What if one of philosophy's most ancient teachings held the key to understanding our modern technological revolution? In this fascinating episode of Musings from the Mount, Michael Lindfield and Joseph Carenza welcome back Professor Wade Chumney for an exploration of Plato's Cave that bridges ancient wisdom with contemporary challenges, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and our quest for authentic consciousness.
Through their dynamic conversation, they reveal how this timeless allegory speaks directly to our modern condition - from our relationship with technology and social media to our personal journey of awakening. Wade brings fresh insights from his groundbreaking book "Conscious Business Ethics: The Practical Guide to Wisdom" (https://www.amazon.com/
Most importantly, this discussion isn't just theoretical - it offers practical wisdom for navigating our personal and collective journey from darkness to light. Wade's innovative work through his YouTube channel "The Consciousness RenAIssance" (https://m.youtube.com/@
If you're seeking to understand how timeless wisdom can illuminate our path through today's challenges, this episode offers both inspiration and practical insights. Join us for this enlightening dialogue that bridges philosophy, spirituality, and the cutting edge of technological change. We encourage you to explore Wade's work further through his book and YouTube channel for an even deeper dive into these transformative ideas.
Meditation Mount and HeartLight Productions are pleased to present Musings from the Mount – a weekly podcast with host Joseph Carenza and guests in conversation exploring a range of topics drawn from the Ageless Wisdom teachings. New episodes every Monday.
If you enjoy this podcast, please consider donating at MeditationMount.org
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Greetings, friends, and welcome back to the Musings for the Mount podcast.
I'm your host, Joseph Carenza.
In this episode, we're joined by returning guest professor Wade Chumney to explore one of Western philosophy's most powerful allegories, Plato's cave.
Through his YouTube channel, the consciousness Renaissance, Wade bridges ancient wisdom and modern technology in the same fashion as his groundbreaking book, Conscious Business, a practical guide to wisdom and examining how ancient teaching speaks directly to our contemporary challenges.
(00:36):
So together we explore why this allegory remains startlingly relevant in our age of AI and virtual reality and reveals fresh insights into the powerful transformation and collective awakening.
So from the shadows on the cave wall to the blinding light of truth, this conversation reveals how Plato's timeless wisdom can guide us through today's technological and spiritual revolution.
(01:00):
And we hope you enjoy the podcast, and if you do, please consider going to meditationmount.org and donating.
Your donation helps us to bring you this podcast as well as all the other programs the Mount produces, both today and in the future.
We're incredibly grateful and honored by your support.
All right, back to the podcast in Plato's Cave.
(01:30):
So Plato's Cave, we're going to explore that today.
And I think maybe first what we need to do is kind of give some background about what Plato's Cave is.
And maybe for the first time since maybe Plato wrote it down, we're approaching Plato's Cave in a kind of a different way, because for the first time, the movie the Matrix is kind of the modern day take on Plato's Cave.
(02:01):
But even since that movie has come out, we've had developments in technology that now give us a new lane to sort of explore Plato's Cave.
Because now it's technically possible.
It's technically possible that we could be living in the Matrix.
And that wasn't something that was.
That was really just an allegory, but now it's a technical possibility.
So that adds another interesting dynamic as we approach this subject to kind of keep either in the back of your mind or just kind of think about, okay, so maybe Socrates and Plato were really onto something.
(02:31):
And so we'll touch on that a little bit, but maybe.
Wade, can you kind of give us a little bit of background about Plato's Cave, why it's.
Why it's.
And why it's important to you and how you use it in your.
In your teaching?
Yeah, absolutely.
So in my opinion and in many people's opinions, you know, Plato's Cave is one of the most important pieces of literature in the Western tradition.
(02:52):
And, you know, he was a brilliant human being.
And if, when we go through this, if you can conceive of anyone able to think of the levels of complexity and depth and analogs to the real world of what he created, it's mind blowing.
So it's a very powerful piece of writing that contains a great deal within it, and it obviously is an allegory.
(03:14):
It means much more than simple prisoners in a cave escaping.
There's a lot more to it.
And so I use this allegory, I mean, as the kind of the foundation for my business ethics class.
The first part of my class is about personal ethics and development.
And I kind of take my students through a Platonic academy and teach, you know, kind of the way he taught, in a sense, personal development and ethics, you know, an ideal interaction with your external context.
(03:41):
And the cave allegory demonstrates this progression of consciousness of, you know, greater perspective growth as you elevate from being attached to the bottom of the cave in chains to being outside looking at the sunlight.
Yeah, there's so many interesting ways to look at this.
But let's give a quick overview.
Do you want to describe the cave for people that don't know the cave?
(04:02):
Or maybe they read it years ago in school?
Maybe just a quick overview of what's happening in the cave.
Yeah.
So in this allegory, Plato describes the fact that there are prisoners, human beings, in the bottom of this cave, and they are chained there.
Importantly, they're chained in this location since childhood.
Not since birth, but since childhood.
(04:24):
And the chains forced them to look straight ahead at the wall, the front wall of the cave.
And on that cave wall, they see shadows moving about.
