I became aware or the elephant-and-rider metaphor a while ago, perhaps due to one of your posts. Since that time, I have attempted to take advantage of the insight by considering what else it could mean.

For example, the rider can "see farther" but the elephant perhaps can "see more clearly what is nearby.". By this I mean only that feelings which have no obvious explanations often come from flashes of intuition about people, ideas or situations which your conscious mind would have never noticed.

In other words, the unconscious mind seems to be the seat of our various pattern matching algorithms, which leads us to make logical errors at times, but may also lead us to infer things about the motives or mental states of other humans or give us a "gut feeling" that some situation is unsafe, when the conscious mind would otherwise have blissfully ignored the danger.

This isn't really in contradiction to what you just wrote; the main idea is that half of training the elephant may be listening to the elephant.