Popular culture is a mirror of the collective
unconscious. My interest lies in super-heroes—in
Superman and Superwoman. My imagination
longs for transcendence, sensing the intoxicating lure of the beyond. In traditional societies, we find tales
of the heroic and supernatural, the cult of heroes, the veneration of saints, the
honoring of gurus and prophets—all people alleged, in some way, to transcend—to escape the limits of
ordinary physical and mental reality.
So how did we get from living tradition to Hollywood and
comic book ideas of superhumanity?
It’s a long story, but science and its materialist assumptions have come
to possess the mind of our economically advanced societies. Besides turning us into consumers, the
official truth dispensers frown upon anything that smells of the supernatural, the
supernormal, or the superphysical. Sympathy or credence regarding such claims is forbidden. Dissed by reductive science, the
repressed ideas of super-humanity return through the outlets of popular
culture.
Popular culture points to the idea of transcendence. But as for me, I want the real
thing. I need more than to tickle
my imagination with a movie or a comic book. So I began to search on my own,
and found there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by our
friends, the reductive materialists. In fact, tbere are mountains of data you can mine that point
to the “more things.” But this will mean nothing to a dedicated disbeliever whose
mind is sealed shut.
Among the extraordinary phenomena I discovered was the case
of Joseph Desa whose life was a schocking display—in broad daylight and before
thousands of witnesses—of a whole spectrum of extraordinary phenomena. The man’s
life is a case study enabling us to imagine a real superman. The
collective fantasies of popular culture are, in this case, vindicated. There truly are super-normal people.
In Joseph’s case, we observe transcendent mind and
transcendent body. It was called
penetrating secrets of the heart, or as we say, telepathy. You were an open book in the presence
of this man, and it made people uncomfortable. Distance was no barrier to his
perception. In a period before modern
communication systems, he always knew when one was approaching him. He knew the exact hour of your illness
or death even if you were hundreds of miles away; he often knew such things before they occurred, in short, prophecy
or precognition were common with him.
Although he had no schooling and could barely read, many learned people
swore under oath that he possessed profound knowledge of theological matters and
expressed it with clarity. The
greatest super-mental capacity Joseph had was his capacity for ecstasy, another
word for creative dissociation or out-of-body experience. In these ways he revealed mind in some of its transcendent aspects.
Even more shocking were the displays of transcendent
body. To begin with, something
about this friar rebelled against gravity, the glue of the universe. For the
thirty-five years of his public life, the friar was seen to levitate, to fly to
the top of trees, sometimes carrying people or animals in the air with him. Thousands
witnessed these mystic flights.
Over a hundred and fifty sworn depositions are on record, men and women
from all walks of life: craftspeople, artists, musicians, surgeons, popes,
kings, princes, cardinals, nuns, infantas, and even official inquistors who
were suspicious of him because he
possessed these powers.
There were other signs of bodily transcendence. Besides levitation, there are reports
of his rare talent for bilocation, being in two places at the same time. He was, for example, seen attending to
his mother on her deathbed in Copertino while he was undoubtedly in Assisi. Another point of vital interest: There’s
extensive documentation that Joseph produced supernormal healing effects.
And then there’s this. Unlike normal human bodies, the
ecstatic friar’s body had a repeatedly reported, highly strange effect. People who touched him or any
garment or object that he touched experienced heavenly fragrances. Witnesses report that for months or
years, despite being carefully washed, anything that had been in contact with
his body would emanate transcendent odors.
In the mythology of the super-hero, one is on the side of
the angels and at war with the demons.
Joseph qualifies on this, and also this: all the super-powers he had
were used in service to humanity, not to feed his or anybody’s ego or pockets. The genesis of Joseph as super-man is a
fascinating story. The interested
reader may purchase the book that tells the story, Wings of Ecstasy, for a pittance from Amazon.
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