The Esoteric Secrets of Plato’s Cave & the Truth Beyond the Simulation

take a look around your room what do you see I'm going to guess some walls a collection of objects my face flapping away on your screen however if you look slower look deeper at any given object you're going to find something strange give this a try if you stare at an item for even a couple of minutes with unbroken sight what seems still and solid suddenly becomes considerably more Wiggly almost vibrating maybe it's just a trick of the senses you say well Science 2 tells us that nothing is really still the atoms that make up

objects are vibrating and you've got to see this according to the most advanced imaging technology we have cells themselves are like these Cosmic flowing ecosystems great philosophers and contemplatives say the same thing to quote Professor Eric steinhardt who's paraphrasing the Great neopat IC philosopher platinus every production of matter is a lie is no true reality but a merely deceptive simulation of course here we're just talking about the physical world but what about everything else that we hold to be important our identity our ideas are religious and political alignments your philosophical beliefs are those real uh

by what standard is anything real and if so what does it mean for me my own psycho spirit spiritual context my own ability to make sense of reality find knowledge find purpose in life dizzying questions for sure some would argue you should just leave questions like this alone I disagree not only do I disagree I can't do it and I know many of you can't leave big questions like this alone either so what is reality what is real do we live in something akin to a simulation or a matrix and On a related note what

is true truth what is knowledge there's definitely no shortage of supposed answers to those questions out there but in decades of searching there's one way of seeing that I really believe shines a light on questions like this a way of seeing that really does cut through the illusion and will forever transform your understanding of reality and your life the ancient Greek philosopher Plato's allegory of the cave is the gateway to this w of seeing it's not only one of the oldest ways of cutting through the illusion but most multi-layered and mysterious versions of what today

we would call the whole Matrix or simulation scenario and for those of you thinking oh I already know this cave allegory trust me there are rarely discussed massively powerful esoteric insights that we're going to cover in this exploration but first the basics what is it broadly The Cave Story is a thought experiment from Plato's most sprawling work the Republic in it Plato through his teacher Socrates tells us or specifically uh in the story Glon Plato's brother also this is just Dawning on me I love that we could construe this as Plato sort of indirectly calling

the reader his Brethren by having uh his teacher Socrates address his brother glaucon anyway through the voice of Socrates Plato tells us to imagine a cave that descends deep into the ground in it there is a very strange matrix-like scenario in which unsuspecting people have spent their entire lives chained up facing a wall on the wall they witness Shadows depicting all sorts of things animals people dramas season one of mil Manor yes somehow mil Manor is a real show I was trying to look up the most vapid reality TV show I could find uh and

that was it seemed like the perfect uh modern example of a shadow on the wall anyway these shadow dramas are the cave denis's entire world so of course they become obsessed with that they argue about what they see they are totally enamored with this Shadow reality so much so that they never question it eventually though Socrates has us imagin that one of these prisoners is freed that for the first time in his life he turns away from the wall and sees the deeper truth that these Shadows are merely projections of objects passing in front of

a fire that there are people orchestrating these shadow dramas but despite what you might think the prisoner does not actually make a break for it he's overwhelmed terrified confused by what he sees he wants to go back to his familiar Shadow World Socrates tells us that the freed prisoner would likely need to be dragged out of the cave because it's just too overwhelming and confusing and when this happens again he would reach yet another level of being overwhelmed and Confused This Time by something far greater than just an object passing in front of a flame

this time he's overwhelmed by the blinding luminous Grandeur of the outside world itself it takes quite some time for the prisoner's eyes to adjust to the True Light of reality but eventually they do quote slowly his eyes adjust to the light of the Sun for first he can see only Shadows gradually he sees the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves eventually he's able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally he can look upon the sun itself only after he can look straight

at the sun is he able to reason about it and what it is so our freed prisoner whether he likes it or not is essentially an enlightened being with multi-dimensional knowledge at least compared to the people who are still locked up in the cave muttering about Shadow dramas given that Socrates argues that it becomes the freed prisoners Duty his philosophical burden to return to the cave and share what he's learned but just like before the freed prisoner doesn't want to go back and it turns out he's right to because Socrates tells us that when he

