Man is a being stitched together by Time and Eternity, neither fixed or immutable--Time remembering itself as Eternity--a monumental crisis of consciousness.

The best kept secret of American superhero comics has always been the aspirational and inspirational ideals of superheroes to readers. In the same way Bruce Wayne uses Batman to push the limits of the expression of his humanity, readers have used Batman for the same purposes. Superheroes are the repositories of extraordinary examples of moral and evolutionary volition. This is why they endure.

Sometimes a thing exists that is so strong you must strive against it without even knowing why or how. Some things attract annihilation like the earth attracts falling stars.

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.