PLATO’S CAVE

It’s taken me (almost) twenty years to see it, but The Matrix is essentially Plato’s Cave isn’t it?

Plato’s Cave is a hypothetical construct, where individuals who are bound to a cave, see shadows on the wall, cast by the sun behind them, and perceive those shadows to be their reality. Plato wondered how freedom would affect those prisoners’ sense of what reality is. What, for example, if they saw the sun and realised the ‘true’ nature of the world?

I’m sitting here by the lake tonight. The birds are going crazy, flapping and squawking and croaking into the dusk. I’m quietly processing.

Plato suggested that we’re only capable of processing the world with our senses, and that there might be a higher plane, or planes, of pure reality that we’re ill-equipped to deal with. I think I might agree with that - we exist in the three dimensional construct of a universe that’s thermodynamically restricted itself that way. But there is so much more...

And not just out there in the realm beyond mathematics! Deep inside of us too! Buried in every fold and starburst of the elegant reality of who we are.

I don’t want to get pompous or intellectual about it, but I’d quite like to study a bit more about philosophy! Philo-sophy, the love of wisdom, the equity of discovering knowledge. At university, the maths students used to say that the deeper you go into the rabbit hole of mathematics, the more it starts looking like philosophy. I can quite believe it.

“Let me show you,” says Morpheus implacably, behind his reflective glasses, “How deep the rabbit hole goes...”

These birds are really noisy. I like it - reminds me that life flows through all of us. I can sit here in silence; that’s part of my design. They can cause a ruckus on an island in the middle of a lake. It’s what they do.

Somehow or other, each of us operating according to our design, letting life find a way, is really rather a beautiful thing.