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The "Wizard of Oz" in Color "What is the assignment?" the students asked. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in spectral - light and color. For your center point, use the Emerald City. My question for beginning students is to give one example of the connection between Kansas and the Emerald City in terms of the rainbow. For mid-level students, define the connection between the tornado and the yellow brick road. For more advanced students, discuss the connection of the Emerald City and Kansas with rods and cones. My grad students - astrophysics and psychics: devise your own question." Have you traveled the world of Frank Baum's original book, The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, recently? Many of you have watched the 1939 classic movie with Judy Garland as Dorothy, singing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow." Why do you suppose this beautiful song was so amazingly appropriate for this story? You will understand better if you read the book as an exercise in creative visualization, starting with color. You artists and photographers will find this exercise to be easy. Those of you who study the visual part of the light spectrum will also find it easy. For the rest, let us take a quick review. Visible light - the part that we humans see, includes "colors" that range from red to violet (to ultraviolet). ROYGBIV - RED - ORANGE - YELLOW - GREEN - BLUE - INDIGO - VIOLET. The gray scale used in photography shows the progression of tints and shades from black at one end of the scale to dark shades of gray through mid-gray at center to the tints of lighter grays and finally to white at the other end of the scale. Remembering this, let us begin. (Special note to older readers/students: You will observe that,in 1939, when the movie was released, a change was made in one critical area: Dorothy's shoe color is RUBY red, rather than Baum's silver. The city is Emerald and not simply green. In 1939, in the time of great revelations about technological knowledge, we think about ruby lasers and emerald gemstones ...and splitting atoms and television premiered at the World's Fair that same year. Ironically, competition that year at the movies was "Gone With The Wind," whose leading character is named Scarlet! Scarlet is one of the options for the color red.) As we journey here, visualize each item in its color and rainbow sequence. Relax. Breathe...Breathe... Maybe you even will journey through a tunnel or hole; but, that would be like Alice. And that is another story! Read Frank Baum's original book, his descriptive colors, the The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz and his comments from the year 1900, more than 100 years ago now. Our colorful trip through this book begins in: Kansas - a world of GRAY: The fields are gray, the dark gray clouds hover over the dust bowls and Aunt Em's gray hair. Only Toto is BLACK, a devise to indicate that "magical happenings" are included in the story-to-come. Black also lays the foundation for the gray-scale's black-white. A tornado's GRAY funnel cloud lifts up the house with Dorothy in it and makes two or three complete upwardly spiraling rotations, turning through the air as it rises. When it sets down and we next look around, we've entered the land of color. At first, we are in the land of the Munchkins. Everything in this region of Oz is BLUE and friendly. The men wear BLUR hats and clothing, the hats being round and pointed. Their boots have blue on top. The women wear WHITE with white gowns. Beds and sheets are blue. The bridges are blue. Houses are blue. Blue is everywhere. When the good witch of the North arrives in her orb, she gives Dorothy the charmed SILVER shoes that had been worn by the wicked witch of the East and the kiss of protection. Dorothy herself wears blue and white gingham. Silver is known as a psychic/shaman/witch color. Dorothy wants to go back home to Kansas. Where is she advised to go to seek help in returning? To the EMERALD City: where everything is GREEN. The buildings and streets and people are all green. How to get there? Remember the quest: BLUE TO GREEN via the YELLOW brick road. BLUE PLUS YELLOW YIELDS GREEN. On the light spectrum (color spectrum for artists) blue is followed by green which is followed by yellow. What is happening is that you are seeing blue and yellow and it is creating an illusion of green. Dorothy is instructed not to be misled by false yellows - she'll meet straw, tin, flesh, GOLDEN keys and golden caps. Wood will carry her downstream on raft and and overstream on trunk, but she must connect with just the right source of yellow - the yellow brick road to find the Emerald City, where all will be green. Astrophysists: which is the correct source of yellow for the pathways needed? She also must avoid SCARLET, which will lead to sleep (Delta waves, death stars, red giants). WHITE is the color that witches wear and silver is the magic communicator - silver shoes, the silvery tinkle sound, the silver whistle. Blue in the East - land of the Munchkins - is friendly. Green is helpful but a little less friendly. Upon reaching the Emerald City, Dorothy is sent upon a mission: to kill the remaining wicked witch who lives in the west. In this land, the good witches live in the north and south and the bad ones live in the east and west. Each region is color-coded. In the West are the YELLOW ones, the Winkies, the tin smiths, yellow bridges and yellow flowers. CLEAR water, of course, dissolves the wicked witch of the West into a lump of BROWN sugar. (What colors compose "clear" water? Clue: see the crystal in picture on this page) Brown is associated with decay - dried leaves and dried out grass. Brown is also an illusion, being a mix of three or more