The Eagle and the Condor
The Ancient Prophecy
There is an ancient Amazonian prophecy entitled “The Eagle and the Condor” that goes back thousands of years. In one form or another it made its way from the Andes in South America up through Central and North America and even traveled across the Behring Strait to the Asian Steppes.
It highlights two paths the human race can take: that of the condor or that of the eagle. The path of the condor is the path of the heart, intuition, and the feminine. The path of the eagle is the path of the mind, reason, and the masculine.
This prophecy states that the 1490s would begin a 500-year period when the eagle people would gain great power, virtually eliminating all the indigenous people in the world. We can see the truth of this prophecy with the advent of Columbus, the growth of science and industrialism, and the annihilation of many indigenous people around the world that still continues today.
However, the prophecy also speaks of the 1990s as beginning a new 500-year period where the potential exists for the eagle and condor to fly together and create a new level of consciousness for humanity.
This represents the marriage of the masculine and the feminine, the mind and the heart, and reason and intuition. However, the prophecy says this 500-year period we have just entered offers only the potential for this, it doesn’t say it will happen. It is up to all of us whether the prophecy comes true or not—in short, whether the eagle and condor will fly together or not.
The Left and Right Brains
What will it take for this to happen? I’m sure many people have heard of the differences between the left brain and the right brain. The left brain is the seat of logic, reason, science and step by step analysis. This is the eagle. The right brain is the seat of emotions, intuition and pattern recognition (like facial recognition), art and music. This is the condor.
The left brain is where the ego sits. It’s the “I” we so identify with. In fact, we are so attached to this “I”, we don’t even realize there is another part of us that sits right next door in our other hemisphere that tells us we are so much more.
We could say the left brain is connected to our thinking mind and the right brain is connected to our heart.
We have been conditioned to believe our intellect alone is sufficient to solve our problems both individually and collectively, but it isn’t. Our total Being is crying out for us to integrate the right brain into our lives to broaden and deepen our perspective.
As I said the left brain is the ego, the “I” that we identify with. The problem here is that this ego is a self-contained entity. It is alienated from everything and everyone. It is like a little atom floating alone in a void with no relation to anything. The left-brain tells us that this “I” is all we are. It tells us I am the God of my existence and the one to serve.
The right-brain is the aspect of ourselves that connects us to everything and everyone. It wants to tell our left brain that we are more than this little needy greedy self we identify with.
The Left Brain Takes Over in the 16th Century
Unfortunately, the left brain is not listening. Our whole culture stopped listening to our right brain in the 16th century with the advent of the age of reason when the modern world emerged out of the Middle Ages.
This is what The Eagle and Condor prophecy is telling us. We have spent the last 500 years riding the eagle alone. While it has given us some benefits, those benefits have come at a great cost.
Now is the time, as the prophecy says, to bring the condor back into balance with the eagle. In short we need to re-integrate the right brain into our whole being to balance the negative aspects of the left brain. We need both. Alone, they are incomplete.
The Longest Journey
We have to take that longest of journeys from our head to our heart. We re-integrate our heart and allow it to have influence in our lives. We need to reawaken our compassion not only for other creatures and the environment, but more importantly for ourselves.
We need to see and experience that we are good people who have been on a mostly destructive path for the last 500 years. When we are willing to see and experience that, we can transform ourselves into caring humans.
So we are at a crossroads. Will we stay stuck in our left brain ego consciousness or will we let down our defenses and let in some right brain wisdom and perspective? If we do, we will see clearly others are not our adversary, they are us.
