An AWAKENING STORY
Once upon a time their was a divine, magical being trapped in a cage. A beautiful being, a parrot who didn’t even know that they were trapped. This is, as legend goes, the story of the Parrot the Hunter and a Spiritual Awakening. One day, a man takes a trip to Africa. He stumbles upon a cave, and inside that cave are dozens and dozens of wonderfully beautiful, multicoloured parrots. They are glowing, they are so bright and radiant with colour. He sees one of these parrots and decides to take one of them home. He takes him home, puts him in a cage, feeds him, and looks after him. The parrot is well-kept, he eats honey, drinks fresh water every day, and eats wild berries, and is content.
A couple of years pass and the man needs to go back to Africa. Before he leaves, he says to the parrot, “Parrot, I am going back to Africa. I will visit the cave where I found you. Would you like me to convey any message to the parrots in the cave?” The parrot thought for a minute and then said, “Yes, I’d like you to let them know that I’m okay, I’m doing well, I’m well-fed, and content.”
The man makes the voyage, comes to the parrot cave and sees all the other multicolored parrots. He says to the chief parrot, “Parrot, I come back. It has been two years, and I’ve come with the message from my parrot. He says he is well-fed, looked after, and content in his cage.” Upon hearing that sentence, the chief parrot welled up with tears in his eyes and fell over dead. The man got such a fright, he ran out of the cave.
As the legend of the story of the Parrot the Hunter and a Spiritual Awakening goes, when he sailed home, he said to the parrot, “Parrot, I’ve got bad news. I’m not sure what happened, it was something strange though. When I went to go and visit the cave, all the parrots were there. I spoke to the chief parrot and told him that you were content and happy in your cage, well-looked after, and well-fed. At that, his eyes welled up, but when I was talking to him, he suddenly fell over dead.”
The Journey back home
Upon hearing what the man said, the parrot in the cage started to well up with tears. He fell onto his knees, tears in his eyes, he keeled over, and died. Now, the man was completely perplexed. He wondered what was wrong with these parrots. Suddenly, as he threw the parrot in the cage onto the wood pile outside, just as he did that, the cage broke open and the parrot flew up to the tree.
“You tricked me,” said the man. “I thought we were friends. Tell me, how did you come to know to do that? Tell me, why did you do that?” The parrot replied to the man, “When you told me the story of the chief parrot in the cave, when his eyes welled up with tears when he heard that I was content, well-fed, and well-watered but in a cage, I realized at that very moment that I was not free and I needed to be free. And he showed me exactly how to do it.”
The moral of the story of the Parrot the Hunter and a Spiritual Awakening is of course about the parrot becoming truly free is, of course, that the cage is our human body, it is our egoic shell, the mask of our personality, the masks and cages that we need to be free from. We are, of course, a soul, we are a spiritual being having a human experience, rather than a human being having a spiritual experience.
We need to realize that we can cope, we can comply, and we can be content with struggling and grinding our way through life, but at some point, we need to realize that we need to awaken, we need to be set free and become who we really are, our sacred selves, the parts of ourselves that are as luminous and beautiful as the multicoloured parrot.
And that’s the story of the Parrot the Hunter and a Spiritual Awakening as best as we can fathom it. Namaste.