The War for Awareness: Norse Myth, Andean Cosmology, and the Fight for Consciousness

An essential part of the spiritual path is learning to see the world through different lenses. The difficulty in this is that it first requires you to recognise the lenses you are already looking through. Looking at the world through a different lens is like trying on someone else's glasses, it’s simple enough, but the problem is that you forget that you put in a pair of contact lenses long ago; you’ve become so accustomed to them, you think they show you the world as it is and without them, you wouldn't be able to see properly.

At some point in my path, I began to look back at the filters I had been provided to make sense of the world I was navigating. I had been brought up to see all religions as childish and tools of the ignorant, whilst at the same time, going through a catholic all boy’s secondary school. I disregarded all religious ideologies fervently, all the while, being made to sit through catholic masses and watch my peers bowing their heads for prayer when ordered by the old man in his robes.  

As a result, my unconscious, or more accurately, the spiritual part of my psyche, had been installed with a narrative that, whether I liked it or not, was deeply engrained, rooted into the foundations of how I perceived the world. The archetype of Jesus, the saviour and self-sacrifice, was the only available highest ideal of man that I was aware of. Although I rejected this system of religion, there was some part of me that had symbiotically connected. My time at school would be the obvious time where the infiltration had occurred, though I later grew to recognise how religion has settled into our very DNA and has played a role in who we are over many generations, its narratives influencing our ancestors for millennia.

It wasn't until much later in life that I discovered there are belief systems that cannot be labelled as a religion. My first sample of this was Buddhism. In deeper study, I recognised that Buddhism technically should not be classified as a religion, though in discussions with some Buddhist practitioners, they informed me that most modern Buddhists now worship Gautama Buddha much in the same way as Christians worship Jesus, highlighting how it has become misled from its original focus.

Then I encountered Shamanism, and with this, Andean Cosmology. Wishing to find a deeper understanding of what this was, as I investigated, it was made very clear that a cosmology is not a religion, and if religion is all you know, then to understand what a cosmovision is would be similar to an English speaker trying to read Chinese; there are no shared roots, no route where one branched off the other – they have grown totally independently of one another with no point of comparison.

A few years of chewing on the concept of a cosmology had me starting to appreciate its flavour. It tasted like something old, but sweet and somehow familiar. It provided me a nourishment that I had been lacking in my years of rejecting the idea of anything more than all of ‘this’ (imagine me pointing around to whatever we can see around us). Its colour began to blend with something in the sphere of my spiritual psyche, bringing an awareness to something that had apparently been there all along. Yet, I knew it wasn’t ‘it’.

I had studied Hinduism through yoga and always found it to be too alien for it to be anything more than a philosophy to me, less palatable than ideas like absurdism or nihilism for example. I knew I could never be a ‘yogi’ for many reasons, though none more obvious than the fact that I am not an Indian, but a white man from half the world away. All these systems and beliefs were not igniting whatever was hiding deep beneath the folds of my proteins. None of them were stirring my ancestors... Until I uncovered a cosmovision that is so deeply engrained within our culture that we speak the name of those Gods every day.

Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Four Gods, hidden in plain sight. Tuesday comes from Tyr's day, Wednesday from Odin’s day, Thursday from Thor’s day, and Friday from Freya’s day. Norse mythology was the cosmological perspective that our ancestors followed before Catholicism invaded and enforced itself on this part of the world. As much as the church tried to stamp the Norse Gods out of the culture, echoes of them still ring down through the ages.

What I found most incredible about Norse cosmology is how closely it reflects the structure of Andean cosmology. Somehow, two ancient civilisations that existed completely independent of one another, existing on continents that were undiscovered by the other, one deep in the depths of the jungles of South America, and the other here in ancient Europe, had managed to develop a similar vision of the cosmos they are a part of. I had heard of Pachamama spoken of so many times, the name of mother earth in Andean cosmology, that I recognised her instantly in Norse cosmology, although here, her name is Jörð.

