excerpted from the print magazine…
As a child growing up in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, I recall riding
in the back seat of an orange Plymouth as my parents take the family on a country
drive at dusk on a moonlit night. No matter which direction the car turns, the
full moon follows me. I watch it through the back window, urging it to come closer
so I can touch it. Not daring to speak and break the spell, for I think it must
be Glinda the Good Witch of the North. She will wave her wand over me and take
me far away: “Behind the moon, beyond the rain. A place you can‘t
get to by boat or by train.”
Years later, a student of yoga, I again watch the film The Wizard of Oz, this
time agape at the obvious similarities between it and the classic yogic journey
to liberation. Can it be that what is arguably the most beloved film in American
history is an allegory for the yogic quest?
The film was released by MGM in 1939. It was based on the book by L. Frank Baum,
published in 1900 long before most people had even heard of yoga. Yet the yogic
references are so strong I wonder if this story is part of a secret Hollywood
plot to disguise ancient teachings as a mega-musical and indoctrinate the masses
in the key to enlightenment? Liberation for the little guy. Subversive.
I have an eerie feeling I am uncovering the hidden truth that yoga is an unheralded
influence on the twentieth-century North American psyche. Millions of people
have unwittingly absorbed the steps to liberation clearly spelled out in The
Wizard of Oz.
* * *
At the end of the film, Glinda tells Dorothy, the young heroine who has lost her
way home, “You don‘t need to be helped any longer. You?ve always
had the power to go back to Kansas.” Dorothy then understands she never
really lost this power but had to learn to believe in herself. She returns to
Kansas by tapping together her ruby slippers and repeating, “There?s
no place like home.”
There?s no place like OM. The yogic symbols in Oz seem obvious to me: the
good witch appearing as a mass of light; the wicked witch as the dark side of
the mind; the Yellow Brick Road that begins as a spiral path of light leading
Dorothy to her destination; the need for brains, heart and courage as companions;
the monkeys as the monkey mind that hurtles us off course; the wizard as the guru
figure; rubies as the wish-fulfilling gem. The list continues.
But my theory on Oz and OM seems not to have occurred to anyone I speak with.
Am I deluded? So begins my investigation to vindicate my imagination. My first
clue is a vague reference on the Internet to the author of The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz having an interest in Vedanta. Aha! Baum must have been one
of the Hollywood Vedantists in the 1930s along with Aldous Huxley and Somerset
Maugham.
* * *
I track down Baum?s great-granddaughter, Gita Dorothy Morena, who maintains
the family interest in Oz. She lives near San Diego where her great-grandparents
used to holiday a hundred years ago. A psychotherapist and author of the book
The Wisdom of Oz, she uses the story as a therapeutic tool. She says, “My
life has been quite parallel to Dorothy?s. As a young child when my mother
read me the Oz stories I thought they were about me.”
It turns out that in 1892, before he began writing The Wonderful Wizard
of Oz, the first of his fourteen books about Oz, Baum became a member of
the Ramayana Theosophical Society in Chicago. He is known to have agreed with
the Theosophists? beliefs in karma, reincarnation, varying states of consciousness
and that a common creator exists behind all religious teachings. While not technically
a “yoga? organization, the Theosophists were the earliest group
of any size in North America to openly adopt yogic thought and practice, in
particular the quest for enlightenment.
The story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz came to Baum one evening as he told stories
to his four boys and the neighbourhood kids. “It was pure inspiration. It
came to me right out of the blue. I think sometimes the Great Author has a message
to get across and He has to use the instrument at hand. I happened to be that
medium.”*
* Michael Patrick Hearne, ed., The Annotated Wizard of Oz (New York:
Clarkson N. Potter, 1973).
