The Elephant and the Rider
The Elephant and the Rider is one of the best models of the human mind that we have. Best, not in terms of clinical or medical accuracy, but in its ability to be understood and used by nearly anyone. This dualistic model mirrors our experience of life, and our experience of our minds. Because of its simplicity and universal applicability, it can be used as a tool by anyone looking to do some self-analysis and self-diagnosis.
We, especially us in the West, too often dismiss the importance of understanding our inner world, our minds. The assumption that only someone visibly suffering or in need of professional help should bother investigating their mind costs us more than we realize. This oversight isn’t without cause or explanation however. The intangibility of the mind combined with a relative ignorance about how it operates, makes the physical body the average person’s primary focus and domain of expertise.
A functional handle on how our minds work is something that can help us live better lives just as a functional handle on nutrition helps. Unlike nutrition’s effect on the body, the benefits of a healthy mind are less easily qualified and quantified. There’s potentially no better way to begin improving our mental nutrition than thinking of the mind as being part elephant and part rider.
Seeing the Division
It makes sense that our mental fitness lacks attention since we mostly assume there is one person in each body. In cultures without a contemplative practice there’s rarely an opportunity to see any distinction in the mind. With no awareness that we operate more by committee than as a single actor, we’ll see nothing to investigate or improve.
To see the internal division it often takes intentional effort. Our daily lives seldom afford us a moment to reflect upon our thoughts, actions, or mental state. Few of us have the opportunity and ability to quiet our minds or engage in focused and uninterrupted activity. The closet most people come to silencing thought is the runner’s high, but even that pales in comparison to a deliberate act of attention.
To see the two most apparent actors in our minds, the elephant and the rider, we often need to gain some mental perspective. Meditation, therapy, and psychedelics, all have the ability to give us enough space to see our thoughts and motives more clearly according to social psychologist, and author of the “Happiness Hypothesis”, Jonathan Haidt. The perspective granting approach that I recommend, the one that is free and always at our disposal, is meditation.
What one is likely to notice after a time or two meditating is that there’s a strong forceful urge toward less high-minded desires. This can be thought of as the elephant, emotional, passionate, and instinctual. The rider would be the conscious and willfully acting rational part of us. One forward thinking and calculating, the other impulsive.
We are the Rider
When we become aware of the two actors in our minds we almost always identify with the rider. The rider is the one that we believe to be in control, the one that is less animal like, and the one that is able to plan and deliberate. That’s how our experience as riders of animals seems to work right?
Our egos play a role in our self-selection, clearly. No one wants to think of themselves as being in less than full control. Few of us would like to think of ourselves as animals and even fewer would like to be ridden. Despite what we’d like to believe, our preferences don’t dictate reality, fortunately or unfortunately.
This egoic desire to disassociate from the less evolved portion of our minds can keep those that see this duality from accepting it as true. It would seem more palatable for some to tolerate cognitive dissonance than a less flattering view of themselves.
Elephants are Strong
Everyone from a small child to the zoologically ignorant adult knows that our strength is inconsequential compared to that of an adult elephant. This apparent power differential makes the elephant and rider model easy to wrap our heads around after a few meditation sessions.
When we have some meditation granted perspective, the rider’s influence in the mind is seen as roughly equivalent to a human’s strength in the animal kingdom. Our ability, since we identify with the rider, to control the movement and actions of the elephant is limited. If the elephant wants to eat cookies, it’s very likely that we are going along for the ride whether we know we are on a diet or not.
Being along for the ride can be fun, but the elephant often behaves in ways and desires things that are counter the rider’s best interest. The massive mental mammal would much rather pursue immediate gratification rather than slog away at long-term goals, making it hard to attain anything of lasting value. It also likes to throw its weight around and let its emotions and feelings be known forcefully. An emotional animal is unlikely to be helpful in most social arrangements.
Powerless but Crafty
If we, the rider, attempt to steer the elephant away from an emotional cliff or away from a plate of treats with force, we’re unlikely to have much success. The elephant is simply too massive in its will for us to exert any sustained control over it. We’ll exhaust ourselves long before the elephant’s desire is sated.
The rider’s relative feebleness means we are powerless if we try to use will or strength to control the elephant, but it doesn’t mean we can’t outsmart the beast. All that need be done to get the elephant to change its aim is influence its desires. If we can make it see what it wants as undesirable, unpleasant, repulsive, or painful, we can get it to change course. With a clear understanding of our duality, and a clear understanding of what we should pursue, we can even get the elephant’s desires to match the rider’s, with enough skill.
Be a Better Rider
Everyone claiming to want a better handle on themselves, a better life, must come to see the duality in their minds and come to terms with it. The two main actors vying for power in a mostly lopsided battle, the rider and the elephant, are us.
Keeping a fragmented view, no matter how good it feels to our ego, will keep us from gaining skill as a rider. It takes a respectful understanding of the animals needs, wants, and power to keep ourselves from being tossed from the saddle as soon as we attempt to impose our will. We aren’t driving a vehicle and it won’t simply comply with our demands in a mechanical input output manner. We must develop a healthy relationship with the animal if we want to experience anything other than being drug behind it.
The real benefit of accepting our relative powerlessness, divided nature, and becoming a better rider is a better life, unless embracing the truth is too painful. If we do it right, after we gain enough skill, we can turn the elephant into an ally instead of an enemy. We might even be able get the elephant to carry us to our destination in a symbiotic fashion. A more efficient and humane approach than dominance and mastery, in my opinion anyway.
