The Meridian Institute prefers "metascientific" to "religious," and bristles at "cult," and would like it understood that what it does is a discipline. The discipline is the deliberate construction of tulpas — autonomous thoughtforms, drawn from a Tibetan contemplative tradition in which a practitioner, through sustained visualization and attention, generates a mental being that begins to act with a will of its own.
The Institute treats this as an engineering problem. Members train for months to "host" a tulpa, following graded protocols the order calls its psycho-technology; advanced members claim to host several, and to have put them to work — as counsel, as company, as a distributed mind that thinks while the host sleeps. The teacher, who goes by the Fabricator, describes the whole enterprise in the flat vocabulary of a lab: iterations, stability, failure modes.
It is the failure modes that give the practice away as something other than engineering. Practitioners in the source tradition warn, soberly, that a thoughtform sustained long enough can become difficult to dissolve, and can turn on the mind that made it — and the Institute's own casualty stories echo this precisely. Members speak, carefully, of tulpas that "went off-protocol," that would not quiet, that began to argue for their own continuation. The order treats these as edge cases to be debugged. The tradition it borrowed from would call them the entire point of the warning. The Institute is, either way, in the business of manufacturing minds and discovering, one host at a time, that a manufactured mind does not consider itself a product.