By Victor M Fontane
About the empirical self and the eternal transcendental self (the two birds).
In a tree there are two birds, one on an upper branch, calm and silent in total peace and the other on a lower branch jumping from branch to branch collecting here and there and eating the fruits of the tree, some sweet but others very bitter and he wonders : That bird up there seems happy and peaceful and is not struggling to survive. I would like to be like him, without the bitter-sweetness of life. Let me go up to ask him but when he climbed he got distracted by another fruit and stopped to eat it, very sweet and then a second very sour.
This is how our spiritual evolution works, we are distracted by the splendors of the material world to fall back into the suffering that our karma produces, moving us away from our spiritual path. If we continue to climb to a higher realm like the lower bird climbing up to the upper bird, we also begin to transform, to shine and we realize that we were already shining and that there was never a lower bird, it was always a higher bird dreaming the life of a lower bird. So the tree really is the physical body, the higher bird is our eternal and transcendental self and the lower bird our lower principles: mind, thoughts, emotions, etc. - (Allegory of Mundaka Upanishad)
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