Eagle | Eagle-Peaks
Eighteen uses.
— Book 1 Canto 3
Still regions of imperishable Light,
All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power
— Book 1 Canto 4
Messengers of Thought to the Unknowable.
— Book 2 Canto 6
— Book 2 Canto 8
Bore her above the trodden fields of thought
Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond
To live on eagle heights near to the Sun.
— Book 4 Canto 2
Mind’s knowledge overtopped the Omniscient’s power:
The Eternal’s winging eagle puissances
Surprised in their untracked empyrean
Stooped from their gyres to obey the beck of Thought
— Book 2 Canto 11
The eagle is considered the king of birds due to its strength, sharp and wide vision, and its graceful and powerful flight.
It is the symbol of the power of the mind and the highest knowledge - that which perceives both the whole and the detail.
For the Greeks, it was probably the highest-flying bird, as the golden eagle can reach 6000m in altitude. That is why it is the symbol bird of Zeus, who is the highest force in the overmind.
The eagle stands just above the boundary between the knowable and the realms of the unknowable. It is symbolically represented by the large eagle-like wings that appear, for example, at the top of the Caduceus of Hermes.
Some authors give Zeus the epithet ‘All-seeing,’ although this omniscience is in fact a characteristic of Helios, the sun, who is ‘Panoptes’, the supramental vision that sees all.
In fact, Zeus sees only the Truth can be seen from the top of Mt. Olympus, the highest point of the overmind, but not the totality of Truth.
The penetrating vision of the highest of the overmind is, however, far superior to that of the lower planes of the mind where the ordinary man stands.
Sri Aurobindo uses the image of the eagle for divine omniscience as well as for the intermediate powers of the highest thought and also the mental powers of the shadow (And Death’s black eagles scream to the precipice).