Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!

It’s Superman!

Superman.

Who is Superman? And why do I need him? Indeed, why do I love him?

Superman is everything I am not. He has everything I don’t have. Everything he can do I want to do.

I want to fly!

I want to be able to leap great distances!

I dream of flying. Of leaping these distances? Doesn’t everybody? I want to be able to catch a speeding bullet in my hand, like catching a baseball, and throw it back at the malevolent shooter. I want to be able to lift great weights, like the front end of a semi-truck, and save the life of the person trapped underneath it. But I can’t. I’m just a somewhat corpulent goofball.

Superman, as everyone knows, has two identities. The first, and greatest of the two, is that of our hero, Superman, the second, is that of the mild mannered reporter, Clark Kent. That’s more like me. But even Kent is greater than I am. He is a front-line reporter. His work is glamorous. His work is exciting. He gets owner-box seats to Red Sox and Yankee games.

And what do I do? I work at the Post Office, or at a local café or diner. If I’m lucky I may even have a job at L.L. Bean with all the benefits. Or at best in some flunky dot.com company. Maybe I sell insurance. I’m a college professor. Not even mild-mannered. I’m a doctor caught in the vortex of practicing insurance-directed managed health care. Maybe I drive a semi. And I’m always the victim. Never the savior. Never the hero.

Superman, because he’s so good, can’t be a human being. All human beings have a touch of goofball somewhere or other. But Superman is from another planet. From another galaxy. He’s from another realm of existence. One that’s not even part of the six major realms of existence described by the old Buddhas. They say that we are somehow inextricably mixed up in the realms of Hell Dwellers, Angry Spirits, Hungry, Ghosts, Animals, Humans, and Heavenly Beings.

Each of us slips in and out of these realms constantly.

The Hell-Dwellers are condemned to lasting torment in any of a series of grotesque hells beneath the earth. This is a state where the energy is so intense that we don’t know if we control the energy within us or it controls us. When we wake up in the morning everything is wrong. Nothing works. Everything is against us. It is a state so intense that paranoia develops. We want to fight someone. But when we strike out we strike against our own selves. It is a state of intense hatred. We want to destroy what we hate and end up destroying ourselves. We want to escape the intense anger we feel but there is nowhere to run to. Our own self haunts us. This is Hell.

Hungry Ghosts suffer constant unappeasable hunger and thirst. It is a state where we already have everything we want and don’t have to look for anything else. But having it makes us hungrier. And makes us look for more whatever that more may be. It is the state of insatiable need. What is done to alleviate that need is never enough. It is the state in which we suck the life juices of whoever tries to feed us, whether that be advice, love, compassion, money, sex, comfort, or whatever. It is never enough. And the one who tries to give to a hungry ghost always ends up feeling violated — raped.

Animals or Beasts live in a world a world ruled entirely by desire and lust where even parents and children will inflict harm on one another. It is the state where we are ruled by our instincts and passions without regard to any other considerations such as love, or morality, or the feelings and priorities of others. It is sex without love. Eating without appreciation or style.

Fighting Spirits live in perpetual strife. It is when we are consumed by envy and jealousy. It is the realm of survival of the fittest. The realm of winner-take-all and loser-be-damned. We are always fighting, always looking for a fight. We take offense at the slightest provocation. This is another form of paranoia. We are suspicious, angry and provocative. We are the one in the fast lane and you’d better not slow me down or be in my way.

Humans contain the possibility of religious aspiration—aspiration to seek, find, express, and manifest the Dharma, or whatever form the teachings of Truth take in our lives. In this sense it is the most beautiful of the realms to be in, no matter what condition our human state can be. We may be poor, hungry, and without resources and yet there is hope and aspiration. This is possibly the rarest realm of all. Consider the rarity of birth. A single fish produces thousands of eggs, and yet a human at the most can produce five or six children, but usually only one.

The reproductive activity of the insect world is even more dramatic. In the small area of a back yard, the births that take place probably exceed the entire births of a small city! We could have been born a fish, or a bat, a worm, or a spider, or an ant.

