ART: Joshua LaRock

Japanese Hill and Pond Garden by Joshua LaRock

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AOM Meditations: 062818

Creation of Adam (1939) by Joshua LaRock

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"The most important of all our perceptions is the way we perceive ourselves.  There is a story in Native American folklore that illustrates this truth very clearly.  According to the legend, an Indian brave came upon an eagle's egg which had somehow fallen unbroken from an eagle's nest.  Unable to find the nest, the brave put the egg in the nest of a prairie chicken, where it was hatched by a brooding mother hen.  The fledgling eagle, with its proverbial strong eyes, saw the world for the first time.  Looking at the other prairie chickens, he did what they did.  He crawled and scratched at the earth, pecked here and there for stray grains and husks, now and then rising in a flutter a few feet and then descending again.  He accepted and imitated the daily routine of the earthbound prairie chickens.  And he spent most of his life this way.

Then, as the story continues, one day an eagle flew over the brood of prairie chickens.  The now-aging eagle, who still thought he was a prairie chicken, looked up in awed admiration as the great bird soared through the skies.  "What is that?" he gasped in astonishment.  One of the older prairie chickens replied, "I have seen that one before.  That is the eagle, the proudest, strongest, and most magnificent of all the birds.  But don't you ever dream that you could be like that.  You're like the rest of us and we are prairie chickens."  And so, shackled by this belief, the eagle lived and died thinking he was a prairie chicken.

Our lives are shaped by the way we perceive ourselves.  The all-important attitudes by which we perceive and evaluate ourselves tell us who we are and describe the appropriate behavior for such a person. We live and die according to our self-perception."

~John Powell