Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 2. Connections 30
most, need something more flexible - a lot of grey can fall between black-and-white.
To extract the most meaning from life is the criterion for deciding what system or
which worldview is right. The ancient Germanic folk, then, sensed reality in quite
a different fashion than modern man. While modern man’s attention is caught up
only with the world of physical things, the ancient perception of the world was overlapped
with dreams and visions (now, usually called ‘hallucinations’ or ‘figments of
the imagination’), in other words, perceptions and experiences without the presence
of a physical object. In the Tale of the Beginning people were created from trees.
To continue the metaphor, in our modern worldview, folks have lost the sense of a
trunk and a root system which, combined, are the history or lineage of the organism
and fall to believing that only the treetops (i.e., the outward appearances of things)
represent reality, and because of the trivialization of objects’ histories, there is often
a feeling of separateness and alienation from the world. Any “non-treetop” information
which flows up from below, i.e. comes from beyond the normal five senses, is
ignored or is not regarded as important to treetop reality. In the ancient Germanic
worldview, however, the trunk and the root system were still regarded as an integral
part of reality. Knowledge could flow freely from beyond the self upward through all
trunks and, because all trees are nourished in the same earth, allowed for constant,
albeit indirect, communication with all other parts of creation. Rather than feeling
separate and alienated, these ancient folk enjoyed an underlying sense of belonging,
a sense of community even though they may have been alone much of the time.
Of course, the early Teutons used exactly the same five traditional senses that
we learn about in school and when they focused their attention was still the treetops,
i.e. the world of things. They accepted experience and perceptions coming up from
“below” as being part of physical reality. A common concept from northern Europe
handed down through folklore and oral history is “second-sight” which can be defined
as information received from outside the traditional five senses.
“Once they were churning at Vaaland, but they didn’t get any butter.
Someone must have bewitched the churn. So they heated the scythe until it
was red hot, and thrust it down in the churn. On the following day, they
went to church, and there they met people from Møgedal. They exchanged
greetings, and the man from Vaaland asked how they were getting along in
Møgedal. ‘Oh, not very well,’ said the Møgedal man. ’My wife cut three
fingers off one hand.’
’Well, it served her right, she was in our churn. We churned the whole
day without getting any butter,’ replied the man from Vaaland.” 13
13 Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend.