Chapter 197

In the story of a group of blind men, they describe the elephant based on their limited experience of touching various parts, and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. They suspect that the other persons are dishonest, and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experience.

Said another way, we are all blind and have limited understanding of even those things we can touch and feel, what we think about these matters, goes through a filter of ignorance and incomplete understanding of the whole of what we are trying to describe or defend or prove, or whatever. You get the picture, or more accurately a part of the picture. Because that is all we can ever get. 

Life is just like my doctoral program where you learn more and more about less and less. You and your experiences become more specialized as you grow older, and that specialization is the less and less, even though you know more and more about that less and less. And a wise person learns humility from this truth. No one can know everything about anything. Its ok to not know everything, and it is more than ok to admit it. Frequently. I admit that I may be wrong about pretty much everything, far far more often and seriously than I did 30 years ago.

Boast in the fact that you are willing to be wrong and to learn, rather than you insisting that you are correct about some unimportant (or important) matter. Your fellow blind seekers are far more important than you being right.