Now, yes, yes, I know I said I would make this a daily blog (at least that's what I told myself), but being a college student hardly allows you to spend at least 15 minutes a day brainstorming about how ignorant you really are. I've got an entire life ahead of me to worry about that and, if I ever do have kids, I have their ignorance-plagued lives to worry about as well. I could pledge to write at least once a week, but then I'll write a post about how you really can't measure a week in layman's terms and how a week is really an illusion and like the Creation story, can be millions and millions of years instead of 7 days x 24 hours. Justification, my friends, is a weapon, like ignorance is a crime, although...justification doesn't kill ignorance, it makes it worse. (I know, there's no logic to it..but it's logical in my head and that's all that really matters.)
I hate to refer to the same class in consecutive posts but this class I'm taking and this professor who's giving the class are...incredible. I can't get enough of both.
What I plan to do is transcribe my crappy, eco-friendly notebook's notes into my new Moleskine notebook, because after taking a modern art history course in Paris that I absolutely loved I realized that there are certain lessons that should last forever. Buying Moleskine notebooks for these classes semi-guarantees this. God, I sound like a commercial.
Anywho, there's a story, or really allegory, that is simply brilliant: Plato's allegory of the cave, commonly known as the Myth of the Cave. Besides it being a multifaceted approach to the human condition, it works with the theme of my blog.
To understand the allegory one must be capable of using their imagination, or so my professor said.
So imagine you're in a cave. There's a wall in front of you and a wall behind you. You are chained (I'm guessing to the ceiling)--hands, legs, head, they're all chained. Behind you is a fire burning and in between the fire and you there's a walkway. People, whom you are not aware of and can't see, are walking through this walkway carrying "artifacts," or different objects, on their heads (you don't know this). You can only see what's in front of you, and because of the fire, these objects become shadows. As for sounds, the noise the people make echoes off the walls...it is a cave after all.
Imagine this is the definition of your existence--you know nothing else than what resides in the cave.
To a person outside this will seem bizarre, funny, abnormal, unorthodox. But not to you. This has been your life.
Actually, this is how your life—how my life—works. The people we can’t see, they are our parents, our teachers, our friends. Anybody who has ever had a say in our lives. These shadows, they are the “realities” or ideas we have been taught—we know nothing else. Our chains? They don’t weigh on us because we can’t perceive that weight, we just perceive comfort. Comfort induced by not knowing of anything and anybody else.
But what if we are suddenly dragged outside the cave to discover another reality?
I’ll let your imagination do the rest. Think.
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