Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 79.

I am your host Noah Rasheda, and today I'm talking about the parable of the blind man and the elephant.

Keep in mind the Dalai Lama's advice, to not use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist, use it to be a better whatever you already are.

So the parable of the blind man and the elephant, this expression of the blind leading the blind.

This is what I want to talk about today. So in the original parable, you have six blind men who approach an elephant and they touch it in different places.

They begin to describe it based on where they touch it. One describes the tale, another describes the trunk, another the leg, another the ears, and so on.

The idea is that all six are certain that their experience of having felt the elephant is the accurate and correct interpretation, while failing to understand that the other descriptions were also correct, and that their own descriptions were also incorrect, since they each only felt one part of the elephant.

Now I heard this parable once in the context of, okay, there are all these blind men describing this thing, but how fortunate for us or the person who's not blind to be able to see the whole picture.

And I think this is something that makes this parable a little bit difficult to fully wrap our heads around because most of us who think of this parable are probably not blind.

So the idea of being blind is already difficult to truly comprehend.

So I think it's very easy to make the mistake approaching this parable thinking, okay, I get it. All these blind people trying to describe the elephant, I get why they don't get it.

But I can picture an elephant. I've been to the zoo or I've seen them in videos. So I have the whole picture.

I know that the elephant isn't just the tail because I can see the ears and I can see the tusks and I can see everything else that makes the elephant the elephant.

But the moment we do that where I think we're misinterpreting the deep lesson of the elephant.

So I think the mistake of the parable is thinking that you are not like the blind men. You have the bigger picture, you understand.

But what the Buddha was trying to accomplish in my opinion with this parable was to truly convey the reality that we are all like the blind men.

So let's just tweak this and update this parable a little bit. A scenario that I think works really well for me.

Imagine yourself at any part of space. You know, when you're in space and you're looking back at the moon, if you've probably seen these pictures of, or not at the moon at Earth, you've seen pictures from the moon looking at Earth,

or just pictures from space looking at Earth. And there's Earth from wherever you are in space looking at Earth, it's going to look unique to depending on where you are if you're on one side of the planet versus in space on the other side of the planet.

And of course the planet is rotating, but at any given moment, wherever you are in space, whatever you're looking at is an incomplete picture because there's the entire other side of the planet that you can't see.

And it doesn't matter where you go if you're at the top or the bottom or where you are in space looking at the planet, you're going to encounter this issue which is that you cannot see the whole picture.

It's literally impossible to see the whole picture at the same time. That I think is starting to get closer to the deep lesson of this parable of the blind men, you cannot see the whole picture. It's impossible.

...