Daredevil and the Green Lama

"Only when the mind is settled can it become quiet.Only when the mind is quiet can it become still.Only when the mind is still can it see.And only when the mind can see,Can it reach the mystery of mysteries."
~Yen Ch'eng

"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” ~ Bruce Lee

"The most profound discoveries are not necessarily beyond that next star. They're within us, woven into the threads that bind us." ~ Captain Jonathan Archer, STAR TREK ENTERPRISE

I'm about to be a published writer! Wildcat Books has accepted my short story "A Voice for Ivy" for their anthology LEGENDS OF THE GOLDEN AGE VOL 1 due out later this month. It's a collection of stories about superheroes from the 1940s who are now in the public domain as far as copyright. Mine is about Daredevil; not the current Marvel Comics hero of the Ben Affleck movie, but a character by the same name from a defunct publisher, Lev Gleason. Daredevil, at least in his early stories, was mute. I tried to write fight scenes that read like a 40s comic book but then added some characterization and moral issues.

I promised to talk about Eastern spirituality and its relationship to quantum physics and stories. I'm going to start with something light, techniques for meditation. The seeds of much deeper concepts are planted here.

CLEARING YOUR MIND

Before you begin a mental effort, such as taking a test, it is good to clear your mind. Just as you can recall where you put something as soon as you stop looking for it, blanking your conscious mind frees the knowledge you need to well to the surface of your mind.

Blanking your mind is as simple as taking a few seconds to think of nothing at all. On a test I do this by focusing on a blank spot on the paper, or on the wall.

Zen Buddhists use sayings called koans. A koan is a question that has no answer. They believe that by concentrating on a koan the chain of logical thought is broken and the mind reaches a clearer level. The two most well known koans are:

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?

Freeing your mind to let the answers appear naturally is far more effective than any amount of last minute cramming or worrying.

AIDS TO MEDITATION

There are several. Some people use a candle to lose themselves in the wavering flame.

Some experts say that you should use the word “Om” or "Aum." “Om” means many things in different aspects of Eastern thought; “Hail!” in Tibetan, from the chant “Om! Mani Padme Hum!” – “Hail the jewel in the lotus flower.” In keeping with the comic book geek theme of my blog, it should also be noted that the 1940s hero Jethro Dumont used the phrase as magic words to transform himself into the Green Lama. “Om” is also supposed to be significant because the word starts with the mouth open and ends with the mouth closed, so that it includes all sounds. The actual meaning of Om is way deeper, so I'll go into that next blog.

There is the koan. A riddle that makes no sense and has no answer. It is used to derail the train of conscious thought.

Use what works best for you. Remember the end you want is serenity, not effort. I tend to use none of the aids. That’s because I end up concentrating on the aid instead of the serenity.

MEDITATE

Sit comfortably. You don’t need to assume any complicated lotus position with your legs tied in a knot. Just what is comfortable, but not comfortable enough to fall asleep.

Steady your breathing. Focus your concentration on your breath. Don’t try to control it. Just observe it. Follow your breaths from your nostrils to your lungs and back from your lungs to your nostrils. You may imagine a cloud of air just beyond your nose. Your breath will fall into a natural rythym. Just observe and let it do so.

Treat any distractions the same way. If you have an itch, observe the itch. If you have an urge to scratch the itch, observe the urge. If you have stray distracting thoughts, observe them and let them pass by. A friend of my cousin used to "entertain" distractions by imagining placing them in a room with snacks, magazines and a tv and leaving them alone there.

Observe as your whole body relaxes but see your body, breath, itches, urges and distractions as one.

The next step is the hard one. Observing your body, breath, itches, urges and distractions, now step back and observe the You that is observing you!

By Sri Chinmoy:

Nothing impresses me any more,save and except

My own deep meditations.

Meditation stops

The sound-loving mind.

To my greatest relief,I have silenced

My questioning mind.

When I pray,

I feel I am tiny,very tiny.