does he will be ridiculed he will be called mad for what he tells the people still lock up in the cave and not only will this newly Meed philosopher have an uphill battle if he's ever going to free anyone Socrates actually says they will likely uh un alive him before they follow him out and of course this is a reference that platoo is making to the fact that this is exactly what the powers that be in Athens did to Socrates himself now I'm sure you already see where this is going thematically and metaphorically of course

something like this cave scario really is the state of our world because most people and let's be honest we ourselves are mostly enamored by things akin to Shadows on the cave wall and even if you're not at the very bottom of this level if you're not at the mil manner level this is still true of you further higher truth if we ever find it is absolutely overwhelming when we're confronted by it and as much as we or anyone says they want it in reality they're resistant especially when it challenges their status quo uh shakes up

their worldview clashes with their beliefs their belief system their BS as one of my favorite authors Robert Anton Wilson often put it yet if you are able to find some real wisdom from Beyond The Cave or simulation if you like it's kind of a burden because like the prisoner it becomes your duty to share that wisdom this Socrates /pl are arguing is the burden of the philosopher the burden of the wise so that in a nutshell is a basic summary of The Cave tale and this on its own is powerful it is relatable so much

so that we can easily project our own egos onto it a taste of this story in that sense is actually a bit dangerous because we can delude ourselves into thinking that we aren't the ones in the cave we're the ones who are free we're not not sheep we see the simulation for what it is but on the contrary the very first piece of wisdom is to see that you are the prisoner you are the one enamored with the Shadows on the wall you are the one living in a simulation comprised of your own beliefs opinions

and worldview we are the ones reluctant to leave and there are always forces both psychological and societal maybe even spiritual that are trying to pull us back down so where does that leave us what if we do want to climb out of the cave and we're ready to carry the burden of higher wisdom well if we want to go there we've got to go into deeper layers than you're going to typically find in conversations about the cave and we are going to get there I promise but first there are some absolutely vital pieces of wisdom

we cannot skip over if we want to fully understand the wisdom of the cave that come from earlier in the same text Plato's Republic the first is the what is it that the sun really represents to Plato because remember in the cave allegory the sun is the thing that symbolizes ultimate truth it is what the freed prisoner must gaze directly upon if he wants true knowledge true freedom to begin to get an idea of why we need to go back to Socrates discussion of the son which also was with Plato's brother Glon so Glon asked

Socrates a truly massive question he wants to understand what the form of the good is a quick word about forms I'm going to speedrun this the idea of forms are Central to Plato's entire philosophy they are the opposite of the particular and the source of the particular you can think of these as archetypes but not just psychological archetypes these are ontological archetypes that really exist so of course we see particular cats running around all of those cats according to platonic thought descend from emanate from one perfect form of catness an archetype of catness and the

same is true of all things now at the height of all of these forms sits this thing that Glon is asking Socrates about the form of the good glaucon wants Socrates to explain this pure unadulterated source of all goodness and wisdom and beauty and order in reality uh I am with you on that Glon but of course Socrates says this is not quite possible for him to put into words but what he can do is give him a simile and to do this he talks about the highest Concept in the physical world the sun quote

as goodness stands in the intelligible realm to intelligence and the things we know the sun stands in the visible realm to sight and the things we see and to make this Arrangement more clear Socrates calls the son the child of goodness The Offspring of goodness and it makes sense why he would compare the two right the sun is essential for our world's existence its overflowing luminosity and blinding Beauty feeds everything on the planet nothing would be visible nothing would be alive if it weren't for the Sun but the Sun Also overwhelms right it's too much

for our senses you can't even look at it without destroying your eyes but as Grand as it is it is only a child of the higher Beauty and truth that is the form of the good I'm sure the sandard view is to take this pretty metaphorically but I don't think Plato and Socrates are really being metaphorical here I think that he's demonstrating that there's a real relationship between the Sun and the Transcendent form of goodness that exists in the higher intelligible realm that they are literally related in a sort of metaphysical ontological chain of being

