An Unlikely Prophet

Tulpa erzählt eine verzaubernde und zeitlose Geschichte darüber, wie Gedanken ihr eigenes Leben entwickeln können und führt uns an die Grenzen von Identität und Wirklichkeit. Alvin Schwartz wurde durch seine Comic-Figuren Batman und Superman weltberühmt. Nun erzählt er eine Geschichte der besonderen Art: Eines Tage erreicht ihn der Anruf eines buddhistischen Mönches, der sich selbst als Tulpa bezeichnet - eine im Geist kreierte und Kraft der Gedanken real werdende Figur. Der mysteriöse Tibeter bittet Schwartz um Hilfe, da er seit dem Tod seines Schöpfers die eigene Existenz bedroht sieht. Denn ein Tulpa benötigt zeitlebens die Gedanken seines Erschaffers, um zu überleben. Verzaubert von der Magie tibetischer Mythologie, beginnt für Alvin Schwartz mit dieser Begegnung eine abenteuerliche Reise in ein Leben jenseits westlicher Denkweisen.

A profound investigation into the shifting nature of identity and reality

- Looks at the ways thought is embodied and how it takes on a life of its own

- Shows how Superman, an archetype of popular culture, is a perfect example of the nonlocality of quantum physics

Writer Alvin Schwartz received a great deal of attention from fans when he began talking publicly about his seventeen-year stint writing Superman and Batman comics. One of the individuals who contacted him was no ordinary fan, but a seven-foot Buddhist monk named Thongden, a tulpa or individual who was thought into being by a Tibetan mystic. Thongden put Alvin Schwartz on the path without form, an amazing journey he took in the company of Hawaiian kahunas, quantum physicists, and superheroes. Superman, as it turns out, is also a tulpa, a being created by thought that takes on a life of its own and, in Mr. Schwartz's words, is an archetype expressing the sense of nonlocality that is always present in the back of our minds--that capacity to be everywhere instantly. Superman is one of the specific forms that embodies our reality when we're at our highest point, when we're truly impermeable, indestructible, totally concentrated, and living entirely in the now, a condition each of us actually attains from time to time.

Alvin Schwartz's story is a personal journey through a lifelong remembrance of synchrony, inspiration, accident, and magic. As it unfolds it puts into vivid clarity the saving grace that inhabits every moment of our lives. The author travels as a stranger in a strange land, whose greatest oddity is that this land is our own.