When the Prophet said, “People are asleep and when they die, they wake up,” he meant that everything that man sees in the life of this world is in the rank of the dreams of someone who is asleep, so it must be interpreted. Phenomenal being is imagination (khayal), but it is God in reality. ~ Ibn Arabi, Bezels of Wisdom

Scientists often ponder the “mystery of sleep”, although “waking up” is the real mystery. Trees are asleep, indicating that sleep is the natural state of life. What we take to be the “real world” is to the awakened person as the dream is to the dreamer. Waking up, then, is understanding that the phenomenal world is an image and that God is ultimate reality.

Just as the dreamer creates all the characters and aevents in his dream, so too does the awake person. Julius Evola repeats the traditional teaching in his intellectual autobiography:

I have always subscribed to the traditional doctrine that we have wished all relevant events in our life before birth.

A deeper way to understand that is that God’s Will and the personal will are fully aligned at the moment of conception.

You might suppose that everyone would wish for a happy life, but that does not take into account the perverse aspects of consciousness. Just as the dreamer may create a nightmare, the perverse will can do something similar. Esoteric teaching identifies three possible outcomes, in which the creative imagination creates an evil and then projects it onto the world as though it were an external being. These are:

• Complexes. These are subjective creations of the individual consciousness.
• Tulpas. These are projections usually of a group mind.
• Egregores: These are the creation of false doubles of collective entities.

Valentin Tomberg, in Meditations on the Tarot, treats these phenomena extensively, so I will be satisfied to quote him directly.

Complexes

Autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession.

Such systems are also called ideologies. Ideologies ignore Tradition, so they seem novel and attractive. Unfortunately, once a being is under the spell of an ideology, it is difficult to shake it off. The high level of psychological and emotional problems seen today are the result.

As a result, they take on an apparently objective life of their own.

Both Eliphas Levi and the Tibetan masters are in agreement not only with respect to the subjective and psychological origin of demons but also with respect to their objective existence. Engendered subjectively, they become forces independent of the subjective consciousness which engendered them. They are, in other words, magical creations, for magic is the objectification of that which takes its origin in subjective consciousness.

Demons, then, are engendered subjectively but experienced objectively. In that case, they appear in consciousness almost like a different being.

Demons that have not arrived at the stage of objectification, i.e., at that of an existence separate from the psychic life of their parents, have a semi-autonomous existence which is designated in modern psychology by the term “psychological complex”. … A psychopathological “complex” is therefore a demon, when it has not come from outside but is engendered by the patient himself.

Tulpa

In Tibetan esoteric work, a Tulpa is created consciously and deliberately. The purpose is to learn to recognize and then overcome one’s fears.

With respect to Tibet, we find there the singular phenomenon of the conscious practice of the creation and destruction of demons. It appears that in Tibet, it is practised as one of the methods of occult training of the will and imagination. The training consists of three parts:

• the creation of tulpas (magical creatures) through concentrated and directed imagination,
• then their evocation and,
• lastly, the freeing of consciousness from their hold on it by an act of knowledge which destroys them

— through which it is realised that they are only a creation of the imagination, and therefore illusory. The aim of this training is therefore to arrive at disbelief in demons after having created them through the force of imagination and having confronted their terrifying apparitions with intrepidity.

Alexandra David-Neel in Magic and Mystery in Tibet explains that early scepticism offers no spiritual benefit. These Tulpas appear real to those not part of the experiment. Moreover, Tulpas exist through the creations of others.

The teachers do not approve of simple incredulity, they deem it contrary to truth. The disciple must understand that gods and demons do really exist for those who believe in their existence, and that they are possessed with the power of benefitting or harming those who worship or fear them. However, very few reach incredulity in the early part of their training. Most novices actually see frightful apparitions. Must we not also consider that we are not the only ones capable of creating such formations? And if such entities (tulpas, magical creatures) exist in the world, are we not liable to come into touch with them, either by the will of their maker or from some other cause? Could one of these causes not be that, through our mind or through our material deeds, we bring about the conditions in which these entities are capable of manifesting some kind of activity? … One must know how to protect oneself against the tigers to which one has given birth, as well as against those that have been begotten by others.

Egregore

An egregore is like a tulpa except that it is the creation of the perverse collective human will and imagination. “There are superhuman spiritual entities which are not artificially engendered, which manifest themselves and reveal themselves.” Egregores, then, are artificially created doubles of such genuine spiritual entities. They are created from below, not by God. Tomberg lists some examples of these doubles:

Although God, Christ, the Holy Virgin, the spiritual hierarchies, the saints, the Church (or the Mystical Body of Christ) are real entities, there still exists also a phantom or egregore of the Church, which is its “double”, just as every man, every nation, every religion, etc., have their “doubles”. But just as he who sees in Russia, for example, only the bear, in France only the cock and in Germany only the wolf, is being unfair towards the country of the Heart, the country of Intelligence and the country of Initiative — so is one being unjust towards the Catholic Church when one sees, instead of the Mystical Body of Christ, only its historical phantom, the fox. In order to see rightly one has to look rightly. And to look rightly means to endeavour to see through the mists of the phantoms of things.

Our age is fixated on egregores, at least in the West, so that only the worst aspects of a collective entity are noticed. Only by dissolving these fixations can one make spiritual progress, not just individually but collectively. Finally, Tomberg identifies the Anti-Christ as the egregore of the human race.

The antichrist is the phantom of the whole of mankind, engendered through the whole historical evolution of humanity. He is the “superman” who haunts the consciousness of all those who seek to elevate themselves through their own effort, without grace.

Tomberg singles out Nietzsche and Karl Marx as those who have fallen under the spell of the Anti-Christ.