more on that later so this form of the good it's something we can know to a degree like the Sun but ultimately it is transcendent or at least something we cannot fully know through traditional uh methods of knowledge acquisition I was really trying to boil this down into something concise and the best I could come up with is the form of the good is the mystery that makes the world make sense it is the thing that allows you to make sense of the world through the application of your mind so returning to the cave this

brings another layer of insight another layer to the duty of the freed prisoner or the new philosopher that they should like the sun shine goodness and Truth onto others through learning and through living in tune with this wisdom of the form of the good so this is what the sun represents to Plato and Socrates and we'll get more into what it actually means to live in tune with the form of the good later because there's another fundamental mystery we need to get to first if we want to even think about freeing ourselves from the cave

and here we're going to start to answer the question of what knowledge is how to acquire knowledge how to Value knowledge what it means to be wise and free of the cave or the simulator according to Plato and Socrates and I don't think it's going to be what most of you think first of all is that even possible after all Socrates himself perhaps his most famous utterance is that all he knows is that he knows nothing and the Oracle of Deli supposedly dubbed him the wisest man in all of Athens because of it well that

is true and kind of not true depending on how you look at it um I have a theory on it we will get there by the end of the video but first another key concept that is core to this idea of what wisdom is and also reflects the entire Journey out of the cave and this is the famous divided line allegory this again comes from earlier in Plato's Republic really it's right before Plato's Cave it leads into Plato's Cave and according to Socrates this divided line that is broken up into four sections demonstrates that there

are varying kinds or purities of knowledge that there is a hierarchy an epistemological hierarchy these four grades of knowledge are aasia pistus dioa and nois each of these four kinds of wisdom represent a kind of cognition a kind of knowing a level of knowing translating them from the ancient Greek at all especially into Modern English out of the context they were originally used in kind of trashes them but of course this is what we must do as non Greek speakers so first we have akashia this is the knowledge of images likenesses opinions also gets thrown

in here in the cave allegory this is akin to only knowing of the Shadows on the wall then we have pistus this is usually translated as belief or faith in the cave allegory this is the object passing in front of the flame that projects the shadow this would also pertain to if we use our cat example from earlier if I'm drawing a picture of a cat this would not be pistus it would be the cat itself that is pistus now as we move from pistus to Diono we cross a really important threshold we go from

talking about ways of knowing that exist only in the physical world to ways of knowing that are intelligible ways of knowing that exist in the mind and this is an actual statement about hierarchy to Plato and Socrates the ways of knowing of the Mind are hierarchically superior to these lower kinds of knowing that only exist in the physical the first way of knowing is Diono this is our capacity to do things like math and logic in the cave allegory this is the point in which the prisoner uh sees the outside world but he only sees

the Reflections in the water he's not able yet to gaze directly upon the Sun and speaking of gazing on the sun this is noesis this is direct apprehension of the forms this is abstract nuanced complex we're going to get deeper specifically into noesis later so these are the four kinds of knowing the four grades of knowing on Plato's divided line we need to talk though about the line itself because the line itself has some special features and it really demonstrates the kind of multi-dimensional wisdom and the esoteric knowledge that's embedded in Plato's work now if

you follow the direction Socrates gives there's only one correct way to construct the line and when you do it you get a very special proportion you get the golden section of course it is widely believed that the golden ratio is an expression of great Beauty it is ubiquitous throughout the design world and in art you will find it approximated in nature all over the place it's symbolized in various mathematical applications in the form of fi and as you may or may not know uh Plato was obsessed with geometry on the outside of Plato's Academy it

said let none ignorant of geometry enter here and he was a deep student of ukids elements ukian geometry but the sacred geometry goes much deeper than that my friends a truly dedicated researcher by the name of John Bremer discovered something absolutely insane in Plato's Republic after get this counting every single syllable in Plato's Republic this is a work of over 200,000 words by the way what he found is that the divided line literally is an important dividing point in the entire work that the divided line literally divides this massive work into a golden section I'm

