Karmageddon or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Calm

Most people have at one time in their lives been blindsided, perhaps in the middle of a mundane Thursday afternoon, by a life’s culmination of poor and unskillful decisions most of which were made unconsciously. It seems in that moment that the dark part of the universe, which had been minding its own business torturing other poor souls, saw you out of the corner of its eye and fixed its terrible gaze on you. It is then that everything you thought you were, the life you had created, the relationships you had cultivated, the career you worked so hard for, all fall away and what’s left is a smoking pile of rubble that resembles more a Jackson Pollack painting than your life. This dark synchronicity of monstrous proportions is of course your very own karmageddon. The one that had been waiting for you for years. And everybody gets one (if you’re lucky). Every bad thing you ever did, every poor choice you ever made all seem to turn around at once and return to where they came from: You.

Karma is a concept that is readily used in American culture today even by Christians, Muslims, and Jews. In some ways it has become a religiously neutral concept despite its Hindu and Buddhist roots. We all employ the concept of “karma” (usually threatening someone by reminding them that “what goes around comes around!”) but despite its popular use it is also one of the least understood concepts in popular culture. Just because you (and here is an extreme example) murdered someone in your past life doesn’t mean you will get murdered in this life or that if you were a thief in a past life you will be robbed blind every other week in this one. Thankfully it doesn’t work that way. Whatever “unfortunate” thing happens to you now is actually a good thing (I know, bear with me a second—this is good news I promise). When you have something “bad” happen to you this means you are finally healthy enough in this life to be able to metabolize the bad karma from your previous lives. You’re finally strong enough to endure the kind of karmic trials that will burn off your bad karma. Basically think of “unfortunate” incidents as rebirth control: an opportunity for you to burn off that bad karma and cease being reborn altogether.

But karma is also not also not punishment, and suffering isn’t necessarily a result of bad karma. As Buddha’s first noble truth reminds us, “All life is sorrowful.” We may suffer, but it doesn’t have to be because of anything we did. Sometimes bad things just happen and as my friend Renea Frey reminds us, “karma is the certainty that you will be presented with opportunities to learn from past mistakes. It is a teaching, it is not punishment… We can't ever *know* all of the strands of karma that converge in any moment (unless we are fully enlightened) so it is impossible to say if what we are experiencing is the result of "good karma" or "bad karma" since we can't see all of the possible ways that things might have turned out otherwise.” All we can do is be mindful of our conditioned minds and attempt to condition them towards more enlightened responses to difficult situations. Pain is inevitable, but our suffering is entirely a choice. We may lose our jobs or our car break down, but it is always our choice to respond with equanimity, letting go of our expectations that things go a certain way. When we are present with things as they are, not as we wish them to be, there is great freedom and clarity. Karma presents that opportunity for us. In every moment it teaches us to choose peace or suffering. No matter which we choose, it is a choice that transforms.

Of course you don’t have to buy into the concept of karma and the whole idea of past lives and futures lives and all the rebirth stuff. In fact, I’m not sure I do either (although there is some tantalizing evidence out there). But one way to think of it that may be helpful is that every moment of your life is a life. Every state of consciousness you inhabit is a single life that you have the opportunity to make more virtuous and more complete. In each of those moments is the chance for you to choose to become more whole, more loving, and more compassionate. For every time you choose fullness over brokenness you train your mind to become that much fuller next time when a similar moment arises that challenges you. The mind is largely a reflexive organ anyway and we all have unskillful tendencies that have been deeply ingrained in us from our childhood we realize must be corrected. The sooner we see our conditioned negative tendencies the sooner we can get about the business of correcting them and showing up in our lives as the wonderfully virtuous and fully awake humans that we naturally are.

So the next time your car breaks down in the middle of the interstate in rush hour traffic, or your boss fires you after ten years of service, or your significant other dumps you, don’t worry and calm down (or try to anyway); you’re looking at an opportunity to meet these challenges with grace, wisdom, and awareness. In doing so you not only create good karma for yourself but you’re no longer adding bad karma that you’ll have to burn off in your next life. So make it easy on yourself in your next life. Don’t be there.