When I meditate,

I feel I am vast,very vast.

When I contemplate,

I feel I am neither tiny nor vast -I am just a playerWho plays hide and seek with God.

When I pray,I clearly see that God is coming down

From Above.

When I meditate,I clearly see that God is already seated

Inside my heart.

My Lord,When I most intensely pray and meditate,The world badly misunderstands me.My Lord, what shall I do?

"My child, you have only one world,And that world is all love.It needs neither understanding

Nor misunderstanding."

When we pray and meditate

Sincerely and soulfully,

We receive an open-hearted invitationFrom Heaven.

The Tao of Tarzan

"I have to say he is the finest man that I have ever known - trousers or no trousers." - Rawlins (TARZAN ESCAPES)

When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote TARZAN OF THE APES in 1912 he had held a number of jobs. As a night watchman, he read fiction magazines on breaks and decided that he could write better than what he found in those. 25 books later, not to mention movies, radio, comic books and tv, ERB was able to retire to a ranch in Tarzana CA.

Tarzan had many mythic sources. The hero raised by animals is a common theme from Romulus and Remus nursed by a she-wolf, the Greek heroine Atalanta by bears and the Celtic Oisin by a deer. His story reflects the Arthurian legend of the young man who discovers his true noble heritage. Like any good hero he eventually became immortal.

In his adventures Tarzan overthrew a lot of false religions, idols and god-kings, yet his own spirituality was almost never mentioned. I said last week that Tarzan was a Zen hero. Reading through a few of the books I found some amazing parallels.

"To Tarzan ... contentment is the highest ultimate goal of achievement ... He saw the greed, the selfishness, the cowardice, and the cruelty of man; and, in view of man's vaunted mentality, he knew that these characteristics placed man upon a lower spiritual scale than the beasts, while barring him eternally from the goal of contentment." ~TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD (1933).

Buddhism teaches that the only thing that bars us from happiness is attachment to things and feelings.

"Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little." ~Cheng Yen

Samsara is a term for living in the world, attached to habits and materialism. It is the opposite of Nirvana, freedom and happiness.

"The initial stage is to reduce attachment towards life. The second stage is the elimination of desire and attachment to this samsara. Then in the third stage, self-cherishing is eliminated." ~The 14th Dalai Lama

ERB wrote adventure stories, not philosophy. Tarzan was not a Zen master. Tarzan did kill, but hey, he was raised by apes, not monks! Burroughs said, "Necessity required him to kill for food and in defense of his life, but the example of his savage associates never suggested that pleasure might be found in killing ... His viewpoint toward death was seemingly callous, but it was without cruelty."

Popular culture analyst Doc Hermes wrote, "This dual nature is one of the things I love best about the character. Tarzan is not a mere animal in a human form, he is a unique symbiosis of the human and the animal natures ... the balance between Lord Greystoke strolling through Hyde Park with Jane on a Sunday and Tarzan ripping raw meat from a freshly killed gazelle is an essential part of the appeal. Tarzan is yin and yang in a single body."

Writing about the traits that separated his hero from the apes ERB said "not the least of these were in a measure spiritual, and one that had doubtless been as strong as another in influencing Tarzan`s love of the jungle had been his appreciaton of the beauties of nature." ~ TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, 1921) Tarzan lives, not in a treehouse with an elephant elevator, but on a sprawling ranch in Africa with his wife Jane. But he "loves to roam remote fastnesses still unspoiled by the devasting hand of civilization." He has a "spiritual enjoyment of beauty that only the man-mind may attain."

Zen sayings and poems like Han shan's "A thousand clouds among a myriad streams And in their midst a person at his ease. By day he wanders through the dark green hills, At night goes home to sleep beneath the cliffs" might be talking about Tarzan.

