Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the November-December 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Lysy, Tony. "William James, Theosophist." Quest  88.6 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2000): pg 228-233.

By Tony Lysy 

On November 17, 1875, Col. H. S. Olcott, the Founder-President of the Theosophical Society, delivered his Inaugural Address in New York City. In that speech, he stated, "If I rightly apprehend our work, it is to aid in freeing the public mind of theological superstition and a tame subservience to the arrogance of science." Later in the talk, the Colonel characterized members of the new Society as "simply investigators, of earnest purpose and unbiased mind, who study all things, prove all things, and hold fast to that which is good."

Olcott's sense of the "work" that the Society was to undertake and the wide range of topics for its investigation and inquiry harmonized with the interests of a young faculty member in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts. While Olcott gave his address, William James was preparing to open the first psychological laboratory in the United States at Harvard University.

James, who became a member of the Theosophical Society in 1882, was acknowledged from 1890 until his death in 1910 as a major writer and speaker in the fields of psychology, philosophy, religion, and psychical research. His fame and influence spread beyond the United States to Great Britain and Europe, and he served as president of three prestigious organizations: the American Association of Psychologists (1893), the Society for Psychical Research (1894-5), and the American Philosophical Association (1906).

William James was born on January 11, 1842. He was the first of five children in a wealthy New York family. His grandfather and namesake, who had immigrated from Ireland, became a millionaire in business and real estate and was known as "William of Albany." One of William of Albany's major projects was the development of the Erie Canal. His son, Henry James Senior, used the money he inherited to support his own personal search for religious truth and to create an innovative form of education for his five children.

Henry Junior, who was born a year after his older brother, William, rivaled the latter in international fame. Henry was a great American novelist whose works include Washington Square, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice, who were born within the next five years, never achieved the fame of their two older brothers.

Henry Senior had reacted against his father's Presbyterian faith by seeking in the works of Swedenborg a more mystical understanding of the world than he could find in Calvin. Swedenborg's God had incarnated in all of humankind, not just in Jesus. A human society aware of its true nature was to complete the unfinished spiritual work through education, reform, and an altruism transcending egotism. Another follower of Swedenborg, visionary Chicago lawyer Charles Bonney, promoted the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago as a providential step toward the completion of the divine plan. William James later believed "that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences."

The environment that Henry Senior provided for his children was designed to encourage their natural curiosity and spontaneity. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne were among the friends of the family who visited the James home in Boston. The financial resources of the family supported frequent trips to Europe and Britain. The children had tutors and were enrolled in private schools in New England and Switzerland. William became fluent in both French and German and stayed in touch with current developments in European thought through his exceptional language skills. The freedom to follow one's curiosity wherever it might lead, fostered by Henry Senior, later emerge in William's scientific observation that the human mind is essentially motivated by personal interest and preference, with feeling as an underlying force.

William was initially drawn to a career as an artist. His father, however, doggedly encouraged him to study science instead. In 1861 he went to Harvard, where he studied anatomy, physiology, zoology, and medicine during the next eight years. An 1865 trip to Brazil with Louis Agassiz of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard brought the youthful scientist in touch with the excitement of fieldwork. But William developed a form of smallpox that threatened his vision. Already introspective, his subsequent chronic ill health brought him more and more into touch with what he later called the stream of consciousness.

William James continued to have difficulties with his health for the rest of his life. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1869 but had no desire to practice medicine. He struggled with depression for the next year in a conflict between the freedom stressed by his father's religious beliefs and the determinism that he was encountering in his scientific work. In reading the works of the French philosopher Charles-Bernard Renouvier in 1870, James found a turning point. On April 30, 1870, he wrote in his diary, "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." His belief in free will became a source of energy for his personal struggles with depression and countless other physical ailments over the next forty years. It also became a major feature of his work in both psychology and philosophy.

James was invited to teach physiology at Harvard in 1873. His wide range of interests, however, led to a shift in his teaching responsibilities, which included psychology as well as physiology. In 1878, James married Alice Howe Gibbens and signed a contract with the publisher Henry Holt to write a textbook on psychology. The text, originally scheduled to take two years to write, actually took twelve years of painstaking research and rewriting before it was finally released by a frustrated Holt as Principles of Psychology (1890).

