Characteristics of Fairytales and The Wisdom Voice Within

 

The personal development and spiritual guidance available from fairy tales has been lost in our adherence to the logical linear mind.  We have, both individually and collectively, lost contact with the wisdom voice within.  As a consequence when we have life experiences that take us into our personal dark forests we are left without a guide.  We are literally out on our own.  However, the wisdom voice is never lost.  In many fairytales and folktales from around the world we are instructed how to access this voice of destiny and its guidance in finding our life purpose.  One story that tells about the power of the inner knower within is the story called Vasilisa the Beautiful.  This is a Russian folktale also known as Baba Yaga.  Baga Yaga is the archetypal Dangerous Old Woman.

 

 

In a far off Tzardom, there lived a little girl who was so lovely that she was known as Vasilisa the beautiful.

When Vasilisa was eight years old her mother became ill and no doctor could cure her. Just before she died, she called Vasilisa to her bedside and told her:

‘My dearest Vasilisa, do not weep for me, but listen carefully to my words.

I am leaving you this little wooden doll, which my own mother left me; you must never show it to anyone.

Always carry it with you wherever you go. It will help you whenever you are in trouble and comfort you when you have no one to turn to.

When you need help, go somewhere quiet and give it something to eat and it will tell you what to do.’

 

 

In the story of Vasilisa the Beautiful the heroine is lonely.   This is often the case with those most in touch with the beauty of who they are.  They are forced to live alone.  This does not mean that they do not have a family, that they do not have a job or a career or are surrounded by friends.  In this modern day culture of acquisition, and possession by acquisition, the one who lives from a sense of beauty is often left to experience this alone.  The paradox is that they are connected to this beauty through a sense of All Oneness.  Rather than feel alone they feel all one.

 

 

This extract from the tale of Vasilisa the Beautiful leaves out an important part of the mother’s instruction.  This instruction is relevant to our own lives.  It is relevant to the way in which we can develop, what this writer and storyteller refers to, as the knowing within.  The mother, who is deeply connected to her child and to her ancestors, tells her daughter that she must give the little wooden doll some little food and some little drink.  When this is done then her daughter will be able to ask questions that the doll will then answer.

 

 

Here we see the importance of tending what we feel is wooden within each of us.  We are instructed within this Russian folktale to nurture that which might seem  not alive within us.  This gift from the archetype of the good mother, representing unconditional love, is wooden because we do not give her the attention she needs to be able to speak to us.  The more attention we pay the knower within the more it can guide us through our personal dark forests.    We all go into our personal dark forests at different times during our journey within time and space.  Many of us, too many of us, perish there.  This is not a literal kind of dying.  It is the psychological death of meaning.  The quest for meaning and purpose to life is at the heart of all fairytales and folktales that are read and told throughout the world.

 

 

The death of meaning is a major issue within our Western culture.  It has been a major issue through the journey of humankind.  Like Vasilisa the Beautiful we have to leave the domain of the good mother.  We leave behind the world of the child and we venture out into the world of everyday existence.  We are asked to grow up, and if we are fortunate, we grow into the beauty we are intended to be and to express within this world of form.  If we have had some half decent parenting then we will have been encouraged to trust our unique sense of knowing.  Then we are able to feel a sense of confidence in the intelligence that arises within us and which guides us to living with a sense of meaning and purpose.

 

 

The characteristic of this Russian folktale is the invitation to trust the still small voice within as represented by the wooden doll who knows the answers, would that we attend to its needs.  Most of us have starved our inner knowing.  This is in large part due to our present educational system.   This inner knowing, however, never dies because the wooden doll cannot die.  This inner knowing is not simply a question of acquiring more information.  The small still voice within is the wisdom voice within.  More information tends to be partial while wisdom, by its nature, is a way of seeing beyond opposites.  It solves problems.  It gives direction because it arises from a higher level of consciousness.  As the scientist and mystic Albert Einstein said,

 

 

A problem cannot be solved by the same level of consciousness that created it.

 

 

The small still wisdom voice within accesses higher levels of consciousness provided you pay it attention and feed it through awareness.  This means that you fill this aspect of your being with awareness and in this way honour its potential to guide you on the true way.  This is best done on a daily basis.  One of the best books that I have read about the characteristics of fairytales is entitled The Wisdom of Fairytales and is written by Rudolf Meyer.  In this book Rudolf Meyer writes “The characters in fairytales lead us to discover the treasures of our own souls.”

 

 

Fairytale characters are representations of the journey to meaning and life purpose.  The real meaning that gives life purpose is the ability to be able to express the creative and beautiful way in which creation intended you to be its expression in a unique way.  Meaning and life purpose are found in expressing your gifts in the fullest way that you are able.  This ability to give of the way in which creation designed you to express through you is what is beautiful within you and is your real treasure.