Oh, and the last one out cut off the lights.

We teach each other wonder. We teach each other the awe of birth and death. The mystery of being and becoming. The breath of God moving through forms. I hold you as you hold me--in the mutual understanding of our endless mortal lives, our endless immortal deaths. And as much as I like, I can't save you from your death nor you save me from mine. But what I can do is one simple thing: I can try to love you.

I'm sometimes frightened at the beauty others see in me that I don't feel about myself.

Why the World Needs Superheroes

“You’re much stronger than you think you are.”—Superman from All-Star Superman

Superheroes you ask? Yes. And I mean it. Bear with me, it’s not as crazy as it sounds, or maybe it is. I’ll let you decide.

The 20th century gave birth to many things—the airplane, telephones, television, computers, the internet, but one of the few things that rarely gets mentioned, one of the best things human beings have ever created, is superheroes. They are the archetypal reminders of humanity’s highest aspirations manifested in fictional form.

Superheroes were born with the publication of Action Comics #1 in June 1938 written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Joe Shuster, which featured the first appearance of Superman, the father of all superheroes. Superman could not yet fly nor was he as strong as he would eventually become, but his appearance in Action Comics was the birth of the superhero as superheroes are currently thought of today. He was “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…” There had never been a character so powerful in comic books or novels outside of religious texts.

When Superman burst on the comics scene in 1938 the world changed. All the mythical gods of the past may have been declared dead, but here was a new kind of god, an American God almost literally draped in the American flag, that represented not only democratic ideals, but truth and justice. Sure, there had been heroes of the past, gods that human beings aspired to be like, but never had there been a secular metaphor so powerful, so uniquely American whose popularity rivaled that of religious icons (for modern religious implications of superheroes see the pics below of the Wat Rong Khun Buddhist temple in Chiang Rai, Thailand conceived by the artist Chalermchai Kositpipat, where he employs the iconography of Superman, Batman, and Neo from the Matrix films alongside images of the Buddha and other traditional Buddhist images-- http://www.feelguide.com/2011/01/17/buddhist-temple-design-inspired-by-superman-spiderman-batman-and-keanu-reeves/).You show a picture of Superman’s chest anywhere in the world and they will tell you exactly who he is. He may have begun as purely an American icon but he now belongs to the world.

There has never been a character quite like Superman. He is the physical expression of a higher way of being, a totem if you will, symbolizing humanity’s tendency to evolve. His sense of morality and justice is unerring in their acuity. Jerry Siegel in describing how he created Superman says, “All of a sudden it hits me. I conceive of a character like Samson, Hercules, and all the strong men I had ever heard of rolled into one—only more so.” It is the “only more so” part that is interesting because Siegel and Shuster created Superman with mythological archetypes in mind in terms of super strength, but they took their character a step farther and eventually imbued him with an unerring sense of morality and justice aided with almost god-like powers and near invulnerability. They created Superman with the evolved ethical and moral codes that the best of humanity exhibited and others attempted to exemplify. Superman is a new kind of myth; he is a god on Earth come to protect the weak and the powerless and to show human beings that we can become more than we are. He embodies humanity's greatest ideals so deeply that he has internalized them, becoming as Aaron Johnson says, “humanity's living conscience.”

On the website The Best Article Every Day (http://www.bspcn.com/2010/10/16/this-is-why-superman-is-my-hero/) a young woman posted a brief article titled, "Why Superman is My Hero," describing her personal experience with the Man of Tomorrow as he appears in Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman. Her experience, perhaps not so different than many readers in her valuing of superheroes, is a profound example of why Superman and superheroes are so important to readers and why they remain ever popular in not just American culture, but human culture.

"I have struggled with depression ever since I was ten years old. It had crippled me emotionally. I was 27 years old, no college degree, no job and no will to live. I decided to kill myself after Christmas.

"And then my sister's boyfriend loaned me these comics. Superman is dying of radiation poisoning and is trying to complete all of his tasks before he dies, but he still takes the time to save a young girl who is about to jump off a building.

