The eagle

The other day I heard a story which was in every way applicable to me.

Once an eagle’s egg somehow fell off its nest. A boy found it and now knowing which bird’s it was, took it and kept it among the incubating eggs of the prairie chicken. After hatching, the eaglet not knowing what it was roamed among the chicken, pecking the dirt like them, walking around like them, etc.

One day it saw a bird flying high above and asked another chicken what it was. The chicken said it was an eagle, one of the strongest and noblest of birds. Then it added, “don’t you go around thinking you are one, you are just a prairie chicken, just like us”. And the eaglet believed.

In spite of the fact that it could soar far above into the sky, it thought it was bound to the earth. So many of us are like that. In spite of our talents, potential and innate greatness we believe ourselves to be chickens, with our eyes forever on the ground, simply because we don’t have the courage to spread our wings and soar.

The dirt is the world of the senses, the illusion of temporary worldly things, in which I'm still lost. The sky in which I'm meant to soar is the boundlessness of spirit, the freedom of my true self, the bliss of being one with divinity.