 

Another wonderful book that uses fairytales for personal development and spiritual guidance written by Lorna Catford PhD and Michael Ray PhD is The Path of the Everyday Hero.  In this book we see the power of fairy tales used as strategies to finding ones true creative spirit.  In this book we find how we can relate to the character of Percival who quests after the Holy Grail.  We find how, in this story of the quest for the Holy Grail we can ask questions that give us our true meaning and purpose.  In the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast we discover how this tale can teach us to create loving relationships.  In Cinderella you get to explore the values beyond material wealth that will enrich your life and allow you to live your one wild and precious life.

 

 

This is the real invitational power of fairytales.  They are great stories for spiritual guidance and personal development that most people overlook.  They celebrate the imagination.  They help you live your life with a path that leads toward greater joy and fulfilment.  They are realistic.  Even though many fairytales end with the words

 

 

and they lived happily ever after

 

that phrase has a different meaning than the one that we might associate with Hollywood movies.  In fairytales and folktales you are always asked to travel the road of trials.  This is not a punishment although it is a trial.  It is the journey of the soul into the arena of higher lovemaking.  At the end of the fairytale the hero or the heroine brings back the gift that they have found.  This is a metaphor for the finding of the treasure that is within you and that you are heroically willing to gift to the world out of a realisation of Oneness.

 

 

Ashes and cinders in

fairytales are code words

for the ashy, sooty depressed

“out of time” experience.  – Robert Bly

 

 

At the end of the story of Vasilisa the Beautiful returns with fire that flames from a human skull.  This is the symbol of the fire of your creative imagination to light your way through the dark forest.  This power can be frightening to those who live in the sooty, depressed out of time bound life.  You meet with such people who will tell you that the work of the creative imagination is the devil’s work.  You meet with the depressed and the sooty who will tell you that you are a sinner and that your life has no worth unless you become one who mouths some magic spell.  Julia Cameron,  the writer of the Artist’s Way, calls these ashy and sooty people crazy-makers.  They will drown at birth any creative potential you care to share with them.  This is why the mother tells Vasilisa not to show anyone the doll.  This is why the poet Goethe advises in his poem the Holy Longing,

 

 

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

-  The Holy Longing -  Johann W. Von Goethe

 

 

In the beginning, when connecting with the still small voice within, tell only the wise person or keep silent.  This is a private and a tender flowering of your beautiful creative potential.  Guard it from those who would criticize its unfolding and stay away from those caught in the obsession with the darkness of the separate sense of self and who are not insane for the light.  Don’t give it to some religious group consciousness that will bind it and have you feed some other idea of who you should become.

 

Fairytales map the journey of most of the challenges that any one of us will face throughout the time we live in form on this planet and this dimension of polarity.  Some tales include the whole journey into meaning and purpose.  Such a story is the German folktale Mother Holle.  Others cover the stages of Love as in Skeleton Woman.  There are many stories told that show you the ways to integrate within you many of life’s challenges.  These are not just stories for children but for the person who desires to find the treasure of living a meaningful life filled with purpose, passion and prosperity.

 

As a writer and storyteller I use fairytales and folktales for personal development and spiritual guidance.  It is through their instruction that I practice listening to the knower within.  This is the wisdom voice within me that I feed each day I feed it  by trusting in it and nurturing its flow from within.  There are characteristics within fairytales that hold true for all cultures and all times.  This is why they remain as true teaching stories.

 

 

Your life story is not a fairytale.  It is, however, a story that follows the characteristics of a great many fairytales and folktales around the world.  Storytelling is the way in which we learned long before we were tied to a classroom.  You are both the Beauty and the Beast.  You are the one who has locked Sleeping Beauty in the tower which is the tower of the intellect.  You are the one who keeps her asleep and you are the one who is invited to kiss this beauty within you awake.  You are Visalia the Beautiful who is able to feed and nature those wooden aspects within you that come alive in a way that is beyond your intellectual understanding.

 

 

 

The choice is yours.  You can choose to feed the wisdom voice within.  You can learn to ask questions that guide you to a life of meaning and purpose.  You can connect to the knower within that enhances the presence of beauty within you and allows you to follow true spiritual guidance and further your personal development and beyond.  Otherwise you can leave the inner knower to starve to death.   In various tales through the world the result is the experience of the wasteland.  This is the metaphor for a life lived without the beauty of meaning and purpose.  I invite you to take the path less travelled and learn to be the knowing that arises from the still small voice within.

 

 

Let it be so.

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