Historical Imagination as Spiritual Practice: The Namthar Episode

dingirfecho
Sep 16
3 min read

“When the fourth wall of history falls, the masters return — not as relics of the past, but as phantoms urging us toward liberation.”

In this session of our ongoing series, I sat down with Lama Jillian to explore the role of Namthar — the Tibetan liberation biographies — and how they connect with ideas from Joshua Cutchin’s Fourth Wall Phantoms, Mark Fisher’s hauntology, and the Buddha’s teachings on the dreamlike nature of reality.

What Is a Namthar?

Lama Jillian: A Namthar is a sacred story. Sometimes it’s read as hagiography, but more deeply it’s a genre of literature that shows the path of transformation. The term itself is a contraction: Nampar (complete) and tarpa (liberation). So Namthar means “complete liberation.”

Namthars unfold on three levels:

Outer biography: life details — birth, family, teachers.
Inner biography: tantric practices and transmissions.
Secret biography: poetic depictions of realization.

In Buddhist language:

“All conditioned things are like a dream, a phantom, a bubble, a shadow, like dew or lightning. Thus should you meditate upon them.”— Diamond Sutra

Namthars aren’t merely chronicles — they are phantoms of liberation, dreamlike narratives that insist on their own transformative power.

Namthar and the Fourth Wall

Joshua Cutchin observes:

“The stage is never empty. Even when no actors are present, the theater is thick with the impressions, the phantoms, of those who performed and those who watched.”— Fourth Wall Phantoms

Namthars, too, are haunted stages. They collapse the distance between biography and practice. To read Milarepa’s story is not to watch history, but to step onto the stage where his liberation is rehearsed again and again.

Lama Fede: Namthars are like haunted theaters. They don’t leave you as a passive audience. They force you to become a participant.

Hyperstition and the Santa Claus Effect

Lama Fede: Hyperstition is the idea that a fiction becomes real through repetition, belief, and enactment.

Mark Fisher put it this way:

“Capitalist realism is not the conviction that capitalism is right, but the perception that it is the only viable system.”— Capitalist Realism

Hyperstition offers a crack in that realism. Just as children “know” Santa Claus isn’t real yet still behave as if he is, producing real effects, so too do visionary figures like Padmasambhava move from myth into living presence.

Cutchin reminds us:

“Belief and performance blur — once you’ve seen the ghost on stage, it doesn’t matter whether it ‘really’ existed. It has already changed you.”

Padmasambhava may appear only once in historical inscription, but through termas, visions, and rituals, he returns as a fourth wall phantom, shaping practices and lives to this day.

Historical Imagination as Liberation

Lama Jillian: At what point do we stop calling Padmasambhava “fictional”? If a visionary practice can lead to real transformation, the binary collapses.

And the Buddha himself urged this orientation:

“Consider this body as a foam, a mirage. Cut down Māra’s flower-tipped arrows, and go beyond death.”— Dhammapada, verse 46

Namthars make saints into ghostly performers. Yeshe Tsogyal’s trials, Machik Labdrön’s charnel ground practices, Milarepa’s cave meditations — all become spectral dramas that invite us to join.

Namthar as Practice

So how do we engage with Namthar as spiritual practice?

Reading aloud — summoning the ghost through voice.
Embodied enactment — plays, dances, ritual re-creations.
Communal storytelling — sharing Namthar as participatory vision.

Cutchin again:

“A performance is never only about the actors. It is an exchange with the unseen — the phantoms of memory, the ghosts of expectation.”

Namthar works in exactly this way. Biography becomes spectral pedagogy: a teaching transmitted across time by ghostly presence.

Tulpa and Misreadings

We touched on tulpa — misunderstood in the West as thought-forms or imaginary companions.

The Buddha taught:

“Whoever sees dependent arising sees the Dharma; whoever sees the Dharma sees the Buddha.”— Majjhima Nikāya 28

Western occult readings often miscast tulpas as “thought-slaves,” a projection of confusion. In Dharma, emanations aren’t slaves but liberatory appearances — nirmanakaya manifestations.