Realise the truth of the self

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…trailing clouds of glory do we come, from God who is our home: Wordsworth. A hunter found an eagle’s egg and placed it under a brooding hen.

The eaglet hatched and soon became just like all the other chicken on the farm. He clucked and cackled, scratched for worms and ran under the shelter of his mother’s wings at the sight of danger.

Time passed. Now grown old, the eagle one day looked up to see a magnificent bird soaring on powerful, still wings, sweeping the sky in swirls like an aerial ballet dancer.

Spellbound, he asked, “Who is that?” His siblings said, “He is the king of birds, the eagle. He belongs to the sky. Not like us. We are chicken. We belong to the earth.” So, the eagle lived and died a chicken because that is what he thought he was. And we, who are made in God’s image, awe-inspiring in our divine potential, often aspire to be no more than human. Sometimes not even that.

Yet, it is not enough to just know. We must be constantly aware. King Janaka, the philosopher king of Videha, once dreamt that he was a beggar.

He asked his guru, Ashtavakra, “Am I a king, dreaming of being a beggar, or am I a beggar dreaming he is king?” Ashtavakra answered, “Neither. You are the eternal soul”.

And added, “As a bracelet melts into gold, a pot crumbles into clay, a wave subsides in water, you arise from and dissolve in God”.