Review
We've always felt there was an intensely spiritual message behind the story of Superman - the superhero who appears weak yet is actually amazingly strong; who seems ineffective but is in reality capable of transforming the most dire situations into happy ones. Isn't that how we all are, deep down, if we did but know it? So imagine how pleased we were to find out that Alvin Schwartz, author of the earliest Superman comics that came out back in the 1940s and 50s, actually intended the Superman stories to convey this message. In this utterly enthralling blend of personal memoir, allegory and spiritual wisdom, Schwartz takes you through his lifelong journey of discovery about why the Superman character he thought he was 'creating' actually seemed to have a life of its own, and why it exerted such an extraordinary compulsion over him. To help his message unfold, he introduces the character of a seven-foot Buddhist monk named Thongden. Thongden introduces himself as a tulpa, a being who has been thought into existence by a Tibetan mystic. Thongden becomes Schwartz's teacher and, by leading him through a whole series of extraordinary experiences, finally reveals to him the true nature of the Self, and also the true nature of Superman. It's a brilliant book. You'll love it!
220pp, 152mm x 228mm, softback, 2006

Extract
For several minutes as I walked beside him, I had a sense of everything around me standing out with greater distinctness, the colors brighter and a shimmering iridescence in the air. I even felt a kind of energy that I hadn't felt in years, as though some husk of years had been broken through. It had to do, somehow, with that sense that my body did not exclusively possess me but rather that I was its possessor, and even the potential possessor of any other bodies that I might choose. It was a most extraordinary feeling, to put it mildly. But it didn't last long. Thongden was now insisting that I return to my breathing exercises.

'You will need them,' he explained. 'Because there's still the matter of flight. It's very important to explore flight thoroughly - from off the ground.'

Of course I didn't have the least idea what he was talking about except that in some way he was alluding to the World of Birds, toward which we were headed.

I could hear the vast chorus of bird sounds well before we rounded a turn in the path and came upon the huge aviary. And then we were there, facing an enormous black birdcage with literally hundreds of small winged creatures flickering freely among the branches of the small trees that furnished it.

The path led us straight inside, and we were suddenly walking among a mass of smaller, multicolored twittering creatures of all shapes and kinds. The air was almost buttery with warmth and humidity. It had been warm outside, but much drier. Most overwhelming was the sense of endless, fluttering motion, the sudden whirring of wings and the soft cries, the shrieks, the croaking notes all blending into a massive cacophony. The breathing exercises, reinforced by Thongden's mesmerizing story of his creation told during long nights in that constantly re-created surreal world he called home, must all have combined to build up in me a kind of heady sensitivity that had, to phrase it appropriately, no edges.

I was again feeling a kind of cloudiness, but it was different this time since I could not seem to distinguish individual birds. Instead I felt swept up into an enormous cloud of feathery bird awareness. I felt weightless and enjoyed a visual acuity that seemed to reveal every inch of ground below me while I vibrated high above it at an intensity in which I was prepared instantly to swoop, dive, rise, wheel, or slide through viscous currents of air. My throat burst with sound, a loving, ululating, pulsing melody, throbbing with a sensation of voluptuous fullness. I felt thoroughly wrapped in that sensation, certain that my call was being heeded and at the same time intensely alert, ready to dart and swerve out of reach of darker shadows and sudden threatening umbras irrupting into the great swarm of vibrating wingtips. Again I don't know how long I remained in that loose and yielding environment. But suddenly I grew gray, somber, and heavy. I felt pulled down to my feet. I felt the weight of my head resting on the bony wings of my shoulders. I was suddenly without motion, all vibration stilled and remote. The world seemed thick and distant and slow. I was myself again, staring at swirling creatures in the aviary and aware of Thongden looking down at me from his great height.

'I would have liked to remain that way,' I said almost sadly.

'Every change of consciousness carries its own regrets,' the tulpa remarked. He had taken my arm again and was leading me back outside.

We walked in silence for a time, down a path away from the aviary. The park was beginning to fill with lunch-hour visitors from the nearby neighborhoods. People were occupying the hitherto empty benches that lined the walkway.

I stopped at one of the benches, indicating to Thongden that I wanted to talk. He assented wordlessly by settling down. I sat beside him, watching groups of people walk past while I marshaled my thoughts. I had been greatly impressed by the experience of flight. From Superman to those birds, I had felt a deep envy. How could humans be superior if we lacked the wondrous free power of flight? I had even experienced and mourned its gradual attrition in the great ostrich.

'You attribute that free feeling to the wrong capacity,' Thongden said, as though once more he had been reading my thoughts.

I shook my head. 'It was a wonderful feeling with the birds,' I said. 'I mean the sheer uninhibited motion - like a dance in four dimensions.'

'And Superman? Did he give you the same feeling?'

I shook my head. 'Of course I envied it. The way he soared to that collapsing bridge. But it was different. I was on the outside, watching him. He even held me off with his silence. I still don't understand why he ignored me that way.'

'He had no choice if he was to do what was necessary.'

'That's no explanation,' I said. 'Is that the best you can do?'

'There's no way I can tell you. You'll have to figure that out for yourself. Maybe the breathing exercises will help.'

'Seems mostly like hypnosis to me,' I said.

Thongden shook his head. 'Here in the West, there's no real understanding of prajna. You think breathing is to bring oxygen into your body. Your physiology doesn't get beyond the coarse molecular level. But there's a greater electromagnetic connection with all of life - what you think of as outside yourself. Of course that's impossible. There's no outside, just different positions and attitudes of the self - different magnetic angles. As in certain kinds of flight. Bird flight, such as you've just experienced. But of course that wasn't the flight of a single bird. That was bird flight in general - birdness, you might say. But flight itself -' He shook his head. 'It's really nothing much.'

From An Unlikely Prophet, ?2006 by Alvin Schwartz, published by Destiny Books.

Click here to read another extract from this book.