It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind…
Moral:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887)
“The Blind Men and the Elephant”
We cling to this false self. Deep down, we see it as the solution to a basic fear or anxiety that we won’t be loved or accepted. But because our solution to this basic anxiety rests on a rejection of the who we really are – a rejection of our true self – it never works.
Dr Allen Berger
Expansion of consciousness is no highfalutin enterprise: it is simply the process of getting to know ourselves better.
Patrick Little
The parable of the blind men and an elephant, a story which has its origins on the Indian subcontinent, goes as follows:
A group of blind people heard that a strange beast from far-off lands, a mammal called “elephant”, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape or form. Out of curiosity, they said: “We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable”. So, down to the marketplace they went to seek it out, and when they found it they each approached gingerly and groped about it.
The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, “This being is like a thick snake”. For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, her hand touched upon a leg and said, the elephant “is a solid pillar – like a tree-trunk”. The blind man who placed both hands upon its side said the elephant, “is a fortress wall”. Another, who felt its tail, described it as “a rope”.
In life, so many things – like the elephant – are multidimensional but the Inner Critic, with whom we are all familiar, and whose energy is set on maintaining dominion over our minds by proving it is always right, is holding on to the tail in the absolute certainty that that’s all there is. This voice states boldly: “I already know the full truth”.
In the PQ (Positive Intelligence) Mental Fitness modality, the Inner Critic is identified as the “Judge Saboteur”. This is the Commander-in-Chief of an array of Saboteurs we all know and have, to varying degrees: The Controller, Stickler, Hyper-Vigilant, Victim, Pleaser, etc. The Judge is infamous for holding on to a narrow perspective, breaking things down into diametric opposites (good and bad, true and false, etc.), insisting that only one of these opposites holds true, and being certain about its opinion.
We can shift out of the constrictive energy of the Saboteurs by applying a circuit breaker to our incessant mind activity – our “stinking thinking”. This is achieved by engaging in short body-based exercises such as conscious breathing, attentive listening, or feeling the weight of our seat in the chair.
Having moved our focus to the body, we can experience the gap between mental stimulus and our answer to this stimulus. Now we may have our thinking rather than our thinking having us!
In this somatic state, – a healthy form of being “out of our heads” – we can engage our deeper Self through the heart, and shift to any one or combination of the five so-called Sage Powers: Compassion (Empathise), Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate.
Each of these is a manifestation of one of the many facets of love. Compassion is the love of connection. Explore is the love of discovery. Innovate is the love of creativity. Navigate is the love of values and purpose. Finally, Activate is the love of making a difference, of converting ideas and intention into actions.
In Explore mode we move from the absolute certainty of the Judge to the open curiosity of the Sage. We aim to discover the fuller truth and ask: “What else might be true here?”
In the poem quoted above, each blind person concluded that the elephant was like a wall, snake, tree, fan, or rope, depending upon where they had touched the animal and how they had processed the sensory information.
The moral of the parable is that we humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on our limited, subjective experience as we ignore other people’s subjective experiences – which may be equally true, limited and incomplete.
During a recent conversation, it struck me as interesting to apply these ideas to the process of self discovery. There are currently quite a few people in my extended circle of family and friends who are on the threshold of adulthood, experimenting with their life circumstances in an effort to get a clearer picture of who they really are and their role in the world.
This was a very confusing time for me. At 18 I was still enraged with the Universe for the recent death of my beloved father at the age of 51. He had died of cancer a few months after my 16th birthday. There was no-one to turn to in my grief. Everyone close to me was fully preoccupied with their own rage and grief, even deep depression.
So, the grief got suppressed and turned into the destructive force of rage. This rage I turned primarily on myself, engaging in self harm with the use of alcohol and other lethal drugs. This set a pattern which was to continue for over two decades. It was the breaking of this pattern, in 2003, which initiated my evolution towards recovery, healing, growth, and emotional sobriety.
But back then, I had no clue who I was. I hated myself and my circumstances, so it was not surprising that so much of the life forces was invested in “getting out of my head”.
