Song of the Bird

[-YellowRose-]

A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eagle hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life, the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet in the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among powerful wind currents with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth - we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken because that's what he thought he was.

~Anthony DeMello~

[ScabbyDouglas]

Once upon a time, a man was climbing in the mountains and happened upon an eagle's eyrie. In the nest was a partially hatched eagle chick, dead.

By a sequence of improbable events, he happened to be carrying a fertilised hen's egg. As the man was not the brightest of creatures, he decided to place the hen's egg into the eagle's nest, and removed the dead chick.

Meanwhile the hen's egg hatched out and the fluffy yellow chick was raised as an eagle by its parents. It was fed gobbets of wild hare, and screeched alarmingly for no reason. It developed a keen appetite for warm, bloody flesh ripped - or indeed, pecked - from the body of a newly-killed corpse. As it grew to adolescence, it came into its adult plumage and began to flap its wings in preparation for soaring into the thermal currents that carried its parents far across the mountain ranges in search of prey.

With a gentle nudge from its mother's head to urge it to the edge, the young chicken flapped her wings, stepped off the edge.... and plunged to her death one hundred and fifty feet below, flapping ineffectually all the way down.

Coincidentally, but not helpfully, the chicken's fall was slightly cushioned by landing on the rotting corpse of the climber. On the way back down the mountain, he had fallen down a ravine and broke his leg in three places, dying in unbelievable agony of hunger and thirst ten days later.

At any rate, a chicken's always a chicken - even if it thinks it's an eagle.


[Edited by ScabbyDouglas on 5th May 2004 at 13:02]

[-YellowRose-]

"Poor Fletch. Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly."

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

[ScabbyDouglas]

There ain't nobody here but us chickens
There ain't nobody here at all
So quiet yourself,
And stop your fuss
There ain't nobody here but us
Kindly point that gun,
The other way
And hobble, hobble hobble of and
Hit the hay

Louis Jordan

--- sometimes, what it looks like, is what it is ---

[-YellowRose-]

Like all creatures on earth, man has a higher sense (instinct/psychic ability). Birds will follow magnetic fields; seventy percent of all dogs in California will run away two weeks before an earthquake; dairy cows in New England will sense atmospheric changes before our best technology. A pack of Canadian or Alaskian wolves will attack and kill another wolf in their pack if they sense genetic changes. There have been cases where a family dog or cat will locate their owner even when separated by a move of thousands of miles. The list continues on; whales, dolphins, and apes...in fact, all creatures on earth. They innately have this psychic sense.

If the animals of the earth have this sense, is it such a large leap of the imagination to think that man, also, may possess an innate awareness of instinctual....even psychic...ability?

An awareness not found in any written form. An awareness not formed by listening to philosophical reasoning of our peers. A One-on-One type of learning experience.

What do you think, ScabbyDouglas?

[Fear_nam_Beanntan]

May God be kind to captive fish
Who dwell in little bowls and wish
To swim, but can't, and have no notion
Of what has happened to the ocean.

And may He bless, in aviaries,
Continually caged canaries,
Who wonder, when they try to fly,
What can have happened to the sky?

-Fr. Leonhard Feeney

[ANDY-J2]

Originally posted by -YellowRose-
Like all creatures on earth, man has a higher sense (instinct/psychic ability). Birds will follow magnetic fields; seventy percent of all dogs in California will run away two weeks before an earthquake; dairy cows in New England will sense atmospheric changes before our best technology. A pack of Canadian or Alaskian wolves will attack and kill another wolf in their pack if they sense genetic changes. There have been cases where a family dog or cat will locate their owner even when separated by a move of thousands of miles. The list continues on; whales, dolphins, and apes...in fact, all creatures on earth. They innately have this psychic sense.

I don't accept that there is any evidence to show that animals have psychic ability.Human beings try to apply their values and beliefs to the natural world where they don't really belong.That animals have senses and instincts which are more highly developed than our own is not in question but there is nothing supernatural about animal behaviour.Until recently it was believed that homing pigeons navigated by an amazing ability to sense the earths magnetic fields when in fact it was found they were doing nothing more complex than following roads and memorising the routes they had taken.There are natural explanations for all animal behaviour no matter how remarkable it may seem to us.