The Hidden Meaning of The Wizard of Oz

Well tonight we’re going to see what is called “the most watched movie of all time”. And it’s a film that definitely pushes the boundaries of the portrayal of higher truth in film. It goes beyond even Frankenstein and Dracula, which portrayed the lower truth of the fall of the ego—but in this film we are seeing the path to enlightenment and liberation—the path to nonduality. And nonduality in Christian terms is equivalent to “salvation.”

The film, of course, is The Wizard of Oz. How many have seen The Wizard of Oz? Pretty much everyone. OK. But you haven’t seen it like you’re going to see it tonight. So today I took notes—too many—and if this gets boring I want you to start booing or throw apples, and I will leave the stage and let you see the film. But you might find it useful.

And the reason is, that the author—a man named Lyman Frank Baum—who was born in 1856 and was a very extraordinary being in the US at that time—he actually lived in Kansas when he was writing this, in 1890. He was a Druidic theosophist, he was actually a member of the Theosophical Society, led by Madame Blavatsky, and he comes from Scots-Irish ancestry, was very tuned into the Druids, and of course the Tuatha De Dannana, as the worshippers of the Goddess—this worship and understanding of the nature of the Goddess was embedded in the film—as well as the understanding of the advaita path, which was also embedded in theosophical and druidic thought.

And so, we have a man whose very informed about higher consciousness, who is writing this story for children—ostensibly—but frankly I don’t think so, even though I think children will enjoy it. There have been many different levels of interpretation of this film, as I noticed when I went online today—many of them are stuck on the political level and want to interpret this as a communist or labor oriented tract—and want to deal with it, in some cases, as a feminist tract, but although, and it’s true he was married to a woman named Maude .. was it Gonne.. no, Gage, (Maud Gonne was married to the Irish poet Yates). Maude Gage who was the daughter of a famous suffragist and so that kind of political activity was going on in his life, and he was also—not only politically active, but active in theater—and travelled around the US as a performer and director, and then a writer. And he ended up writing 14 Oz novels, so this was just the first, and the story was continued. But the first one contains, I think, the entirety of the message. And the film is different than the original book that he wrote, and includes some of the elements of his later writings and comments on Oz, in it. I think the film was made in 1939.

So, the film opens on a barren, country road, very desolate scene—and we see Dorothy running along the road with Toto beside her, and she’s obviously frightened—she’s in a scared state. And so right away we have the framing of the film’s message—Dorothy represents consciousness on the run. OK? This is very important. What is she running away from? It turns out she’s running away from the judgement of a woman who claims that her dog, Toto, bit her, and will need to be destroyed. OK? So there’s a judgement that is pending against Dorothy, and Toto. Right?

So this is a very important point, because we have to understand the film as a dream, and therefore in a dream, all characters representing aspect of the Self, this means that Dorothy is plagued by a self-judgement that is disturbing her peace. OK? It’s not a judgement of another, even though this woman, Miss Gulch, who turns out later to be the evil witch, is seemingly external—but that witch is an internal superego figure that is attacking her. Right? OK.

Why? What is the judgement about in this case? The judgement is against her loyalty to her dog, Toto. Because she is allowing Toto to trespass on her property, chase her cat, come into her garden and make a mess, etc etc. And so what she’s being judged for is her loyalty to Toto. Now this is very interesting, because Toto is the central character of the film, not Dorothy. The word “Dorothy”, but the way, means “Dor On Theos”—it comes from the Greek—which means “a gift of God.” OK? But Toto is God. Literally, Toto, “total”, “todo” in Spanish, but total totality, the whole, the Absolute. Toto represents, signifies, the Absolute. Which is a very interesting thing, since Toto is not perfect. I mean, I don’t think I’m biased when I say he’s a rather scraggly and small and not a very handsome animal. (someone boos). There you go! But what he is, is a Cairn Terrier. OK? This is very interesting—a Carin Terrier—the word “cairn” comes from Scotland, and it’s a word for a memorial megalith. “Terrier” the word terrier, comes from “terra”, the earth—so he’s representing the ground of Being. And yet it is a memorial megalith to something in the past, or something other than what is being signified.

