The student asked:
-What does the cave of Plato symbolize?
-The Master answered: The human skull and his brain.
-Who is the binder?
-The mind
-Who released the prisoner of the cave?
-Consciousness
-From what did he set him free?
-From the shackles
-And what were the shackles?
Ignorance and fear.
-And the mouth of the cave?
-The eyes.
-The shadows?
The inverted images.
What does the stiffness of the neck symbolize?
-The doctrine -How did he overcome fear and guilt?
-When he started looking from right to left and up he saw the true LIGHT without shadows. The Mind free from the mental anchorages of the past flew free out of the cave.
-Why did not the other captors of the cave accept what he testified to them? -Because their consciences were not ready.
I read this simplified de-symbolization of Plato's cave allegory, which I consider to be a useful tool and which has begun and is bothered by the cunning confusion of today.
Plato's Allegory of the cave, in a nutshell:Plato in his book Politia, places Socrates to describe a set of people who live their whole lives chained to the wall of a cave, facing an empty wall. These people look at the shadows that form on the wall from objects that pass in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. Shadows are the reality of prisoners. Socrates explains that the philosopher is like a prisoner who has been released from the cave and is at the level where he understands that shadows are not reality, as he can understand the true form of reality and not the constructed reality, which are the shadows for the prisoners. . The prisoners in this area do not even want to leave their prison because they do not know a better life.The prisoners one day manage to break their bonds and discover that their reality is not what they thought. They discovered the sun, which Plato uses as a match for fire, behind which man can not see. As fire sheds light on the walls of the cave, the human condition is forever captive to the impressions created through the senses.