extraordinary%20encounters

246 The Two
educated at the Sorbonne, traveled widely
through Tibet in the early part of the twentieth
century, exploring places and meeting
Buddhist holy men that no European had before
encountered. The Geographical Society
of Paris awarded her a gold medal, and the Legion
of Honor knighted her.
David-Neel wrote that while living with
the Tibetan yogis, she decided to conjure up a
tulpa. She imagined him to be a fat, jolly
lama. After some months, the being came into
existence. Apparently David-Neel essentially
considered him a vivid hallucination, a kind
of imaginary companion, and she was unsettled
when it began to take on a reality of its
own. First, she claimed, it became no longer
necessary for her to think of it for it to appear,
and it seemed to adopt a recognizable personality
and to perform appropriate actions.
“A change gradually took place in my
lama,” she said. “The countenance I had
given him altered; his chubby cheeks thinned
and his expression became vaguely cunning
and malevolent. He became more importunate.
In short, he was escaping me. One day a
shepherd who was bringing me butter saw the
phantasm, which he took for a lama of flesh
and bone.”
Alarmed, she decided that she had to destroy
the entity. It was not easy. It took six
months of hard mental work. She concluded,
“That I should have succeeded in obtaining a
voluntary hallucination is not surprising.
What is interesting in such cases of ‘materialization’
is that other persons see the form created
by thought.”
Though such first-person allegations of
real-life tulpas are exceedingly rare, David-
Neel’s story would inspire a great deal of speculation
that seeks to explain a broad range of
extraordinary entities, from lake monsters to
UFO humanoids, as tulpalike “thought
forms” or (in Michael Grosso’s phrase) “psychoterrestrials”
(Grosso, 1992).
See Also: Imaginal beings; Psychoterrestrials
Further Reading
David-Neel, Alexandra, 1957. With Mystics and Ma -
gicians in Tibet. New York: University Books.
Grosso, Michael, 1992. Frontiers of the Soul: Explor -
ing Psychic Evolution. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.
The Two
The Two were Marshall Herff Applewhite,
also known as Bo, and Bonnie Lu Nettles, also
known as Peep, two of the stranger flyingsaucer
contactees. Nettles would be long dead
when Applewhite, then heading a cultlike
group called Heaven’s Gate, led thirty-eight
followers to mass suicide in a house in a
wealthy neighborhood of San Diego in March
1997. Their departure from this world—intended
to free their bodies so that their souls
could board a spaceship thought to be accompanying
the Hale-Bopp comet—generated
headlines the world over.
Behind the tragedy lay a quarter-century of
spiritual odyssey that began in 1972, when
the psychiatrically troubled Applewhite, a
musical director at a local Episcopal church,
met Nettles, a nurse, at a Houston hospital.
The Two shared an interest in the occult, and
in Nettles, Applewhite found someone he had
been looking for: a woman with whom to establish
a platonic relationship and a shared
metaphysical mission. Applewhite’s homosexuality
had caused him legal and employment
problems and spiritual confusion. The occult
doctrine the Two would create, under guidance
from space people, eschewed sexuality
and demanded chastity from its adherents.
Beginning in 1973, Ap p l ewhite and Ne ttles
set out on a rambling pilgrimage thro u g h
s e veral western states. While living along
Ore g o n’s Rogue Rive r, they experienced a
re velation that they we re the two witnesses
who Re velation 11 had prophesied would
appear on Earth during its last days. T h e i r
first attempt to announce themselves to a
larger world occurred in Oklahoma City,
w h e re they introduced themselves to local
ufologist Ha yden Hewes, who had a flair for
p u b l i c i t y. They told Hewes to announce that
they we re here to help the human race ascend
to its next evo l u t i o n a ry level. Ac c o rd i n g
to Hewes, they spoke as if “humans we re