Down the rabbit hole
If you never have read Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll please give yourself time to read this masterpiece. Maybe you know the term “down the rabbit hole” from when something is getting very complicated or you might know the term from losing track of time. It’s a metaphor for distraction, and we have a lot of distractions in modern age in fact an entertainment industry that slowly conditions our behaviour in day to day life and call it “wonderland”. Lewis Carrolls original version of Alice in Wonderland starts with Alice a little girl following a white rabbit into a rabbit hole and fall. She ends up in Wonderland and from there sit meets a lot of different characters, and from these characters she gets a lot of wisdom. Alice also experience a lot of nonsense, but it is with a hidden wisdom in the nonsense. One of these characters is the Cheshire Cat. Alice stands at a cross road and don’t know which direction she should take. She therefore asks the Cheshire Cat and the Cheshire Cat asks Alice”where do you want to go”? Alice answer is “I don’t know” and the Cheshire Cats answer is “If you don’t know where you want to go, then it doesn’t matter which path you take”. Any path as we know starts with one step and then Alice’s Adventure begins – and so do yours and mine.
What Alice in Wonderland also shows us is that on our own personal Hero’s journey we will meet different archetypes. Alice who is the Hero/the innocent child who is the curious force in us, and the White Rabbit is the Herald or the messenger who call Alice to Adventure going down the rabbit hole – the hole symbolises the subconscious mind. On the adventure Alice meets the Queen of Hearts who is a tyran and represents the Shadow. Alice also meets the Mad Hatter or we also calls him the Fool who highlights absurdity. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland represents in that way wisdom about every soul journey we all have to take and the archetypes we all meet on our journey. If you’re interested in diving deep into your subconscious mind I’ll recommend you start to read Lewis Carrol, C. S. Lewis who wrote the famous The Chronicles of Narnia and of course the Fairytales of H.C.Andersen. You might ask why it should be so important to know any fairytale? because you learn so much more about yourself and at the same time you’ll be more conscious about how the modern entertainment industry use “white rabbits” to get your attention and lead you down the rabbit hole. I know for sure that the one “rabbit hole” where I am losing track of time is Instagram and it is not a fairytale, but a part of a huge entertainment industry that manipulates with our subconscious mind – so be aware of which rabbit hole you walk into.
The Matrix and the Cheshire Cat
What does the movie the Matrix have to do with Alice in Wonderland you might ask? In the Matrix the character Morpheus is a kind of Cheshire Cat figure giving Neo cryptic advice in directions. The Matrix is as in Alice in Wonderland asking the question about reality. If you’ve noticed a lot of modern movies is modern versions of old fairytales, and there is a reason for that. All fairytales are based on a”universal language” or you might know mythology which is also based on universal language. The Roman, The Greek etc different mythology is based on the same universal language e.g. archetypes as the great mother, the great father, the queen, the king, the fool etc. It makes no difference – the universal language symbols, archetypes etc “speaks” to our subconscious mind. So does the entertainment industry – it manipulates with our subconscious mind. For that reason you should be aware of “the fairytale” in advertising, computer gaming, propaganda and social media. What is happening on a subtle level is manipulation like the Trojan Horse with your mind. There is nothing wrong with the old fairytales the purpose of them was “a hidden wisdom”. The problem is that the entertainment industry use the same “technic” but with a hidden agenda to sell a product, create a behaviour etc.
Existential Vacuum and search for meaning
Viktor Frankl a psychiatrist who wrote the book “Man search for meaning” was aware of what the entertainment industry did to people. Frankl wrote about the existential vacuum – a vacuum that “arrives” every Sunday when people were free from work and the shops were closed. People were so getting used to outer stimuli e.g.consumerism. A majority would rather be entertained (which is another kind of consumerism) than confront themselves with the existential emptiness they actually felt. The entertainment industry as we experience it today is very much the same as when Frankl was writing about the existential vacuum – the difference is that the technology has become more advanced. We have a choice as Neo has in the movie the Matrix – do we want to take the red pill or do we want to take the blue pill?
