(Melody Brucks) What is REALity?

"Myth is a passsage into reality" --Eliade (as discussed in class)

Today in class we discussed Plato's allegory of the cave. In high school we had gone over this particular story and had to write a few paragraphs on our thoughts. This was my take:

"As I read Plato's essay about the cave I found myself in deep thought of just what exactly he was saying; this idea of ignorance vs. enlightenment, of dark vs. light. His allegory of the prisoners was not far off from realization that I came to, that we are all prisoner's of our own mind.



I found it interesting how Plato defined truth. He states that this "truth" is found in the condition that the people are put in. The prisoner's would not consider actual forms truth, they would consider the shadows of these forms real because that is what they were accustomed to. This made me relate "truth" to the people around me. No one person is in the same truth as any other one person! This is because we are all in our own cave of reality that we have made throughout our lifetime.


Plato also addresses how the darkness of the cave represents ignorance. This makes sense to me because it always seems to be that the person with the least amount of knowlege on a topic thinks that he or she is absolutely correct on the issue. This is because they have come accustomed to the shadows and cannot see clearly to admit that their reality is not actually real.


This brings up an entirely new topic of what exactly reality is?! Plato calls it the light. But how do we know whose light is actually the pure sun or whose possibly is only UV rays inside of some tanning bed? This question is exactly the thoughts that Pluto was trying to stir. He goes on to say that even in the light, prisoner's can still be led astray, and that to find true enlightenment, we need to keep searching. We must never be satisfied with our cave of ideas, because there may always possibly be another world out there that can show us more than mere shadows. We just have to have the courage to admit we were wrong and keep on looking for the sun."

I find my thoughts completely relevant to mythology because our own cave of reality is no more right or wrong than any other person's cave of reality, so who are we to judge myths and say that they aren't truth and who are we to tell someone not to believe in Santa Clause?! Myths are powerful and meaningful to the person believing and retelling them and we should honor and repect that whether we think they are sane or not, because maybe what we consider "real" is completely off from the actual truth as well.

Inception is an amazing movie and I would tell everyone to watch it. The topic of what is real or not plays heavily in that movie and there is a scene where a bunch of old men get together and dream everyday. A character asks why they want to be in a dream and another character replies (and I'm totally paraphrasing because I cannot remember the exact quote) "because to them, the dream is reality; they come here to live." If that is not a modern sentence for illo tempore I don't know what is!

I'll end with a quote from Joseph Cambell that we also discussed in class; "What is a dream if it isn't a personalized myth? And what is a myth if it isn't a depersonalized dream?" --great quote and shows how dream/myth/reality are all interchangeable words. Re-read this post and substitute each word for the other two; the message is still the same!