Enchanted Sleep - The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Early in Genesis (Gen. 2:21) there is the episode of Adam falling asleep, and attentive readers throughout time have noticed that it is at this point that duality is created, expressed there with the scene of God's taking the rib from Adam's side and creating Eve. In modern spiritual literature certainly Blavatsky paid attention to this episode, and so have many others, for it sets up the condition we seem to find ourselves in in this life.
The Course in says:

Yet the Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam, and nowhere is there reference to his waking up. The world has not yet experienced any comprehensive reawakening or rebirth. Such a rebirth is impossible as long as you continue to project or miscreate. It still remains within you, however, to extend as God extended His Spirit to you. In reality this is your only choice, because your free will was given you for your joy in creating the perfect. (ACIM: T-2.2.I.3:6-10)

The story of the baptism in the River Jordan, when the skies open up, and Jesus hears God's Voice, really really is the point where this has come full circle, and we wake up again to who we really are: "You are my beloved son, in whom I am very pleased." (Mk. 1:11) which is the beginning of his ministry on earth, to show us by example who we truly are, and asking him to follow him -- and certainly not to the cross. That is the thinking, the perception of the world, which always thinks the awakening is equated with death.

In myth and fairy tales there are numerous tales we find some kind of representation of our soul, our essence, asleep, enchanted, and bottled up in a form which is not its own, whether it is Cïnderella, Sleeping Beauty, or a Miracle Nightingale, or many other forms that just await their release. In any number of tales the detail shows up of how the Prince, the savior the liberator, does not fall under the spell of the evil witch, for if he did he would fall asleep too, or change into a frog, etc.

Needless to say, throughout these stories, the evil witch, the old King, the angry dwarf and all these figures who cast a spell, or lock people up, are nothing but representations of the ego, which enslaves, and chains us, as long as we are under its spell, and it is truly only the Prince, Jesus, our True Self as the Inner Teacher, which can teach us the distinction, and once more follow the spirit to freedom, and to dance into Life and there "live happily ever after."

Wonderful is the tale of the Miracle Nightingale, where it is very clear that the Prince liberates the spirit of the Nightingale, because he falls in love with the song, and not with the bird, with the content, not with the form, in other words he shows his dedication is to the spirit, not to the form, at which point he has stepped out from under the spell of the witch, and so the princess is liberated. As the Course says: "Time is a trick, a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic." (ACIM:W-1.58.4:1), and that is the witch's wand, that keeps us enchanted. And the thing to get--experientially more than intellectually--is that we can make another choice, the choice for not form, but spirit, not the ego, but the Holy Spirit.

In myth and fairy tale much spiritual understanding has lived on in humanity cloaked in the form of parables, which were mostly misunderstood, but yet lived on among us. The only "divorce" which is the basis of all sadness, is the separation, i.e. our decision to leave heaven, and the "Chymical Wedding of Christian of the Rosenkreutz," and all the fairy tail weddings, in which "they lived happily ever after," reflect nothing but that decision to re-join our true self, and regain the happiness that was ours since forever, and which in truth was never lost, except while we were asleep, dreaming we were a frog. And the secret that undoes the power of the wicked witch is what Eckhart Tolle calls the Power of Now, and which A Course in Miracles calls the "miracle" or the "Holy Instant," which says essentially that it does not matter how many mistakes I made, (which our ego calls sins, and so reinforces the spell), for they are all one, and that is to give our power away to time, and to lose all power which is ours in the eternal moment of now. Eternity is not "an endless amount of time," but it is now, every time we change our mind, until we finally change our mind and re-join our true Self, which for all too long we ignored and mistreated like Cinderella, and then truly "live happily ever after," in what A Course in Miracles calls the Real World, and Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, which goes back to the biblical terminology for this phenomenon.

Inspiration for these comments came from J. W. Kaiser's Wisdom of Fairy Tales, which I am currently translating, and hope to see in publication some time soon.

Copyright, © 2008 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.