However, the similarities between the gods and those details were all things that began to fall into place after the fact that it was the similar construction of the cosmological structures between the two that really made me pay attention. Essentially, (as simplified as I can make it) both cosmologies see that there are multiple layers of realities on top of each other, where we are in the ‘middle realm’ and there are the higher realms and lower realms. It shook me how these two civilisations, with their own separate societies, who would've used hallucinogenic plant medicines within their cultures (as similarly as we use alcohol in todays), had come to see the cosmos they shared in a strikingly similar way.

It was this connection I had uncovered that took me into exploring the Norse cosmology, wishing to learn as much as I could gather on the subject so as to better understand the spiritual beliefs of my ancestors and the Gods that forged this part of the world. I stumbled across other strange similarities in connections between other belief systems such as how Thor, the God of thunder with his hammer from Norse mythology seems to reflect Hannuman, the many-faced monkey God of Hinduism who also was the God of thunder with a hammer. By some good fortune, many tales of Norse mythology have survived the years and can be found in the Poetic Edda, and it is from here that I wish to share with you the story of Ragnarok.

Without repeating the whole story for you here (though I strongly recommend you do read it at some point), in short, Ragnarok is the end of the world, the Norse Apocalypse. It is a prophesised event that all the Gods in Norse mythology are aware of, many of them desperately attempting to prevent from becoming true and only managing to drop the dominos that make the prophecy an inevitable outcome. The Gods know the details of Ragnarok and they know that for each of them, their fate is to die in battle at the hands of beasts such as the world serpent Jormungandr and Fenir the monstrous wolf. Yet, aware of the futility of their efforts, the Gods charge into battle, determined to triumph, fearlessly fighting and letting it be known that they won’t be going down easy. In this act, at no point do they give their lives to their opponents, keeping them fiercely until they are taken.

I have read this story countless times, finding it to be such a beautiful, powerful and truly epic tale. I find it to be a perfect analogy for how one should approach a practice of meditation. The practice of meditation should be met fearlessly, with your intention to be strong against the challenges that appear as you sit in the stillness. The forces of nature will rise up against you as you battle with the struggles of exploring deeper within the self. Ancient adversaries will show themselves, aiming to defeat you in the greatest hero’s journey one can take, the journey to the self. You will encounter the eldritch beings of boredom and impatience who will test your strength, the faceless entities of trauma that will step into the light to test your fears and the titans of who you think you are will shake the foundations of all you think you know; just to name a few.

When one sits to meditate, it should be done as if in futility, without any hope for an outcome. One day, after years of the monsters of mental health controlling my destiny, I made a choice. I chose to sit down and vowed to practice every single day until I was better, even if it took me the rest of my life. I knew that sitting to practice every day was not going to be causing me any further harm and would be better than any other action I could take. Even if it was a futile effort, I would continue, even if it killed me. By letting go of any hope for an outcome, I was able to tune into what truly was. It guided me to an awareness of what was really happening, and to the very roots of my suffering.. If you sit and meditate with hope for an outcome, you will be holding on to an imaginary future point in time where you are different from how you are now. This will only serve to remove you from the present moment – ultimately, there is no outcome to be found.

My favourite quote about meditation is ‘a perfect meditation is preparation for death’. It means to meet death head on, like the Gods to their inevitable fates, to welcome that final moment in complete awareness of the experience, without any fear. Until that final moment, the practice is to be as you are, in the immediate here and now, in every single moment.

Tune into the present moment and start to recognise the entities of old that hold the looking glasses over your eyes.  Perhaps you will find that you have not only been wearing glasses and contact lenses, but that you have been looking at the world backwards through a telescope, limiting the scope of your vision and keeping you far away from what really is. Learning to see clearly comes with taking the time and fierce commitment to step back, sit down, and close your eyes.

When you open them again, you’ll find it all comes into focus.