There’s an ancient oriental tale about a king who heard of this incredible and mysterious animal that the people in his land referred to as an elephant. Having never himself laid eyes on such a creature, he was anxious to learn more about it.
Unable to leave the castle, the king sent out his three most loyal servants, all of whom happened to be blind. He trusted them to investigate and report back to him on this curious creature.
The first blind man reached the outer village where an elephant resided, and had the townspeople point the way. Upon meeting the beast, he laid his hands on it and began feeling up and down its massive legs. Noting its rough texture and huge girth, he hurried back to the king, and reported that elephants were like a living, breathing tree.
The second blind man, upon reaching the elephant, was greeted with a slobbery kiss from its trunk. He felt up and down this strange contraption, which was wiggling and moving about. He rushed back to the king and told him that an elephant was a strange kind of snake with the head of a leech.
The third blind man made his way to the elephant when he bumped into something hard and pointy. He could smell the creature’s foul breath as he ran his hands along the long, massive tusks. He excitedly made his way back to the king, and reported that an elephant is just a land-dwelling walrus.
Of course the king, who had just received three very different reports on what an elephant is, was now more confused then ever. His faithful servants had never failed him so greatly before. Puzzled, he decided he would just have to reserve judgment until he could see for himself.
So once again he sent out his servants, only this time with resources to retrieve an elephant and bring it back to the castle. They did so, and suddenly it all made sense. Only when the king understood what each person perceived and could put them together did the character of an elephant become clear.
The elephant that’s in the room
This parable is meant to teach us about perception. Each of us, in a way, is exactly like the blind men in the story: handicapped not by a lack of vision, but by inadequate knowledge.
When we form our views of the world, each of us is drawing from a limited amount of information, a limited set of experiences. It doesn’t matter how smart or sophisticated you think you are, the reality is that even the most brilliant among us are severely handicapped by the knowledge we lack or the experiences we’ve never had. As a result, we stumble about this world as crippled as a blind man who is trying to formulate the whole picture after having observed only a fraction of its parts.
None of the wise men in this story were wrong, yet none of them were entirely right, either. The first blind man was accurate when he said parts of an elephant were like the trunk of a tree. The second blind man was correct in saying what he observed was very much like a snake. The third was accurate in assuming he had encountered a walrus.
All had observed the same thing, and yet by experiencing different aspects of it, each came away with a completely different understanding of what they had encountered. Our own perceptions are working in equally profound ways in our world today.
Whenever others view things differently than we do, it’s not a matter of them being wrong and us being right, or vice versa. Rather, it’s almost always assured that each viewpoint is both somewhat correct and largely incomplete, and that each of you are merely deriving that world view from a different repertoire of knowledge and experiences.
Only by combining our perspectives can we get a picture closer to the truth. If we all did this more often, especially in regards to those viewpoints (or people) which at first glance seems so diametrically opposed to us, we’d all emerge with a much more accurate understanding of what the world really is.
See also…
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