So, Toto is representing the fact that the Absolute—however it appears in the physical plane—cannot appear with perfection. There is no perfection in the relative plane. Even though Toto is perfect in the Absolute plane. But Toto, as we will see as the film unfolds, he is unchanging, whether they’re in Kansas or they’re in another realm that “isn’t Kansas anymore.” Toto is the same—the other characters change.

So Toto represents Dorothy’s loyalty to the Absolute. And the important thing about terriers, I think, is that they are fearless. And of course, this terrier is very well trained, and he is the intuitive guide who never fails to know the right way to go, the right thing to do, the right way out of the trap. And he guides Dorothy all through her journey of being tested, at a soul level, during this film, as she develops and pursues her Self-Realization.

So Toto guides her, but Toto is already there—he doesn’t need to grow, he doesn’t need to change, he doesn’t need to do anything—he’s literally along for the ride because she has given her love to Toto. Toto can never be captured by anyone, witch or evil beings of any kind, he will always escape. He can only be captured by love. And so he’s captured by Dorothy’s love. Her love is Divine Love. OK.

So in the beginning, when we see Dorothy running home, scared, she’s totally full of herself and her problem—which is this judgement—and she approaches her parental figures, who are not actually her parents, they’re her Aunt Em and her Uncle Henry. I hope I’m not ruining the film for anyone, but you’ve all seen it, so I don’t think it even matters. But what does that represent? It means that these are parent figures, but Dorothy has already reached a level of emotional maturity, where she has cut the umbilical cord with the mother, and the father is not the one she’s dependent upon to get the name of the father from. She has that installed, and although she has a sentimental attachment to Aunt Em, she is not stuck, she’s not in one of those mother-child-dyads that can’t be broken in the unconscious, that’s the source of most pathology in the ego. So she’s already in a state of relative freedom. But she’s full of herself and her problem which is this self-judgement about herself for being too different, for wanting something that nobody else seems to care about, know about, or have any interest in finding out about. She is alone. She is dealing with aloneness. She’s dealing with the trial of individuation, that is causing her to have a different frame of reference to everyone else in her life. No one can understand her, as Professor Marvel will guess later on in the film.

And so she comes and interrupts the two parent figures, whose incubator has broken and all their chickens are in danger of dying, and they’re counting their chicks and trying to save them—she is too busy with her problem, but very soon she will be the one who saves all the celestial chicks—who will be the munchkins, when she ends up in this other land. OK? So although she can’t function on this plane to be of much use in the practical world of work, she is very useful, even though accidentally, in killing witches and negative problems in the realm of imperience.

So Dorothy reveals to them that she’s in trouble, Miss Gulch has tried to hurt Toto but failed, Toto can’t be hurt, even though people will try. But they don’t think anything of it, they do not take her seriously, she’s a child, she’s not recognized for who she is and what she knows and how far she’s developed spiritually.

She then meets the three workers in the field, and the one who will be the cowardly lion, is bullying the one who will be the scarecrow, and Dorothy interacts with this future scarecrow, and the scarecrow guy criticizes her for not having brains, because she’s taking Toto through Miss Gulch’s garden—why doesn’t she walk home another way? And he accuses her of not having and using her brains—and then he says at the end of this little interaction, “Her head ain’t made of straw you know.” Well of course, it’s his head that will later be a head of straw, but this signifier “head of straw” unites them. He projects the signifier on her, and it is his own signifier. And this unification of a shared signifier is a, let’s say, an exchange of a token of the currency of love. Because there’s a deep understanding between them, and that is because they are both wako. And “head of straw”, in this case, this signifier means a kind of crazy-wisdom—that means “we know about something others don’t know about, which is Real two.”

So she has a different kind of wako strategy, because he is kind of an idiot on the phenomenal plane, hitting his finger with his own hammer, etc—doing things that are obviously a negative kind of clowning. Her wako strategy is that she wants to learn how to become a wizard. She wants to be a magician. She wants to know about the divine powers that transcend the ego.

