The Cave

*Alarm goes off*. No one stirs.

Heads are drooping, bobbing; arms are crossed over faces, bodies thrown back, passive.

It is a recreation of the scene in Sleeping Beauty when the 3 fairies put a spell on the castle, except on a mass scale. This has been going on for decades, centuries in fact…

*Loud snoring*

We have been asleep for too long.

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Shadows

What does it matter? What matters that I work here or make this amount of money? What does it matter that I have this new outfit to wear, or this event to go to?

We are made to believe that This* is all there is. This Game, with no prize worthy of the hunt, takes up all our efforts, all our waking hours. But are we really awake?

As Henry David Thoreau suggests, “We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface.”

Think back to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. We are the prisoners tied up, facing the wall of the cave, where society behind us plays with puppets before a fire, creating shadows on the wall. Growing up as we have we can only believe what we see to be soundest Truth.

We have been deceived. We have been entranced.

Throughout history, it is only the poets, the writers, the philosophers, the artists who have parted the veil of Reality. They have scaled the heights and through their inspiration gone beyond the cave into the light of Truth. They have been good enough, once seeing the Truth, Beauty and Goodness with their own eyes to descend back into the darkness to tell of what lies above.

But meanwhile, down in the cave, “shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.”- Thoreau.

But isn’t this Reality? Not as society says it is.

So what matters? What has any everlasting value? If the things of this world pass, what can we hold onto? Again, Thoreau seems to have an answer:

“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.” Thoreau suggests we live this superficial life “because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be.”

Only when we are awake, truly awake, do we realize what shams and shadows play about the cave wall, and can name them as such.

The Veil

This sleep, it closets us, shutters us, and stuffs us down into our very being, until we consist of concentric layers and our very essence remains at the bottom of the funnel.

So what penetrates through the seeming empty slumber? Art, Music, Literature, Kindness, Nature…these puncture through the portal…we get glimpses of an Ideal existence. As L.M. Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables) suggests,

 “It has always seemed to me, ever since early childhood, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I caught a glimpse of the enchanting realms beyond-only a glimpse-but those glimpses have always made life worthwhile.”

Awakening

As Thoreau adroitly points out, “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"

 So how do we awaken, and learn to keep ourselves awake? 

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." Thank you Thoreau. My advice: Be present. But also transcend what "matters" in the world's eyes. You are Infinite; do not allow yourself to be tied down. Even if you have metaphorical stones thrown at you, 'twould be better to see the Light and try to share it than be trapped in a deadened state forever.