Randy’s Blog

Lately I've been reading books about comic books. I started with Mutants and Mystics by Jeffrey Kripal, which was a fascinating history of comics books and science fiction, showing how authors have incorporated their paranormal experiences into their stories. It was so good that part of me wants to re-read it and take copious notes.

But before doing that, I decided to read a book discussed in Mutants and Mystics, called An Unlikely Prophet by Alvin Schwartz:

Schwartz wrote Superman and Batman comics in the 1940s and '50s. Decades later, in his eighties, he had a kind of awakening, where he realized how often Superman and the paranormal intertwined during his life. The book describes how he came to that realization. It's marketed as an autobiography, but it very effectively weaves in his imagination. So much so that it's hard to tell which parts are real and which aren't, and that's probably the whole point. For me, this was the most profound, reality-shattering book I've ever read. I immediately read it again, taking lots of notes the second time.

Schwartz says that late in his life he was contacted by a man claiming to be a tulpa: a living person created entirely out of pure thought by someone else. In other words, a fully materialized thought form. The tulpa says he's there to help Schwartz finish creating his own Superman tulpa, a process he unknowingly started while writing Superman comics early in his life, but never finished.

This is crazy, right? Schwartz agreed, telling the man such things aren't possible. People in the twentieth century know better (the book was published in 1997). The tulpa says:

"But what you call the twentieth century, Mr. Schwartz, is only an atmosphere--or a climate. It does not reach everywhere. The forces that make up each climate are never quite the same."

After that he talked about how complex reality is. He used the word as though it had quotation marks around it. He said reality had many levels of which we in the West knew only a single one.

... Thongden's response was that the body itself is a composite and has no essential reality. A so-called out-of-body state, he said, is no different from any kind of in-body state that incorporates flying or any other unusual abilities. Thongden insisted that one such state is no more likely than another except that there seems to be, in our Western culture at this particular time, a consensus that the nonflying state is the "real" state.

"I'm beginning to realize we live in a very strange world, Kay. We pass our everyday lives as though it simply weren't so."

The tulpa keeps pushing Schwartz:

"Mr. Schwartz, have you ever wondered why one cannot see from the inside? Is there a law that keeps you bound to the outside--to the external? Is there a law that says you are fixed in just one moment of time, at one moment of your age, at one place only? Your purpose in being here today is to abandon that prejudice by entering the Path without Form."