In "The God of Tarzan" (JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN, 1917), Tarzan reads about God and sets out to find this being who is supposedly more powerful than himself. Investigating what he hears from jungle people, he eliminates false gods like the Moon, idols and tribal shamans. Finally he understands that the still, small voice in his conscience that stops him from killing a helpless enemy is God, and God is stronger than Tarzan. You can read the story here:

http://www.literature.org/authors/burroughs-edgar-rice/jungle-tales-of-tarzan/chapter-04.html

That story was probably one of the earliest influences on my own spiritual thought.

The Nature of Freedom

"There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. ~G'Kar, BABYLON 5

"Once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created. There is no blissfulness more precious than freedom, than being a master of your own destiny. ” ~Osho

Myth reassures us that we are all heroes, we have a purpose and a connection to the All. Relatively recently, the stories also tell us that we are free.

In earlier cultures stories reinforced the idea that a good person obeys the local gods, preisthoods and kings. There were exceptions like Robin Hood, but most heroes like Beowulf, Hercules and Lancelot stayed in line.

It wasn't until the 1800s that the idea of personal freedom emerged. Its roots are in heroes such as Hawkeye in LAST OF THE MOHICANS and romanticized stories about pirates and Western outlaws, but the first great romantic rogue hero in fiction was The Scarlet Pimpernel, beginning as a play in 1903 and a series of books by Baroness Emma Orczy. The Scarlet Pimpernel was a British nobleman who was an outlaw in France for rescuing people from the guillotine. With his colorful name, secret identity and symbolic calling cards he was forerunner to generations of masked heroes from Zorro to V For Vendetta.

The Victorian era produced Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective who worked independently of the law and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, using his submarine the Nautilus to try to end war.

The 20th century brought pulp magazines and comic books and with them hordes of masked, cloaked "mystery men"(1). The 1920s -30s were a time when gangsters seemed to run roughshod over the law. The Phantom, The Shadow, Doc Savage, Batman, and The Spirit took matters into their own hands, supplanting such authority figures as Dick Tracy in the popular imagination. It was like telling us that if society couldn't save us, the Universe and the human spirit working together would.

The ultimate expressions of freedom came in Tarzan, The Saint, Superman and Doctor Who.

Tarzan was free of civilization and all its expectations and limitations. For those familiar only with movies, Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan was not that ignorant character but an educated English nobleman who when he learned his hertiage chose to return to the jungle.

The Saint literally laughed at the law; his books had titles like THE HAPPY HIGHWAYMAN and THE BRIGHTER BUCANEER. He helped people (and himself) with an utter disregard of the criminal nature of his methods, and had fun doing it.

Superman was not only free of society but of all mortal limitations. He was a logical extension of folklore heroes. Individuals who were more powerful than their environments, from the purely physical in Hercules to advancing technology in John Henry and Paul Bunyan. Superman himself has changed with the times: in his early stories he could be harmed by exploding shells, but now he could survive a nuclear war.

Doctor Who is free of time and space. In his TARDIS he travels anywhere and anywhen, the embodiment of Hung-Chih's saying "A person of the Way fundamentally does not dwell anywhere." The Doctor is not bound by the laws of any one period or society, not even his own (he stole the TARDIS).

Of the above, Tarzan, I think, is the most free. He can't fly or deflect bullets or travel in time but his mind is free. He goes where he wants and accepts whatever he meets. Tarzan is probably the most Zen-like of all the heroes.

In TV and movies, private eyes and loner cowboys were more prevalent than police heroes. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer broke with the Council of Watchers who supposedly controlled her destiny. The science fiction heroes have gone from the Space Rangers and Space Patrol of early tv and STAR TREK's upholders of the United Federation of Planets to the rebels of STAR WARS, the fugitives of FARSCAPE and finally the "Let's Go Be Bad Guys" crew of FIREFLY.

Stories like these don't just express the need and yearning for freedom. Myth tells us that we are good and deserving, and eternal, and it tells us that we are free. We just have to decide to accept it.

Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull told a gull with a broken wing,

"You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way."

"Are you saying I can fly?"

"I say you are free."

(1) before the term "superhero"