An Unlikely Prophet

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."
Schwartz writes:

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.
What other levels of reality are there?

... 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.
All of this causes Schwartz to remember paranormal events in his life, often when he was writing Superman comics. He starts to take the tulpa seriously, telling his wife:

"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."

I'm still not quite certain what the Path without Form is, but under the tulpa's direction, Schwartz learns to transfer his consciousness into animals, other people, and even his younger self, by making a concentrated leap of the mind.

Of all the quotes in the book, there was one that, for me, towered over all the others. One of the memories Schwartz recalled is a conversation he had (or imagined he had?) with a Hawaiian shaman during a trip to Hawaii in the 1960s. The shaman, foreshadowing the tulpa's appearance a few decades later, said this:
"One day," he said, "you'll find out for yourself what thinking can do. The power of thought is sometimes more than the thinker. Lucky most people don't understand that. They think so many different thoughts that nothing much happens, which is probably a good thing. But lately a lot of angels are being created. That's right. Angels. Where do you think all the books and stories about angels come from? Out of thin air? No. Because people need help and don't know where to turn, so they look for guardian angels, and the power gets formed, and the angels are there. And sometimes they can help. Up to a point. Then there are the people who create space aliens. But mostly they're very confused about what they want from aliens, you know?
That may be the single best explanation of the UFO phenomenon I have ever read.

So how does it end? Does Schwartz fully manifest Superman into a tulpa? The answer is maybe. Or maybe not. But what he realizes is that Superman represents the highest possible state of human consciousness. Superman exists for the rescue: for that single moment in time when all of his power and strength is concentrated in the now, to save someone in peril. That's a state humans can achieve, such as in times of extreme personal danger. Schwartz then realizes that no one can live their life in that state; they would burn out in a matter of minutes or hours, and that's why Clark Kent has to exist. Even Superman can't be Superman all the time. He has to return to an ordinary, average, everyday existence to balance out his superpowers.

And for us, we can, temporarily, move beyond our everyday Clark Kent existence and make use of our own superhuman selves. How do we do that? The tulpa not only has the answer, but is the answer:
"The key is thought."
This was easily one of the best books I've ever read. Even reading it again, knowing what was going to happen, I was still riveted and sometimes even shocked for a second time at how profound it was. I'm happy to report that Schwartz wrote a sequel (published when he was 89!), called A Gathering of Selves, about Batman. I look forward to reading that next.