(for those not acquainted with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, here's a nice cartoon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2afuTvUzBQ)
"Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night
God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light." -- Alexander Pope.
It is not coincidental that we use the term Enlightenment to speak of both spiritually clarified beings (Jesus, Buddha, Socrates) and the period of human history when it began to be understood that human beings possessed (at least to some degree) the power/ability to qualitatively improve their existence…….
Reflections on Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’
The cave is the universe as comprehended by the mind, the darkness ignorance, and the fire reason and science. But the cave of perceived reality (like the universe it attempts to grasp) is without walls. The darkness (ignorance) is the space where science and reason have shed no light, and at that shadow’s edge (just beyond the illuminated) is the veil of mystery, which only enlarges as the expanding light grows, for there are no walls in this infinite mystery, the "walls" of the cave exist only in our minds………
“This vein presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished would recognize that infinity of other truths of which he understands nothing." Galileo
The enlightened ones exist in the space where the ever-expanding light dances with the ever-expanding mystery (the Mystery abides), those who would reject science and reason remain trapped in the cave; by continually dousing the flame of their own reason with irrational dogma, the ‘truths’ revealed by science remain ungraspable, and existence is explained by delusion……. these then, the irrational dogmas substituted for science and reason are the chains, that keep the self-imprisoned from increasing the light…….
“More Light, more Light” Goethe’s dying words
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