Excerpt from draft of forthcoming post with working title “What We Owe to Self-Awareness and the Price We Pay for Avoiding It.”
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Nonsense
. . . Plato’s Cave. Western philosophy’s idea of where the lower tier of Jung / Myers-Briggs personality type traits – extraversion, (body)-sensing, feeling (animal brain action), and perception (victimhood-specialness) – has trapped itself. A horror show of imprisonment, deception, and abuse. A parody of tribal togetherness so inhumane, injustice so outrageous, that it can only end in rebellion.
And yet the Cave’s occupants, tribal-realists all, are so taken in by the deception that nothing can persuade them to turn against it. Instead of a choice it’s become a given. A necessity that can’t be overthrown: the delusion that the Cave, its shadow-reflection author, and its occupants are all of one piece. And to part with any of it would be self-betrayal. A parting with existence itself. One unified, organic self composed entirely of opposites. Impossibilities: an alternate reality that, like “alternate facts,” can’t make sense. Can’t be true or Real. A “creator” that can’t create. An authority with no Logic, legitimacy, or power of its own. Mind Free Choice that’s deprived itself of its will and capacity to choose.
Blasphemy
This is the world of intractable injustice that Plato intuited with Logic after his friend and mentor, Socrates, morality’s philosopher, was made to drink hemlock by Athenian authorities. By the same mindset of un-self-awareness portrayed by the Cave’s occupants. This is alternate reality, the self projected by deluded ESFPs, the self-appointed shock troops chosen to defend it. Tribal-realists -- the apotheosis of un-self-awareness.
To its ESFP occupants the Cave is the best of all worlds. “Created” and ruled by a “creator” that’s legitimate and worth worshipping because it doesn’t depend on Mind / sixth sense to detect and verify its existence or on Logic-explanation to be understood and obeyed. It’s the obvious reality-force of the body, its five senses, and the natural environment / nature of appearances that bless the body with sensuous and sensual pleasure. Hedonism is the ESFP body-brain’s religion and the body and its senses are its god.
It imagines itself the sworn enemy of Mind-Intuition because anything thought to be Real that’s not body-brain senses is suspect, a real or potential threat to body-verified, body-sanctioned reality and its body-“creator.” The resistance of the ESFP body-centered personality type to anything suggestive of a competing-opposite reality is depicted in the resistance of Plato’s Cave occupants to enlightenment by another perspective / point of view. By another voice that blasphemes with talk of another god.
Relatability
Plato’s Cave continues to attract re-interpretation because it holds up a mirror to humanity’s opposition to changing its mind. To the Logic-Love of explanation that understanding requires so that the human mind will open itself to other perspectives, listen to other voices, and entertain other ideas about Reality-Creation without feeling threatened. Without fearing the loss of all that it’s attached to: the reality, meaning, and source of its existence. The self-unawareness that’s replaced awareness with a made-up world of appearances.
The Cave is an absurdity: the opposite of Oneness-Being that by definition can have no opposites. Psyche-Soul that’s the interconnectedness of Innocence-harmlessness functioning as one Mind / Logic-Love with Free Choice, creating-expressing the Worth of Reality-Creation, of Life / Self-Awareness. The shadow-Cave’s perversion of Oneness is a cult of self-delusion / self-unawareness. Faculties of Mind / Logic-Love and Free Choice perverted by body-brain’s self-delusion into multiple animal herds. Human-animal tribal predators coded for pointless doing-“action” that depicts the worthlessness of life through its finality: the specter of death preceded by suffering. Through the malignant harmfulness and cruelty of authoritarian rule and the conflict-violence with which it enforces it.
All held together by the relatability of its shadow-opposite source to its likenesses, the inhabitants of a shadowland of opposites. Our alternate reality and its body-brain projections – Plato’s Cave. . . .