going to say this again Plato purposefully placed the divided line at the exact ratio in the text he created the exact golden ratio in the text through where he placed the divided line analogy is your head exploding yet because your head should be exploding imagine the planning necessary on Plato's part to pull this off and by the way this is just scratching the surface of other hidden geometric themes and Pythagorean harmonic themes in Plato's Republic once again I am speedrunning this if you want more specifically on what I'm getting at here uh there's some links

in the description that explain it in more fine grain detail and I think even already you can begin to appreciate the fact that pl's work is like this multi-layered onion of meanings it's like a literary psychic megalithic pyramid or something that encodes all kinds of secrets so now that we know what the divided line is the four types of knowledge and the hierarchy they sit in now we see another layer of depth to Plato's Cave that the whole journey out actually exemplifies the different kinds of knowing the different grades of knowing and to Nutshell it

that means if you fully want to know fully understand something it's not just about how you feel it's not just about your opinions or how things seem according to your senses I want to be clear it's not that aasia and pistus you know these worldly ways of knowing are wrong we require them but if we want to be free of the cave we have to go further we have to be able to question things logically investigate our own bias and behavior you need to be able to wrap it in logic see it in its full

context fully digest information from all angles because if you're not that is you're not deconstructing things to get to the deeper truth you're trying to preserve your own worldview your own opinion but what's that you say still not esoteric enough well I was hoping you would say that so let's take it there and I'm going to go out on a limb and say even if you knew everything or have thought of everything up to this point I don't think you've ever heard what I'm about to tell you what if all of this the Cave the

sun The Divided line what if it's not just a metaphor about how to think what if it's not just an epistemological hierarchy a kind of you know purities of knowledge like I was talking about earlier what if it's an actual map of reality itself what if we do not metaphorically live in a false or at least limited Shadow cave reality and what if we could like the prisoner climb out of that simulation into a higher reality what if Plato is providing us a hint here of how we could do that well this is precisely what

many platonic sages believed that reality is comprised of a massive web or chain of forces beings archetypes and that we live very close to the bottom of said chain of said hierarchy the good news though is that we can to a degree and there's debate about this climb that chain into higher forms of knowledge higher realities and that this chain stretches all the way back to that Transcendent goodness and Oneness that we were alluding to earlier when we were talking about the form of the good and speaking of platonic sages uh who went incredibly deep

into this let's talk about procus procus of Athens was the head of Plato's revived Academy he lived from about 412 to 485 CE um actually I just want to pause here and fully acknowledge the scope of this man's genius he was preposterously prolific he wrote like it was a sacred Duty like he was literally on fire on a daily basis he was identified as brilliant from a young age he mastered math and logic took over Plato's revived Academy from his teacher sanus when he was in like his mid-20s this is a man who fully dedicated

his entire soul to the pursuit of wisdom and every conceivable way he even has some miraculous events uh to his name apparently so I just wanted to establish who we're talking about here we're talking about a philosopher wizard Sage genius anyway according to procas this is what the divided line really is it is an occulted piece of Pythagorean wisdom and by the way discussing what that is pythagoreanism this is a whole other rabbit hole that could slurp us right in just to give a little bit of cont context this is a lineage that spawned from

the presocratic philosopher Mystic Pythagoras who seemed to have some sort of philosophical mathematical mystery school he predates Plato and it is widely believed that Plato himself was an initiate of this Pythagorean wisdom because there are Pythagorean themes and hidden pieces of geometric and harmonic wisdom all throughout Plato's works but back to this idea of the divided line actually secretly being a map of reality according to a paper by Professor Peter dein entitled The metaphysics of the divided line in procas quote process's main concern is not so much with the epistemology of the divided line but

