Cave Series 2: Troglodytes

I look at the cobblestones on the street. They exist. I see a dog. It is playing. I watch a woman walking. I was told it was all out there, that that was reality, but lo! I remember my cave and counter the thought with the experience of the film projectionist.

I am a strange being, I can empathise with sky, sun and moon, and plants and trees, and with animals. And they are always beautiful. I don't judge them very much. But I only seem to see the outside skin of people, their clothes and hair, and I unfortunately judge them as to their beauty or lack of it, whether they look happy or sad, calm or stressed, eyes vacant or eyes glinting life, and so on. Sometimes I walk for minutes on end and can’t see any joy. And then maybe I’m lucky enough to see a dog jumping around with a plastic bottle in its mouth, or a toddler squealing with arms reaching up to the sky. That seems nicer than many of those tired, wrinkled adult faces I encounter on my walks.

The movie projector operator switches on the light and sets the reel in motion and the images magically appear on the white screen. And so to counter my judgemental mind, I picture the realities of people coming into my field of vision as images on my mind’s screen. After all, we are trapped like troglodytes in a Plato’s cave of sense perceptions. How can we see Reality? Everything is filtered through the five senses. This is the way our machine is made. What other avenues of approach do we have? I saw the dog, but then only as an image on a screen. With that attitude, I realise I do not know what a dog really is. Maybe even my hero Cesar Millán doesn’t either, although he knows more than many. I saw a woman, but I willed her onto my mental screen and I realised I did not know what she was either. I am only getting a partial data flow. I have severe bandwidth limitations! Visible light hits a few cones on the retina, and the brain reacts as it is accustomed to. Vibrations in the air as the woman talks to a friend hit my eardrum, and the cochlea transmits what we call sound to the brain, again converting a physical stimulus into a psychological phenomenon, and science can’t say how this is achieved. It’s a trap, “on purpose laid to make the taker mad”, as we sit shackled to our posts in the dark cave, interpreting things we have grown used to. Feasting on impressions in our troglodytical life.

What sense impressions give are raw materials for the mind. It’s up to us to decide what to do with them. And my thoughts are of the same ilk. Why do I have to pass judgement on what I appear to see? Why should I allow myself to have a thought produced from a raw sense perception? Behind all this lies the darkness of the cave. Maybe there isn’t even a cave, maybe it’s just nothingness, brought to life by thinking it’s somethingness. 

Whatever the case, cave-life is what we have, so cave-life must be studied and understood. And then troglodytes blinded by the sun’s rays may be transformed into Seers.