Landscapes in the Mind, and Plato's Cave
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I have been convinced for a long time that most of what we call culture is
really just the noise we make while desperately trying to avoid being alone
with ourselves. The United States is drowning in the commerce of consumption
not because it really needs or wants more cars and dishwashers, but because
we're to frightened to turn off the noise of production and ask ourselves why
we're making all this junk to begin with. We're drowning in a sea of billboards
and TV commercials designed to try and convince ourselves that happiness is
"out there", in some external form that can be acquired simply by paying out
some money, or by looking and acting the right way. But it's not that simple,
and the happiness we seek isn't "out there".

Human beings are very, very strange animals. We physically occupy real space
and time, but we live in an endless landscape of illusions produced in our
imaginations by the sensory input that enters our brains. Like the people in
Plato's Cave, all we can see in our mind's are the shadows of reality dancing
across the darkness. The only information we have about reality comes in to our
minds through our limited senses, and our minds have to use their imagination
to put these fragmented bits of information together into a meaningful "whole".

But that "whole" is mostly imaginary. What we think is real and what we think
has meaning are still just shadows dancing across the walls of minds stuck
within the darkness of our limited physical bodies. We can only know what our
senses let filter into the cave, and it's not nearly enough. So we take those
little glimmers of light and fill them in with our imagination. The result is a
whole imagined landscape in our minds that to us is our reality. It's all we
know. It defines who we are and who everyone else is. It defines the character
and nature of the world around us and it defines God. Yet it's still mostly
just imaginary: just shadows dancing on the cave walls.

It's a very frightening thing, for most of us, to be confronted with the
realization that most of what we think we know about God, life, ourselves, and
the world are just imaginary extrapolations derived from minimal fragments of
information that have filtered into us over the years. To recognize this truth
is to see that whole landscape that we invented return to being a confused
jumble of shadows flitting across the wall of our minds. It means having to
face the realization that we don't know what's going on, or who we are, or why
we're here. And this is so difficult for most of us to face that we will never
do so if we can possibly find a way to avoid it. Even when the landscapes we
have invented for ourselves are full of self hatred, abuse and hopelessness, we
still will prefer even that to the horror of having no landscape to stand in at
all.

And so our species continues on, millions and millions of us, each with his
head buried in this imagined landscape of his own, desperately trying not to
see that what he thinks is real and true is really only a shadow dance taking
place in his mind. We seek out accomplices among each other who will help us to
maintain our illusions. We avoid those who's illusions contradict our own. We
coalesce into huge cultures based on the similarity of our imaginary mental
landscapes. Often we will even kill those who threaten to expose our illusions
as illusion: lovers who refuse to love us in return, atheists who refuse to
accept our illusions about God, homosexuals or polygamists who don't accept our
illusions about sexual interaction, and revolutionaries who wish to move us in
some other direction. We will kill them to keep them from making us see that
our ideas about truth and reality are just illusions created in our minds. And
we drown out our own suspicions with the numbing noise of our own endless and
breathless effort to force the world around us to comply with our imagined
ideas of it.  We would much rather "correct" the entire universe than to stop
and ask ourselves if perhaps it's WE who have the incorrect view. To do that
would bring us face to face with the even more horrible realization that our
view really is just a view and that "correctness" is relative to it's point of
view. It's just an imaginary landscape that we pretend is real because the real
one is too big and too unfathomable for us to grasp.

We are the victims and prisoners of our own imagination and fear. We are beings
lost in the labyrinth of our own illusions, and we don't even want to come out.
Well, most of us don't. There are always a few who are so curious and
persistent that they just can't keep themselves from poking at the shadows. And
there are also always a few who by circumstance have been forced to see that
their view of reality was never real to begin with. And a few of these will
also recognize that this is an inevitable part of the human condition. They
will know that we and our illusions are inseparable. The best we can hope for
is the courage to keep this in mind, and so not to hold too dearly to our
images of reality, our ideas of truth, and our insistence upon justice. And
certainly not to harm others in an effort to deny that our illusions are
illusions, or to force our illusions upon them.

In the end we will all succumb to our illusions sooner or later. After all,
they really are all we can make of the limited bits and pieces of reality that
we're able to take in. And after all, too, this is who and what we are. It's
what we do. But I'm hoping that through time and evolution, we may slowly rise
out of the cave. Perhaps some higher levels of self awareness will enable us to
remain cognizant of our limited state and therefor cognizant of the imaginary
aspect of that landscape we call our reality. And through this awareness of
limits, the limits may be surpassed.

But then it's part of my own imaginary landscape, these days, to be so hopeful.

Peace,
Dave