I do occasionally watch blockbuster films, but, due to my peculiar situation, they take a while to get to me.

In watching ‘The Avengers’ (which I have been carefully trained to enjoy profusely since childhood), I am aware for the first time that these films contribute little to our ability to experience our own power and nobility, and, instead, generate scenarios that manipulate us emotionally, to produce a result that actively inhibits our realization of our nature and abilities — particularly in groups united for a common and noble goal.

These spectacles act as a combination replacement and pressure valve for the unrealized and infinite potential we carry within us as a part of our human and animalian heritage. The extremes of emotion generated are the result of being subjected to images that pose simplistic war scenarios that mimic the injustices that might otherwise call us forth into a vastly broader and more profound realization of our abilities and our humanity. This theft is accomplished with insipid representations engineered to deliver maximum wow, while actively attacking what they mimic. The goal? Replacement. We are to be robbed of what we bring to human birth, and sold little fictions at every possible opportunity and price. We will be hungry for these, too, because the theft happens in our very souls, and the void it leaves their calls to us for answer throughout our entire lives.

The ardent exaltations felt as we witness ‘vengeful violence’ in response to fictive injustices are not authentic. The substitutes we are provided with are compelling lies, and their purpose is to obscure and replace what we might otherwise discover in ourselves. They are toxic mimics.

We have forgotten most of what we are and may become together, and this is, in part, because we are subject to vast collectives — cultures — whose needs and intelligences create us in their image. Our natural powers emerge when we intentionally compose teams, or, more properly, ‘rings’ — tightly-knit groups whose relational intimacy creates what appears to be superhuman ability. But it is not. The reason we want super-heroes is because we have something far better inside us. But our cultures deny, inhibit, co-opt, and punish it. In fact, they are terrified of these possibilities. If they should awaken even once in our time, they will overwhelm our cultures in a flash of cleansing realization, humanity, and mutual recognition.

And that would spell the end of nations and corporations as we know them.

I am reminded of Loki’s preparatory speech in the beginning of the film. That we are happiest when we are told what to do. That what passes for our humanity, is largely a form of slavery. That freedom either terrifies or sickens us.

But most of all I am reminded that, in small, intimately bound relational groups whose noble endeavors and purposes are guided by intelligence and who have the power to evade the common dogmas that ruin our minds — we can become something together that makes superheroes look like the tiny, plastic lies they actually are.

Real heroes are human, and they need a family to arise, survive, and become what they are carrying.

And what they are carrying is more than all of our stories. All of our science. And all of our religions combined.

Bring it forth.