The two-volume work was a great success. The depth and breadth of its scholarship and the lively style of its author made James an international celebrity. It was quickly translated throughout the world and was destined to be included as a volume between Dostoevsky and Freud among The Great Books of the Western World. An abridgement, Psychology (Briefer Course), was published in 1892 with James's cautious recognition that the mixture of empiricism and metaphysics of his pioneering work was far from a definitive portrayal of human complexity: "This is no science, it is only the hope of a science."

James was now secure professionally and began to devote himself entirely to the traditional problems of philosophy. The philosophy faculty at Harvard, which included James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana, was one of the strongest in the world. C. S. Peirce, a friend of James who participated in the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, was never on the faculty but nonetheless had made a lasting impression on James through his concern for clarifying the meaning of ideas by grounding their implications in observable actions or changes, a method Peirce called "pragmatism." The question James borrowed from Peirce was "In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true?"

In 1896, James gave an address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, which, when published the next year as The Will to Believe, led to an invitation to give the Gifford Lectures in Scotland. James proposed, "Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead." He went on to call "the decision between two hypotheses" an "option" and distinguished three kinds of options. Following the electrical metaphor, an option can be "living" or "dead." An option can also be either "forced" or "avoidable" and either "momentous" or "trivial."

James then utilized those distinctions to categorize the situations humans face with regard to religion. If one regards religious belief as not true under any circumstances, there is no "living" option with respect to it. But if one genuinely thinks a "living" option is involved and envisions the possible benefit of religious faith as a "momentous" one that is also "forced," since any hesitation or suspension of belief sabotages the possibility of the gain through faith, an act of faith is preferable to skepticism. James reached this conclusion:

To preach skepticism to us as a duty until "sufficient" evidence for religion be found is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true.

James observed the benefits some people gain through their beliefs, and he defended them against the growing skepticism grounded on what he saw as a narrow interpretation of scientific method.

James supported every individual's right to "will to believe" in a religious creed that seems to correlate with good consequences such as "healthy-mindedness" or an attitude of optimism toward meeting the challenges of life. Just as his depression had lifted in 1870 when he chose to believe in free will, James saw the basic attitude one has toward life as a central source of direction and energy.

In his paper "What Psychical Research Has Accomplished," published in The Will to Believe, James tries to counter the dismissal of psychical research by materialistic scientists who did not find any "electricity" in spiritual explanations. James was strongly of the opinion that the irregular phenomena or "unclassified residuum" encountered in any scientific domain are worth investigating since they may lead to a new and more complete vision of reality. He found the "contemptuous scientific disregard" of the many mystical phenomena recorded throughout history disappointing, given the openness of the scientific ideal. James observed that "animal magnetism" or "Mesmerism" was "stoutly dismissed as a pack of lies by academic medical science the world over" until the nonmystical theory of "hypnotic suggestion" was found acceptable to the scientific establishment.

For James, the territory claimed by the Society for Psychical Research was being investigated by people with impeccable academic credentials, who rightly saw the issues involved as "momentous" rather than "trivial." He presented, with suitable caution, the conclusion of Frederic Myers:

The truth [is] that the invisible segments of our minds are susceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives. This may not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, with their astral bodies and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on the correcter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientific form.

James did not, unfortunately, show the same caution with regard to Richard Hodgson's report on Madame Blavatsky, and he apparently accepted its erroneous conclusions without objection.

The titles of the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion at Edinburgh show the scope of the work that catapulted James to an even greater fame than his Principles of Psychology had. "The Reality of the Unseen," "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness," "The Sick Soul," "The Divided Self and the Process of Its Unification," and "Conversion" promised to be practical, as readers sought to find themselves in his taxonomy and look for hints on how to improve. More than ever, James became a source of advice when his Talks to Teachers on Psychology and Talks to Students on Some of Life's Ideals were published in 1899. In his talk to students entitled "What Makes a Life Significant," he urged his audience to hitch their wagons to creative work for progress on Earth in every conceivable field.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), originally delivered as the Gifford Lectures, proved to be an amusing and elegant treatment of the possibilities and powers of things unseen, dismissed by both materialistic science and dogmatic religion. Some critics point out that James increased his investigation of mediums, clairvoyants, and healers in his psychical research after the loss of his parents and infant son over a three-year period. But by the time the young son died in 1885, James was capable of shifting effortlessly between the perspectives of physiologist, psychologist, philosopher, and psychical researcher. At heart, he was an observer of life in its broadest strokes, an empiricist who so loved varieties of every possible kind that he felt mockingly suspicious of words like "oneness" and "unity."

