Imagine you’re sitting in a dark cave. You’ve been here as long as you can remember—in fact, you’ve never known anything else.
You sit all day watching shadows flicker across the cave wall in front of you. You are bound in chains and shackles, so that you can’t turn around to see the source of the light, or the objects making the shadows—the shadows are all you know.
The shadows come in all kinds of strange shapes, and you have words for some of them. Sometimes you talk with the people sitting next to you, your companions in this existence, and tell stories about the shadows and what they mean. You have all kinds of theories, maybe even strong beliefs about these shadows, and these stories are the frame of reference you use to understand yourself and the world you live in.
But all these stories are based on a lie. You have no idea about the objects that cast the shadows on the cave wall. You don’t know where the light that dances across the cave wall comes from. You certainly know nothing of the world outside, with its green trees, winding rivers, its blue skies and flights of birds. You’ve never seen or even heard of the sun, the ultimate source of light.
Right at the beginning of Western philosophy, there is a metaphor. You might remember it from Philosophy 101: Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave says that the world we experience every day is an illusion, or at best a pale reflection of a higher world.
But what are we to make of this allegory? Should we accept Plato’s premise, or reject it? And what does it have to teach us about our life in the world and how to navigate it?
Like a Dream, a Rainbow, Or a Magic Show
The idea that the reality we experience is an illusion has echoed down through Western philosophy and culture for over 2000 years. But it has parallels in Eastern philosophy as well, in the Indian concept of Māyā, the illusory nature of appearances, and in the Buddhist philosophy of śūnyatā or emptiness.
In certain Tibetan Buddhist teachings, the reality we experience is said to be like a dream, a magic show, or a rainbow. Like a dream, it seems to be real until we wake up. Like a magic show, it appears real to our senses, but is actually a trick of perception. Like a rainbow, it appears solid but is in fact just a fleeting phenomenon caused by the temporary coming-together of sunlight and moisture in the air.
From a Buddhist perspective, everything in life is like that—nothing has any lasting or inherent existence, just a momentary appearance made up of temporary causes and conditions. Our ignorance (Avidyā) of this reality is said to be the primary cause of human suffering, as we get attached to illusory things and our made-up stories about them.
A Glitch In the Matrix
While the modern world seems to have rejected Plato and the Buddha, and embraced a philosophy of naive realism—believing that the material world we experience with our five senses is not only real, but that it’s all there is—cracks are starting to appear in the facade.
Plato’s philosophy found one of its most powerful modern expressions in the 1999 film The Matrix. The protagonist, Neo, comes to learn that humanity has been living in a virtual reality simulation created by an AI, that is using human bodies as batteries to power its race of machines. The Matrix, as a false reality, is used to keep the humans docile and ignorant of their true fate. The symbolic language of The Matrix—the red pill and the blue bill, “there is no spoon,” déjà vu as a “glitch in the Matrix” and so on—has become pervasive, finding its way into cultural memes and becoming one of the defining myths of the 21st century.
Even Elon Musk has publicly speculated that there’s a high probability we’re all living in a computer simulation, a virtual reality created by some advanced form of intelligence. Many Silicon Valley types take what’s called the simulation hypothesis seriously, even literally. But the simulation hypothesis is just a modern, technological version of Plato’s myth, with a computer program taking the place of a cave full of flickering shadows.
However, there may be scientific reasons to doubt the veracity of appearances. In his book The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid The Truth From Our Eyes, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that the world we experience through our five senses and our nervous system is far from an objective representation of reality. Instead, we evolved to perceive reality in a way that helped us survive and reproduce.
But as one of my professors in grad school said, “we’re wired for survival, not for happiness.” What if the neurological wiring that helps us survive also blinds us to the truth, and predisposes us to unnecessary suffering?
The Way Out
If the reality we experience is in fact illusory, and if that illusion is in fact a primary cause of human suffering, then what can we do about it?
The contemplative traditions attempt offer a way out. Plato’s followers believed we could reach beyond the Cave through philosophical contemplation and theurgy, a process of ascent through higher levels of reality (similar to that found in the Corpus Hermeticum). Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta teach various forms of meditation and self-inquiry aimed at seeing through the illusory nature of appearances and apprehending the truth.
I’m not enlightened, and I can’t claim to have transcended human suffering. But in my experience, even an intellectual understanding of teachings like the Buddhist concept of emptiness takes some of the oomph out of suffering. And the experiences I’ve had through practices like Effortless Mindfulness and self-inquiry feel like glimpses of sunlight beyond the Cave.
That’s all for this week! As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mind, Meaning, and Magic. Feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment, below, to let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
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