Shadows on the Wall.
As I delved into the realm of Plato's Cave Allegory, I concluded that we live in a cave, which is our ego, and we're all prisoners within its confines.
Everything we perceive, experience, and believe, we filter through the lens of our ego. We see all from within: our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, experiences, knowledge, and even people and events that populate our daily lives. Nobody can escape from this exercise. We're all prisoners of ourselves. Everything that happens outside, we capture it within, and it is this perception that makes the flickering shadows that shape our reality, our cave.
For example, we see people interact with them, yet an invisible veil separates us, a gossamer thread that connects us without truly unifying us.
The effect of this "invisibility" is evident in places where people gather, such as elevators, streets, the bus, the subway, and planes. We see others, but we don't know them. Yet the collective synergy of the crowd touches us, much like the tide touches the beach. And so, we react like water, not like drops but like a mass carried by the wave. Likewise, energy manifests in feelings like love or hate, which keeps us together or divided as a species. From these interactions, vague memories linger, haunting us like faces in dreams we cannot remember when awake.
So, we're all prisoners in our caves, warming by our fire and entertained by those shadows.
But then, when we try to become free of ourselves (when we decide to see the world as accurately as possible), people will see us as delirious, laugh at us, and shun us.
In truth, no one wants to be free because freedom will bring us away from the cave that shelters us, the fire that warms us, and the shadows that entertain us. And this is what we will never do: trade our comfort for freedom, as if we were animals in a zoo. So we keep ourselves happy, prisoners but happy in our ignorance, chained to our walls, warmed by the fire of our thoughts, and entertained by the shadows we project on the walls of our souls.
