Elephant Inside

To manage yourself, to be able to do what has to be done any time, to perform duties with pleasure – is not it a dream? Everyone finds their own way to achieve this ideal state. Some were taught by their parents or the school, others learn it under the pressure of army discipline or other life circumstances. Often small children “teach ” their parents. After several years of baby caring, one becomes less sensitive to the lack of sleep or other physical inconveniences. One learns how just do things. We learn how to live.

But there comes a time when we get enough sleep and little physical extortion, and the children move far away and take care about their own children, but you still notice that you do not exactly on the top of what you wanted to do. You delay things to the last moment. You start to execute according to the great plan and quit after the first few bullets have been checked. I, for example, wanted to write and started doing it several times, but dropped it repeatedly.

There are many books written on this subject. Judging by the reviews, some advice was helpful to some people, while different advice helped others. What has helped me to overcome the inertia, I do not remember already. But our memories are not very reliable source anyway. We could not help but adjusting the facts of the past to fit a beautiful and logical story, while life, in fact, often shakes and jerks us quite arbitrarily.

One way or another, eventually I have learned how to deal with myself. I imagine that I am an elephant rider. I study his (my) habits, preferences, characteristics and use this knowledge to manage this powerful animal (inner myself). It can do a lot, but also gets tired, needs food and sleep, even a kind word sometimes. So, I let him go to roam with friends — other elephants — once in a while. Sometimes I indulge him, train him or do other tricks to keep him in shape, but not too wildly. Any owner of any animal could talk for hours about their pet and how one deals with it.

I picked up this metaphor from the book Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, published in 2006. Later, I came across an elephant in the same context in the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, published in 2010. Then, quite recently, I discovered the original source – I think – of this idea. It turned out that Buddhist monk Shantideva wrote about taming “the elephant of my mind” as early as in VIII century.

Here are a few lines from Bodhisattvacharyavatara translated by Alexander Berzin:

With the wish to safeguard my training,
I need to work hard and safeguard my mind;
If I’m unable to safeguard my mind,
I’ll also be unable to safeguard my training.

Left to run loose, the elephant of my mind can ravage me
With (a joyless realm of) unrelenting pain.
Untamed, rutting elephants in this (world)
Can’t cause me such harm.

But, if the elephant of my mind is firmly bound
By the rope of mindfulness on every side,
All fears will vanish and everything constructive
Will come into my hands.

Professor Jay Garfield mentioned these lines in his course Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World’s Great Intellectual Traditions from the Great Courses series. Now it made sense to me why the animal inside was an elephant and not a coyote or giraffe. In India, an elephant is almost a household animal. Besides, it is a prominent symbol in Hinduism too. In other cultures it could be a horse or a cat – the idea of an inner animal that needs to be tamed and controlled or at least watched out would not change.

The “elephant within” acts reflexively, without much thinking. It helps us to make many — thousands! — decisions every day. If we did them consciously, we would be overwhelmed by the huge flow of signals coming from outside. The elephant takes it on himself to face the challenge and protect us from being overloaded. So, we — thanks to the evolution — make most of the decisions using our guts only.

By the way, this observation calls into question our vision of ourselves as “basically rational beings.” True, the definition depends on how much weight we assign to each of the decisions. We take time to come up with a decision that may affect our lives. So, I can agree with those who say that we make automatic decisions on minor issues only and therefore can be qualified as rational creatures, as we address consciously truly important decisions.

But Daniel Kahneman has adjusted our understanding of the role of our emotions. He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith) for proving that even such important and calculable decisions as economic ones are often made not completely rationally.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes effects that prevent us from making the best decisions. Among them are:
– anchoring: our tendency to be influenced by irrelevant numbers. Shown higher/lower numbers, experimental subjects gave higher/lower responses;
– availability: a mental shortcut that occurs when people make judgments about the probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples;
– substitution: substituting a difficult question with a simpler one;
– optimism and loss aversion: the tendency to overestimate benefits and underestimate costs, impelling people to take on risky projects. We fail to take into account complexity and that our understanding of the world consists of a small and necessarily un-representative set of observations. Furthermore, the mind generally does not account for the role of chance and therefore falsely assumes that a future event will mirror a past event;
– framing: the context in which choices are presented. Experiment: subjects were asked whether they would opt for surgery if the “survival” rate is 90 percent, while others were told that the mortality rate is 10 percent. The first framing increased acceptance, even though the situation was no different;
– sunk-cost: we tend to “throw good money after bad” and continue investing in projects with poor prospects that have already consumed significant resources. In part, this is to avoid feelings of regret.

One of Kahneman’s major discoveries was that our automatic decisions are influenced not only by our emotions but also by our stereotypes, our sub-consciousness and… just… our laziness, which is the result of our inner elephant running out of energy.

According to legend, the Seven Wise Men of Ancient Greece advised, “Know Thyself.” I tell myself, “Take into account the idiosyncrasies and state of your inner elephant.” It helps me a lot.

“Know thyself” was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, “Be thyself” shall be written. Oscar Wilde. The Soul of Man under Socialism

My friend since college Vladimir Timofeev, who lives in Sankt Petersburg, has found very good illustrations to the idea of an Elephant Inside:

I would title them as “Elephant War“, “Angry elephant“, and “Sad elephant“. But they are called differently by the author – the Russian artist Nikolay Kopeikin. His works can also be found in this or that of his on-line galleries, or just look him up on internet.