The Inner Vehicle: Prayer, Tulpamancy, and the Magic of the Mind

T.M. Luhrmann has demonstrated the role of mental imagery practices, called “kataphatic prayer,” in allowing evangelical Christians to hear God and interact with Him through their physical senses and their minds. The online community of tulpamancers employs similar practices to develop a kind of imaginary friend within their mind, known as a tulpa. Scholarship has not yet engaged in a sustained comparison of the two communities and their use of kataphatic techniques. This paper fills that gap, seeking to understand how the psychological processes in question foster the experience of contact with a non-human other (God in the case of evangelical Christians and tulpas in the case of tulpamancers) and examining the role of faith and an encouraging community as supporting elements in the process. Additionally, I explore how these mental interactions with non-human others can provide psychological benefits like bolstering emotional well-being and mitigating negative effects of mental illness.