[Side note: There’s no formal introduction to this series, because I didn’t want to give you the illusion that I had planned it. I happened to write a string of posts that fell under a common theme by capturing the same idea at different angles.]
Just as Western science and other fields have made their way to the East, so have Eastern philosophy and other ideas grown popular in the West.
There is an old story about blind men and an elephant, which according to Wikipedia is from India about 2500 years ago:
“It is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is 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 experiences which may be equally true.”
That story really moved me when I first heard it, as I’m sure it did for many people. Yet in these past few years, I had almost forgotten it.
I feel like it is such an ancient and beautiful story, yet thousands of years later we still have not internalized it. We sometimes still fear people who contradict our truth, myself included.
People make the mistake of arguing about subjective or experiential truth as if it were objective truth. We are fighting over inaccurate maps of reality, instead of asking, “Oh really? Where have you been? What have you seen? Who have you heard from?”
The first lesson from this story is that truth is bigger than any of us know.
Second, it isn’t useless to share our perceptions, because sharing them in a constructive manner leaves us all the wiser. When a friend relates a personal story, most of us immediately empathize. This common understanding fosters a connection much stronger than the mutual agreement that 1 + 1 = 2. This is because you have shared your unique and personal path, and I have seen it only through you.
Subjectivity cannot be outright dismissed (some may argue it is all we have), but it can be put into perspective.