And their entire lives since childhood, they've been chained in this position.
So those shadows that they see moving about are their reality.
It is their world.
It's everything to them.
It's all they know.
And Plato says in his allegory, this is like me and you.
(04:46):
We as human beings, we are the ones, all of us chained in this shadows on a cave wall.
And he talks about one of the prisoners that escapes, gets out.
And the first thing they do is they turn around and they're blinded by the light of the fire.
There's a fire at the far back of the cave, emanating light.
And initially, you can imagine they're completely blinded by this light that hits them in the face.
(05:11):
And once their eyes adjust, they actually want to go back to the shadows because it's much more clear to look at the shadows than the.
This Blinding light.
But once their eyes adjust over time, they realize there's this raised wall behind them with people who they can't see beneath that wall, holding up these objects that they're carrying back and forth.
(05:32):
And the prisoner at that point can't really realize, are the shadows causing these objects or are these objects causing the shadows?
But eventually they realize, oh, the fire in the back of the cave is shooting firelight.
The it hits these objects that creates the shadows I've been seeing my entire life.
And that's what I've been witnessing is reality.
And so the prisoner who escapes these chains, eyes adjust, they see those, I call them two dimensional objects.
(05:57):
I mean they're just pale imitations of reality.
And as the prisoner notices those objects and the people carrying them beneath, they then see the fire behind the cave.
You know, that's kind of like the fourth level.
And that fire is obviously the source of everything they've seen.
It's a system that's within the cave that they are a part of.
And they're seeing this system in progress, working, creating the shadows on the wall.
(06:20):
And that would seem to be the end of it.
But this same prisoner notices that like, oh my gosh, there's another source of light streaming into this cave.
What the heck is that?
And it's actually sunlight that the prisoner sees.
And so they start to.
It's a long, difficult journey, he says, to get out of the cave, to get, follow this sunlight out to the upper world.
(06:43):
But as they do that long, difficult process, eventually they get out to the reality, to the three dimensional world that you and I know and are looking at, people looking at trees, looking at objects.
And interestingly, prior to seeing those three dimensional objects, the first thing they have to do is notice the shadows because again, their eyes have to adjust just like they did in the cave.
(07:06):
It takes time.
And the first thing that I would say of import that they notice as they get out of the cave is they see their own self reflection in the water.
That's the first time they've seen themselves in any way, shape or form because prior to that it's all been external shadows.
So that's a real interesting point in the story of self reflection kind of kicking in.
(07:28):
And so they notice that in the water, eventually their eyes adjust, they can see the three dimensional reality, the world around them, the interconnected world that we all inhabit.
And then eventually they notice, you know, that the source of all of this is the sun up in the sky, the highest level, the light that emanates, that gives Life to everything outside the cave, inside the cave, it all comes from there.
(07:49):
And then eventually that prisoner, after noticing these various levels that we can talk about, they decide to go back into the cave to help others, you know, to tell them about what's real.
You know, and if you think about it, every single level up is more true, more real than the level below.
So they know what's true and they go down to share that with the prisoners who are chained in the cave.
(08:11):
And if any of you have ever tried to change someone's belief system, I think, you know, it's not that easy.
People don't enjoy that.
So in the story, it's kind of akin.
It's a story about his teacher, you know, Socrates, who was put to death for, you know, poisoning the minds of the Athenian youth.
And you know, the prisoner who goes back in the cave to share what reality is.
(08:31):
The people want none of it.
And he says, eventually, you know, they would kill that person.
And again, that's just an homage to his teacher.
But that's the entirety of the story kind of capsulated, as simply as I can put it.
Wow, there's so much that just brings up.
I went to, for instance, like the Buddha.
(08:51):
The Buddha made it through.
He removed the chains that bind you to the wheel of rebirth through non attachments.
He was chained and then he achieved enlightenment, and then he came back down to help others achieve enlightenment by letting go of their change, by freeing themselves from the imprisonment of attachment.
(09:13):
So you see this reflecting in everything.
And I love the way you just described the different levels, because when I look at the basic level of the prisoners facing the wall, and it isn't the shadows of the people they're seeing, it's.
It's the shadows of the objects that the people are carrying.
And because there's a wall behind them, they don't actually see the shadows of the people, they just see the shadows of the objects.
(09:36):
And the people bearing these objects actually name what the objects are.
So the words they hear, they believe that they're being spoken by the objects.
Yes.
And so their point of reference is totally off.
And because they were there from childhood.
I didn't know that.
Thank you for letting me know.
But they already had impressions in the world, they already had memories.
(09:58):
So what you do when you see something, it's a pattern recognition and it triggers a certain emotion or a certain belief, a certain understanding.
So the objects that cast the shadows that they're on the wall that they're looking at are bringing up in them their experience.
Of life, which at the moment is still distorted.
(10:21):
Therefore, they are in an imprisoned situation.
And you mentioned the Matrix.
I also think of one of my favorite movies, the Truman Show.
Yes, same thing.
Based on this.
So he has to bust out of the cave and he finds the door out of it in the end.
