The ancient Indian scriptures from times before Christ tell the story of Five Blind Men and the Elephant. Here is my own interpretation of the story to illustrates the pitfalls of beliefs based on falsehood or partial information.

Having heard wondrous stories about elephants a group of five blind men decided to find out for themselves as to what an elephant looked like. Their spiritual teacher, a wise old man, took them to an elephant and asked them to touch it to understand its shape and size. After feeling the elephant, they went back home and shared their beliefs about the elephants based on their individual experience.

The first person who had touched the trunk said that the elephant was like a thick snake. The second person who had touched its ear said that it was more like a fan. The third person who happened to touch the elephant’s leg was confident that the elephant was like a tree trunk. The fourth person who touched its tail thought it was like a rope while the fifth who had touched the side of the elephant said that everyone else was wrong because he was confident that the elephant was like a wall.

This resulted in a fight breaking out between them, each self-righteously proclaiming the accuracy of their beliefs based on their vivid and clear sensory perception. Unable to come to a consensus they turned to their spiritual teacher and requested him to settle the matter.

The teacher calmly told them that each one of them was right, but also wrong.   The blind men were nonplussed as while they fully trusted their teacher, his statement did not make any sense to them, so they asked him for an explanation.

The teacher told them that while each one’s belief was true in context of their own experience, each one of them was also wrong because their beliefs were based on partial facts and perceptions. Knowledge of the Truth, he explained, was a process of continually enhancing your beliefs with knowledge from the widest possible sources and perspectives. This, he continued, is possible only if we temper all our beliefs with a healthy dose of innocent curiosity and skepticism. The Truth is singular and can never be divided into ‘your truth or my truth ’ which are mere facts reflecting our subjective perceptions and understanding.

Warning them he said that they could also have been easily misled by a false prophet who might have taken them to a donkey as an expedient substitute for an elephant. While they would all have been right in believing their perceptions, their fundamentally false assumption about the donkey being an elephant would have rendered even their shared beliefs fallacious.

Beliefs, he concluded are like ephemeral objects which need to be constantly reinforced with facts and polished with reason to continually yield wisdom and Truth.

This story is a perfect illustration of how the One truth, represented by the elephant, can be perceived partially with multiple and misleading perspectives. I suggest that the five blind men in this story represent our five senses which can easily mislead us.   Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) in his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous put forward some very persuasive arguments to illustrate the unreliability of our senses which can be validated with the following simple experiment:

• Submerge your right hand in a pot of cold water
• Put your left hand in the second pot with warm water
• Now, simultaneously remove both your hands and place them in a third pot with room-temperature water.
• Note that while you right hand feels warm, the left hand feels cold in the same pot of room-temperature water.

So, is the water in the third pot warm or cold? How can the same thing be simultaneously perceived differently by our senses? The simple answer is that our senses are blind without the enlightening influence of reason, a combined function of our intellect and intuition, which is represented by the spiritual teacher in the story.

The story teaches us that even beliefs which seem undeniably true can still be misleading if based on false assumptions. We can judge the validity of our beliefs by remembering that it is NEVER what we believe, but the OUTCOME of our beliefs which is the litmus test of their validity. If the outcomes do not contribute to harmonising our physical, spiritual and social environment creating a sense of joy, peace and tranquillity, then we can safely conclude that our beliefs are based on either partial or false assumptions.

Muse

1. How many of our beliefs are based on partial information and unexamined assumptions?
2. Can we transform our life by improving the quality and quantity of knowledge which informs our beliefs?
3. Reason is a function of knowledge and mostly subjective. Can we use it as the only reliable basis for our beliefs?
4. How can be establish the veracity of our beliefs?

Next Week – Evolution of Belief