In the Gifford Lectures, James defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." In his last lecture, he listed the following as chief characteristics of the religious life:

1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance;

2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end;

3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof--be that spirit "God" or "law"--is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.

Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics:

4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism.

5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.

In a postscript to his conclusions, James made a confession of his own position, distilled through the alchemy of his interdisciplinary struggle to be faithful to both the observable and the invisible, which he and others had experienced in different ways:

Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief--that, in communion with the Ideal, new force comes into the world and new departures are made here below--subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type.

James coined expressions like "the practical cash-value" of a word but seems to have had difficulty in appreciating metaphor in mystical scriptures. After reading a rich passage from The Voice of the Silence to his Edinburgh audience, he stated:

These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which nonmusical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.

James could understand others being moved by the "musical compositions" of mystical scriptures. But expressions like "the Soundless Sound" seemed to him to be unsound counterfeits, lacking the cash-value he ultimately demanded in his later work.

James devoted his remaining years to an attempt to articulate his philosophical thinking in a fuller and more systematic way. He published Pragmatism in 1907, in which he introduced this distinction:

Carl Jung later noted that his Psychological Types (1921) was a project similar to this simple attempt by James to delineate two types of "mental make-up." James's dichotomy displays the polarities that he himself had struggled with. It is not surprising to find his notion of the pragmatic method, when applied appropriately, as "a mediator and reconciler" that "unstiffens" theories. He suggested the adoption of "a pluralistic monism," for example, when his pragmatic analysis showed that the "world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but just as indubitably it is many, if you look at it in another."

James thought his adaptation of Peirce's idea of pragmatism would prove to be a method of settling metaphysical disputes by tracing the "respective practical consequences" of each notion or concept employed. He particularly objected to what he called "magic words" or "solving names," which had some power perhaps similar to music in enchanting humans into a false sense that their problems had been solved and their questions had been answered:

All the great single-word answers to the world's riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role.

James maintained that "on pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it." But "magic words", though lacking "cash-value" from his perspective, continued to flow with full electrical charge as the currency of his critics and adversaries in philosophy, religion, and psychical research.

James's last works, The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and the posthumously published Some Problems of Philosophy(1911), are efforts to answer the critics of his Pragmatism (including Peirce). He dedicated his last work "to the great Renouvier's memory," perhaps as a final testimony of the life-long effects of his "first act of free will" forty years earlier. James realized that he had not succeeded in presenting his work as a full system and left this humorous note with the manuscript: "Say that I hoped by it to round out my system, which now is too much like an arch built on one side."

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung both met James when they visited Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909. In one of his autobiographical writings, Freud recalls a walk he took with James:

He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death.

Jung wrote, "I spent two delightful evenings with William James alone and I was tremendously impressed by the clearness of his mind and the complete absence of intellectual prejudices." The internationally celebrated psychologist and philosopher had met two figures whose own forms of interdisciplinary alchemy took Depth Psychology in new directions.

Martin Marty, in the foreword to a recent collection of papers entitled The Vision of James, points to James's relevance today as a philosopher who "more than any other American and more than most of the other moderns, invites readers into his world for a conversation." When James bemoans the thought of "a shallow wig-pated age," one can understand his vision of the "actual universe as a thing wide open" in the same way one understands the growing astronomical data charting the mysteries of the universe or multiverse.

At a crucial period of history, James attempted to synthesize religion, philosophy, and science. He was fearless in his study of psychical research and maintained a high international reputation despite those critics who dismissed his spiritual interests. He remains an interesting writer who is a catalyst for and kindred spirit to the type of investigator Olcott spoke of in his Inaugural Address.

Anton Lysy, PhD, is Dean of Studies of the Olcott Institute and a student of depth psychology and transpersonal psychology as they relate to Theosophy.

Originally printed in the November-December 2000  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Johnson, Andrew. "The Spirituality of Oz: The Meaning of the Movie." Quest  88.6 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2000): pg 212-217.

