Fairytale magic and the experience of life
My younger son is five and crazy about the Snow Queen right now. And after having watched the latest animated version a hundred times I got curious about the Andersen original. This totally blew my mind, see if it works for you, too.
The story begins with the devil himself, who created a mirror to amuse his little devil students. This magic mirror distorts the view of everything good into something mean, foul, evil, nasty, malicious and bad. Hold it on to a beautiful garden and all you see in the mirror is some rotten green. A loving smile is instantly turned into an evil grin. This device is a major hit with the devil kids. They have so much fun holding it on to all the beautiful things on earth, dreaming of the nastiness and decay they could play with, if only the mirror image was true. They even fly up to the heavens to test it on god and the angels and all the mirror shows is malice and mean spirit. The little devils get so excited about the mere prospect of what evil looks like that the mirror heats up and shatters into a trillion little pieces, scattering around the world, shooting tiny particles into the hearts and eyes of the people. Now, (and this is where it gets all fascinating!) everyone who was hit with a piece of the magic item would stop seeing the world like it was a minute before. The nearest and dearest would turn into needy monsters, trying to trick them. Every smile would be a manipulative grin, never to be trusted. Every imperfection in nature would be a major flaw and the beauty and ease in the world could no longer be seen. It all just looked scary, evil and ugly.
I couldn’t remember ever having read the initial setting for what turns into the much loved epic battle of love over evil, of a heart strong enough to melt ice. Interestingly, in this magical set up, the world did not change. It just looked like a different place. And because people were scared of what they saw, they started to act in totally different ways. What’s more, the little devils knew that the magic wasn’t real, merely a trick of perception. Until the mirror broke it had no more power other than being a fun toy to entertain some diabolic little minds. But the people didn’t know about the trick and believed what they saw to be true.
What a brilliant way to make sense of a phenomenon which is so hard to even spot. Why do people act in strange, unreasonable ways? Why do we hurt other people, even the ones we love, defend something aggressively without it ever being claimed or challenged? Why do we create so many problems for ourselves simply by acting on potential threats and potential risks, or potential thoughts we can only assume in others?
Well fact is, we all really do respond to what we see in the world and fact is too, that what we see is different for everyone. And even though we almost certainly don’t have a piece of the devil’s mirror in our eyes, we do see our world through the filter of our own thinking.
You will have your own examples for situations or people who react to things you cannot see. A good friend of mine for instance, was plagued with colleagues who couldn’t do their job. The poor girl only ever met incompetent or lazy people and always ended up doing everything herself, because no-one ever did a proper job or worked hard enough. We used to laugh about it when we were younger, but actually her way of experiencing others in general caused her a lot of unhappiness and stress. She didn’t know that it was her sense of perfection and her fear not to be in control that made it impossible for anyone to please her. Or have you ever driven your car with someone sitting next to you who cannot bear not being in charge of the wheel? Or maybe you met people who always know from the very second they fall in love with someone amazing that this relationship is never gonna last, because they will inevitably get hurt?
Self-fulfilling prophecies used to be a mystery to me. I can now see how this works. It’s not karma or bad luck. It’s got nothing to do with the things you attract and people that surround you. It works because we don’t see what IS but only ever what we THINK is. Our thoughts pretty much work like that magic mirror. They are as misleading and as powerful as long as we think they are true.
Knowing that 'it's only Thought' however, didn't do the trick for me straight away. I'm a slow learner with this understanding.
How can we know what is, if we only see what we think is?
This clearly must be the difference between the fairytale and the real life. Gerda made it look so easy. She just followed her heart, stuck to what she knew to be true and ignored all the signs that suggested otherwise. And everyone she met on the way was at her service, regardless of their initial, and often evil intentions. But this is fairy land, right?
Back in my life I found two things really helpful to discover. For one, learning that we experience life through thought made me curious and allowed me to recognise specific thoughts that made specific situations sticky. I realised, for instance, that my daily annoyance about my kids acting up the minute we are trying to get out of the house, wasn't really about my kids. What annoyed me was the fact that I'm not in control of this Groundhog Day scenario unfolding over and over again. I felt powerless, inadequate and potentially judged by neighbours or anyone who might witness some of the daily drama. This would get me every time. So when I looked in this direction, I could see that this was about me, not them. Interestingly, since I saw this, we don't have the situation anymore. It simply stopped being a problem for me and my kids just stopped making such a fuss. Recognising Thought as the source of my feelings made the annoyance, anger, frustration, anxiety, fear or whatever feeling I'm experiencing a lot less potent. And after having seen a few of those specific ones, I'm beginning to find it easier not to take others, which I haven't figured out yet, too seriously.
The second thing I discovered was even trickier for me. I was brought up almost religiously unreligious. Believing and trusting in a higher power feels uncomfortable. It still does. But I've been practicing Reiki and Yoga for years and experience life energy (Chi, Qi) as a very tangible current. I can hold this life force in my hands and can even share it with others. Since I recognised this to be the same as what we now refer to as MIND, it feels a lot more natural for me to be a part of that energy. I discovered that without me getting in the way, I'm a lot more alined with it and a lot more in flow without me having to do anything about it.
For my little one, the fascination 'Snow Queen' is a lot more straight-forward than for me, but just as powerful. Good and evil are not that different to him. They compliment each other, one does not make sense without the other. His most disarming response to me whenever I'm telling him off is always: "But nobody can be good ALL the time!" For him there is no question that good is underneath in everyone, whatever side they are on. And he is sure that there is always a way to bring it out. “It’s like ‘The Trolls’ say, isn’t it mummy?: ‘There is happiness inside all of us. We sometimes just need a little help finding it’”.
Isn't that magic?
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