The Elephant In Every Room
Above: The Multisense Realism take on the Blind Men and The Puzzle of the Elephant. (Original art below borrowed from here).
In this version, the small elephants can see what the parts of the elephant actually are – their sense is empirically valid. They are not blind men who mistake the trunk for a snake, but they are so focused on what they see that they do not notice that each of them are part of the large, blind elephant.
The blind elephant is the totality/Absolute. Not a perfect omniscient deity, but a flawed singularity which sees indirectly through the smaller sighted elephants. Meanwhile, the interior of the Absolute reveals the elephant dreaming of fictional impressions…seeing not the public parts of the body from the outside, but seeing the totality of all of the experiences in a compressed and mythic form.
The mandala illustrates the continuity between the endophoric and exometric verses, the head and tail of Ouroboran monism.
Leave a Reply
Recent Comments
 | ptero9 on Where the Rubber Hits the Road… |
 | multisenserealism on Multisense Taoism |
 | Marc on Multisense Taoism |
| ptero9 on Multisense Taoism |
 | Multisense Taoism |… on Continuum of Sense |
Multisense Realism 
Saying the elephant is blind seems mere projection.
It’s intended to convey the idea that the singularity of the Absolute is symbiotically related to its own periphery through sense. If the elephant could see herself from the outside, what would be the point of adding more and more mini-elephants who can see?
…besides, the elephant is only blind on the outside. She dreams in the inner light.
In what sense flawed?
Only in the sense that it has delayed gratification of its own completeness. It fashions spacetime out of a piece of itself that it is forever missing (which is probably what that business about Adam’s rib was about in the original metaphorical sense).
Life could be a dream:
Craig: the interior of the Absolute reveals the elephant dreaming of fictional impressions
Joe: The Absolute elephant knew it was all there is. It could not know itself experientially, only conceptually. Yet the experience of itself is what it longed for. It wanted to know what it was like. , what it felt like to be this magnificent elephant. It could not know what it looked like or felt like to be magnificent unless that which was not showed up. In the absence of that which is not, that which is is not.
The one thing that the Absolute elephant knew is that there was nothing else. And so it could never know itself from a reference point outside of itself. Such a point did not exist. Only one reference point existed, and that was the single place within.
Still, the Absolute elephant chose to know itself experientially. It realized it would have to use a reference point within.
It reasoned quite correctly that any portion of itself would necessarily have to be less than the whole, and thus it simply dreamed itself into portions, each portion, being less than the whole could look back on the rest of itself and see snake, spear, wall, tree trunk, fan, rope.
The Absolute elephant became, in one glorious moment, that which is a wall, a spear, snake, a rope, a tree trunk, a fan. For the first time, walls and spears, snakes, ropes, tree trunks and fans existed quite apart from each other. And still both existed simultaneously. As did that which was neither.
Thus, six elements suddenly existed: that which was the wall, the spear, the rope, the tree trunk snake, and fan. And, that which is neither wall, spear, rope, tree trunk, snake, or fan – but which must exist for wall, spear, rope, tree trunk, snake, and fan to exist.
This is the nothing which holds the everything. It is the non-space which holds the space. It is the all which holds the parts.
Craig: …seeing not the public parts of the body from the outside, but seeing the totality of all of the experiences in a compressed and mythic form.
Oh, life could be a dream (sh-boom)
If I could take you up in paradise up above (sh-boom)
If you would tell me I’m the only one that you love
Life could be a dream, sweetheart
(Hello, hello again, sh-boom and hopin’ we’ll meet again)
Oh, life could be a dream (sh-boom)
If only all my precious plans would come true (sh-boom)
If you would let me spend my whole life lovin’ you
Life could be a dream, sweetheart
Now every time I look at you
Something is on my mind (dat-dat-dat-dat-dat-duh)
If you do what I want you to
Baby, we’d be so fine!
