Book 7: The Allegory of the Cave

If one fully understands the Allegory of the Cave, one understands why Plato wrote The Republic. The Allegory of the Cave is both Plato’s critique on civilization and Plato’s attempt in boiling down esoteric knowledge to an easily digestible form. But in its most simplistic form, the Allegory of the Cave is Plato’s roadmap for the soul.

Plato divides this fictional world into two components: The Cave and the Outside World. The Cave represents Man’s ignorance where the Outside World represents Man’s illumination or Enlightenment. The Cave represents the world of becoming and the Outside World represents the realm of Being. The Cave is the realm of mind and matter and the Outside World is that which lies beyond mind and matter. Obviously, Plato recommends to go outside the cave.

In the Cave itself, there is a world of Shadows and a world of awareness of Shadows. Shadows themselves are inherently ephemeral and awareness of Shadows is the cognitive recognition of the inherent ephemeral qualities of a Shadow. Shadows are always a false representation of what ‘is’. And what ‘is’ can be defined as the quality or state of a thing in its most direct form. The people looking at shadows find great amusement and pride in watching, recognizing, and commentating on the Shadows. Taken literally, anyone can recognize that such people are wasting their time and their lives worrying about things that are transient and are never what they appear to be.

Welcome to the Shadow Realm

In the 21st century, the majority of the global human population have been banished to the shadow realm. Everyone is constantly inundated with false representations what ‘is’. A constant stream of entertainment, information, and biased realities is delivered to billions through screens, news feeds, and through direct interaction with the world and its inhabitants. People are flooded with so much information that they end up accepting these realities as their ultimate reality (here the distinction is between ‘r’eality and ‘R’eality). A symptom of this is how the masses accept the news as gospel and why they personally identify with their main means of entertainment (Sportsball, Video Games, TV shows, etc.). Even the stories, narratives, and daydreams that occur in an individual’s head can be said to be a prison made of Shadows. Their sense of self has been entwined with that of the Shadows. And any such false identification with Shadows will result in an equivalent false extension of the perceived Self.

Through repeated identification with the Shadows, eventually one becomes indistinguishable from the Shadows themselves. One’s sense of Self will have layers upon layers of identities, tendencies, and reactive conditioning that makes one entrenched in the Samsararic forces prevalent in the world. The only way out is to recognize Shadows for what they are. To painstakingly remove each layer of the false self until one reaches the fully unconditioned State (Nirvana). Almost all esoteric wisdom is geared towards this direction. Regardless of the culture or geographical condition, traditional societies all embody a purifying element where one moves from ignorance to truth (hence the prevalence of the symbolism of light and fire in traditional societies).

The only way out of this ‘Cave’ is to orient the soul upwards. What this means to each individual is dependent on their dharma. But what remains constant is that one must orient their entire person (and persona) towards the pursuit of what is invariable. And this orientation must be done with full commitment, as if every cell in the body were an antenna that is tuned in into Transcendence itself. Only through the continual training of acute perception and pervasive wisdom, can the philosopher-king realize true transcendence.

“just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so, too, the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being”