So then she has the scene of falling into the pig-sty, the future lion man saves her, and tells her to have courage—of course he is the one who really lacks the courage—and then the future tin man shows up and says they’ll build a statue to him—and he of course will then be a statue because he can’t move, he’s going to be rusted. And so everyone presents themselves in real one, in the same way that they will be in real two, but with an entirely different meaning, an entirely different depth of implication, when they finally get to Oz.

So, the Auntie Em says “Go away! Sit somewhere when you won’t get into trouble.” And so Dorothy goes into a reverie state and says, “hmm.. I wonder if I could ever find a place where there is no trouble?” Right? Where is a place where there is no trouble? Well it could only be a world governed by divine love, in which everything is beautiful and perfect, and there are no negative projections, no judgements, no conflicts between people. She wants a world of magic, and a world of love. And then of course she goes into her main song, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, in which she invokes this magical realm of real two. And of course, half of the song she’s singing to Toto, and Toto of course is already there, and he’s, you know, saying, “OK, let’s do it babe! I’m ready!” And so, the song is a kind of invocation of what is now about to become Real.

And so the message of the film is, dare to dream the highest possible dream, because whatever you dream will become your reality. You can make it your reality—your mind is that powerful. Trust it. And therefore, don’t let your mind project negativity, because that will become the world you live in. Hello!! Everyone really wants to live over the rainbow, so why live in Tartarus, when for the same price you can be in Oz?

OK. So this reverie, this song, of course is interrupted immediately—uh uh, it’s not that easy—the witch shows up and she has come now with an actual legal complaint that she was bitten by Toto, she wants him destroyed, she’s going to take him away, and take custody and have him killed by legal execution. So of course, Dorothy turns to the parents and says, “What are you going to do about this? You can’t let her take Toto!” And they say, “Well, it’s the law—we can’t go against the law.” And they prove that they are weak.

So in that moment, Dorothy realizes that all adults are either evil or weak. And so at that point she gives up on the phenomenal realm of real one, and she says, “No way am I gonna live in this world.” And she of course decides to leave home. Toto escapes from the witch, and the two of them leave again.

Now they’re on the road, but this time they’re running away not so much from the judgment, but from the disappointment in the incapacity of the law to support truth and goodness and right. And Auntie Em at some point turns to the witch, and tries to argue with her but says, “As a Christian woman I can’t say what I want to say to you. I can’t say the truth.”

So, what we see here is now the impotence of Christianity itself, that religion no longer gives power to anyone to transcend the jurisdictional law of the phenomenal plane, with the spiritual law. And that was the whole point of Christ’s teaching, and his willingness to be crucified. He did break the law—but he broke the law for a higher purpose—and if you’re not willing to break the law because there’s a higher law, then you’re lost in this world.

So, Dorothy and Toto are on the road, and almost immediately Dorothy receives magic help, because she has taken the risk—she’s risking everything in separating from the family system psychologically, and the world of the social system as well—she finds Professor Marvel.

But her one problem is, she is still emotionally attached to Aunt Em. And so when the Professor tests her, he puts on his fortune teller’s hat, and he tells her that he is from the lineage of Isis, the Egyptian Goddess, right? (We have Goddess worship again—he is someone who is in this line of magic that comes from the Druidic and Egyptian sources in the ancient world, and he is the one that will of course later show up as the wizard.) And when he tests her, by saying he sees Auntie Em suffering, maybe she’s dying because of sadness at the loss of Dorothy, Dorothy weakens, and she goes back.

So in other words, she wasn’t ready to make a complete cut. So here we have two weaknesses in Dorothy—one is the emotional attachment that keeps her in a weak child state, rather than keeping her in full adulthood, and then there is this second sense of guilt that is the witch’s judgment.

In this interaction with Professor Marvel, Marvel and Toto hit it off very well. Marvel shares his hotdog with Toto, and he says, “It’s among dogs”—so we all share things together. So, what this means is, that they are resonant with one another. Professor Marvel, even though he’s going to turn out to seemingly be a fake wizard, he is acting in the service of the Absolute. OK? So, it’s important that we see that, because later on that will be the key to understanding what Dorothy really learned from the wizard.

