Mind Over Matter
All of our past experience and knowledge guides us as we move through life. After a time, we come to have faith in our knowledge, we start to behave based on that faith. When we are confronted with radical new knowledge and/or experiences, our faith is sometimes slow to change. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Gospel of Mary are both examples of people trying to impart their newfound knowledge onto others. In both cases it is difficult to do, and for many of the same reasons.In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave we are presented with a story of a group of people who are kept imprisoned in a cave for their entire lives, “Here they have been since childhood, chained by the leg and also by the neck, so that they cannot move and can see only what is in front of them, because the chains will not let them turn their heads” (p.227, the Allegory of the Cave). These people experience only what is presented to them in the form of shadows on the wall caused by the light of a fire that they perceive to be the sun. This is their world. The voices that they hear from the people controlling the shadows, they believe to be the voices of the shadows. This is the only world that they know and they have no reason
Both The Gospel of Mary and the Allegory of the Cave show the difficulties people encounter when trying to further their knowledge of reality. Vision is a gift and a curse. In the Allegory of the Cave the man to leave the cave discovers that his entire reality is not what he thought while in the Gospel of Mary the disciples discover that what they believe of God, or of their way to commune with God, is not as correct as they once believed. However, what is the same is the idea that there is always more to learn than what you already know. Many people are satisfied with the reality that they know at the moment and do not quest to seek out more and therefore reject the attempts of others to enlighten them, He might be required once more to deliver his opinion on those shadows, in competition with the prisoners who had never been released, while his eyesight was still dim and unsteady; and it might take some time to become used to the darkness. They would laugh at him and say that he had gone up only to come back with his sight ruined; it was worth no one’s while even to attempt the ascent. If they could lay hands on the man who was trying to set them free and lead them up, they would kill him. Yes, they would. (p.231, Allegory of the Cave) This hesitance is rooted in a lack of knowledge that many people are hesitant to accept and embrace, although we all have the ability to do so. In the story, one man escapes from the cave to find that everything that they have been witnessing in the cave is really just a representation of the real world, that the light from the fire is representative of the sun and so forth. When the man returns he attempts to explain to those still in the cave what is outside but they are unable to believe him, for it is so far beyond a
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Gospel Mary,
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Approximate Word count = 1204
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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