Oh, life could be a dream (sh-boom)
If I could take you up in paradise up above (sh-boom)
If you would tell me I’m the only one that you love
Life could be a dream, sweetheart
Sh-boom sh-boom Ya-da-da Da-da-da Da-da-da Da
Sh-boom sh-boom Ya-da-da Da-da-da Da-da-da Da
Sh-boom sh-boom Ya-da-da Da-da-da Da-da-da Da, sh-boom!
Sh-boom sh-boom Ya-da-da Da-da-da Da-da-da Da
Sh-boom sh-boom Ya-da-da Da-da-da Da-da-da Da
Sh-boom sh-boom Ya-da-da Da-da-da Da-da-da Da, sh-boom!
Every time I look at you
Somethin’ is on my mind
If you do what I want you to
Baby, we’d be so fine!
Life could be a dream
If I could take you up in paradise up above
If you would tell me I’m the only one that you love
Life could be a dream, sweetheart
(Hello hello again, sh-boom and hopin’ we’ll meet again) boom sh-boom
Hey nonny ding dong, alang alang alang (sh-boom)
Ba-doh, ba-doo ba-doodle-ay
Life could be a dream
Life could be a dream, sweetheart!
Life could be a dream
If only all my precious plans would come true
If you would let me spend my whole life loving you
Life could be a dream, sweetheart
(dee-oody-ooh, sh-boom, sh-boom)
(dee-oody-ooh, sh-boom, sh-boom)
(dee-oody-ooh, sh-boom, sh-boom)
Sweetheart!!
I get that, although are you using “delayed” in a metaphorical sense? Does the totality experience time in any sense that we can describe something being “delayed” to it? And is this delay eternal, the completeness forever out of reach as time moves forward? The totality becoming ever more “filled” with significance? At least I think that may be what you’re trying to say.
I would say delayed in a computational sense – a WHILE loop for branching routines into subroutines. Our local view presents these loops a sequential, but I think the Absolute view, undiffracted by spacetime, is a presentation in which routines and nested subroutines are also happening simultaneously. It’s a harmonic synthesis rather than linear steps. The mathematical concept of Aleph numbers reveals this territory I think. Infinities have these counter intuitive properties which dissolve seemingly absolute relations of scale into relativistic localizations.
Yes, I think the delay is eternal, but (Aleph number style) is distributed into all of the delays experienced by us locally (and every other participant in the universe). We are the Absolute, only perpetually stuck on the runway. Our misery is like sexual tension for the Absolute. It’s the way that non-local, non-temporal experience tolerates itself. Significance is part of the game, adding to the receding horizon of delayed gratification a dimension of richness and progress which is absolute. The flow of time is not just a repeating sinewave, it’s a helix-making spiral of spirals. Each turn a new season on top of an old season, and each moment an old season becoming new…again.
I am in agreement more or less with what you are saying, but I put a different twist on it which I think explains it more realistically. There are no blind men, but there are miniature versions of the elephant seeing itself from a limited perspective. They do not see fictional ropes and fans, but see directly what there is to see according to their position. This is the public diffraction of sense across space. It is unified in that the trunk is legitimately connected to the head and not to the foot. The diffracted elephants can change their position and confer with each other and actually know the outside of the universal elephant (science – especially physics and mathematics). The universal elephant is blind to its own physics. It has no skin in that game and has partitioned this exteriority to seem utterly indifferent and causally closed. From all points of view outside the elephant, the elephant must appear blind.
The interior view of the universal elephant is unified and divided in the opposite way. It is a single eternal experience, but it lacks spatiotemporal coordinates. We are all this elephant, mixing the universal dream with the impressions that we get from our sub-personal appendages – ‘through a glass darkly’, as it were. The myth and the magic, the super-signifying halo around special things and ideas are visible within they are ephemeral. It is only through the syzygy – the yoking together of that which has been diffracted apart, that fulfillment can be realized and the elephant restored, reverse-Humpty Dumpty style in the fullness of time.