But she learns here in this scene, because of her attachment to Aunt Em, that she cannot escape physically from the family system—she must learn to escape it psychologically and spiritually—if she tries to leave prematurely on a physical level, she will internalize it and remain trapped in a sense of dependency.

So, it’s important that Professor Marvel did create a friendship with her, and a connection to the Goddess—and remember Madame Blavatsky’s magnum opus is a book called Isis Unveiled. And the whole teaching of theosophy is really aimed at bringing out the truth about the nature of the Goddess, whom Dorothy is a fledgling avatar of, without knowing it.

So, Dorothy goes back, and she immediately of course falls into a stormy depression. She yearns for the greater reality, but she didn’t have the strength to go for it, and so now she suffers from emotional vertigo, and this shows up as a tornado. And this tornado, as it approaches the house, causes everyone else to go into the basement and she is locked out. So, she is forced then to continue her separation from the family system.

The tornado then signifies the event of the transcendence of the ego. It is the awakening of the upper death drive. So, the soul is now able to use the tornado to spiral upward into real two. But she has to deal with her fear, her helplessness, and her aloneness. And she has to come to accept her situation—that no one can go with her from the old world into where she needs to discover her Real Self.

At this moment she is hit by an imploding window. It’s very important that she’s knocked out by a window. It is the window, literally, into another world. And then she looks through the window and her life passes before her eyes, just like someone who had died or has a near-death-experience. And she sees all the people in her life, and she sees the witch and she sees the whole story that has led to this moment. And so, her ego in a way has passed out. It’s not dead, but she is in a near-death understanding and realization of what ego-death is. It is the soul’s knowledge of the ego, and the significance of its egoic life in the larger frame of reference of the soul and the supreme Self. And she realizes her life was all a dream, but she’s horrified by it, and she must now destroy her inner witch superego, before it tears apart her soul.

So, her house goes up, and then it lands. The landing means she now has her mission clear to her—and in the landing—she doesn’t know where she’s landed but suddenly there is silence. The noise of the film stops, and that means she’s in inner silence, and now she is present, she’s awake, she’s aware. And when she opens the door of the house for the first time, she’s in a world that’s in full living color. Before that, the world was not even black and white—sepia tinged—it was a very boring drab brown color, there was no color, energy or life in her existence—now she sees the life with heightened consciousness.

And it’s a magical world, and clearly she has discovered a realm that is completely new and unprecedented, and would be unbelievable except for the fact that she’s there. It’s real, it is real two, it’s not a dream in the sense of a hallucination—it’s more real than real one. And she will learn that her house has accidentally or somehow landed on the bad witch of the East and has killed her.

So, she discovers she has landed in Munchkin Land, which is the land of the child-ego. This enables her to see that everyone in her life is really a child, not a real adult, there aren’t any real adults in her world, but these children are innocent. And in their innocence, they are able to express the beauty of an immature consciousness, that has not yet been filled with self-judgment, guilt and shame, etc. And so she returns to her own innocent child-state prior to self-judgement, and she is the hero.

Thus begins the hero’s journey—she’s literally the national hero of Munchkin Land—and we are not in Kansasto-Rica anymore, we are not in real one—we are in this land that’s the equivalent of the Hobbits in the Tolkien trilogy—but we are in a land where she will not be able to stay, because she has committed the crime of killing the witch. Even though it’s not a crime to the munchkins, it’s liberation, it’s a crime to another witch, her sister, who will show up soon.

But before that, the good witch of the North, Glinda, shows up. She comes in a purple orb like an alien spaceship, and she lands, and she describes the reality of what magic power is, and she of course represents the Goddess, the archetypal Self, and she is afraid of nothing. Dorothy denies being a witch—that’s the first question that Glinda asks her, she says “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” And she says, “I don’t know, I’m not a witch.” But of course, she is a witch, but she doesn’t know it yet. And she is told that indeed she has come from a star, and her whole old life narrative, including the killing of this witch that was her judgement about herself—that has in fact been killed—because look, what she was believing in turns out to be real. The world is magic. And so therefore, she is able to take on the power and the ruby slippers of the dead witch.

