In this occasion, I’d like to take you to go through a classic sufi story. Once, upon a time in a faraway land, three blind men met a king and his elephant. The three blind men had once heard about elephant, but they had never known one. So, with the king’s permission, they approached the elephant. They felt it randomly. They touched parts of its body, and imagined the shape. Soon after, they realized they had different depictions about elephant. The blind who touched the elephant’s ear said, “Elephant is wide, big, and thin, like cassava leaf with rough surface.” The one who touched the proboscis contradicted, “No! Actually, elephant is long and strong, like a giant snake.” Of course, both opinions were also denied by the one who touched the elephant’s leg: “No! Elephant is erect and steadfast, like a pillar of a palace.”
And so the debate went on. Three blind men remained firm with their own arguments. Yet actually, none of them was wrong. None of them was right either. They had just seen a small part of an elephant. And they were busy debating, busy withstanding their own arguments. Busy judging which was right and which was wrong. They could not see other parts seen by others. They held on with the slice of truth they held themselves; they had never come into the real truth about an elephant.
***
Eventually, all of us share the same fate with the three blind men.
As souls, we long for The Truth. We are incessantly seeking for it. And, eventually, The Truth has come to all of us. Without exceptions. Yet, as humans, our soul is imprisoned within limited point of view. We can no longer view things so widely. We can only feel The Truth randomly, then imagined the whole part of it with our very limited perspective.
For that reason, it was not at all a wonder, when each of us has different depiction about The Truth. We claimed our religion, philosophy, politic preference, and lifestyle, as “truth”; and judged beliefs different from ours as something “untrue”. We debated the differences with our own arguments. Yet of course, we were never really right. And we were never really wrong. Only that each of us sees The Face of Truth from unique, different point of view; and eventually, there are infinite point of views to look at it…
The three blind men might understand the elephant more accurately, if only they put aside right and wrong judgements. If only they could see the differences as fragments complementing each other. Fragments that makes up one big picture of an elephant. And so with us. We can never understand The Truth by busy debating differences. We walk closer to The Truth by being open to differences. By being open to infinite perspectives, infinite possibilities.
***
Our souls long for The Truth. Our souls incessantly seeking The Truth. And eventually, The Truth has come to us. Yet we are imprisoned within limited point of view. The point of view which makes The Truth looks so different from other perspectives. So, there is only one certain way to get closer to The Truth. Only by opening ourselves to infinite differences.
For that very reason, The Soul Sanctuary is committed to facilitate the revelation of The Truth, by facilitating freedom of speech.We are all blind souls, and it is here that we can gather to learn together. To collect the pieces of The Truth and put it together into a complete big picture. So, please post your comments, your ideas–anything. Only do remember: The Soul Sanctuary is a place to learn and to admit differences. Not a place to distinguish which is right and which is wrong. So, do not contradict any idea here. Do not fall into pointless debate. Do not argue. There is no absolute Truth here.
Open your mind. Open your heart. Open your soul. Look at present differences without judgements. Look at the congruities, above all of those. Let us put the piece of puzzle we had together, and let us reveal The Truth. Let us reveal The Truth together.
Warm regards,
Rizal