"I cried for hours after reading this. I identified with that girl so much, and I could almost hear Superman telling me that I'm stronger than I think.

"Now every time my depressesion [sic] starts to rear its ugly head, I just repeat his words and imagine him hugging me when I'm standing on the edge. It works better than any medication or therapy I've ever had.

"Now I'm in college and top of my class. I have friends. I have a life. And I don't care that he's a fictional comic book character. He still saved me."

Superman has remained the brightest star in comics for over 70 years not only because he was the first and greatest superhero, but because he represents the highest human potential. Over the last 70 years institutions have changed, politics have changed, governments have changed, cultures have changed, but Superman has remained constant. He remains the idealized human being absent of any moral or spiritual flaws. Superman is human perfection incarnate and represents the evolutionary impulse in human beings to become better, more complex, more ethical, more spiritual, more loving, more compassionate, and more whole. He invites us to evolve. He invites us to become like him—to become a superhero.

Of course, we can’t match the Man of Steel’s physical superpowers (although in the future who knows?), but we can aspire to match his spiritual superpowers. To live up to our fullest human expression would indeed be superheroic. To treat one’s life with the serious care and concern necessary to develop one’s self along many of the major lines of development from moral, spiritual, emotional, cognitive, even kinesthetic, is an engagement with the world on such an intimate level that one not only transforms one’s self, but changes the world as well. What Superman suggests is fully alive transcendent human beings engaged in the world at a high level of consciousness. The world needs us to be evolutionaries.

If the 20th Century gave birth to fictional superheroes, the 21st Century will give birth to real ones, men and women who are not afraid to grab evolution by the head and lead it; who will make a commitment to Spirit and see that it unfolds through humans into higher states of being and better ways of becoming; who will sacrifice their lower selves on the altar of their highest selves; who will have enough divine pride to stand where they are and say, “I am what the world has been waiting for. I can help. And I begin with making myself the best I can possibly be.” The world needs to be reminded that giants still walk the earth, that human beings possess almost limitless power, that on our best day we accomplish miracles. The world needs to be reminded that the power and responsibility to make our lives better is ours and always has been.

Superheroes derive their strength from inner authority, their superpowers metaphorically representing their spiritual strength. This is why they will never go out of style or be so deconstructed they collapse as the cultural symbols and moral signifiers they are. Superheroes, in their transformative and moral dimensions, are like Superman—bulletproof. They inspire readers to become more than what they are. They inspire us to take responsibility for our lives and cultivate the necessary human agency that will bring about our mutual liberation. The time for superheroes is now. We must remember what Nietzsche implored us to do: “But by my love and hope I beseech you: Do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!” (trans. By Kaufmann, 156). Superheroes are the cultural seeds of transformation. It is superheroes as transformative catalysts that inspire readers to live their own heroic lives of self-actualization, service, and yes, truth and justice too. Are you ready to begin?

Capes are optional.

Can you love me? Are you strong enough? Can you sit inside the sun? Can you stand steadfast against the largest ocean wave? Can you say, “I know you and accept all that you are”? Can you become the still place where all worlds come to rest? Can you love you?

The Hero

Others can only watch the hero suffer from afar. No true respite can be offered to her and she will not take any. Her pain is her own. What she suffers is her own to suffer; she would not have it any other way. She suffers so others will not have to. Her reckoning is with the world inside herself, unmoved by joy or sorrow, unmoved by hopelessness or despair. Her work is just to strive, to become more and more with each sacrifice, to endure if she can, to help when she can, and to become as wonderfully alive as her life allows. Others can only bear witness to her spirit as it strives with its own otherness… and lights the fire in others to begin.

I don't have to know you to love you. I know ME.

Because everything is ending, life can be good.

I think we will come to understand that the world was more wonderful than we thought, and more dangerous. That it held more possibility than we ever imagined, and more emptiness. But that it was our world all along, and the choice to be a part of it was always only ours.