Munchkin Land is celebrating the end of evil. The end of the rule of Kali, right? The witch is Kali, so it means the end of Kali Yuga. But as we see, it was a premature celebration, because the witch has a sister who’s not yet done with putting her through tests, and creating great anxiety for her.

So, Glinda tells Dorothy she has to get out of Oz. She just got there, but she’s got to get out. Why? Because she’s in danger of the witch that wants to kill her, and Glinda cannot fully protect her—she’s on her own—even though there will be some protection. But she is not allowed to trust that, she has to begin to depend entirely on her own internal resources. But how to you get out of Oz, without going back into real one in the ego? You’ve got to keep going up. So now she finds the spiral again, it’s the upper death drive but now at the soul level of its functioning—and that’s the yellow brick road. So now she’s on the road to liberation, which has to pass through Emerald City, where she will meet with Wizard who will give her the information she needs to get to real three.

So of course the path of gold clearly means that there’s a reference to the Golden Age, and to Golden Light, and to the gold of the avataric consciousness, but if she is going to get what she needs, and not be waylaid on this path, she’s going to have to pass a number of important tests, and she will need allies.

So, although it’s a single road, she comes to a crossroad, where again she cannot make a decision, which is the right way to go? Which means that her mental powers are not sufficient—her mind is not strong enough—she needs to have gyana. She needs to have an intuitive understanding of what is the accurate move in every given situation. And so she meets the scarecrow, who is her animus, her first animus figure, who represents mind—of course it’s mind in the absence thereof, he can’t think—he’s got a head a straw but that also represents the fact that the highest level of thought is no thought. It’s instantaneous knowing without thinking. But it has to go through a symbolic mastery of thought. So, if you cannot think, you also cannot transcend thought.

So now she recognizes that through the scarecrow she must get an awakened Buddhi that can discern the truth, and function as a gyani. But the scarecrow has no backbone—in fact he has no bones, he can’t stand up—he has no strength. This means that mind-power alone is not enough. You can have all the intelligence in the world at the mind level, and it will not get you to liberation. But it’s a good start.

And so, then they go on, having passed this test, and they come to an apple tree with a toucan in it. Something you rarely see, even in Costa Rica. And these, it turns out these apple trees are not very friendly, and they start insulting her and the scarecrow, and are very nasty. But in their nastiness, they throw apples at her—they won’t give them to her, but they will throw them at her as weapons. She and the scarecrow gladly pick them up and eat them and are nourished by them. OK? Very important passing of a test—when people insult you, use that. Don’t be hurt by it, be nourished by it—there is more good information in an insult than in a compliment, OK? So, this is the first important wisdom that she gains, and as a result of passing that test she finds herself at the feet of the tin man, who is stuck, he is rusted into immobility. And of course, he’s the one who wants a heart.

But to want a heart means to want to understand the hearts of others. That’s really the meaning of having a heart. It’s empathy, it’s compassion, it’s the ability to get what is really going on that will never be spoken in words, or put into symbolic form, that can only be known between the lines, without words—the wisdom of the heart has a kind of knowledge that’s much deeper than anything that can be formulated in language.

And so, by saving the tin man, she is able to have this ability to awaken her feeling function. Then later of course she meets the cowardly lion and puts him in his place, and the desire for courage, for fearlessness, then is added to her motivation for getting to meeting the Wizard.

Next comes the test of the field of poppies. And the witch puts this field in front of them, that they will have to pass through to get to Emerald City—and of course poppies do, I think represent opium. And they represent all psychedelic substances. And what is being said here is “This will give you only an imaginary form of ego-death and liberation. Don’t fall for it.” If you fall for what you get out of ayahuasca, or out of opium of cocaine, or heroin or LSD or 5-MeO-DMT, or whatever it is that is the thing that made you feel like you had a window on the infinite and the Real—don’t believe it. It’s an inflation of the imaginary function of consciousness and it will let you down, and you’ll find that however many of these trips you take, you’re still in your ego when all is said and done.

