This article follows my article titled ‘The Liberty sphere must discover our Humanity’.  In this previous article, the picture was sketched that the world around me I form by the concepts that I allow to live within me.  Somehow, my hands and feet and mouth do things aligned to what I allow to live within me. The article also highlights that there are an abundance of possibilities as concepts that I can choose from to carry within me and it seems like ‘anything is possible’.  All I have to do is choose.  I want to link this to Plato’s World View because it is a very useful parable and the base of a very sound and broad concept for our understanding of the human being today.

Plato gave the Cave analogy where he says that if a person were fixed in such a way that they could not turn their heads back but were forced to look at the wall of the cave and that they could see on the wall the shadows cast by objects passing behind their heads but in front of the light of a fire further back, the shadows that they would see would be semblances of the objects causing the shadows, just as, actual things of the material world are a semblance of reality, of the world of ideas.  In practical terms an example would be that:   I see a cup as the ‘shadow’, a semblance, of the world of ideas, or of my thinking.  The cup, when I look at it in detail and objectively and connect the right concepts to it, informs me of the idea behind the cup, that is, to hold liquid.  Taking this further, if I have a cup and a glass in front of me as two ‘shadows’ that I look at carefully and objectively, I notice that the ideas are different between the two.  The glass cannot hold hot liquids as it has no handle, would lose heat quickly and so on.  The cup on the other hand can hold hot liquids because of the handle.  The ideas behind each is quite different and the consequence of these ideas expresses itself differently in the forms of the glass and the cup.  While others might interpret Plato in another way, my experience and testing has shown me that our thinking is indeed very powerful and does impact our environment directly.

 Taking Plato’s concept of the Cave and looking in a bit more detail at what part the light of the fire plays in the whole understanding of it, one comes to the realisation that the all possibility is contained within the light.  It depends what part of the light we allow ourselves to think about or to hold within ourselves in value systems, skills, experience, and so on.  If I have a piece of land, I could allow it to become a cabbage patch, a hotel, a glass production facility, or a racetrack. It depends on what I hold within myself, what choices I make, what I value.  So, if I hold within myself a desired outcome of a drinking glass, this is what will eventuate.  Initially it is an idea, but it becomes a ‘shadow’ or a material item, a glass.  This comes via the initiation of my thinking, a non-material activity, and ends up via my will as a physical item, the glass.  So here I possibly add to the view of Plato in that the object passing between the fire and the back of the head of the observer of the shadow is not a solid one, but rather what lives in me as inner content.  I feel myself as an allower of the light.  I am inherently a dark ‘lens’ that can become alive and active, make choices, get skills and experience and so on.  To the extent that I get this right, the light can come through my lens and appear on earth.  My dark lens is ‘cleared’ through my inner clarity and work, in places, so that the Light can come through it and appear on earth.  For example, I cleared my lens of darkness as it relates to glass manufacture, and a glass eventually appeared as a consequence of my will being directed from this source.  Had I wanted cabbages to appear, I would have had to place something else in my lens, something related to farming cabbages.  So, in principle, my lens is dark and lets no light through when I am unconscious.  As soon as I am conscious and applying myself inwardly in a certain way, something other than nature happens around me.  I can choose what I want to be relative to the Light.  I can choose to be a farmer or a businessman or an artist.  All of these are available to me in principle, but I end up being something – an allower of a certain kind.  I decide what clear spots and forms that I want in my lens.  These then allow things to take shape in the physical world. It is through me that things other than nature happen on earth.  I am the connection between the world of ideas and the world of things.  The lens is opened when I practice, take in, master the human qualities, or lens openers, within me.  This requires training and effort in daily life but makes me a servant of the Light.