Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 6. The Sky 164
The ancients accepted that all individuals were part of a whole system. The
sky-realm, for them, consisted of two tribes of Gods who were able to overcome their
hostility towards each other through negotiation, so that each tribe eventually could
see that there was a greater cause: the preservation of the World Tree. What was
initially a struggle between different worldviews became a concerted effort towards
maintaining the wholeness/ health/ holiness of Yggdrasil. The individual person
gained honor and respect by how much he could give to the community, communities
worked together under a king. They understood the power of cooperation in spite
of individual differences.
Early Teutons maintained a strong sense of family, but in the 20 th century
this has been replaced by the highly mobile “2.8-kids-nuclear-family. Although
there are advantages to being highly mobile in terms of material goods, accessability
of job opportunities, etc., there are also some serious drawbacks in the
social-emotional-spiritual realm.
“There is no doubt that an individual (during the Viking Age) was less a
separate being and more a limb of a larger organism, the whole family, than
he is today. His responses would automatically tend to put the well-being of
the family first. That demanded the maintenance of the integrity of family
property and of the corporate standing of the family in the community. Profit
and loss, honor and shame were all shared, and common efforts were required
to achieve the good and blot out the bad. As well as sharing in communal
religious observances, the family nucleus usually also took private steps to
ensure divine favour. There were many divinities and there was ritual to
observe at both public and domestic festivals, but there was no compulsion
for an individual to establish personal relations with the Gods.” 30
Because of the passing away of the family lands and the viral industrialization of
western society, the concept of the extended family is little more than a quaint
anarchronism, but the “need” of a family-like support is as important today as it
ever was.
A common 20 th century malady is the feeling of isolation and with this comes
feelings of loneliness, lack of support, dissociation, and alienation. In general, the
cure for this disease is for the individual to refocus his self-absorbed attention outside
himself, out toward others within the environment/ community, and to begin to view
himself as a part of a system. Constant struggling for personal salvation, “getting
what one deserves,” personal rights, etc. is doomed to failure without community
support. The “support group” phenomenon which has infectiously invaded the field
of counseling has been, essentially, an attempt to create small micro-communities in
30 P. G. Foote and D. M. Wilson, p. 5.