Watching "Oz the Great and Powerful" last night, I found myself enthralled by the film as a prequel with its twist on the original Oz tale as well as abruptly aware that it might not have been the continuation of Walt Disney's plans for the Oz books as suggested in the bonus segment about the film. Even so, the exciting account moves the male lead, a carnival magician, from drifting in the waves of his life's happenings into a world of choice, consequence, and enlightenment.
His definition of perception and the realization that making a purposeful stand in living not only grows the strength of character present, but increases his sense of compassion and accountability. While performing his act before his trek into the land of Oz, our hero haphazardly and by rote tells the audience "to believe." With his developing change and ownership of ethical traits as the wizard, he tells the Munchkins, "We have nothing to fear as long as we believe." And he regards this as truthful. There will always be those we've touched in the wake of our interactions - some positively and others who must deal with their responses to our inability to conform with exactitude and precision to their framework of ideals. The naive young and lovely dark-witch experiences hurt when she believes that the "wizard," as he is accepted to be from prophecy, has discarded her for the good witch Glinda. Her self-attuned sister offers her an apple laced with magic to squelch the pain of feeling. Biting into the fruit, the bad witch becomes forever changed and the upset flares into jealous rage and hatred. Of course, the prejudiced hostility presents as irrational and no attempt is made to curb the execration of all that has produced upset along her historical timetable.
The apple's power to mask the pain of upset actually blotted the balance of the equation where another has free will and exploded the hatred of aggrievement into ugliness. In the story, the once beautiful dark-witch evolves into the pointed-chin, green woman as a quintessential black-magic sorceress intent on destroying all who thwarted her happiness. The wizard in this presentation is the one who comes to understand his own failings and then to discover his personal sense of valor and risk.
The farther I move from my own discolored land of angst with a narcissistic spouse and his taker-clan, the more volitionally ready I am to believe in my accountability and sense that anything is possible. For such a long time, I felt adrift and at a loss for the firm foundations of belief systems I once valued. The "what if's" had disappeared from my thoughts and vocabulary and my dream-scape had become mundane. Although I feel that my ex-spouse lay somewhere on the continuum between narcissism and psychopathy, it was I who allowed the persistently sustained sense of identity into which I had fallen. I am getting off my broom and freely electing to drop not only any rose colored glasses, but blinders as well.
I have just read Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's The Amazing Results of Positive Thinking. What I might well have deemed innocently credulous not long ago, I now embrace as amazingly dynamic in the navigation of the principles of the suppositional question on a higher tone of imagination. What happens if one "just believes" - in the face of all the thoughts and energies to the contrary?
It's a doorway. Not into Oz, but into the appearance of probabilities.
"Are you the great man we've been waiting for?"
"I think I could be."
James Allen sums it very well:
"The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow.
Sow an act and you reap a habit.
Sow a habit and you reap a character.
Sow a character and you reap a Destiny."
