4 ideas
An eagle's egg hatches in a barnyard, and the eaglet grows up scratching for worms and clucking because it believes it is a chicken. Late in life it sees an eagle soaring, is told 'that is the king of the birds, but we are chickens,' and dies a chicken because it never questions the identity it absorbed. The mechanism is that an unexamined self-concept, learned from one's surroundings, limits behavior more than any real incapacity does.
A guru tied up an ashram cat during evening worship because it distracted the worshippers. After his death the disciples kept tying up a cat at worship, and later generations wrote learned treatises on the essential role of tying a cat in proper worship. The story shows how a practical workaround, once its original reason is forgotten, hardens into sacred doctrine that people defend for its own sake.
A young fish asks an older fish where to find the thing called the ocean, and is told it is swimming in it right now. The young fish dismisses this as mere water and swims off to keep searching. The point is that what people seek spiritually is often already present, and they miss it because it is too ordinary and too close to register as the special thing they imagine.
Any concept of the divine is only a signpost, and grasping the words replaces the experience they point toward. Awakening therefore comes from direct attention to what is present, not from accumulating better descriptions of it.