By Andrew Johnson

What is the meaning of "true home"? . . . We talked about a wave. Does a wave have a home? When a wave looks deeply into herself, she will realize the presence of all the other waves. When we are mindful, fully living each moment of our daily lives, we may realize that everyone and everything around us is our home. . . . A wave looking deeply into herself will see that she is made up of all other waves and will no longer feel she is cut off from everything around her. [Thich Nhat Hanh 1999, 40-1]

Oh, but anyway, Toto, we're home—home! And this is my room—and you're all here—and I'm not going to leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all. And . . . oh, Auntie Em, there's no place like home! [Dorothy Gale in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz]

Spirituality, Truth, and Reality

Spirituality can be viewed two ways. First, in a secular sense, it can be seen as an accumulation of one's higher values, virtues, and ideals. It is the higher part of self, superego or superconsciousness. Second, spirituality can also be seen in a sacred sense as the part of one's self that is connected to the universe, one's divine essence, or the perfume within the clay jar.

Truth

The first thing to be said about The Wizard of Oz is that it is true, absolutely and completely, or as Munchkins would say, "Morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely . . . true."

There is a difference, however, between truth and facts. Although facts may be true, they do not always lead to Truth. Indeed, there are many instances where a series of facts have led to the wrong truth simply because of which facts were attended to and which were ignored. Although Holy Books may not always contain facts, they contain symbols, metaphors, myths, and dreams, which are signs pointing to Truth. One of the shortcomings of humankind in this past millennium is that we have attended to the sign, but not to what it is pointing to. We declare the stop sign to be holy and good while proceeding right through the intersection without stopping. And then we wonder how a good and loving universe can allow car accidents to happen.

Reality

The Wizard of Oz is very real. If you look deep enough, you see that there is no difference between reality and fantasy, between this and that, here and there, the idea and the thing. All are variants of the same reality. All are waves; temporary forms of the same water.

Thich Nhat Hanh (1999), the Buddhist mystic, describes two levels of reality that exist simultaneously. Phenomenal reality is the reality of things seen: that which we are used to experiencing, the waves, bits of reality coming into temporary form. Noumenal reality is the reality inaccessible to logic or the normal senses. This is the water, the essence of all things, the ground of all being, God, Allah, Jehovah, WaTonka, Brahman, Oz.

Universal or Collective Unconscious

The Wizard of Oz is true on a noumenal level. It is filled with symbols and metaphors, all pointing to other things. Carl Jung and later Joseph Campbell described how certain symbols and motifs appear in mythology, fairy tales, stories, and religions throughout the world. According to Jung, these symbols are an expression of the collective unconscious, a concept similar to the akashic records mentioned by ancient mystics. It is a psychic cyberspace, a place where every thought, feeling, and action of humanity is recorded. Whether or not we are aware of it, we are all connected, we are all online.

It was from the collective unconscious, a bubbling cauldron of archetypal images, that The Wizard of Oz was birthed into existence in 1900 as a book and later reincarnated as a movie in 1939. The movie, released the same year as Gone with the Wind, was the product of five different directors and a myriad of studio writers, continually assigned and reassigned. Thus the film did not come from any one person, but was truly a collective.

Movies are like dream states in which archetypal images appear, Hollywood itself being the land of dreams. A movie is like a group dream, a conscious decision to suspend reality, alter our consciousness, and let the images play out in front of us (Nathanson 1991).

Bits of the collective consciousness of its time crept into the movie. The Wicked Witch of the West is a dark, controlling presence who seeks to dominate and control very much like Hitler. The Guards at the Witch's castle (the Winkies) are dressed in Russian-like costumes. Their "Yo-ee-oh" chant, which uses the interval of the fifth and distinctively low pitches, is reminiscent of the ancient liturgical music favored by the Russian Orthodox church (Nathanson 1991). The flying monkeys have helmets that look very much like those of Japanese imperial warriors.

Of Archetypes and Journeys

Dorothy's journey away from Kansas and back again represents a spiritual quest, an expedition to inner dimensions to face all aspects of the Self (Stewart, 1997). It is a move towards self-actualization, atonement or at-one-ment, whole-ness or holiness. It is a remembering or becoming again one member with what we once were.

Dorothy is a prototypical hero very much like Jesus, the Buddha, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, or Arthur. Both Dorothy and Jesus (a) had questions regarding their parentage, (b) started out life as very common ordinary persons, (c) had to flee in the early part of their lives, (d) traveled a path with a clear beginning and unavoidable end, (e) battled evil in different forms, (f) found companions along the way to help with the journey, (g) had companions who were scattered in times of turbulence, (h) went through wilderness, forest, or desert, (i) found or possessed an inner power to help transcend their experiences, (j) eventually went home or returned to another dimension leaving sad companions behind, and (k) were not afraid to take a stand on moral issues or principles.