Of course, in hindsight, this idiom is clearly a cruel misnomer. It was not out of the head I was getting. On the contrary, it was getting out of the body and especially out of the heart, while becoming more and more entrenched in the head. This is the story of every addictive dynamic, with the same sad results: self-estrangement and utter loneliness.
Watching my adult children and other people in their twenties and thirties today, gives me cause for optimism and strengthens my belief that evolution is really working.
With more freedom from the expectations of others, they began, very early on, this process of self-discovery by first identifying who they were not. This is very refreshing. Let’s take an example of someone in their mid-twenties who has gone through the effort to get one or more academic degrees.
After a year or two of work experience, this young woman, who is excellent at her challenging job, decides that she does not want to spend the rest of her life sitting in an office interacting mainly with one or two high-resolution screens and a bunch of members of a dysfunctional team, the subset of a global dysfunctional organisation. And the icing on the cake is that she then acts on this discovery, seeking and finding alternatives more suited to her personality and desires.
I made such discoveries in my fifties when I took on a project for the German Development Agency, making compost our of organic waste in Mozambique. I traded decades of dapper suits and polished shoes for flop-flips and shorts. Only then did it become clear to me how important it is for my well-being to spend most of each day in the outdoors, working with rural smallholders and their children. This experience has changed my life.
So, the dapper-suited, VIP – Very Important Patrick! – Executive in the multinational organisation turned out to be only “the wall of the elephant”. There was much more to discover.
What values drive my work? Making money for others? Making money for self? Learning? Making a difference? Serving? A vocation which has been taking shape and revealing itself in the course of my recovery and healing, has become easier to follow as I shed layers of who I knew I was not.
There are people in my life who, on becoming parents, shun the illusion of financial security, in order to be able to spend most of their child’s first years with them, day-in-day-out. Almost every other member of the animal kingdom shows us the way, in this respect. When my children were born, my focus shifted towards creating the most secure (material) environment I could, even at the expense of working fifty hours and more away from our home every week. That the security is always an illusion had not yet dawned on me at that juncture.
This “provider” aspect, then, – in itself benign and noble, but potentially destructive when driven by fear – was perhaps the “tail of the elephant”, something one could hold onto in times of apparent peril.
Layers of the “False Self”, the entity we created in the dysfunctional setting of childhood where affection, affirmation, acceptance, acknowledgement, and allowing were often in short supply – layers of this “who I am not but have created in the hope of at least getting crumbs from the table” – begin to fall away as we grow into the realisation of who we really are.
How do we do this? We take our lead from others who are up ahead of us on the same path. Those who were once lost and have made good progress in “remembering” who they truly are. This is an archetypical journey familiar to the human species since the dawn of time. It is described in all culture throughout the world since humans have been recording their endeavours to grapple with what we now call the “Human Condition”.
A major milestone in this process is that of “Inventory”.
Taking stock of oneself with the help of friends and Elders who have been through the same process, often many times. The fourth of the Twelve Steps is that of drawing up an inventory. Step Five is sharing that inventory with Self and another human being. Six and Seven are about identifying and becoming willing to relinquish old patterns (those driven by the Saboteurs) which are no longer serving us today. Eight and Nine are about restitution. Becoming willing to make amends for harm done and then going out to make those amends.
Experience shows that the most powerful amends are the so-called “living amends”, i.e., our new behaviours. Say my transgression was that I was often insufficiently present in our relationship, my greatest amend is to learn to be more present, whatever this my entail, in terms of my own personal development. And then to put this into practice.
Step Ten is a compact version of Steps Four to Nine, for daily application. This resource facilitates the process of life-long-learning with respect to self-actualisation. There is no finish line here. The process continues until we take our final breath.
This is also true of the process of discovery, but rather than trying to clearly see and grasp the “is-ness” of the elephant, we are beginning to learn who we really are, why we are here, and what actions are called for today in order to establish alignment between purpose and manifestation.
This is a never-ending process of unfolding and re-membering who we truly are.
