The Farmer And The Eagle

Continued from yesterday…

Our current state of unawareness reminds me of the story of a farmer…

While walking through the forest one day, the farmer found a young eagle that had fallen out of its nest. Feeling sorry for the injured bird, he brought it home and left it in the farmyard with his chickens. It did not take long for the king of birds to regain strength and grow. But confined to the pen, it had adopted the behaviors and eating habits of the chickens.

An environmentalist passed by the farm one day and, noticing the majestic bird in the yard, asked the farmer what an eagle was doing among the chickens. The farmer replied that the eagle had never learned how to fly. It had been surrounded by chickens most of its life, so it ate like a chicken, clucked like a chicken, and walked like a chicken.

“I’d say that bird is more chicken than eagle now,” the farmer said.

“But its true identity is still as an eagle,” the environmentalist said.

“It just needs to wake up to what it really is!”

Similarly, we, as humanity, need to wake up to who we are. The chaos created by our unconsciousness is evident everywhere.

Greed, hatred, bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, racial intolerance, violence, and wars are just some of the negative symptoms of humanity’s unconscious state. But, like the eagle that thinks it is a chicken, we need to awaken the gift of conscious flight that lay dormant within us.

But how can we awaken? What does it mean to be conscious, and are there different stages of consciousness?

To be continued tomorrow…

Adapted from Section 1 of Awakening To I Am Love by David Youngren