Awakening Our Innate Superpowers

I Love Superhumans

As children, we are drawn to fairy tales about giants, wizards and monsters. As we grow older, many of us remain fascinated by stories of superheroes. Stan Lee, the creator of numerous fictional superheroes, such as Spiderman, produced a successful tv series called “Superhumans.” Its 31 episodes portrayed people with unusual endurance, strength, memory, flexibility, temperature control, resistance to heat and cold and other qualities one might label “superpowers.” Lee gave his episodes exotic titles: “Electroman,” “Killer Punch,” “Rubber Band Man,” and “Human Crash Test Dummy.”

I loved this series and watched every episode, occasionally showing one to my physics classes. We would discuss the idea of human beings extending the limits of what is possible for us as a species. I told my students that as a boy I had dreamed of having a superpower, and that I finally got one when I was 16. They wanted to know what it was. I promised them that I would reveal it and teach it to them on the last day of school. More about this later.

Unbreakable

My favorite episode in “Superhumans” was the 9th, “Unbreakable.” At the beginning of the episode, the narrator tells us that: “In a temple in Kuala Lumpur, the Shaolin monk Hu Qiong demonstrates his unbreakable body by smashing steel on his head, and spears in his throat as biomechanics professor Dan Voss measures the forces at play to prove this is real.”

One Sunday afternoon many years ago, my wife and I attended a demonstration of Okinawan martial arts in the New Rochelle “dojo” where our 16-year-old son was a student. The teacher was an Okinawan martial artist who for many years trained the American Armed Forces in fighting techniques. His studio housed a collection of the honors and prizes he had won. One photo showed him pulling a truckload of soldiers with a rope he held between his teeth.

The demonstration began. One of his teenaged students assumed a stance with his knees bent and his hands on his hips. I was sitting about 3 feet from him. The other students emptied a quiver of arrows and passed them around to the spectators. I examined one of the arrows and verified that it was a steel-tipped target arrow with a sharp point. Then four students took arrows and placed them against the neck of the squatting student at 90° intervals. The arrow in front was positioned at the soft part of the student’s throat, just below the Adam’s Apple.

At a command from the teacher, the four students pressed the arrows into the student’s neck. The arrows bent under pressure and then, one after another, they broke with a loud crack. The student was completely unharmed. A few moments later I verified that there were no marks on his neck from that experience.

The teacher explained that the student had been taught to utilize an internal energy called “qi” to temporarily harden his body and protect it from injury. He explained that it took a great deal of training to get to that point. We were impressed but glad that our son was not the subject of that demonstration.

I invited his teacher to give a martial arts demonstration at the high school where I taught. He agreed and arrived at the school a few weeks later. The auditorium was packed with teachers and students. He began by emptying a sack of broken beer bottles onto the wooden floor of the auditorium stage. He laid down on the bottles and two assistants placed a large concrete block on his chest. They then broke it with sledgehammers.

The audience gasped. He rose and showed us his bare back, which was unscathed. I was convinced that this was not some trick but an authentic demonstration of his prowess. He then broke boards and bricks with his bare hands. A few of his students who attended our high school also demonstrated their skills. Some audience members told me that they could not understand how he avoided injury in the beer bottle demonstration. Having had years of martial arts training, I felt confident that it was an authentic display of his expertise. In effect, it was his superpower.

Discovering My Own Superpower

In 1956, my sixteenth summer, we moved to a bungalow in Far Rockaway, a beach town at the western border of Long Island. The ocean water was clear and warm. I learned to skin dive with a mask, snorkel and flippers, occasionally catching a fish with a homemade spear. Weekdays I commuted by train in the early morning to Wall Street, where I worked as a “runner” delivering stock certificates to brokerage firms. Far Rockaway was the last stop on the line, and it was frequently cold in the early morning. I didn’t want to wear a jacket because I knew that by noon it would be hot in the city.

One chilly morning on the train, I imagined a pot of boiling water sitting on a stove in my abdomen. I visualized the steam coming off it and permeating my body. Within a minute I was warm. I was astonished. I kept this to myself, as I didn’t want my friends to think I was a little weird. The technique worked every morning as I rode into Manhattan bathed in self-generated warmth.

Throughout my adult life, I’ve used this technique whenever I was cold. In the early 1970s I discovered an article about the Tibetan practice called “tummo,” which involved imagining a fire in the belly that warmed the body. That immediately resonated with me and I read everything I could find about it.

I learned that in Tibetan, tummo means “inward fire.” Tummo meditation consists of breathing and visualization exercises that enable the adept to raise his internal temperature. Some tummo practitioners claim that they can sit on the frozen ground wrapped in a wet sheet in the Himalayas, and melt the snow in a six-foot radius around their bodies.

Does tummo qualify as a superpower? It depends on your definition. I believe that everyone possesses latent abilities that we might call “superpowers.” To develop these abilities takes dedication and practice. It also requires a culture that believes in the existence of these abilities. If we grew up in Tibet, we would take tummo for granted. By chance, I discovered my form of tummo because I needed a way to get warm in the mornings. I was lucky to have thought of visualizing a pot of boiling water.

In later years I showed my high school physics students how to do tummo, and they quickly discovered that they could warm themselves just by visualization. They told me that they believed that they had developed a superpower.

The lung-gom-pa Runners of Tibet

In her 2005 book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, Alexandra David-Neel describes her encounter with a “lung-gom-pa” in northern Tibet:

“Towards the end of the afternoon… I noticed…a moving black spot which my field-glasses showed to be a man who proceeded at an unusual gait and with an extraordinary swiftness.”

One of her guides recognized the runner as a lung-gom-pa, a lama trained for years to “run” in a trance for a purported 200 miles a day. He warned David-Neel not to interfere with the runner’s passage, nor interrupt him in any way. When traveling, they must maintain their meditative state or they could die as a result.

David-Neel continued:

“By the time he had nearly reached us, I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far-distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground.”

According to Govinda, a German-born Buddhist monk, after years of seclusion and focused meditation, the initiate “practices the art of levitating, or yogic flying.” He sits in a cross-legged position, fills his lungs with a deep breath, and then leaps into the air without using his hands. He repeats this exercise over and over again.” After completing years of solitary training, the lung-gom-pa “has become so light and subtle … that he can move with the speed of a galloping horse, while hardly touching the ground.”

What are we to make of these accounts? If true, the lung-gom-pa runners surpass Western science’s understanding of endurance and performance. They have acquired a superpower.

Do We Need Superpowers?

Whenever I am chilly, I turn on my tummo heat generator. It is the only “superpower” that I have developed during my life. I do not expect to acquire another. I believe that any future advances — let’s call them superpowers — in my physical abilities will come from AI-based enhancements such as mind-controlled prosthetics, rather than from my innate capabilities.

I continue to be fascinated when I read documented accounts of humans who exhibit a physical power above and beyond the normal. I also await the appearance of those who use their extraordinary gifts to help raise the morality, compassion and ethical behavior of others. Now there’s a superpower that could change the world.