But know this: Suppose by the grace of God one of them is made seeing so that he perceives and knows the elephant as it really is, and says to them: "In what you have said of the elephant, you have indeed grasped some aspect of the elephant, but you do not know the rest. God has given me sight, I have seen and come to know the elephant as it really is." They will not even believe the seeing man, but will say: "You claim that God has given you sight, but that is only your imagination. Your brain is defective, and madness assails you. It is we who are the seeing."* * *
Jules Verne, a later mystic retold the tale in a variant form see: "In the Country of the Blind" ... the short story starts off slow, one can just skip to where the protagonist falls down the mountain and is lost from his party, whereupon he meanders until finding a strange village, not unlike a Federal Agency.
Unfortunately the man who thinks he can “see” doesn’t see the underlying reality of energy waves and molecules that make up the true reality of what we call “elephant”. And so, the gist of the fable is that some might know more than others, but true understanding is an illusion.