what’s in the name?

The title of this blog reflects one aspect of my personal world view that can be best explained in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The following summary of the allegory is from Wikipedia:

Imagine prisoners who have been chained since childhood deep inside a cave. Not only are their limbs immobilized by the chains; their heads are chained as well so that their gaze is fixed on a wall.

Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which shapes of various animals, plants, and other things are carried. The shapes cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. When one of the shape-carriers speaks, an echo against the wall causes the prisoners to believe that the words come from the shadows.

The prisoners engage in what appears to us to be a game - naming the shapes as they come by. This, however, is the only reality that they know, even though they are seeing merely shadows of images. They are thus conditioned to judge the quality of one another by their skill in quickly naming the shapes and dislike those who begin to play poorly.

Suppose a prisoner is released and compelled to stand up and turn around.

His eyes will be blinded by the firelight, and the shapes passing will appear less real than their shadows.

Similarly, if he is dragged up out of the cave into the sunlight, his eyes will be so blinded that he will not be able to see anything. At first, he will be able to see darker shapes such as shadows and, only later, brighter and brighter objects.

The last object he would be able to see is the sun, which, in time, he would learn to see as that object which provides the seasons and the courses of the year, presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some way the cause of all these things that he has seen.

(This part of the allegory, incidentally, closely matches Plato’s metaphor of the sun which occurs near the end of The Republic, Book VI.)

Once enlightened, so to speak, the freed prisoner would want to return to the cave to free “his fellow bondsmen”. Another problem lies in the other prisoners not wanting to be freed: descending back into the cave would require that the freed prisoner’s eyes adjust again, and for a time, he would be one of the ones identifying shapes on the wall. His eyes would be swamped by the darkness, and would take time to become acclimatized. Therefore, he would not be able to identify shapes on the wall as well as the other prisoners, making it seem as if his being taken to the surface completely ruined his eyesight. The other prisoners would then not go to the surface, in fear of losing their eyesight. If someone were to try and force a prisoner to come to the surface, the prisoner would become murderous, and kill whoever tried to force him to come to the surface.

What if the world actually exists in just this type of false reality. What if glimpses, whispers, and mere shadows of Love are all that can be seen, as we exist in our current state of bondage, and hence, are perceived to actually be true Love and reality. Such perception may not be completely false, as black is from white, but surely it is a dull gray existence when perfect radiance is the aim. Why do we settle for the shadows of Love, the shadows of reality, the shadows of life, when a truer reality exists beyond our current realm of awareness?

The question that remains is what is the true reality that casts the shadows and how can we come to live in it?