rather with its metaphysics and the ontological map it provides for the ascent of the prisoner from the cave mic drop just kidding there's a ton more one way of doing that of climbing that ladder of reality the professor goes on to highlight is and this probably won't be popular with many of you at first is math but before you rage quit this video because math boring really if you think about it math is incredibly mysterious why is it that it can Pierce into reality so deeply why is it that we can use this thing we

just call math to describe the very physical laws of reality curious enough but now let's go into some territory that truly melted my brain and took me a while to fully comprehend the first thing I want to make clear is I'm not talking about mathematical notation here the the symbol system that we use to demonstrate and talk about math I'm talking about what that symbol system points to whatever those truths are of course we can't capture them fully and we can't find them anywhere in physical space yet we can and do logically use them and

prove them to be true all the time not just on pieces of paper but in the inventions that we use to do everything there are millions of cars on the road right now there are thousands of airplanes in the sky zillions of videos being watched on the internets all because of math and logic but not just math and Logic the deeper truths that they point to but what are these truths and why can the human Mind through using math and logic access them and this is where I even as someone who hated detested math growing

up uh this is where even I get chills according to procas we can do this because our intellect a word that is typically um in Greek the word that's used is no we translate it into English as intellect uh or mind it's because our noose is not really ours we are participating in it but it's not ours like in the allegory of the cave intellect noose is projected into our souls into our psyches as are the higher truths and principles that exist in that realm of mind so just like the Shadows on the wall in

the Cave Story these higher realities cast a shadow down into our level of reality so there is a shadow of a higher reality on the wall of our psyches as such we can to an extent recognize the signature of those higher realities and use it to learn about them through things like math and logic quoting from the professor's paper again mathematical forms constitute a subclass of the entire realm of dianoetic forms according to procas it is by projecting or bringing forth and unfolding these innate logoi of which the soul is essentially constituted that discursive reason

generates the entire manifold of mathematical sciences and theorems okay so what does that mean well it's essentially what I was getting at earlier these logo or intelligible forms as he calls them these are the higher truths that math and logic point to are the shadows of these intermediate forms are projecting themselves down into US emanating from an even grander truth than we can fully comprehend at our level of reality yet we can comprehend them to an extent using our psyches our souls especially our rational faculties our dioa our noesis so according to procas and many

other platonists by the way the development of these rational faculties these ways of knowing on the higher parts of the divided line it's incredibly important to work on and develop these faculties if we want to be free of the cave because again according to procas and I'm paraphrasing this paper now the intermediate forms are reason principles that are the essence of the soul and by virtue of that we're able to comprehend the forms in a way or at a level that is proper to our own own nature as humans procas is arguing that we can

use these faculties to climb the ladder of reality itself to climb our way to higher levels of reality through higher levels of cognition this is obviously so different than the way we typically think about math and logic now but it's not just ancient philosophers there are mathematicians that calls platonists or at least mathematical Pless because of this I've referenced him before but Roger Penrose may be the most famous one he's a Nobel prizewinning physicist he openly calls himself a mathematical platonist for this reason because he believes these mathematical truths exist for real in some unseen

what he calls platonic realm that we can only reach when we've sharpened our minds essentially our world our minds even nature encode these higher mathematical principles these higher realities these intermediate forms in a kind of As Above So Below way uh watch this video for more on that whole subject I really hope I did a decent job connecting those dots for you because that's a whole rap that really tickles my soul perks up my Wonder whiskers and that's part of the point interacting with interfacing with this stuff over and over again does start to change

your mind it does start to alter your perception of reality put you in awe makes you want to appreciate even venerate the beauty of the world in reality and this brings us to the shore of something that I promise that we would get back to this highest kind of knowing nois which if you recall in the Cave Story uh nois is exemplified by the prisoner directly viewing the Sun and and more casually we can say that it means to uh have a direct experience direct cognition of a form of course this is difficult to talk

about it might be the most difficult thing to talk about of everything we've covered so far in that it is just the most distant thing from our everyday experience yet it's also the truest and purest and riffing on noesis is also really going to bring us full circle uh first let's go for a straightforward explanation that I uh stumbled across on a website which I I really like the difference between dioa and this highest kind of knowing noesis in contrast nois presupposes a soul has turned away from specific selfish concerns to seek the good itself

