PLATO WAS QUITE A GUY

Plato was quite a guy. Probably the single most impor-
tant philosopher in Western history, he has been given
a status above all other philosophers. It was said of him
by a 20th century philosopher (Whitehead?) that all of
Western philosophy is merely a series of footnotes to
Plato.

Still, Plato had some strange and even scarey ideas. (or
was he only quoting Socrates?) For instance, he thought
the ideal form of government was by oligarchy---the rule
of a few, backed by an army, who would hold lifetime off-
ices. Shades of fascism!

He also thought that every object in the world was an ex-
pressed instance of an ideal that existed outside the
realm of space and time. Thus, any particular horse was
merely the reflection of an ideal Horse that was not di-
rectly available to the viewer. Plato was an idealist; i.e.
he thought that ideas were more real than the ordinary
manifestation of everyday physical objects.

Another belief of his was that knowledge was not some-
thing we gain, but rather something we remember---
from a pre-vious lifetime. This is an idea that is central
to Eastern thought but is scarcely found in the West, at
least among philosophers.

But Plato had another idea that astounds me because
however marginal it might be to the Western world, it
is a mainstay of the East. It is also to me one of the few
images that reflect something of what the world is really
about. This is Plato's Cave Analogy:

A man is in a cave, chained so that he can only see the
back of the cave, not the entrance. Between the man and
the entrance of the cave is a fire that throws the man's
shadow on to the back of the cave. Thus the man can
never see the reality of the world beyond the entrance,
only a distorted view of reality that reflects the shadowy
world that he can see directly.

This is an extremely radical idea. It says that the ways
we view the world are not ultimately real but only im-
perfect manifestations of reality. What? Our families,
our friends, our possessions, our jobs---these are mere-
ly distortions?

Well, yes and no. (This is me talking now.) Our every-
day realities are real in a sense but also not real in
another, deeper sense. We are all like the man in the
cave, seeing reflections when we could be experiencing
reality directly by breaking our chains and looking be-
yond the fire to the entrance of the cave, where the real
reality lies.

What if we believed this preposterous idea---what then?
Then we could take steps to break the chain of unreality
and view ourselves and our world in a simple, direct
manner.

And how do we do this? Meditation is the only way
i know of, altho there might be other ways i don't
know about. But the impetus to meditate comes
from a belief in the truth of the cave analogy, which
is not a matter of faith but a gut level of understand-
ing in which the cave analogy seems to make sense.