The First Lesson

As the story begins, we see Dorothy, a girl of twelve, running down a road. Her age is pertinent, as it is the end of childhood and the beginning of the transition to adulthood. In it two realms or ways of seeing meet: the dependent, intuitive childlike and the independent, logical adult.

Miss Gulch arrives at the farm. It appears that Toto, Dorothy's dog, has bitten her on the leg. She wants to take him to the sheriff to be destroyed. According to the law, Miss Gulch was right. One person's animal does not have the right to invade the space of another, much less bite that person on the leg. In accordance with the law, Miss Gulch had every right to seek restitution and demand that Toto be destroyed. But are right and wrong defined by the law?

Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1984) has described six levels of moral reasoning: punishment, reward, social approval, law, social contract, and universal principle. Miss Gulch was operating at the level of right and wrong as determined by law. This is the level of the fundamentalist, the literalist, the insurance document. However, what is legal is sometimes not ethical or moral. Those who let laws, holy books, religious edicts, or religious figures determine right and wrong without questioning are abdicating their responsibility as human beings. For example, at one time, segregation and overt racial discrimination were legal. Thus it takes principled beings to challenge and shape the law.

Not being bad is not the same as being good. At first, Uncle Henry took a moral position:

Dorothy: "Destroyed? Toto? Oh, you can't . . . you mustn't . . . Auntie Em - Uncle Henry - you won't let her . . . will you?"

Uncle Henry: "Uh . . . ah . . . course we won't . . . eh . . . will we Em."

However, when Miss Gulch threatens to bring a damage suit that will take away the farm, Uncle Henry suddenly has a moral revelation: "We can't go agin' the law, Dorothy." For Uncle Henry, right and wrong are determined by the possibility of punishment. So Uncle Henry, like a Skinnerian rat in a maze, seeks to avoid punishment in giving Toto to Miss Gulch.

Dorothy is the only person in this movie to take a stand based on moral principle regardless of the consequences. When Lion jumps out of the bushes and begins growling at Toto, in the face of what might have been great risk to herself, she slaps Lion on the nose and admonishes him for picking on poor little dogs. Here, Dorothy acts courageously from a moral stance: It is wrong for more powerful things to pick on weaker things. Again, at the final scene in the throne room of Oz, the group is met with flame, smoke, and a thundering voice in an attempt to scare them. Lion faints. Dorothy stands up to the great and powerful Oz and says: "Oh . . . oh! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Frightening him like that, when he came to you for help!" Again the moral decree: More powerful things should not frighten weaker things that are in need of help.

Cyclones

Cyclones represent those unpleasant events in our lives that move us to higher places. This reflects Dabrowski's (1964) theory of positive disintegration, which states that advanced development requires a breakdown of existing psychological structures in order to form higher, more evolved structures. Inner conflict, neurosis, guilt, depression, anxiety, adverse conditions, or unpleasant life events can, through assimilation, lead us to higher levels of moral or ethical behavior. Growth requires that old psychological or spiritual structures give way to new ones. New wine cannot be put in old wineskin. The disintegration process can result in inner tension as a sign of growth in a healthy individual.

Had Dorothy not been transported to Oz, she would never have attained the insight, growth, understanding, and realization of her power that she did. Miss Gulch would still be a presence in her life. Thus the cyclone, while unpleasant, is neither good nor bad; it is merely a byproduct of life outside the Edenic realm. Cyclones may be the loss of a job, life transitions, death of a loved one, or the dissolution of a relationship. They are the internal tension that brings us to a higher place.

Toto the Dog

Toto represents the inner, intuitive, instinctual, most animal-like part of us. Throughout the movie, Dorothy has conversations with Toto, or her inner intuitive self. The lesson here is to listen to the Toto within. In this movie, Toto was never wrong. When he barks at the scarecrow, Dorothy tries to ignore him: "Don't be silly, Toto. Scarecrows don't talk." But scarecrows do talk in Oz. Toto also barks at the little man behind the curtain. It is he who realizes the Wizard is a fraud. At the Gale Farm and again at the castle, the Witch tries to put Toto into a basket. What is shadow will try to block or contain the intuitive. In both cases, Toto jumps out of the basket and escapes. Our intuitive voice can be ignored, but not contained.