Art

Art, if it's done properly, should kill people. There should be holocausts. Blood in the streets. Hopefully whole genocides. Art should bring about the death of our old selves, our lower selves. It should also give birth to a more expansive, more loving, more compassionate, more alive self. Art, if it's done properly, should simultaneously be Thanatos and Eros. If art doesn't kill, it isn't art, it's distraction.

Laughter as philosophy, weeping as epistemology.

If you cannot be satisfied in the fight, winning will never be enough.

Remembering the Body in the Information Age

“…we have come to the point in biological history where we now are responsible for our own evolution. We are self-evolvers. Evolution means selecting and therefore choosing and deciding, and this means valuing.”—Abraham Maslow

Today human beings find themselves in an interesting situation. Our modern lives really don’t require much from us. Many of our efforts are half-measures by design. Our techno-economic culture in some ways really limits human agency in that in our current way of interfacing with technology it does not inspire our fullest human physical expression. Many of the activities in our lives require no more from us than the pressing of a few buttons, the typing of a few keys, even our groceries can be delivered to our homes. Our spiritual mettle isn’t tested. Our bodies are built to hunt, to fight or flee, to engage with life not only at its highest intellectual levels but also at its most primal levels. We’re hardwired for action, to connect with the world on a deep and energetic level. Our bodies, our minds, and our spirits shine when we are challenged.

At the risk of eulogizing the past, in our not too distant horticultural and agrarian past, human beings participated in life in a much more direct way. Their world placed very immediate and dire demands on them. They knew they had to fulfill the requirements of nature: hunt, eat, plant, and harvest. But we have evolved since then to not only transcend purely agrarian modes of living and being, but also industrial. Today we find ourselves in the information age. Life is vastly different today than even 100 years ago and it is evolving at a surprising speed (one only has to think of the Wright brothers who in 1903 achieved the first flight—by 1969 we had taken our first steps on the moon). Today, much of the work of human beings is simply the processing, collecting, distributing, and exchanging of data. The information we get is often second-hand at best. We get our information about the world either from the television, internet, or newspaper, and rarely if ever actually experience the realities we read about or see. Our relationship to the world is indirect. And while it’s easy to blame technology, technology isn’t the problem. We are. Let me repeat that. We are.

In the dialectic of progress we have forgotten where we came from. We were so impatient to evolve that we have attempted to kick out the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder that has allowed us to reach our present height. We have forgotten our bodies. Evolution, the process of becoming more complex and more whole, is spirit-in-action. The same spirit that gave birth to the manifest world moves through us too. We are, so far as we know, the latest evolutionary model—cutting edge biological technology. What this means is that for the first time in human history we are in control of our own evolution. What this also means is that we are co-creating our world now. And the vehicle of this co-creation is our bodies.

Because so much of our time is spent in the virtual world shuffling 1s and 0s, we have lost touch with the real world. We connect with life by proxy. And so, the connection between us and our bodies has been divorced. They feel less and less like our own and more and more like flesh baggage we drag around. One would almost thing we no longer need them. We are so out of touch with our bodies that our bodies have finally begun to notice. According to the Get America Fit Foundation “Obesity is the #2 cause of preventable death in the United States; 60 million Americans, 20 years and older are obese; [and] 9 million children and teens ages 6-19 are overweight.” Not to mention the cost in productivity: “Workdays lost: $39.3 Million; Physician office visits: $62.7 Million; Restricted Activity days: $29.9 Million; [and] Bed-Related days: $89.5 Million.” Our lack of attention to our bodies is now an epidemic. We are literally dying.

