I don’t remember exactly who wrote it, but an academic I read in university termed Plato “A Christian before Christ”. That didn’t make any sense to me. How could someone that died three and half centuries before Jesus be called a Christian? And then I read the Cave Allegory in Plato’s Republic and it all made sense.

The cave allegory goes something like this: Plato imagines a group of people that have been imprisoned from birth in a cave, and confined in such a way that they can’t see themselves. All they can see are the shadows of themselves and other objects that are cast upon the back wall of the cave by torchlight. Plato poses the question, “What would this group of people’s conception of reality be?” Without ever having seen themselves, they would simply think they were a shadow. They’d have no conception of three dimensional space, let alone the whole, great big wide world outside of the cave.

Now, here’s the really interesting part, “What would happen if someone did escape the cave …and then tried to free this group of people so that they experience life outside as well?” Plato’s answer? The cave dwellers would kill him. Makes sense. Everything about your life, even your conception of yourself, is being challenged. You think you’re two-dimensional and then this three-dimensional being comes along and starts talking about caves, and the sun and the sky… And people get really, really pissed off at small changes, like when the McRib is taken off the McDonald’s menu. So if someone came along and blew their entire two-dimensional worldview out of the water… well you get the idea.

Allow me to tie this in with some of the concepts in my previous posts. It’s possible that our scientific and rational conception of the world isn’t complete, and that there might be a “super-reality”… something more real than we’re able to intellectually comprehend now or ever... something beyond the shadows of our current conception of the world. And this “super-reality” does a much better job of describing and guiding what it means to be human. You might call it a “coping-mechanism”, but it’s one we (will) all need, whether we realise it or not. I’m not sure of all of this mind you, I’m just open to the possibility of this benevolent super-reality, and I’m not going to be constrained by our zeitgeist and dogma of the certainty of reason that I dismiss evidence that doesn’t conform to a rational/intellectual worldview, or indications of this super-reality. Oh.. and as I’m sure you picked up on earlier in this post, someone may have already come along and told us about this super-reality, and given us some very good guidance on how to experience it… but we killed him.