#131: Blind Men and an Elephant, Four Ways of Seeing & Information Detox
3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Changing Perspectives
I. Blind Men and an Elephant
The Blind Men and the Elephant is a parable about the importance of perspective when looking for the truth. It originated in India and goes something like this:
Six blind men are brought to an elephant to figure out what it is. They know nothing about elephants, so they decide to approach it one by one and find out by touch. The first man touches the side and figures it must be a wall. The second man feels the tusk and concludes it must be a spear. The third has an encounter with the elephant’s trunk and deduces it’s a snake. The elephant’s huge leg makes the fourth man think it’s a tree. The fifth man puts his hands on the ear and claims an elephant is like a fan. The sixth man argues that the elephant is more like a rope when he feels the creature's tail.
We all have limited perspectives so understanding the complete truth often requires us to consider an issue from different viewpoints. None of the blind men had the full picture. Even though each of them was technically correct (the best kind of correct).
II. Four Ways of Seeing
Say you have two people or organisations and want to gain insights into how they perceive each other, their motivations and conflicts. Use Four Ways of Seeing, an applied critical thinking tool developed by the U.S. Army’s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies.
This Red Teaming tool guides you to explore each entity’s points of view and how they see themselves and others. Here are the four perceptions to analyse:
How X Sees X
How X Sees Y
How Y Sees X
How Y Sees Y
The Four Ways of Seeing can highlight commonalities and differences and uncover potential misunderstandings.
Source: The Red Team Handbook
III. Information Detox
Gathering more and more information and endlessly analysing it will only get you so far. Sometimes, Information Detox is needed. For example by disconnecting from it all and clearing your mind through meditation.
The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening. If you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you. Just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were listening to music. Don’t try to identify the sounds you’re hearing. Don’t put names on them. Simply allow them to play with your ear drums. […]
Let your ears hear whatever they want to hear. Don’t judge the sounds. There are no, as it were, proper sounds or improper sounds. […]
Look at your own thoughts as just noises. And soon, you will find that the so-called outside world and the so-called inside world, come together. […] Everything is a happening and all you do is watching it.
—Alan Watts
🐘
Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com