Mark Turner's Mysterious World: photo

5/7/14

Dragon Photo, a tick of Light and Shadow, or a Tulpa?

Welsh Dragon? Image: Mercury

Mark Turner
Mysterious World
05/07/2014

Accounts of fire-breathing dragons stretch far back into ancient Welsh history. King Arthur is said to have fought one from an account from the Historia Brittonum, written around 828 A.D.. Now comes this latest incarnation of a Welsh dragon. A photo taken by Michael McMullin during his early April visit to a beach in Tenbay south Wales shows what looks to be small dragon.

McMullin was taking photos of the shore and only later noticed the image, which oddly resembles the dragon that appears on the national flag of Wales.

Welsh national flag. Image: Getty

"I had been taking scenic shots throughout the day on North Beach but when I came to look through them later that night I was gobsmacked," Michael McMullin recounted his discovery. "I showed it to my family and even without promoting them, they too all said 'oh my god, that's the Welsh dragon."

Though the image, as the Daily Sun recounts, is nothing more than a trick of light and shadow, the resemblance to the national flag in a place where dragons are part of the distant past and collective experience and pride of the Welsh people, reminds me of the tales of the Tulpa from Tibetan mysticism.

According to Alexandra David-Néel, tulpas are "magic formations generated by a powerful concentration of thought." It is a materialized thought that has taken physical form and is usually regarded as synonymous to a thoughtform; as described in Wikipedia.

A trick of light, a thought-form or both? Image: Mercury.

Are we seeing an unconscious national thought projection in McMullins photo? A kind of hologram? The combined unconscious thought of a myth projected into our three dimensional reality?