ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ ～♡

“Plato compares ordinary men to prisoners bound in a cave, of which they can see only the back wall. On this wall fall shadows cast by those who pass the mouth of the cave. The play of shadows is the prisoner’s world; it is reality to them; but whenever one of them succeeds in freeing himself, and sees the entrance, sees the Light and the real beings moving in it, then he realizes that he has lived in a world of illusion, that he has been ‘in a state of darkness,’ and that his eyes have been ‘hoodwinked.’ We must know ourselves in order to know the world. The man, therefore, who becomes proficient in ‘that most interesting of all human studies, the knowledge of himself,’ renounces the popular world; and he gradually attains consciousness in a world described as ‘not to be touched by hand or to be seen by eye,’ but otherwise supremely real. Withdrawal from this world of illusion, however, involves a transition from the ordinary natural state and standard of living towards what is known as the regenerate state, with its correspondingly higher standard.”