The Blind Men and the Elephant

There is an old story from India that serves as an excellent tool for understanding the meaning of our expanding into enlightenment. The story was made popular in the 1800s by John Godfrey Saxe in his poem entitled “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” Once there was a group of blind wise men who sought out an elephant to try to understand its nature. One wise man grabbed the trunk and said it was a snake. Another felt the animal’s ear and mistook it for a fan. The tusk felt like a spear. The elephant’s frame was a wall, the leg a tree, and the tail a rope. None of the wise men were correct, yet each believed he was right. Saxe’s poem reveals how the personal truths we live by seduce us into mistaking a part of a problem for the entire reality.

Plato told a version of the same story twenty-four hundred years ago, though he set it in a cave rather than a zoo. In the allegory of the cave, prisoners chained since birth see only shadows on the wall in front of them and mistake those shadows for reality. When one prisoner is freed and sees the sun for the first time, he is blinded by the light. And when he returns to the cave to tell the others, they think he has gone mad. The pattern is identical: we mistake the small piece of reality we can perceive for the whole, and we resist anyone who suggests that there is more.

When we grope through life with our eyes closed, we may wake up one morning and think: My God, here is my to-do list and I am not even on it. I cannot handle all these tasks when I should be dealing with my everyday relationships and responsibilities, my self-image, my children and community. We usually panic at this point and use various coping mechanisms to numb out.