Plato’s Cave
Plato’s Cave is an allegory contained within the larger work of Plato’s “Republic”. I won’t go into detail about the cave part, but you can do a google search and read it on your own. I highly recommend it.
One of the many things I’ve learned from working with people as a therapist is that psychological strife is often born of living lies. The further we live from the truth (the truth and our truth), the harder time we have navigating the world (our inner world and the world outside of us). By ignoring our inner voice, or being unable to differentiate signal from noise in regard to what our true feelings and instincts are, lead to a confusion and an inability to act without fear. Anxiety and depression are largely the symptoms of living in this misalignment of our true selves, of our values, of our hopes and dreams. When our internal compass is off like this we can also struggle to find adequate meaning and purpose. (Side Note: the culture we live in seems by design to undermine our innate abilities to find ourselves, but that is a topic for another essay).
The light of truth reveals who we are, what we need, and illuminates the path before us we must walk in order to live a life that feels in alignment and harmony. The problem with the truth however, is that it’s often painful, scary, and it requires us to ”leave the cave” to find it.
Navigating truth is often treacherous because it often means dissolving some previously held beliefs or notions about how the world works and who we are in it. The human psyche however has means to protect itself from harm via dissolution. The reasons for this may sound silly, for why should we have such things that make growth, change, and the pursuit of truth harder? For one, you don’t really need truth, growth, or change to survive all the time. You can get by with something approximating it, and that will often do good enough. Life and the universe is mind bogglingly complex, and to know everything is just too impossible a task. It would require far too many resources, and most of the time a rudimentary map will do quite well. Think of the cartoonish looking maps of amusement parks. They are not very high resolution, they often don’t place things to scale, and don’t have anything but internal reference points from which to navigate. This is all fine and well for getting from the roller coaster to the water slides. But trying to use that map to find your way from the amusement park to anywhere else in the world won’t help you very much. For that you’ll need a bigger and better map.
To get a such a map and use it requires more. If there weren’t maps that others have already made for us and you had to draw one up yourself it would take a considerable amount of resources and time to do so. Maybe you would get a drone and fly it around taking photos. Or perhaps you would use surveying equipment to take measurements of the land. If you had satellites and a global positioning system that would be even better. Maybe you’ll have to settle for a compass and climbing up every hill and mountain top to get a good view. You could consult old maps that others have drawn. This all takes time and energy to do so. When you are working to grow and change you are updating the “map” of your nervous system and your cognitive perceptions an that takes time.
That this takes so much time is often frustrating for people. Although rapid change might sound good it’s only until we consider what it might do to us. I will borrow again from the Greeks, this time the “Ship of Theseus”. It’s a philosophical exercise in which a decaying ship is rebuilt plank by plank. If all the planks are replaced, the thought experiment asks us to consider whether it’s the same ship or not. Now imagine instead of replacing the planks one at a time, you attempt to replace all of the planks at the same time. Doing so could easily compromise the structural integrity of the ship, it may fall apart. Something needs to hold the structural integrity of the vessel enough so that it can be rebuilt one plank at a time. Even a caterpillar which turns to amorphous goo in the cocoon is at least contained by the walls of the cocoon during its metamorphosis to butterfly. This is much like our psyche.
The mind, or rather the sense of self, has a structure to it much like that boat, or even a house. If you take a sledge hammer to the underlying framework you may introduce too much instability and the structure can collapse. This is partially what happens in a nervous breakdown. The self unravels and the individual can struggle to function for a time while they work to build back up. Obviously this can be detrimental, so our psyche has developed safeguards (defense mechanisms) to prevent this from happening.
Change can be costly, but so is staying the same, never adapting or growing. Stagnation is a failure to adapt to the changing environment (and the one constant in life is change). Consider the adaptations required throughout life as we go through each developmental stage. The requirements of you to master the stages of childhood are different than that of later adulthood. Our social environments shift throughout our various stages of life and relationships as well. At what point the balance tips and the potential chaos of change outweighs the drawbacks of stagnation is no easy line to discern. We often tip into stagnation by a large margin before we are aware that something needs to change. Indications can range in feeling alone in our relationships, dreading going to work, becoming depressed or anxious.
When we get to the point where we want change, we may rush out of the cave into the light, expecting clarity of vision, truth, a way forward revealed in a moment. In the cave allegory, those previously chained in the darkness venture outside, the blinding light of greater truth is painful just as exposure to the new truths necessary for personal growth are painful and disorienting. What we think we know is based on what we’ve previously lived, chained to the floor of the cave. As we remove these bonds and come out into the light, its not that we suddenly see the truth, (for its painfully bright) it stings the eyes. Instead It’s the shadows cast by the light which we will make sense of at first. Shadows are familiar to us. As we continue to strive towards greater understanding and truth, our eyes adjust and it’s the light of stars in the night which become known. Only after time and adjustment can we tolerate and see by the daylight a path that may lead us towards greater truth.
If we don’t change we risk psychological pain in a world where change is the only constant, we must adapt when needed. The question becomes, at what point does the cost of changing outweigh that of staying the same?
