The Allegory Of The Cave Turn Around

The Allegory Of The Cave: Turn Around Essay, Research Paper The Allegory of the Cave: Turn Around Putting the Allegory of the Cave into my own words seems comparable to the Christian idea of using the lord’s name in vain. First, I’d like to introduce a phenomenon I have observed throughout my life time. I call it soul resonance. Bear with me here. When two objects emit sympathetic vibrations, the sound or force multiplies. Example: Two tuning forks of the same frequency are struck upon each other and held a few feet apart. The vibration is much stronger. Something basic about each object recognizes a similar quality in the other, and amplifies it. As with so many other laws of science, this law applies to many other phenomena. I believe this is what people feel when they

first hear the Allegory of the Cave . . . soul resonance. Somehow, something deep inside tells them that here we have found a singular truth. The Allegory, taken as the story of one man, narrates his life from ignorance to enlightenment. He sits within a cave, facing away from a blazing fire. He stares at the wall opposite him, watching pretty shadow puppets. He listens to the exotic, wonderful, and large words whispered in his ears by the puppeteers. He would naturally turn around, or perhaps even stand, but chains bind him to the ground, and the puppeteers have servants who hold his head in place. One day, a situation arises where he finds that the chains are broken, and he stands. This is against the will of the servants, but they have no physical power over him, if he does

not allow it. He turns round and sees the fire and the puppeteers and then he realizes that all has been lies. He is not what they have told him. He does not feel what they have said he does. The fire blinds him. The puppeteers, seeing they have lost another to knowledge, quickly get rid of him by pushing him into the dark cave that looms off to the side, hoping for his demise. The man is lost, he has gone from darkness to light to darkness once again. Something within him tells him to climb, and he does, scrabbling. He cuts himself many times, and many times he almost falls to his demise on the rocky ground below. He pauses often. Until there comes a time when he sees a distant light at the exit/entrance to the cave. When he sees this light, he is not sure whether this is yet

another shadow puppet on the wall, but it is upward and that is where he must go. When he comes out into the bright sunlight, he cannot see, the brightness of the sun alone has stricken him temporarily blind. He stumbles about, closing his eyes for periods of time and then reopening them, adjusting himself to the light. And one day, he stares at the sun without fail, and knows. Let’s start at the beginning. He is in the cave, he is in the darkness of his own ignorance. Even the light behind him is a false representation of the glorious sun outside. People have assaulted him with their falsehoods, telling him what God is, what Ideals are, and what his morals should be. These are the shadows on the wall, a terrestrial God, money, Law, etc. When he was young he may have questioned

these ideas, but if you say something enough to someone, they will come to believe it. The man built his own chains, fashioned them from a forge in his own soul, and soaked them in a barrel of his ignorance. He learned resignation, and now he sits in an office all day, being unhappy, his blood-pressure rising. One day he snaps, for it is a drastic force that rips the chains from the ground. He turns around for the first time since he was young, and cries. He now realizes the truth, he is not who they have told him he is. He realizes there are truths inside him that are not the truths of which they spoke. And he cries, also, for he sees that he and the puppeteers are the same. He weeps at the realization of his own self-imprisonment, his true nature, and burns himself upon the