Finding the Elephant in the Dark

This story starts with a group of Indians who bring an elephant to their hometown for the very first time. No one has seen an elephant before, and they are really excited to see what it looks like, but the elephant is in a dark room. So people entered the room and touched the elephant, and came out. The one who touched the elephant’s ear thought it looked like a fan. The other who touched the elephant truck was thinking about a pipe-shaped animal. These people got into a fight after talking about how they had seen the elephant. They were all right and wrong. Each of them had their own reality of the elephant’s shape because of the imperfect evidence. However, if someone had lit a candle in the room and let people see what the elephant actually looked like, all these disagreements would disappear. So, Rumi says:

Each of us touches one place

and understands the whole, that way.

The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark

are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.

If each of us held a candle there,

and if we went in together, we could see it.