with this change in mental orientation we may then begin to see things more truly and in their proper relation to one another we may better think judge and therefore act according to natural law and right reason we will consequently be more harmonized with the external world as well as within ourselves good stuff but it's also pretty General so let's once again go deeper and let's once again probably scramble our brains by looking to the work of the brilliant platinus The Thinker considered to be the founder of neoplatonism and to give you an idea of his

flavor if you're not familiar with him he had a reputation for being almost a yogic contemplative philosophical Mystic and on that note if you've been waiting for someone who absolutely seems to have escaped the cave via mystical experience via some kind of deep Consciousness modification plotinus is your man uh what follows is going to be a mixture of quoting and paraphrasing plotinus's direct writings from from the anad and also a paper by Professor David P Hunt noesis is a kind of deep contemplation that merges us with a deeper level of reality or a higher level

of reality platinus equates hypotheses or levels of reality with the relative strength or weakness of the contemplation which occurs in them he says that a soul has quote won its way to the intellectual realm this realm of noose this higher realm of mind if it beholds a contemplation if it reaches a mode of Consciousness that is of its order that on a deeper level really all of reality is some sort of noesis some level of cognition which is like in the physical Stratus of life and all of its different organisms that there's some kind of

mental version of that some kind of psychic version of that so that quote the clearest thought is also of the highest life the highest life is identical with the highest intelligence the Supreme life is also the Supreme thought the life of the second rank is also the thought of the second rank the lowest rank Etc so to be clear I know this sounds abstract but it's because we can't say what these levels of contemplation of knowing are we can't say what these mystical States Of Consciousness are that lie outside the cave we have to experience

them ourselves platinus attempt to explain it in his writings but of course it's nothing like the impact of experiencing it for ourselves we have to be in them we can't even mathematically describe them or logically describe them with our faculty of dioa or rather if we could we'd be talking about a lower level than noesis we wouldn't be in this state of contemplation that noesis entails a noesis of something means that your psyche your soul has risen to the level of it you have in a sense achieved it or become it and now that we've

at least attempted to climb that whole ladder of the divided line we arrive at the deepest truth of Plato's Cave again to paraphrase from that same paper in platinus himself all knowledge then is self- knowledge because it is only when a soul is able to raise itself that it can gain knowledge of higher forms but this is only when the soul becomes that very higher form which it contemplates and as platina says by what sort of simple intuition could one grasp this which transcends the nature of intellect we shall say to the person to whom

we have to explain that this is by likeness in ourselves so to put it simply how is it that we become like the higher when we really are the lower when we're stuck in this lower realm when we're stuck in this cave we have to embody it we have to understand it through doing through being through expanding our minds and this is possible because like we said earlier that a trace of the higher exists within us there's a shadow of the higher World on the wall of our psyches as platinus says a trace of the

capital G good is seen in it our souls and it is the likeness of this that one should conceive its true archetype forming an idea of it in oneself from the trace of it which plays upon intellect so we have to learn to recognize the traces of that higher world that higher truth within ourselves within our own minds of course we do this through seeking knowledge seeking after truth throwing away our bias throwing away the ego games to the greatest extent that we're able to hold truth and Beauty Above All Else also contemplate and recognize

the various ways in which the form of the good shines here in this world and how our deepest truths our mathematical laws are all reflections of it then we slowly unravel begin to understand the nature of this mysterious form of the good and through understanding it we begin to become more like it so very simply uh just become God and since I said the uh the taboo G word I just want to take a moment to reflect on that because think about how different what we just outlined in this video is than the typical way

that we think about faith the typical way that we think about what it means to be spiritual it's all about saying I believe this I associate with this group I don't associate with that group and I'm really not trying to strawman anyone's beliefs here but where does that kind of rationale that kind of thinking sit on the divided line what matters is what you do what you think what you are what you exemplify and whether or not you're raising your psyche to higher and higher realizations about yourself and the nature of reality to do that