So what happens is, Glinda drops snow on them. I would say snow represents real one death, and what is being given here is a warning—if you fall for the opium you’re going to end up overdosing or having some total misunderstanding of reality—your ego will act out in a way that will cause you to do some very bad karma, misunderstanding yourself, having an inflated idea that you are God, and that can lead to a total failure of reaching liberation on the path. And so it is that warning, of the coldness of the snow, that awakens them, and then they can pass through onto Emerald City.

So you have to attain ego-death without any props, and it can’t be something temporary or situational, it has to be permanent, and it has to be complete—without any trace of ego remaining.

So they end up in Emerald City, and Emerald City is of course the Emerald Isle, it’s Ireland, and everyone’s in green, and they’re all leprechauns, or other magical Druidic kinds of beings, and they are in the magic land of a particular sort—which is this land of the worship of the Goddess.

The one who plays the Wizard also plays many other roles. He is a shapeshifter. Shapeshifting is one of the things that the Wizard does, in order to be able to awaken Dorothy. Before they go all the way into Emerald City, however, the witch makes another appearance, and she writes in the sky the words “surrender Dorothy”. Now this is very important a message—indeed if Dorothy will surrender to the Wizard as being a representative of God, and follow what is commanded to complete the tests, she will reach liberation. But if she surrenders to fear—to the witch—then of course she will lose. So, there is the test—to what are you surrendered?

OK. So as they are eventually invited in to meet the Wizard, they are all overcome by insecurity, and when they finally get into the presence of the Wizard, he asks them twice, “Who are you?” OK, the famous question, “Who am I?”

Well, they can’t really answer the question. And her answer is, “I’m Dorothy, the small and meek.” So here she falls back into her ego. She falls back into a false modesty, a humility, that is not up to the task of receiving power. And so therefore, although the humility is good etiquette, it nonetheless is not sufficient to gain her the reward that she is seeking. And therefore, they have to pass through a test to prove their worthiness, which is to acquire the broomstick of the wicked witch, which means they will have to kill her to get it, no doubt.

On the way to the wicked witch, in the evil forest, they encounter paranormal forces that they call “spooks.” So, it is a fact that on this path, at some point, sooner or later you will have to deal with the paranormal. Alright? And you mustn’t be afraid of it, but it will show up, and it will show up in ways that will, can, be frightening, if you do not have the knowledge and the faith in the perfection of reality and of the truth of nonduality.

They are attacked by an army of evil flying monkeys—these are kind of the inverse of the army of Hanuman’s monkeys in the Ramayana—and Dorothy is captured and taken to the evil witch. They don’t care about the others, but they want Dorothy, or the witch wants Dorothy, and Toto of course. So, the witch tries to negotiate by saying “We’ll save Toto for you if you give us the slippers.” But it turns out she can’t take off the slippers, even though she agrees to do to the trade, they have their own electromagnetic defense shield—the slippers have a power that she does not yet have—so we could say it’s a dissociated part of her soul that has not yet been integrated into her consciousness, but it’s already functioning.

Anyway, her three helpers rise to the occasion—they overpower enemy troops, they impersonate the enemy to get inside the castle. I think this is another important teaching—that you must use your own understanding of evil—the evil that’s in you—in order to understand how to out-wit external evil, and evil that appears in the dream-field. And therefore, you turn bad karma into good karma.

Eventually, in the struggle with the witch, who will try to set the scarecrow on fire again, Dorothy takes a bucket of water to save him, and accidentally hits the witch—and it turns out, voila, water is all it took to cause her to melt away. But I would say this is holy water. It has been made holy, because it is used in order to save life, and Dorothy’s holy love for these parts of the Self, and her fearlessness, and so the witch is actually baptized and included in this energy-field of goodness, and she can no longer hold onto her beautiful evil nature.