In the last scene, Toto chases after a cat, causing Dorothy to chase after him and hence miss her balloon ride. This is what leads to Dorothy's ultimate transformation, to the discovery of her inner powers. The balloon ride is representative of traditional religion, with a skinny-legged wizard promising a trip to the Divine. Toto was right to force Dorothy out of the balloon. Otherwise she might never have found her magic. This is a call for us to listen to our intuitions, our gut feelings, those momentary bits of imagination that appear seemingly out of nowhere.

The Window

The window is an opening between one dimension and the next, the air hole through which eternity breathes through to the temporal world. We too have a window, the place where the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious meet. It takes a journey to find this place.

In a startling bit of movie magic, Dorothy is actually hit on the head with a window as she begins the journey from Kansas to Oz. She pulls herself up from the bed and peers fearfully out of the window at the wreckage floating past: a chicken roost, a fence, a house, a buggy, a tree, a henhouse, a crowing rooster. This window represents the inner world, a dream state, personal unconscious, prophecy, and archetypal images.

Munchkins and Glinda

Munchkins, by their childlike appearance and mannerisms, represent the spiritual ideal, which is the child state. Children forgive easily, are quick to love, and are content to live in the moment. The Munchkins also live in communion with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Glinda is a figure not represented in the other dimension—Kansas—thus she can be said to be truly other-dimensional. She is a being of light, a spirit or celestial power who appears both in physical form in Munchkinland and in nonphysical form in the poppy field. Poppies represent spiritual sleep. Glinda was a force to help wake Dorothy from that sleep.

Shadow Witch

The Wicked Witch represents our Shadow side, the dark or unconscious part of the personality that the conscious ego tries to ignore. The Shadow is Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll.

At the castle, Dorothy throws water on the witch. The water represents consciousness. When Jesus walked on water, he was above consciousness. Self-actualization or at-one-ment is not a matter of destroying the shadow. All humans have shadows. Individuation is a matter of facing the shadow and coming to grips with it. Thus Dorothy confronts the Witch, who melts. Dorothy assimilates the power of the Witch in the form of the guards, the flying monkeys, and the broomstick.

The Path and the Wizard

The Yellow Brick Road represents our Spiritual Path. The whole problem in the movie is that Dorothy followed it looking for the Wizard of Oz, instead of for Oz. Oz is the transcendent power, Love and Light. The Wizard represents those humans who sip the nectar of their own illusion and become drunk with greed, power, and control. These are the religious charlatans who claim to speak for God, while they are building theme parks. They are all little men and women standing behind curtains.

The Point of the Movie

Dorothy asks Glinda, the Good Witch, "Oh, will you help me? Can you help me?"

"You don't need to be helped any longer," A smiling Glinda answers. "You've always had the power to go back to Kansas."

"I have?"

"Then why didn't you tell her before?" Scarecrow demands.

"Because she wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself."

The Tin Man leans forward and asks, "What have you learned, Dorothy?"

"Well, I . . . I think that is . . . that it wasn't enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em . . . and that if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard; because if it isn't here, I never really lost it to begin with."

This is what Dorothy learned:

1. We have the power. We have Ruby Red slippers to transport us to Kansas, to bring about the Edenic state, or to create our heart's desire.

2. Witches and cyclones, while bad, can be a means for spiritual growth.

3. We must learn for ourselves. Truth is not given so much as it is realized. Look within. You do not have to go off in search of a mystic or seek truth from a variety of exotic religions. Truth is found in your own back yard.

4. Reality is very simple. We create our own reality. We tend to make it more complicated than it need be. The simple universal fact is that, if we believe it to be so, it is.

5. There's no place like home. The kingdom of heaven is not a place; but a condition.

References

Dabrowski, Kazimierz. 1964. Positive Disintegration. Boston: Little, Brown.

Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1984. The Psychology of Moral Development. New York: Harper and Row.

Nathanson, Paul. 1991. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Nhat Hanh, Thich. 1999. Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers. New York: Riverhead Books.

Stewart, Jesse. 1997. Secrets of the Yellow Brick Road: A Map for the Modern Spiritual Journey. Hygiene, CO: Sunshine Press.

Andrew Johnson, a former second-grade teacher, is codirector of the Center for Talent Development at Minnesota State University. He can be reached at thinkingskills@aol.com.