Again death echoes this same pattern. Many say after death there is question until the bright light draws them toward it. .
The Outside of the cave, the true reality, then is a symbol of heaven. Both represent a better place, a sort of paradise where things can be more clearly understood. Those who are lucky enough to have found true reality while on Earth were the exception. They did not have to die to find out what others find out after death. The cave is an example of the Earth and the way we live our lives. In a sense we break free from our physical forms and now are an essence that is free to explore new worlds. Heaven is represented by the outside of the cave. It is what is strived for by all, to escape the cave and go somewhere better and become something better.
He expresses this theory with three approaches: his allegory of The Cave, his metaphor of the Divided Line and the Simile of the Sun. Each theory is connected; one could not be without the other. The shadows are produced by men, walking in front of a fire behind the prisoners. Plato says that to the prisoners, reality is only the shadows thrown onto the wall. Next he describes releasing a prisoner from his chains and how his movements are difficult, his eye adjustment painful and suggestions of the effects of returning to the cave. .
The Cave suggests to us that Plato saw most of humanity living in "the cave", in the dark, and that the vision of knowledge was salvation from darkness. He put it this way, "the conversion of the soul is not to put the power of sight in the soul's eye, which already has it, but to insure that, insisted of looking in the wrong direction it is turned the way it ought to be." Plato's two worlds: the dark, the cave, and the bright were his way of rejecting the Sophists, who found "true knowledge" impossible because of constant change. Plato believed there was a "true Idea of Justice". The Cave showed us this quite dramatically.