Looking at the attached picture, you can see a visual representation of the famous Indian fable where six blind men come across an elephant…
The first blind man feels the the elephant’s massive side and tells his companions that clearly the elephant is like a wall…
The second blind man disagrees, and as he is feeling the elephant’s tusk reports that in actual fact the elephant is more like a spear…
The third blind man also disagrees as he comes across the elephant’s trunk and believes it to be more like a snake…
The fourth blind man having been feeling the leg of the elephant claims it is exactly the same as a tree…
The fifth blind man though has encountered the massive ear of the elephant and proclaims it to be like a fan…
And the sixth and last blind man is feeling the tail of the elephant and tells all that the massive mammal is like a rope!
Now, this fable of the six blind men and the elephant is just a metaphor for how we experience reality in our everyday lives…
Our reality (the world we believe to be real) is based on predominantly three things:
- Our senses
- Our social conditioning
- Our belief system
Look at the six blind men: Each of them had an experience with the elephant and came away believing their experience to be the ’true’ reality…
However, the reality (no pun intended) of it was that none of them had a true elephant experience and therefore the true elephant was missed by them all!
By relying on our beliefs, and limited senses, our perception of reality can be just as distorted as that of the six blind men…
Ask yourself if you are perceiving the whole, or just a bit of the available reality that is available!
