The doctrine of forms is familiar to students of man's romance with wisdom. Is this purely academic, to be accepted or rejected on faith, or to be kept as an object of sophomoric debate and banter, and good at best only for that, or is it useful and does it have some practical application?

    In Plato's "Republic", this world of appearances was likened to shadow play upon a cave wall that we have been chained to sit facing. There is a light behind us, and we have been so long bound, wearing blinders, with only the wall to watch, that we have come to take the shadows for ultimate reality. The "two-dimensional" shadow of our "three-dimensional" body we take to be ourselves, those of our fellows we take to be truly them. Projections of various inner cave features dark-paint the stone canvas and make its scenery, "forming" its environment. Myriad creatures, unseen in their substantiality, also block the light, giving the shadow world its animals and other natural life. Other entities, unbound, occasionally visit the vicinity of our wall; coming and going with indifference to shadow obstacles, their shadows appear and vanish in ways that outrage our sense from the common experience of things moving upon our wall, for they can move behind or around the plane of obstacles to which we are fixed in casting our shadows upon the wall. We call them "saints" or angels, ghosts, spooks, or UFOs.

    When a person is removed from his seat to be taken to another section, we see his shadow fall (or, rather, cease to fall), the dark-casting of the shackles remaining but now unmoving, lifeless. We mourn and say a friend and comrade has died. That same one might be returned to where his shadow falls again to some new place where we might see it from our place before the wall; but the old shackle liners have been traded, and even if we see him, it is without recognition. It appears to us that a new person has been born and is growing among us as he raises himself in his new seat.

    The light itself that casts the shadows comes from a source entirely outside the cave. Yet, is it not conceivable that the cave with its various projections, the wall itself, myriad creatures and unbound entities, the very light that shines reflected from the outside, are all part of some strange God? Are the shackled men the fingers of this God, a set of eyes on the front of each one, and a third - which they never seem to use - to look above and behind them, away from the wall? Then He has kept these fingers tied to their places before the wall so long that they have fallen asleep, and, as they are numb, the God has forgotten Himself in them, even believing substantiveness of the shadow world, and as them, realizes not that all that they see shadowed on the wall, including their fellow finger shadow men, and all they might see if they would turn their finger-of-God heads a bit away from the wall, and all that they might encounter were they to wander freely in the cave, and even the very light itself (without which there could be no shadows to show what lies behind, and nothing would be illuminated to be seen by the light's reflection were they to look out at things directly), exists within themselves, and can be more truly seen by the inward look.

END OF PART ONE.

The suspicion that all of physical reality is only shadow begins the search for freedom.

To realize that the shackles that bind us to face the wall, casting one shadow and from its perspective viewing all others, are themselves only of shadow, is the beginning of freedom.

When we find that the light for which we seek is the light by which we seek, the goal and the path have become one.

Copyright 1998-99 by Hiero.JDG for the Paradisians

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