Reality versus Unreality
As I mentioned in my first post, I have decided to write Substacks in order to help guide you back to reality. In this episode I would like to focus on the terms “reality” and “unreality”.
Reality versus Unreality. What are we really talking about and what does it mean in our everyday lives?
People have been struggling with this question for millennia. It was Plato who wrote the “Allegory of the Cave”, which goes something like this: In the Cave, prisoners are chained and their necks are fixed. This forces them to look at the wall before them. Behind them fires are lit and people are displaying objects out of the real world in front of the fires. This causes shadows to dance on the wall the prisoners are forced to look at. Since the prisoners have been inside the cave their whole lives they perceive the shadows as “reality”.
Imprisonment in the cave
Plato begins by having Socrates ask Glaucon (his brother) to imagine a cave where people have been imprisoned from childhood, but not from birth. These prisoners are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed, forcing them to gaze at the wall in front of them and not to look around at the cave, each other, or themselves. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway with a low wall, behind which people walk carrying objects or puppets "of men and other living things"
The people walk behind the wall so their bodies do not cast shadows for the prisoners to see, but the objects they carry do ("just as puppet showmen have screens in front of them at which they work their puppets") The prisoners cannot see any of what is happening behind them; they are only able to see the shadows cast upon the cave wall in front of them. The sounds of the people talking echo off the walls; the prisoners believe these sounds come from the shadows.
Socrates suggests that the shadows are reality for the prisoners because they have never seen anything else; they do not realize that what they see are shadows of objects in front of a fire, much less that these objects are inspired by real things outside the cave which they do not see
Departure from the cave
Socrates then supposes that the prisoners are released. A freed prisoner would look around and see the fire. The light would hurt his eyes and make it difficult for him to see the objects casting the shadows. If he were told that what he is seeing is real instead of the other version of reality he sees on the wall, he would not believe it. In his pain, Socrates continues, the freed prisoner would turn away and run back to what he is accustomed to (that is, the shadows of the carried objects). The light "... would hurt his eyes, and he would escape by turning away to the things which he was able to look at, and these he would believe to be clearer than what was being shown to him."
Socrates continues: "Suppose... that someone should drag him... by force, up the rough ascent, the steep way up, and never stop until he could drag him out into the light of the sun." The prisoner would be angry and in pain, and this would only worsen when the radiant light of the sun overwhelms his eyes and blinds him.
"Slowly, his eyes adjust to the light of the sun. First he can see only shadows. Gradually he can see the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves. Eventually, he is 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.
Return to the cave
Socrates continues, saying that the free prisoner would think that the world outside the cave was superior to the world he experienced in the cave and attempt to share this with the prisoners remaining in the cave attempting to bring them onto the journey he had just endured; "he would bless himself for the change, and pity [the other prisoners]" and would want to bring his fellow cave dwellers out of the cave and into the sunlight.
The returning prisoner, whose eyes have become accustomed to the sunlight, would be blind when he re-entered the cave, just as he was when he was first exposed to the sun The prisoners who remained, according to the dialogue, would infer from the returning man's blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should not undertake a similar journey. Socrates concludes that the prisoners, if they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave.
(from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave)
Sounds familiar? Plato keenly observed here the tendency from people to want to remain in their own comfortable truth / environment. The reality they perceive is enough for them. This is why it is so hard to talk to people who are not “awake”; they rather believe that you are crazy, or even dangerous, than they would leave their own “caves”. .
So we’re talking about a very deeply ingrained aspect of the human mind. The problem these days, of course, is that we no longer need to content ourselves with mere shadows on the wall. Our “shadows” have, by means of book-printing, then computers and the internet, become vastly more sophisticated. In fact so very beautifully rendered, that even for well-educated people it becomes hard to discover what is “real” and what is the “cave projection” anymore.
And we haven’t seen the end of it either. In this Substack, Simplicius the Thinker takes a deep dive into the development of AI, and what it might end up doing to our lives.
He speculates that AI might first become a “helpful assistant”, and then morph into a sort of a second self, that can independently represent us and take decisions for us. Our actual selves will become…. well.. obsolete… And reality will have morphed into unreality, thereby destroying it.
Socrates in the allegory of the Cave calls the outside world “The Good”. [In fact, in this text, the outside world represents the “unseen but knowable” part of our existence, and the cave people are only observing the material world, but for this particular post I think Plato wouldn’t have minded if I used his allegory for the real world vs the unreal world - Minky]. “The Good” is what we should all strive for; to lift our minds out of the cave.
I am taking the allegory one little step further, and at the risk of sounding a bit medieval, I am calling the world outside the Cave Truth. And the more spiritual minded among you would perhaps agree with me that God is Truth. But if God is Truth, and Truth is life outside the Cave, or “reality”, what is going on inside the Cave? This is, logically, not Truth, and therefore also NOT God. And what is it that we know as NOT GOD? It is the adversary, the Father of Lies, that which brings us further away from God or the Truth. (I told you, bit medieval, but for lack of other terms to describe what to my mind is going on, it will have to suffice.)
