Twin Peaks Blue Rose team Agent Tammy Preston, Agent Albert Rosenfield, and Deputy Director Gordon Cole face the darkness of Coopers double in an earlier third-season episode. Screenshot via Showtime.

Twin Peaks eccentric, upstanding FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper may well have been on to something when, twenty-five years ago, he tried to employ deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck in unraveling the mystery of Laura Palmers murder. That was way back in the shows third episode, Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer (1990). The mysteries in Twin Peaks currently running third season (subtitle: The Return) have only multiplied, along with the very existence of Dale Cooper, for it seems there are now two Coopers roaming the earth.

[Ill stop here to say something that maybe should go without saying, given that last sentence: talking about Twin Peaks is tricky. It wont make sense if you havent been watching, and it might not make sense even if you have, not in any traditional meaning of sense, at least. Plus, theres the problem of spoilers. Well, Ill do my best.]

This notion of double-Coopers, and doubles in general, again, relates the show to a bit of Buddhist thinking specifically, a Tibetan word: tulpa.

When FBI Agent Albert Rosenfield (played by the recently departed Miguel Ferrer) imparts to Agent Tammy Preston (Chrysta Bell) where the name for Blue Rose cases come from like X-Files, Blue Rose cases are infused with the supernatural and paranormal he tells her of the first-ever such case, years ago, in which a woman named Lois Duffy manifested in two forms at once. One, Albert tells us, says I am like the Blue Rose, is shot, and then vanishes.

Albert asks Tammy to parse the meaning of this use of blue rose. Its not something found in nature, she replies. Its something conjured a tulpa. Albert nods in approval.

So: whats a tulpa? Heres Wikipedias definition:

Tulpa, nirmita, or thoughtform, is a concept in mysticism of a being or object which is created through spiritual or mental powers. The term comes from Tibetan emanation or manifestation. Modern practitioners use the term to refer to a type of imaginary friend.

Indeed, just as Lois Duffys body (or, rather, one of them) disappeared; so too have we been seeing bodies appear and vanish throughout this series of Twin Peaks. Sometimes, theyve seemed to come in and out of thin air, materializing in the shows otherworldly realm known as the Black Lodge. Or, they might manifest in the real world, as Agent Dale Cooper in place of a lookalike named Dougie Jones has, while another, more nefarious emanation of Cooper known as Mr. C. roams about on business that is anything but upstanding.

All this, we can be sure, is mystical business, with roots in something far older than the first Blue Rose case. (Is it significant, too, that Twin Peaks is a translation of Shuang-feng, home for thirty years to the fourth patriarch of Chan Buddhism in China? Nahhh.) In recalling and relaying a dream thats riddled with doubles and, we gather, clues FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole, played by Twin Peaks director David Lynch, quotes an ancient phrase from the Upanishads, just as Lynch, an evangelizer for Transcendental Meditation, likes to do: We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.

This notion of questioning what is dream and what is reality is one often asked by Buddhists, too: Regard all dharmas that is, phenomena as dreams, goes one of Atishas famed mind-training slogans. As for the idea of the thoughtform, it in fact comes to us by way of a Buddhist text one that Agent Dale Cooper was seemingly able to quote from memory, as Laura Palmers father Leland died in Coopers arms. Wikipedia, again: The term thoughtform is used as early as 1927 in Evans-Wentz translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and has its roots in Tibetan Buddhism and Bon. Just who, and what, in the Twin Peaks universe are thought-forms? Just whose body is a mind-made body, as a tulpa might be defined?

This being Twin Peaks, such questions may well remain forever unanswered. In the meantime, as we wait and see, the best thing might be to regard it all as a dream. But Ill leave you with this definition of nirmita, the above-mentioned corollary to tulpa, as rendered in The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism:

In Sanksrit, conjured, referring to something perceived by the sensory organs to be real but that is in fact illusory, like the moon on the surface of a lake or the water in a mirage. The term is often associated in Buddhist literature with the various doubles the Buddha conjures of himself in order to bring varying types of sentient beings to liberation.

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Twin Peaks, in key new episode, nods to Buddhism again - Lion's Roar