Today I am Fascinated by Plato’s Cave
Posted by Spozbo Moswell on Sunday Sep 4, 2011 Under PhilosophyYou are held captive in a cave, and the only things you can see are shadows cast on the wall.
It’s that way for as long as you can remember: the shadows are all that you know.
One day, you escape from the cave. This forces you to re-think everything you’ve ever known to be true.
As you get over the trauma of being outside, you learn that there’s a fuller and more expansive truth, outside the cave.
If you go back to the cave and try to describe “real life” to people who are still captive… they don’t understand.
They’ll never understand until they experience it for themselves.
I’m fascinated by how this simple story has so many immediate analogies:
- Organized religion is the cave (when you’re in it, it’s all you know)
- Cinema is the cave (shadows projected onto the screen)
- Facebook is the cave (too much time on facebook, and you forget what the word “friend” really means)
- Our eyes are the cave (we’re slaves to our own perspectives)
More on this last one, “our eyes are the cave”: In the eye, light rays are projected through a dark space onto a surface. We can only see waves in the “visible spectrum.” We can only see such a limited version of what’s going on around us. We’re missing out on x-rays and gamma rays and radio waves!
In a way, the story is like the story of your birth:
For a long time you were trapped in a cave. You felt restricted there, but you were totally taken care of.
Then one day you had to get out. You just couldn’t take it anymore. That day was the day you were born.
Coming out of the womb was the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to you. You’ve basically blocked it out of your memory.
But afterward, you learned that there’s a lot more to life. You could never go back into that cave.
So you were literally born with the story of Plato’s cave… that fascinates me!
(read more by Spozbo Moswell)