7

My View of the Elephant

The Elephant Walks into the River

When I started writing this book, it was all about the Intelligence Elephant. It was while I was writing this chapter that the elephant I was trying so hard to see started turning into a river. I have nothing but good feelings for elephants. And while we were stumbling around in the fog trying to see this mysterious intelligence beast, our image of the sages and the elephant seemed just right. But as I thought of the examples of the Intelligence River that surround me — family, friends, and colleagues who exemplify this powerful current operating in the real world — I didn’t see patchwork pachyderms. What I noticed was how all the facets, all the parts of each person’s intelligence, flowed so naturally and strongly together. It wasn’t a tusk here and a trunk there, however well tusk and trunk might work together. It was one seamless current of intelligence, one stream of abilities flowing together. One night as I was falling asleep, I actually saw the Intelligence Elephant standing in a river, and then becoming the river. Hey, you can’t ask a psychologist to entirely ignore his dreams!

Do you share my sense of this change? The Intelligence Elephant has been a useful analogy. It has allowed us to look at the parts of the whole. But it’s about what we don’t understand, about our attempts to patch together an understanding of this complex entity we call intelligence. As a clearer picture begins to emerge, as we begin to see intelligence as a single, organic, flowing whole, the elephant becomes a river which sweeps us forward to new lands.