Of course none of this new. We have known for years. As Maya Angelou is fond of saying, "When you know better you do better." I think it’s time we finally do better, don’t you? And it begins with our awareness. There is nothing that can get you as connected to life as your body. It is after all through your body that you experience the world. I want you to do something very simple. After you read this article I want you to just close your eyes, relax, and sit comfortably. Notice your breath coming in and going out of you. Do you feel your breath? Can you feel your lungs contracting and expanding? Can you feel your heart beating beneath your breast? Can you feel the way your back is tensed to support sitting upright? Can you feel the way your hands rest on your lap? Can you feel what all that really feels like? Do you remember what it feels like to be lucky enough to have a body and to be able to use it? Open your eyes and look at your body. Get naked if you want. There is no other body like it. You have the only one. And there was never a body like yours before and there will never be one like yours again. It is yours. It is the most well made thing in the universe. Do you feel that sense of awe? Do you feel that warmth pour through your body? Notice it. Remember it. Feels good doesn’t it? What you’re feeling is information—original information. And this is all it takes. Just noticing your body, remembering (re-membering) it. Because if you remember it, you’ll be more likely to take care of it.

Your body is here for one purpose: to support your consciousness to become the fullest human being you are capable of becoming. The better you take care of your body, the more productive you will be and the sooner you can enjoy the kind of human flourishing that not only expresses the full beauty and wonder of who you are, but will be a living example to others that a complete life, a life of meaning and purpose, must include the integration of the body, mind, and spirit. Because many of us have forgotten: these bodies of ours are not physical, they’re spiritual. We call them physical, but it’s not true. They are spirit manifest. Let us learn to value our bodies as the spiritual vehicles they are. It feels good, I promise.

Never underestimate the healing power of a good storm or a sudden change in weather.

Everything's trying that wants to be whole...

Art and Happiness

If you cannot find joy in the hot flash of creation, in the midst of unknowing, intuition, striving inch by inch, thought by thought towards the event of completion, of art, then whatever happens afterwards will never satisfy you. You will never be happy your whole life.

My Strange Love for Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts

The past few years the character Doctor Strange created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, has become very important to me. Important how, you ask? Well, he’s a rather odd sort of character that really should NOT work in narrative form. His only power is his magic. He doesn’t possess super strength, and he’s not terribly flashy by today’s superhero standards. Last but not least, writers always run the risk of making his magical powers a deus ex machine, which makes him a difficult character to write for, hence his rather sporadic publication history of late. All the things most people dislike about him, I actually love. I love weird characters. He’s not an easy character to love mind you. You have to have a rather eclectic background to have an appreciation for Doctor Stephen Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. And I for one probably love him for very different reasons than most readers. See, it really comes down to magic. Real magic.

My interest in magic came pretty early in life, perhaps 12 or 13. Now, I wasn’t one of those kids who pulled rabbits out of hats or tried to wow friends with cards tricks that only worked half of the time and were still boring whether they worked or not. I was more of a Platonic magician, which is to say, I loved the idea of magic. But more precisely, I loved the idea of magicians. I loved Houdini first and foremost (and lately David Blaine who seems to have picked up where Houdini left off). His absolute and unswerving commitment to his craft was inspiring to that poor farm boy in North Carolina (who wouldn’t have cable television or internet for five more years). But what most people would call his magic was secondary to me. For me, the real magic took place before he performed his magic tricks. The real magic for me happened during all the solitary years he prepared himself to become arguably the world’s greatest (and certainly most famous) magician. To see his will expressed so elegantly, to witness his keen mind manifested in death-defying feats of physical and spiritual skill, was nothing short of sublime. I checked out every book from the local public library (there were two) and even managed once to watch a documentary about him at my cousin’s house (who lived in town and DID have cable). Here was a man who through his will recreated from Erik Weisz, one of seven children born in Budapest, and in a sustained commitment to becoming, became Harry Houdini, magician-superhero. Harry Houdini was in many ways his greatest magic trick. Who he became was his highest creative act and a genuine work of art. All one has to do is look at a photograph of him to see his power and grace, the external referents to his inner magic. So magic and self-creation was linked in my mind from an early age.




















Later when I was maybe twenty or twenty-one I discovered Doctor Strange. I can’t say for sure how I became aware of Doctor Strange, it’s one of the situations where once you are aware of something it seems you were never NOT aware of it. If memory serves I thought he was a quirky character, one of Marvel’s B-list characters for sure, and certainly very different from my most beloved DC superheroes like Batman, Superman, the Flash, and Green Lantern. But there was an instant appeal, most of it on an intuitive level. Something about him spoke to me. Part of it I know now was Steve Ditko’s otherworldly artwork.