colors, usually with parts of it being red. Which colors mix to create brown? Is green a part of brown? Along the way, the travelers must journey through darkness filled with fearsome creatures and flying monkeys. They must not drift too far downstream or get lost in the field of scarlet poppies. Using flight, they traverse to their next destination, the south lands, where the more powerful good witch can finally help them get Dorothy back to Kansas. In the South, the trees are high, there is a WHITE china wall and white china doll people. A spider monster guards the region and the powerful witch has RED hair and BLUE eyes. She wears WHITE, the witch color. Bridges and roads and beds here are RED. The powerful witch reminds the girl, Dorothy, that she has had her answer and her protection with her all along: the charmed SILVER shoes will take her home and the protective kiss of the good witch of the North had kept her safe from harm from the bad witch. Using the silver shoes, Dorothy returns to Kansas, land of GRAY. Dorothy stands in Kansas, realizing the the "other world" is everywhere around her, just "over the rainbow." And so we, too, have traveled from the land of gray - mid-point on the photographer's black-white-gray light scale via upward spiraling motion to the world of color. We've gone from the percepton of rods to the perception of cones. We've found a rainbow - ROYGBIV. We traveled from blue to green - the mid-point of the visual color field by way of a yellow road. We've added yellow to blue and found green. We've discovered that green was an illusion - we were really seeing the blending of blue with yellow - we were looking through filters - through special lenses - to see green. We realized that gray then also was an illusion - it was the blending of black and white. We've seen that the mid-point green corresponded to the mid-point gray: Emerald City and Kansas were the same! We've learned that not all yellows yield the same results so that we must find the proper source of yellow - which is the road, the way - which travels through the regions of color - to achieve our destination. We travel stars and planets - red giants, blues, whites, yellows - as we traverse space. And so we look to light and the sun(s). We begin to examine astrophysics, other dimensions, space travel, and dreamtime, while skirting around sleep and avoiding "death." We've traveled up and "over the rainbow" and found home.  ROYGBIV: We are energy-in-motion. One system examines the flow of energy through centers in our personal orb called chakras. Energy which flows and spirals up and down the spinal cord, passing down through earth or up beyond the head, is often called Kundalini. Follow the colors as Kundalini energy flows through chakras - red at the base of the spine - to orange to yellow- as it rises. Apparently green as it meets the heart chakra, energy traveling and spiraling upward, passes through blue and silver as it traverses the throat chakra. Continuing upward, blue to indigo to violet and beyond, it passes through the crown chakra to the edge of our orb or beyond. In Dorothy's trip, she travels first upward from the heart chakra (home) in spiraling motion (tornado) two or three times (two or three energy points/chakras) to the land where everything is blue. She then spirals her energy downward (winding road) to the region of green (Emerald City) which is the heart chakra. In her case, her heart was "home." Choosing to see Kansas as she knew it, she reverses the admonition to "avoid scarlet and sleep." Apparent sleep at one frequency is awake at another. Desiring to leave Oz and arrive home, she moves her energy downward through red regions (Southland) and to her feet (black-to earth). Her brain waves alter beta-alert) and she is grounded in the land of gray again: Kansas. How "grounded" are you? How "down to Earth?" Are you in the lower regions of your aura? You're practical today. Are you "airy fairy," up in the blue to violet range? Psychic, but may forget earthly belongings? MEDITATION: As you listen to the colorful words or see the colors, find them around you in your life. What color did you wear today? Children should reach down to their toes if they can reach them or imagine that they are reaching down... Now, the crown chakra colors will be meeting with the base colors of red...even Earthy colors, such as browns. As you listen, travel upward from the reds of your feet through the saffrons and oranges at your tummy, not missing that yellow gold energy center, called the solar plexis (grownups can show you where that is), to the greens/pinks of your heart, past the blues and silvers and indigos of your neck and up to the top or crown of your head again. Now, you can keep rising to the regions of light and color usually perceived by butterflies. Did you know that dragonflies are known to find others who are the same color as they are, even if the color belongs to a human being or clothing? If you like, you can travel from head and toe to your solar plexis and make a continuous circle or oval with your own universe of color. Did you see an aura of color around yourself or others? What did you see or imagine? How do red giants play a part in this? Do Dog stars relate? How do color and light affect our system of classifying stars? What is the connection to solar plasma? Magnitudes of light? Energy orbs? You.... Relax. Breathe deeply.  Go over the rainbow. Applied PSI allows communication in the meantime and the way to structural healing. Copyright 2007-2018.Asha of Antares.Asha Ariel Aleia.All Rights Reserved. Background courtesy:www.britsattheirbest.com Chakra image courtesy: www.rickrichards.com Judy Garland, in "The Wizard of Oz" singing "Over The Rainbow" courtesy: www.youtube.com Other images courtesy: Asha Ariel Aleia | |||