The Allegory of the Eagle That Grew Up Among Chickens
A man once found an eagle’s egg and placed it among chickens. The eaglet grew up together with the chicks. Like them, it clucked and scratched the ground, searched for worms, flapped its wings, and tried to fly. One day, the grown eagle saw a proud bird in the sky. The bird was soaring, flapping its large wings.
Enchanted, the eagle asked, “Who is that?”
“That’s an eagle, the king of all birds,” a fellow chicken replied. “It belongs to the sky. But we chickens belong to the earth.” The eagle then continued to live and eventually die like a chicken because that is what it believed.
This allegory raises the question as to who we are as people: Are we like eagles tossed among chickens, or are we more like chickens that cannot fly?
We are indeed more like eagles. However, we presently fail to identify with our eagle origin, and since we grow up in an environment that tells us that we are chickens, then that is what we believe we are. Therefore, for the time being, humanity is more like chickens.
Our chicken-like state is that we are born and raised in an egoistic quality that first and foremost considers self-benefit over benefiting others and nature. In our coop, we see other chickens running after the range of egoistic pleasures we have available here, namely food, sex, family, money, honor, control and knowledge, and we ourselves try to make our way by catching as many of these pleasures as we can.
However, before we were born into an egoistic quality that makes us want to constantly absorb pleasures into ourselves, in our spiritual origin we were initially in an altruistically connected state. In the wisdom of Kabbalah, that state is called “the soul of Adam HaRishon,” where instead of feeling our existence as separated individuals striving for tiny transient egoistic pleasures, we felt ourselves as a single whole organism, and we each acted similarly to cells and organs in this whole — where each received what it needed for its sustenance, gave the rest for the whole’s benefit, and accordingly we all received the feeling of a much fuller, whole, eternal and perfect life of that whole. We since fell from that awareness of our state as a single soul, i.e., as the eagles in the allegory, and entered into this narrow egoistic existence, the chickens in the allegory.
Therefore, whether we remain as chickens or become like eagles depends on self-awareness. Eventually, we will have to reach the realization that we are the eagles in this allegory. We can gain that realization by feeling and understanding our higher purpose from within. Otherwise, our lives are not real lives. That is, we discover our true life when we discover our full potential as eagles, i.e., as a single soul of which we are all its parts, and until we do, we are not truly living.
We thus have no other choice. After multiple generations of failures, no matter how inferior, insignificant, small or confused we feel, we need to lift ourselves up and try to soar. One way or another, we will discover our true origin as eagles, i.e., as an eternal and perfect soul.
As the man in the allegory placed an eagle’s egg among chickens, likewise nature placed us on this earth, as if taking away our ability to fly, and leaving us to walk the earth. However, in our origin, we can fly. Flying, in this case, means relating to each other with attitudes of mutual love, bestowal and positive connection, the same as nature’s source qualities, and feeling a much broader and greater life through such qualities. On the contrary, walking the earth means remaining relating to others through our egoistic lenses, concerning ourselves solely with self-benefit out of our every interaction.
The feeling that we can fly arises in us. Eventually, we start questioning our true origins because it is also planned within nature that humanity will evolve to discover its true origin. It is does not appear directly, as an understanding that we are in fact eagles that can fly, but we become increasingly dissatisfied with our state as chickens, feeling that such a state is inferior to “something else” that we can achieve, which is much greater and truer than the form of existence we currently have.
If this point awakens within us, the point of the eagle, which makes us question our origins, it means that we have received a spiritual inheritance. The more we let this desire guide us, it will gradually guide us to the very edge of our chicken farms, where we find the books and teachers of Kabbalah, a method made specifically for guiding our conscious development to discover and attain our true origin. It is written about such a discovery that the Creator — the source quality of love and bestowal in nature — leads us to the good fortune, and then says “take it.” It is then up to us to make use of our choice of environment — Kabbalistic teachers, friends and books — and use them in order to fly, i.e., to attain our true, eternal and perfect origin as a single soul.