to reach this way of knowing or really I would say being we have to undergo some kind of really alchemical transformation I think we take a step into the mystical for sure because this change in orientation is also a change in the understanding of our s what we are that we are an emanation of something higher and truer and when we have that realization we achieve a huge change in orientation we're way less concerned with the Shadows on the wall we're way less concerned with mil manner being free of the cave means that you're no

longer longer governed by the ego or these outer World associations that you're trying to embody this higher Transcendent archetypal wisdom that you're seeking after for the rest of your life this is why platinus really has the reputation for being this inward-facing almost yogic platonist why he a number of times stresses the importance of deep contemplation what today we would for sure call meditation because through that inner work you begin to see these Shadows of the higher world the light of the inner Sun this is why procas wasn't just writing like a mad man and doing

rigorous math and logic but he prayed he did rituals multiple times a day according to his biographer plutar who we haven't talked about at all another really prolific platonic philosopher was also a priest at the Temple of Deli I amus another neoplatonic Sage was said to have been an Egyptian priest and probably most piercingly it's why Socrates was willing to give his life because he knew it was the right thing to do The Virtuous thing more consistent with the form of the good than avoiding his death uh which it seems like he easily could have

you don't live your life or end your life in the manner of any of the above if the mystical Dimension isn't a felt reality in your life but notice none of the above people that I just mentioned entered this what we could call Mystical or spiritual territory at the expense of Education or critical thinking uh in fact this spirituality can really be seen as the culmination of the sharpening of the intellect and the education of the individual and all of the above is just Why I am so moved by this why this is the only

kind of thinker that I will forever fail toward being could you imagine if this was our approach to education and wisdom seeking and psychospiritual understanding you know imagine if we could alchemize all of that and On a related note um that's really part of the prescription of the Republic in general to understand what it means to wield your soul well um Plato actually calls this state where all three parts of the Soul are harmonizing Justice uh more on this idea in this video and that's a good segue towards some closing thoughts here because I know

this is really Broad and big ideas about um what knowledge is and what reality is it is not just theoretical there is a serious personal Dimension to this as well because if we can get even a little bit closer to that state that I was talking about uh just before that state of living in a way where our soul is becoming more like the form of the good for me just in the process of making this video my awe and wonder levels have been noticeably amped up I'm more motivated my mind is clearer my path

feels more obvious and on the note of finding your path I mean it's impossible for me not to mention this though we absolutely don't have time to get into it here I believe this climb out of the cave is if not synonymous really harmonizes with um what one of my other philosophical Idol Carl Yung calls individuation that is our path of becoming who we naturally are who we're uniquely meant to be I've also got a whole video on that here and though we're certainly not out of the cave in a meta sense I do think

hopefully we've reached some level of new height and according to the allegory of the Cave the thing to do is return once again to the shadows and free someone or some part of ourselves so in the interest of making this practical I will be seeking to identify the most pernicious shadows in my life I will seek to be removing the mil manners and trying to raise my psyche to higher levels I hope you will do the same but as always this is baby steps this is lifelong stuff but maybe after Decades of living in this

way of pixel by pixel slowly starting to understand what the form of the good is and how it shines down into us uh maybe we'll do what Socrates did not the drinking the hemlock part but the elevating our own soul experience the felt presence of the inner sun and its Immortal infinite overflowing glory and I have to imagine that if we ever do experience that unspeakable ultimate mystery firsthand free ourselves from the cave from the simulation for real will'll truly know what Socrates meant when he said that he knew that he knew nothing big gratitude

for hanging out for the balance of this transmission my friends my name is Michael Phillip I know this was a rather girthy one it was a huge undertaking for me uh so I would greatly appreciate it if you tickled the algorithm with a like a sub a comment a share we've also got a huge catalog of podcasts both here on YouTube and only on audio platforms we've got hundreds more so do subscribe to third ey drops wherever you listen to pods if you want to support more directly and you want to riff with me hundreds

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