Hermetic Principles
The first of the seven Hermetic Principles is: “Everything is Mental”. This law describes how thought precedes manifestation in matter. If you are rusty on the Hermetic principles, here’s an excellent video explaining them:
The fact that everything in the material world is preceded by a mental exercise, is easily seen in our everyday lives: everything that was ever made, had to be conceived in the mind, first; from the simple chair to the high-tech supercomputer. It all first existed as a concept only, then it could be made.
So if this goes for everything man has made, it must go for the entire universe; the universe is mental, and our earth, what we perceive, our own bodies even, are an expression of thought. Whose thought? The thought of our Maker. The thought of God.
The thought of God expresses itself in all his creation: in the Earth, the plants, all the animals and Man. Unfortunately, as per the fourth Hermetic Principle (the principle of Polarity), God has an opposite: the Unmaker, the Destroyer, the Not-Truth. This force is constantly trying to undo what God has made, to lure us away from the Goodness of God. The ideal world is balanced, but in practice there is a pendulum swing, from Good, to bad, back to Good again.
Back to our reality versus unreality. If God is good, and God made our world the way it should be, then we should reacquaint ourselves with His creation. His creation is nature. In the beautiful plants He made, in the animals He made expressly created to serve us. God is here, in other words, God is waiting for you in your own backyard.
Where God is absolutely NOT is in your smartphone, or in your TV. This is a false world that is drawing you in, making you believe things that are verifiably untrue (Such as the idea that there are more than two genders). This is your “cave”, where you perceive only the shadows of things; they are lies. People who stare at their phones all day and believe the lies that are propagated there, are getting further and further away from God. They are running the risk of loosing their very souls, because people on the Internet are telling them they have no soul. And if you truly believe you have no soul, you are making it so.
Because God in all His wisdom gave us, his sons and daughters, the power of Creation. Anastasia says this power was meant so people could help making the Earth (and eventually other planets) more beautiful. To take a creation that is already perfect, one notch higher, still.
Anastasia is a hermit who lives in the Taiga of Siberia. Vladimir Megre put her words down in the series “The Ringing Cedars of Russia”. You can download them (free) from Anna’s Archive.
Anastasia (part 1) on Anna's Archive
Millions of Russians were inspired by these books, have been writing poems and songs about her, and have started to live the way Anastasia recommends: on their own hectare of land, planting this to their own designs, with their families. I will write another post about her, soon.
The power of Creation works not just for individuals, but for humanity as a collective, as well. If enough people will be made to believe that the world will come to end, soon, this thought will eventually materialize, and it will be made so. It does not matter exactly how people might think the world would end; be it from Climate Change or collective Vaccine injury or lab grown pathogens, our mental powers to imagine our demise will bring it that much closer. This is why I would like to urge you to put away your smartphones as often as you can, and for God’s sake don’t watch television. It is wholly captured by the powers working for destruction.
Instead, picture a beautiful future, where we can live close to nature, in balance with creation. Where our children can grow up how they were meant to be; free and unhindered by anyone’s ideology, just them and God. If we can envision a bright and happy future, collectively, we can work on making that a reality. Don’t put mental effort in fear; put it in reality. Plan your garden. Envision how you could make it a wonderful place. If you don’t have a garden, make your balcony or your living room as pretty with plants as you can. Praise God for His creation. It’s a wonderful start!
Creatures that perceive cannot know reality, since perception is conveyed through the senses, and those senses have limits. Nevertheless, it represents our experience of life.
Creatures that conceive, can imagine reality. But conception is a mental construct, not necessarily representative of what can't be perceived directly.
If a group of people only had the ability to perceive, and their sensory acuity were identical, would they be capable of having different perspectives?
Would they perceive good or evil?
Our ability to form mental constructs, gives rise to multiple perspectives. Gives rise to concepts such as good and evil.
A group of people might occasionally disagree on what constitutes a table or a chair, or any element of the material world. That is a matter of perception.
Whereas a group of people will often disagree on issues of the day, such as the war in Gaza. They argue endlessly on what is good and what is evil. That is a matter of perspective, of mental constructs.
We are social creatures, and social conditioning has an enormous influence on our conceptions of good and evil. As individuals, we may reject some of that social conditioning, and arrive at perspectives not held by the majority. This is healthy.
Finally, there are individuals who are anti-social. They may go as far as to reject all social conventions. They may go through the motions, in order to function within society, but they have no inner conviction that societal norms are good and just. By mimicking socially acceptable behaviour, a sociopath can appear to be adhering to ethical principles.
The problem with perception is that we are ALL being manipulated into certain view points of good or evil. It is exactly THEIR point that we do not agree. Your example of the war in Gaza is that for most people in the world (except of course the people in Gaza) this war is abstract. It is only an idea, a shadow on the wall. THEY use it to antagonize us, to have us hate each other, so that we are not awakening, so that they can keep us in the cave. The only solution is this: accept that the war in Gaza is for you an unreality. If everyone would keep their distance and agree that this war - if it exists (I have not been in Gaza, personally, have you?), however terrible for the people living it, has nothing to do with him in fact, then we would stop being so easily manipulated. Keep your mind on wat is true, what is real, and do not become emotionally invested in what is not directly affecting your life.