Plato’s Cave is a well-known allegory presented in the dialectic entitled Republic. In the course of explaining the philosopher’s objective to understand a greater reality, Plato describes a people who live in a cave, chained to a blank wall while observing shadows. The shadows are reflections of the objects that pass behind them illuminated by a fire, but they are only representations, merely fragments of reality. The cave dwellers, Plato tells us, are humans observing the world around them relying solely on their limited senses rather than their intellect and reason.
We might argue that our present world is the perfect illustration of Plato’s allegory. Our shadows are the stories, the inventions that we and those who seek to persuade us concoct to disguise the distorted half-truths meant to pass for reality. The persuaders understand that humans construct narratives that explain our past, influence our present and condition our future expectations. These narratives are, of course, no more real than the shadows cast on the cave wall, though they contain a tiny fragment of reality, a seed once planted in our consciousness that we will harvest throughout our lives. Through narratives, we explain our lives to ourselves and shape our story going forward.
For most of us, the past, as far as we are able to recall, is a series of isolated memories of people and incidents from which we construct an emotional fabric. We were happy or sad, fearful or content, felt pain or joy. Each experience and the feelings that accompanied it became the building blocks of the narrative that we have come to believe about the world around us and who we are. But is that story real, did the things we recall really happen as we remember and did they mean what we construed?
The tricky thing about narratives as every storyteller knows is that they are not built upon facts as much as inference. We are wired to connect the fragments of our experience together in some coherent way but we are not unbiased observers. As children we try to make sense of ourselves and our world but we are unable to discern motive from accident, cause from effect. What occurs to and around us must necessarily follow some design, but we have only the feelings generated by our experiences to guide our understanding, we cannot know why things have happened as they did. In this void we begin the process we will follow for the rest of our lives, filling the blanks in our understanding with our impressions and often with the words and ideas of those who surround us. Gradually, these become established as fact in our minds and from that point forward we will bend each new impression, each new experience to fit the narrative we have created.
We should never deny that things happened to us and led us in the moment to feel one way or another. That is the fragment on which we have based our narrative. But it is not the whole of the story, never the entirety of what occurred. These narratives become so deeply entrenched in our psyche, that is nearly impossible to dismantle them, even when presented with contradicting insights. And it is from this wellspring that all our views arise, our prejudices, our loyalties and convictions. That is why it is so very difficult to alter one’s views, to shake someone’s beliefs, and why life altering changes are rare.
Our entire beings are thus shaped by our personal narratives; our politics, views on race, religion, good and evil and so much more. Knowing this, Plato instructed his pupils to seek the entirety of reality, to deconstruct the narrative or rather reconstruct it with access to a more complete version than the fragment they owned. He believed this could only be done through the higher levels of reason, through mathematics, natural science and deductive logic. And indeed, though it is rare, some are able to change their narrative by wiping away the framework of belief on which their lives were based and dispassionately questioning whether their impressions and views were logical, were accurate, were real.
Some have done so as a result of a life transforming experience, a trauma, or even through the use of mind-altering substances. Unsurprisingly, in every instance there is a single and common effect, the death of the ego. It is only in such a circumstance, when we surrender our self, that we are able to let go of the narrative that holds us captive. Few of us, however, have the discipline or the unbidden desire for self-discovery that is necessary to reject the perceptions of a lifetime as most psychiatrists and psychologists would attest.
Knowing our capacity to reject evidence that does not comport with our narrative, how then do we begin to re-construct any alternative? No, I am not going to recommend drugs or a lifetime of therapy, and it is my profound hope that you do not suffer a life altering change unless it is for the better. But I do suggest we are all capable of asking ourselves to imagine a different history, to question whether the events of our lives had a different meaning than we think. It is a daring journey to be sure, but one that may reveal hidden dimensions of ourselves. In the words of Joseph Campbell: “Life itself has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to ask the question when you are the answer.”
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