Could Santa Claus Actually Be Real?
By: Elan Cassandra
Tags: Paranormal, Christmas, Childhood, Culture, History

Could Santa Claus Actually Be Real?

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

About 85% of American children believe in Santa Claus for some period of time. (Just keep that in mind as you read on.)

For me, growing up in what was ostensibly a non-religious household, Santa was the center of the Christmas holiday. He was magic and goodness and hope, all wrapped up inside a man in a red suit.

And even now as an adult, I have to admit that there’s the teeniest tiniest part of me that still desperately wants this obviously fictional character to be real.

Looking back, I see my mom too held some bit of hope. Even as a parent who put gifts under the tree, she still wanted this magical man whose sleigh she was once sure she’d seen, to be out there somewhere.

Yes, my mom and I are a bit silly. But we might also be on to something!

Go with me here as I take you down a bit of historical lore and contemporary paranormal theory, and you’ll see what I mean.

Tibetan tulpas

In the early 20th century, anthropologist Alexandra David-Neel, the first woman to be given the title of Tibetan Lama, published the book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, in which, among other things, she discusses the creation of tulpas.

The Tibetan term tulpa apparently translates roughly to “manifestation.” In this context, the tulpa is an autonomous and “fully-real metaphysical being” created first within the mind and then projected into physical reality.

You may also hear it referred to in contemporary discussion as a thought-form.

“[Although David-Neel] describes their existence as relatively rare, she provides a number of encounter narratives, both from others perspective and her own concerning Tulpas. In all of these cases, third parties are witness to the existence of Tulpas created by individuals.”

The worldview on which this rests is one in which “mental energy and physical energy are considered to be part of the same system,” and the key to tulpa creation is a high intensity of mental energy.

“The creation of such a being is seen as proof of the illusory nature of reality, and the monk’s capacity as a practitioner to cut through the delusions of reality.”

Tulpas and the paranormal

A number of people over the years have purported to have created their own physical tulpas. The previously mentioned Alexandra David-Neel put many months of meditative work into the creation of her own tulpa in the form of a jolly monk.

Although she was successful in its creation, her monk, who could be seen walking about the monastery grounds, began to change. She became so uncomfortable with the changes that she had to put in all sorts of meditative work to un-create him.

Tulpas are frequently discussed in the paranormal community as an explanation for all sorts of entities. There are people who believe, for instance, that Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, and Black-Eyed Children are all tulpas.

In these cases, however, the argument isn’t always that the entity was created by one person’s intentional efforts, particularly since, even if you believe it to be possible, for most people, it would be extremely difficult.

It could be, rather, that an idea takes hold so strongly in a community or in society at large that an entity is spontaneously created as a result of this intense mental energy.

And this is where we come to Santa Claus.

Could Santa Claus be a tulpa?

Here’s what we have to consider.

Although the origins of Santa Claus can be found in the nearly 2,000-year-old story of Saint Nicholas, our modern Santa Claus really began to take shape in New York in the early 1800s — still quite a while ago.

Santa became a part of holiday shopping in the middle of the nineteenth century. He gained his standard belly in the late 1800s, became a part of Coca-Cola’s advertising in the 1920s, and has gone unchanged in appearance since the 1960s.

But the mythology around Santa Claus, his elves, the night before Christmas — all of that was set by the 1930s.

With that in mind, how many kids do you think have seen very similar images of Santa Claus? Have pictured his workshop and his sleigh? Have obsessed over him, waiting months for Christmas to come back around?

Between 2.4 and 3.8 million babies have been born each year in the US since 1940. Right now, in the US there are about 20.5 million children under the age of 10.

And remember, about 85% of American children at some point believe in Santa Claus.

That’s a lot of very imaginative minds, not just at this moment, but over many decades who have focused tons of mental energy on this being.

So if anything or anyone is prime tulpa material, it’s Santa.

Now, I’m not saying Santa’s coming down everyone’s chimney or that you aren’t the ones buying your kids presents.

What I am saying is that it’s possible that some version of Santa does exist out there.

Maybe he’s fully physical, and maybe he isn’t. Maybe he exists in a space of our reality that we’re not great at perceiving.

But kids will swear to you they’ve seen him. Even some adults have a hard time explaining what they saw outside their window that one Christmas Eve night many years ago.

All I’m saying is, it’s possible that Santa Claus exists — that he’s real because we made him.

And I really, really hope so.