The Further Shores Ain’t Kansas

The Wizard of Oz has delighted audiences for over eighty years. For me, Yip Harburg’s lyrics stand out as among the most original and entertaining in musical theater. 

One of the things that makes the show so enduring is the idea that we don’t have to go on a great journey to validate our best talents (such as intelligence, courage, or compassion) because they are already inherent in us. And we certainly don’t need an all-powerful Wizard to tell us. To feel whole, we simply need to recognize those qualities in ourselves.

That “there’s no place like home” is another theme of the story. But this idea is reflected in the first. Our ultimate home isn’t “Kansas,” and never was. It’s our embodied self. So the journey that ultimately needs to take place is in our hearts and minds. It is a journey of self-awareness and acceptance.

When people want an ‘elevator speech,’ I’ll often compare The Further Shores of Knowing to The Wizard of Oz, with this distinction. The place we need to return to is not a mid-western state in an idolized America. It is a greater awareness of our own consciousness and the opportunities for growth and peace that that brings. In short, it is a state of mind, which includes a clearer conception of our own inner cosmology. If Part I in life is discovering the wholeness in ourselves that was always there at the start, Part II, which may quickly follow, is the realization that no one can take it away, be they good, bad or indifferent.

Yes, there are evil-doers around, just like in the Land of Oz, ready to undermine our most cherished projects. Who hasn’t been plagued by such personalities at one time or another? The challenge here is, can we hold out love for these entities? The answer is, we must, otherwise we may lose our own bearing. At the end of The Wizard of Oz, even Dorothy shows shock and remorse at the demise of the Wicked Witch, who expires when she is drenched by a bucket of water that Dorothy had tossed on the Scarecrow to extinguish his flames. 

Dorothy didn’t need a lift in a hot air balloon to get back to Kansas. She simply needed to wake up and realize she was there all along. That is essentially what all the great spiritual teachers have been telling us for millenniums… we just need to wake up.