The Dream of Oz

Up to this point, I've attempted to lay the foundation upon which Spiritual Truth and the Course's pedagogy is built. The cornerstone of that foundation is that the world we perceive through our physical senses is a dream -- an outward projection of our lower-mind thoughts. Preserved within the Soul's Subconscious, that Great Truth also is projected "out there" in allegorical form. One such "form" is L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. On the off-chance you don’t know the story, I’ve constructed the following plot summary based on the 1939 MGM musical adaptation of Baum’s book:

Dorothy Gale, an innocent and orphaned teenager, lives on a farm in Kansas with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. One day, feeling useless and afraid for her dog’s safety, Dorothy leaves her happy home to seek adventure in the world. After meeting a kindly peddler, she gets caught in a storm and is knocked unconscious. She awakens in Oz, a dream-land filled with a variety of characters and creatures, some helpful to her, and some with harmful motives. Wanting to go home, Dorothy takes the advice of the Good Witch Glinda to follow the Yellow Brick Road. If anyone can help her get back home to Kansas, Glinda assures her, it’s the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, who lives in the Emerald City.

Along the way Dorothy makes friends and is helped out of sticky situations by Glinda, who watches over her unseen. Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch of the West is out to get Dorothy, because she’s wearing the Ruby Slippers. She got the slippers from the mean witch’s dead sister, after crushing her accidentally when her flying house landed in Oz.

Eventually, Dorothy gets to Oz and confronts the Wizard, who seems fearsome and unreasonably demanding. He tells her that to earn his assistance she must bring him the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West—a seemingly impossible feat. On her quest to obtain the broom, Dorothy is captured by the witch, but later inadvertently kills her with a bucket of water. In the end, the Wizard tells Dorothy and her companions they’ve all had what they wanted all along. They just didn’t know where to look or how to use their innate powers to help themselves.

As the Wizard departs for Kansas without her, Dorothy clicks her heals together and repeats the magical mantra the Good Witch gave her: “There’s no place like home.” Within moments, she awakens in her own bed, safe, sound, and surrounded by the people who love her.

To help you decipher the symbolic parallels, I have listed them below:

• Dorothy is the Soul, Atman, and/or dreaming Christ-Self fragment figure, whose “original error” was leaving home because she wasn't getting enough "special" attention;
  
  
• Auntie Em’s Kansas farm, where Dorothy is loved and missed, is Heaven;
  
  
• The dream of Oz is the dream of separation;
  
  
• The Emerald City is the Spiritual Triad, the transitional realm we return to before waking up in Heaven;
  
  
• The Wicked Witch of the West is the Ego Mind, the architect of evil, fear, and separation;
  
  
• The witch’s broom symbolizes the Ego’s power over our minds, which are fear and its “children.” By getting the broom and killing the witch, Dorothy conquered the imagined source of her fear and also the guilt she felt over leaving home;
  
  
• The water Dorothy uses to destroy the witch represents the “living water” of True Forgiveness, which washes away our unreal perceptions and projections;
  
  
• The Good Witch Glinda is the Spirit of Grace, the "Mother" Holy Helper in the dream;
  
  
• The Yellow Brick Road is the spiritual path we must follow to get home;
  
  
• The Wizard of Oz is Jesus or The Christ, upon whom our return to Heaven depends. Like the Wizard, Jesus is commonly perceived and/or depicted as inaccessible, fearsome, and condemning. In exchange for salvation, he appears to expect us to perform super-human feats, make unreasonable sacrifices, and attain impossible levels of perfection. Also like the Wizard, Jesus is actually kind, humble, loving, forgiving, compassionate, and helpful;
  
  
• The Ruby Slippers represent Grace/Agape, the internal "superpower" we must reclaim and share to wake up from the dream. That "superpower" repels the Ego Mind, just as the sparks emanating from the Ruby Slippers repels the Wicked Witch in the image below.

Pretty cool, right? And there's even more symbolism under the surface. The Ruby Slippers, being red, denote Divine Will and Strength (the Aleph-Beth union), while the Emerald City, being green, represents the partnership of Lamed (whose "aura" is yellow or gold) and Hey (whose light is blue). It might be the other way around, but no matter.

The friends Dorothy meets along the way represent the levels of Ego Consciousness the Soul must overcome to reawaken. Think about it. The Scarecrow wants a brain -- the perceived instrument of the intellect, which enables higher understanding. The Scarecrow, therefore, represents both the Buddhi and the Causal Sub-plane of lower-mind thoughts from which the dream originates. The Tin Man, meanwhile, wants a heart so he can love and escape his mechanical shortcomings (like rusting constantly). He is, therefore, the symbol of the choice between fear and love, as well as the Astral Sub-plane of the emotions. The Cowardly Lion, who wants courage or fearlessness, represents the choice between irrational egoic passions and worldly power and the strength, power, and holy treasures provided by God. Thus, the Lion character also symbolizes the Kamic Sub-plane.

Pretty interesting, right?

Also symbolically noteworthy are how the story’s Ego figure endeavors to conceal from Dorothy (the Soul) the power she has, and also how desperately the Wicked Witch tries to take the Ruby Slippers from her. That’s one of the Great Deceiver's dirtiest tricks, by the way: concealing the God-given powers we all possess to dissolve the nightmare at will.

Did L. Frank Baum know he was crafting the perfect allegory for the dream of separation when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? Probably not, on a conscious level. But that doesn’t mean the Holy Spirit didn’t use Baum as a messenger all the same. God’s Spirit has His little ways of disseminating helpful communications on a mass scale, even when we’re oblivious to them. Our insensibility is, in fact, an asset. Why? Because what the Ego Mind doesn’t recognize as Spiritual Truth, it won’t actively resist. Our Souls, meanwhile, will receive and interpret the subtle and abstract messages missed by the Ego’s literal reading of the delivery device.

How many times, for example, have you watched or read The Wizard of Oz? Did you understand what it was really about before I explained the symbolism? Our perception of the world is exactly the same. We don’t understand what’s really happening until we begin to recognize and understand the symbolic messages the Holy Spirit is sending to our Souls through everything our egoic intellects interpret wrongly.

As we move along, I’ll expose more of the hidden ciphers that have been under our noses all along. In the meantime, let me say that, like Dorothy, we are still safe at home, only dreaming we’re in a land filled with wicked witches and flying monkeys. Also like Dorothy, we all wear the Ruby Slippers of God's Will, Strength, and Holiness, which the Spirit of Grace equipped us with when she re-engineered the dream-realm to wake us up. We just have to click our heels together and say with complete sincerity, “There’s no place like home!”

Desiring our Ego self-concepts and the world’s shabby offerings more than going home imprisons us in the dream of Oz. If we’re suffering, it’s because we chose UNreality over Divine Reality, deceptive illusion over Higher Truth, fear over Perfect Love, miscreation over Perfect Creation, and self-authorship and authority over God's Authorship and Authority. But we can always choose again and reverse the ill-effects of our earlier wrong decisions. How we correct our previous errors and much, much more will be covered as we move along.

In closing, let me share a related thought that's truer than you know: Karma's only a bitch if you are! So choose loving kindness, my sleeping brother, because what you give (at the level of thought and behavior) returns to you on the level of form.