Ditko’s art was beautiful and unlike any I had ever seen. It was almost surrealistic with his depiction of the mystical worlds Doctor Strange travelled in. Shapes were twisted and space itself imbued with a shifting nature that became almost a psychedelic experience to even look at it. Many readers just KNEW Ditko was tripping on acid or on mushrooms (this was the early 60s you know), and so, Ditko and Doctor Strange became a kind of symbolic hero for the hippie counterculture (of course, little did they know that Ditko was a staunch conservative). But his artwork was the stuff of magic itself—it created a space where the surrealistic beauty of the art alone was enjoyable on a profound level. For me his work became archetypal in its symbolic roots, and the formal qualities of his art represented in pictorial form what the inner worlds of consciousness vying with itself looked like. He depicted the inner life of the mind seeking enlightenment. Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts was the enlightened mind warring with its own shadow elements manifested as demons, monsters, extradimensional warlords, wraiths, and even death itself. Each adventure was the enlightened mind overcoming the stumbling blocks of illusion, human frailty, ignorance, and even evil. The landscape of Doctor Strange for me was always the inner life of the mind. It was psychology (the psyche-soul) played out in the superhero genre. But as I said, Doctor Strange also represented magic itself. Real magic.



The kind of magic I’m talking about is the kind that many artists of the past have used, artists like Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Harry Smith, Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Anger, Marcel Duchamp, and recently Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Real magic as I understand it is the manipulation of symbols, language, to bring about a result in the world. It’s a process of manifesting the will of the magician into the world by means of interacting with the subtle and largely mysterious metaphysical version of the morphogenetic and probability fields. One of the greatest magicians working right now is Alan Moore and he describes magic as nothing less than art itself. Art and magic are interchangeable. The earliest descriptions of magic usually referred to magic as “the art.”And rightly so, because that’s exactly what it is. Moore in the Mindscape of Alan Moore says that the magic and sorcery textbook called a “grimoire” was simply a fancy way of saying “grammar” and that when someone said they were going to cast a “spell” it literally meant they were going spell. Magic in many ways is the science of language (whether that is the grammar of words, visuals, or music). He sees magic as a transformative force that can change a human being, change a society.

In magic’s liminal building project of art it destabilizes the consciousness of the experiencer and in this disorientation the consciousness then must reach to integrate this new experience. It is the consciousness’s reaching that creates a new space in which the world can be viewed (in fact the actual world becomes new—when the mind changes, so does the world). This new space is more whole, more inclusive, and more complete than the latter. What I’m talking about is transcendence, transformation, or at the minimum, a state of consciousness (or a peak experience) that can facilitate a transformation of consciousness. It is this function of art (magic) that can literally transform the world.

It is this idea of magic that informs my love of Doctor Strange. He is the personification of human spiritual potential in the realm of magic. But he is also like Houdini and all the other self-made people and fictional characters I have used as inspiration in my own self-making. Doctor Strange had to re-make himself after a terrible car accident. Stephen Strange was first a world-famous neurosurgeon, but he was selfish and only cared only about money and his own notoriety. After his car accident, his hands were so badly injured that he could never perform neurosurgery again. Alone, depressed, and quickly becoming broke, he travels the world to find a cure. Finally losing everything he had ever owned, his quest leads him to the Himalayas where he meets the being who will become his teacher and who he will inherit the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme from, the Ancient One. It is there in the mountains that he learns what powers he innately possesses, and he masters the mystical arts, becoming who we now know as Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, Master of the Mystical Arts!











Magic, self-making, mysticism, spirituality, human potential—all these things I equate with Doctor Strange. Every time I pick up a Doctor Strange comic I always get a feeling of inspiration and hope. Sure, most people don’t get it, and that’s okay. He’s not for everybody. But he’s exactly right for me. For me, he’s one of the best comic book characters ever created. He’s pure magic.