should aspire to become, in a linear manner. 

On the other hand, the Hopi belong to a loose language group called UtoAztecan. Their language reveals a world that is much different than our own. It is closer to the concepts in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. According to some physicists, the Hopi language could have been used to express Einstein’s theory which at present can only be fully described in mathematics.

To the Hopi, there is the reality of the here and now manifest material world and then there is the unseen, unmanifest world from which this present world came. In this part especially, the Hopi view reflects the basic pattern of our ancient cultural view that the material world is manifest from an unseen spiritual world with which we can be in communication and which we can influence according to our behavior.

In any language to which these words could be successfully translated, there will be the concept of linear time. There will be past, present and future. This is the very psychological cornerstone of the myth of linear increase. Nonetheless in the time that is measured by distance of planetary travel, the earth doesn’t really go anywhere but around in circles. Our mental appreciation of time that we gained from that measurement is turned into a linear progression that we think of mentally as starting in the remote past and moving through to a remote future in a linear manner.

The Hopi metaphysics imposes upon the universe two grand cosmic forms, which may be called manifest and unmanifest. The objective or manifested comprises all that is or has been accessible to the senses, the historical physical universe, with no attempt to distinguish between present and past, but excluding everything that we call future. The subjective or unmanifest comprises all that we call future.

Unmanifest also includes everything that exists in the heart, not only the heart of man but the heart of animals, plants, and things, and behind and within all forms and appearances of nature in the heart of nature. The unmanifest embraces not only our future, much of which the Hopi regards as more or less predestined in essence if not in exact form, but also all emotion, the essence and typical form of which is the striving of purposeful desire toward manifestation. 

Manifestation is much resisted and delayed, but in some form or other is inevitable. It is the realm of expectancy and purpose, vitalizing life, efficient causes and thought thinking itself out from an inner realm into manifestation. It is in a dynamic state, yet not a state of motion. It is not advancing toward us out of a future, but already with us in vital and mental form, and its dynamism is at work in the field of eventuating or manifesting, evolving without motion from the subjective by degrees to a result which is the objective.

That which is unmanifest exists in potential, in a world that is yet to work itself out into the objective hardness of this world. The Hopis in their effort to maintain the balance of the world, work on the inner subjective. Then they do the same in the elaborate ceremonials in the village plazas. They do this in order to help that which will become made in the objective world. 

A fundamental understanding of Hopi, and generally most natural cultures, is that each person is a conscious participant in the consciousness of the whole world. Thus the thinking, intention and balance of each person has an effect on the balance of the life of the whole. This is one of the aspects of what the Hopi mean when they say they are keeping the world in balance. The meaning of this statement is not that they are keeping the north and south poles in their places. The statement is a simplification of a vast complex of meanings involved with the balances and manifestation of life.