So, they go back, they have their broomstick, they’ve done their deed, and the Wizard breaks his promise. Now this is very important—the Wizard has to break his promise to them. And of course, he’s doing this in the service of revealing to them that they should not depend on his recognition. They need to realize they have the power within themselves, and they don’t need an external wizard to give it to them. And so, this Wizard is kind enough to give them that teaching. Dorothy of course—Toto of course unveils the truth, pulls across the curtain that shows he’s just like them—he’s a human, he’s not this big Wizard in the sky—and Dorothy then accuses him of being a bad man. But she’s wrong. And he says to her, “I’m not a bad man, I’m just a bad wizard. I’m a good man.” And indeed, he is, and his way of being a good wizard is to be a bad wizard. This is a very important teaching—the wizard at some point has to fail you in a way that will cause you to claim your own power. Because otherwise you’ll be dependent on the wizard for the rest of your life, and the wizard doesn’t really want that, he wants you to become a wizard. But for you to become a wizard, you have to understand that you are already the same as the wizard.

So, the wizard does give them what they came for, which is the recognition of the Big Other. Which comes in the form of the diploma, and the medal, and the testimonial, etc—but it is done with a kind of irony in which one realizes that there is no Big Other. The Big Other doesn’t exist, but if you want some symbolic form that is the proof that you have completed your tests and you have come out with the power to liberate yourself, then so be it. And the wizard says here, he is authorized by E Pluribus Unum—very important point, “one out of many”—in other words nonduality is his authorization—he’s in nonduality. And because he’s in nonduality, he’s authorized to recognize them for how far they come, he has an understanding of their relationship to nonduality, and the fact that this complex, this being who comes as four beings in one, is actually already the totality, Toto is there, and there is completion.

So what the lesson that the wizard is giving is, that all of reality is staged. It is a play. It is a play for your benefit, and the only way that you get benefit from the play, is realizing you have no enemies. But you also have no one that you should feel either inferior to, or superior to. The ego makes the mistake of judging some people negatively. The ego is disappointed in some people. This is a very bad mistake, because in the play it is necessary for you to be disappointed in order for you to recognize that your primary disappointment is always in yourself, for the failure of your own ego. And you would much rather project your disappointment on someone else and not have to face that.

But it’s only in the recognition that imperfection is the way that the world appears and you cannot be perfect—not even Toto—you cannot be perfect except by the transcendence of the imperfect ego, and the realization that you are the nondual totality that in its wholeness, in its love, in its integral nature of mutual enhancement, mutual liberation of the whole, through love, perfection does appear. But it is never the property of any individual being.

So the Self appears as the Radiant Sameness that is the blissful perfection of the truth. This, everyone now is satisfied, the three animus figures have signifiers that satisfy them, but Dorothy requires a different treatment—she must go it alone. So the wizard says he will take her back to earth, but Toto makes sure she gets out of the hot air balloon, and he goes alone. The balloon by the way says, “State Fair.” His state is fair, and mantra is “om-aha”.

And so he goes back to the om, but she cannot go back with him. She has to have her own aha, and that aha is the realization that she has the power, through the ruby slippers that she is wearing, that she has earned, that does belong to her, that prove that she is a witch—she has the power to return to the world that she left behind—but to realize it as the integration of real one, two, and three, as a single nondual whole.

That’s why she says—and I think the most important sentence that she speaks in the film, which makes no sense at all from a logical perspective within duality—“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.”

OK? So what she’s saying is, she’s going back to her back yard, but not because her back yard has the goodness and the infinite beauty and perfection she’s looking for, no—it’s because it isn’t there. And it isn’t there, because it’s in her. She has never lost it. But not she as an ego, she as the realization of the one Self that is the perfection, one real one is seen with that perfection, that is home. OK? Oz is not home. Oz is a transit realm, a bardo state you have to pass through. But she returns home, to the Absolute that can appear only as a relative—and she’s back with her relatives. But she’s back with them, realizing that all the people in real one are the same ones in real two, and Toto, representing real three, is the unifying factor that has enabled the successful completion of the quest. And she realizes that the signifier “I” has no signified, except the Absolute, the whole, the total.

And so, she has realized the mind that is no-mind, and the truth that is presented as fiction, and she is the avatar of that Eternal Home, from which we have all come.

Namaste,  Shunyamurti

Audio File: The Hidden Meaning of The Wizard of Oz – Audio File.MP3