The Light Beyond the Leaf
Profound wisdom can be found anywhere, even on your television.
Throughout the years when I was navigating my own spiritual journey, I always imagined my greatest discoveries would come from old religious texts.
I thought the answers to life must be hidden within one or all of these cryptic books. Why else would they cause such a commotion among so many of my fellow human beings?
I was baffled by the idea that millions of people could collectively endorse the words of something so old and outdated, with no real knowledge about it’s origin or author(s).
There must be something special about these particular sheets of papyrus, right?
There were several churchgoing people in my life, after all, who I considered extremely intelligent. From my perspective, most of these people were lucid, reasonable, and sharp minded individuals who walked through life with a fearlessness that can only come about by a belief in immortality.
Wanting to know what they knew, I became curious, and dove deep into a variety of religious texts.
From the Upanishads and the Vedas, to the Dhammapada, and then The New Testament, Old Testament, Gnostic texts, Quran, Zohar, The Poetic and Prose Edda, followed by general Mysticism and Hermeticism, Non-duality teachings, Native American oral histories, studies in ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Druidic cults, as well as explorations within fringe domains such as Theosophy and Astrotheology; I tried to read it all.
Toward the end of this binge-reading escapade, I came to the conclusion that the only way any of this religion stuff could make any sense was if it all worked together to paint one big picture.
Aldus Huxley called this the Perennial Philosophy, a single philosophical perspective that views all of the world’s religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown.
This gave me an idea: I could read it all again; and then create a mental image of “God” constructed from snapshots of the “divine” that I would take from the various vantage points of every historically enduring religion that had ever existed.
All I managed to do was create the ugliest Frankenstein’s monster theology had ever seen.
Lovecraft would have been proud.
For 10 years, from age 20–30, I worked my 9–5 job, read books in the evening, and contemplated the contents of those books that night and following morning. In my opinion, this is the worst possible decade of a person’s life for serious religious exploration.
It was an eye-opening time for sure, but I was mentally exhausted 24/7... for 10 years, during what should have been the prime of my life.
I’m embarrassed to say how many times I skipped a night out with friends just to stay home alone, smoke weed, and read an 1,800 year old manuscript I had printed the night before.
Theology was my cocaine.
I’m not saying it was time completely wasted… but in the grand scheme of things I now see it as valuable time on this earth that I squandered in a desperate attempt to solve the problem of dying.
That’s the real reason I scoured through religions looking for answers: I was afraid of death.
Needless to say, I was obsessed (addicted?) with gaining spiritual knowledge, whatever that is. Something in me needed to understand, and I refused to stop until my readings bore spiritual fruit.
Until one morning…
On the morning of this day I woke up with an intense feeling that if I were to read one more religious, spiritual, or philosophical sentence — I was going to throw up.
For whatever reason, on that particular day the idea of continuing my pursuit of metaphysical information made me feel physically nauseous; not being a fan of the bathroom floor, I heeded the warning.
Instead I sat on my couch, scrolled through my TV apps, and chose to catch up on the latest season of the History Channel’s television show Vikings.
For those of you who have never seen the show Vikings, that’s okay, I’m not writing this to tell you “it’s a must watch.” The show is almost exactly what it sounds like, a bunch of bearded men and blonde women fighting over lands, laws, and lovers.
Large sections of the plot are (loosely) based on historical events, which adds a layer of interest to the story and character development, as well as the decent acting — but I digress.
I bring up Vikings because of the way it captures and evolves religious concepts from season to season, and the equality with which they are represented.
Half of the characters in Vikings are ironically Christian, and others are usually referred to as “Pagan”, a derogatory term the Christians use to denote a person who doesn’t believe in their monotheistic God.
Naturally, the Vikings look to Odin, Thor, Freya, and Frigg for their spiritual guidance, gods which they believe — unlike the Christian God — can be heard and seen through events within nature.
WARNING: Vikings Series Finale Spoilers Ahead.
In general, the way this show deals with the historical mixing of Norse and Christian values and belief systems is fantastic, but the writers take it a step further in the final few scenes of the series.
They ultimately give weight to both theological perspectives evenly throughout every season, and then in the very last scene of the very last episode, they brush off religion altogether using the voice of my favorite character, Floki Vilgerðarson, played by Gustaf Skarsgård.
Floki starts off the show as a bizarre yet enthusiastic Viking, infinitely loyal to the Norse gods. As the seasons progress, his enthusiasm turns increasingly eccentric and his love for Odin’s pantheon becomes more and more of a danger for anyone who doesn’t follow the Viking way.
This eventually leads him to murder an important/innocent Christian character, sail away from Norway, have an ambiguous religious experience in Iceland, and then mysteriously vanish from the show altogether for at least a full season.
When he finally returns to the screen it’s the last episode, and the series is wrapping up loose ends. Floki now resides in North America (maybe Canada) living peacefully among a tribe of indigenous Americans. An old friend and fellow Viking, Ubbe, finally finds Floki and asks for his long lost mentor’s advice.
Sitting side-by-side on the sands of a salty beach, peering out over a calm foreign ocean, the two men exchanged the following words:
[Ubbe] Do you have any advice, Floki?
[Floki] Advice?
[Floki] Always take stones out of your shoe.
[Floki] That’s good advice.
[Ubbe] Did we do the right thing coming here? (to America)
[Floki] What do you think?
[Ubbe] I’m not sure we had a choice.
[Floki] I’m not sure about anything.
[Floki] Not anymore.
[Ubbe] Are the gods here?
[Ubbe] Hmm?
[Ubbe] Have you seen them?
[Floki] Don’t bother me with that.
[Floki] What business is that of mine?
[Floki] I am an ant,
[Floki] toiling on the forest floor.
[Floki] I see only the leaf above my head.
[Floki] That leaf brings me some relief from the sun.
[Ubbe] Are you happy?
[Floki] [scoffs]
[Ubbe] There’s still so many things that I need to know.
[Floki] You don’t need to know anything.
[Floki] It’s not important.
[Floki] Let the past go.
As soon as I heard this dialogue come out of my television, I was floored. I remember literally getting off the couch and laying on the floor.
It was everything I needed to hear in that moment. The dizziness had begun flaring up again during the episode, but immediately after Floki had spoken those sentences, it stopped.
Permanently.
This simple exchange of words between Ubbe and Floki has stayed with me for over a year now, which is more than I can say about most passages from the plethora of religious texts I devoured over the years.
Floki’s radical change and his new passive spiritual attitude was exactly how I felt on that day, and surprisingly, I still feel that way.
I tried to escape my dizzying pursuit of religious understanding by watching a mindless TV show, and instead I accidentally stumbled upon life changing advice that altered that same pursuit.
If the species that created the Holy Bible is the same species that created the dialogue for the hit television show Vikings, who’s to say that one contains deeper wisdom than the other?
We all have our own personal visions of what it looks like to be a “spiritual” or “religious” person; what if that is just an adopted concept?
What if your idea of spiritual liberation has nothing at all to do with spiritual liberation?
In fact, what if the pursuit of this concept of “spirit” is the only thing holding us back from real spiritual understanding? Maybe true wisdom is found in the last place anybody would ever think to look… the mundane.
Is it possible that Floki from Vikings has just as much to teach us about being human as the New Testament's Jesus?
I say, yes.
We’re all just ants, toiling on the forest floor, and the sun is a mystery to us.
What can an ant know of the sun?
Only that it is the light beyond a leaf, and nothing more.
Thanks for reading!
Stay tuned for more blasphemy.