Shakyamuni says being born as a human is like a blind turtle that lives on the bottom of the sea and rises to the top once every thousand years. When it reaches the top it manages to insert its head through a yoke floating on the surface of the sea. So rare is human birth. Being born a human means we have already won the lottery! The lottery of life! We have, as humans, the wonderful opportunity to realize everything. It doesn’t matter what problems we have. We are in the human realm and can hope for something better. We can change our lives.

Heavenly Beings are the virtuous people, sages and bodhisattvas, who live in constant happiness and know no suffering. They never know awakening or have religious aspiration. In this state we are the self-made person. We spend hours developing our body. We delight in our health. There is great pride of accomplishment. We are satisfied with our achievements. We are intoxicated by our own ego. The mirror mirror on the wall always declares us to be the fairest of them all. We thank the gods that we have achieved our goals. We’re content. Ours is the perfect marriage—even though it may be the fourth—the six-figure-a-year salary, the Mercedes, the split-level-home with state-of the art-stereo-surround-system, plasma TV, an outdoor state-of-the-art-butane-fired-barbecue, the Barbie Doll perfect wife, the Barbie Doll perfect children, none of whom are into drugs. What could be sweeter? How lucky I am.

Where does Superman fit in? Where does Superman come from? Is he a heavenly being? No. Is Superman a Hell Dweller? A Hungry Ghost? A Fighting Spirit? An Animal? A Human Being? No, he’s not one of these.

There just isn’t a place for him in the Buddhist teaching of realms of beings. He is an extra-terrestrial. Almost a god. When I talked with Margaret about Superman, she hit the nail, by saying Superman is the perfect example of “Deus Ex-Machina.” The dictionary says, “Deus Ex-Machina is a deity in Greek and Roman drama who was brought in by stage machinery to intervene in a difficult situation. Any unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event suddenly introduced to resolve a situation or untangle a plot.” The actual translation of the words is “god from a machine.”

Which means someone from another world, or from the gods, who comes down from the heavens to make things right for us fallible, failing, goofball humans.

Superman then is an admission that we do not have the inner resources within ourselves to make things right. And that’s one of the problems of theism.

The theistic position is to look outside of oneself. That somehow, somewhere, God will make it right, whatever it is. Angels will swoop down from heaven and restore justice in this unjust world. This flies in the face of the Buddha’s teaching that we are, as we are, complete. Nothing outside of ourselves is needed.

The Buddhist teaching is not that there is no God, but that there is no Superman. The Buddha’s teaching is that we don’t need a Superman. We don’t need a God. We don’t need an omnipotent deity outside of ourselves. Everything we need we either have or can get. This is what is meant by enlightenment.

Buddha’s position is that as we are, fallible, failing, stumbling, bumbling, slipping in and out of the six realms of existence, we still can do it.

We have all the tools necessary to achieve our salvation.

Whatever it is we wish to do, we can do.

We don’t need a Superman to drain our polluted rivers of the malignant PCB’s that pollute them.

We don’t need a Superman to clean up our environment.

We can stop the pollution of our precious earth.

We can stop the devastation of our rain forests.

We can turn it all around.

We can do it.

Ourselves.

We don’t need to have the super-strength to lift that semi-truck. All we need is the simple tool of the fulcrum. Archimedes said, give me a fulcrum and a place to stand and I can move the world.

We can make that fulcrum.

We can stand our ground.

We can tilt the world.

We can stop the injustices that plague our world—our universe.

We can end racial hatred. We can solve the problems of the middle east, or Iraq, of Afghanistan, of Italy, even of our own country, the United States.

We can end wars.

It’s all possible.

The trouble is, we are colossal fatheads. We elect fatheaded incompetents to high office. We make them our kings, our prime Ministers, our Senators, and our Presidents.

And yet, in spite of our fatheadedness we sometimes manage to produce a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, a Justice Douglas, a Lincoln, Washington, a Francis of Assisi, a Thérèse, a Jesus, a Buddha.

And still, we think we can’t do it, and turn to Superman. We think it’s beyond our grasp.

But Shakyamuni insists, it’s within our grasp.

Within our reach.

Turn, and look within, Thou are the Buddha.

Turn, and look within, Thou art the Christ.

There is that within you that enlightens, ennobles, enriches, and reaches to the furthest stars and speaks with them.

So, no thank you. No distant far-off deity and no Superman is needed here. May your lives go well.