But this is very powerful, the way that you're describing this, because it does reflect the current state of society, is that a lot of what we believe to be true are the shadows cast by things projected and shown to us by others.
(10:57):
It is not necessarily our own investigation of the truth.
Yes, we are still being impressed and imprinted by the world, which is what the Matrix is about.
So how do you break free from that?
So, wow, there's so much more.
(11:17):
But I love the way you open that up.
And I mean, Joey, what is this stimulating you?
Well, for me, whenever I revisit Plato's Cave, there's a new layer to explore for me, and that is with the role of who's operating the cave.
Because as I get older and more experience in the world and you realize how things work, it's interesting for me.
(11:41):
So who's running this operation?
What is their responsibilities?
What's their obligations?
What's their ethical approach?
And then I've heard it maybe interpreted a couple different ways.
One, the person escapes.
But I've also heard it interpreted as that one of the people is released because a teacher has decided to help them through this progression.
(12:05):
But the key there, though, is, as I've understood it, is there has to be a desire.
You have to have this desire to.
You know, there's like.
Would you like to know more?
Yeah, yeah.
You have to pursue it.
And you have to pursue it, like with.
At the.
At your.
At the peril, with everything that comes with it.
(12:26):
You know, it's.
It's not going to be an easy journey and has, you know, we.
You can go.
We can also get into the hero's journey and how that works and sort of the Socrates example.
But also what happens with Prometheus on the return journey, I think is also interesting to explore the kind of the concept of the no good deed goes unpunished.
(12:47):
So for me, that's what comes up.
And how as you gain more experience in life, especially as a seeker on the path where you see yourself in this operation, you know, and I find it interesting, you know, that we, you know, all three of us actually have ended up in this place where we're trying to share what we've learned with other people.
(13:09):
You know, not saying we know it all, but just trying to share what we've learned.
Well, we've often used the analogy of we're comparing and sharing field notes.
Yeah, exactly.
This is what I've learned so far on the journey.
What have you learned?
Put them together and you go, oh, another aha happens.
And so we inquire the way together and that's it.
So.
(13:30):
Wow.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
And I love the fact that you talk about you have to have that desire, you have to have that intention to want to break free.
And the word Plato uses, wonder.
Philosophy begins with wonder.
Wonder is akin to curiosity, but that's what motivates the person to continue this difficult journey.
(13:52):
You're blinded.
It's completely different.
And I tell my students when I teach this, you have to feel it.
You have to imagine you are in that cave.
What does that feel like?
Now imagine seeing light for the first time directly.
How horrifying and how disorienting that would be.
So you have to actually embody what he's talking about to really get what he's conveying.
(14:15):
Is that through each of these levels your feeling grows, expands your consciousness.
It's just a very powerful story.
And Joey and I recorded a five part series on initiation, which is really the birth of the light within, the revelation of the inner light so that it can merge with a greater light.
(14:37):
And it's an expansion of consciousness and expansion of the capacity to be of service.
And so what I see with Plato's cave, it's all about the light.
And Joey just mentioned Prometheus.
Well, the fire that he stole and brought to earth was the fire of mind implanted in humanity.
(14:59):
So we use that.
But it's still one of the lower fires.
It isn't the higher fire, so it still doesn't illumine properly.
It's not the fire of the heart, it's the fire of the rational mind.
And so it has its limitations.
Yes.
Wow.
This just started up a whole chain of thoughts that I need to digest and assimilate before I speak them.
(15:21):
But wow.
So in terms of a modern context, we're always trying to bring this back to how is this applicable to the listener today?
And so I think what's interesting from your perspective is like you do actually teach this through the lens of business and ethics.
And since one way or another, we're all involved in business and we all have our own sort of ethos and approach to things.
(15:45):
So how does this work in terms of an ethical life and ethical perspective?
You know, how does how does that hit home for someone today when, when perhaps morality has never been more gray, I guess, than it is right now?
Great question.
And, you know, the realization that this story is about ethical development is a big one.
(16:07):
And if you, you know, when he starts, the whole first sentence of this story is, this is about education.
This is about the nature of education.
This is about, you know, and what is, what are you going to educate yourself about?
You know, it's about the nature of reality.
And to understand the nature of reality, you have to know yourself.
So when I think of that prisoner escaping, what was the phrase whispered to them to get them to break free?
(16:30):
It's know thyself.
Which, that was, what was the powerful phrase back at the, you know, in the Temple of Delphi, you know, that, that concept of knowing yourself, that is the personal journey that gets you out of the cave.
That's what kicks it all off.
And if you know yourself, you can know reality, you know, as above, so below, as within, so without.
(16:51):
And so it's a, you know, these stages are very important and maybe I'll just briefly mention these stages because it's a, you know, it's an analogy.
And every analogy has analogs for each thing that it represents in the real world.
And based on, you know, my reading and my research and teaching and stuff, here's what I've determined these things to be.
(17:12):
And they can have other meanings as well.
So keep that in mind.
But at the first level, what I found is that there's seven levels that he kind of talks about in this cave.
And remarkably, which is what really blew my mind, is that they correlate with modern psychology, with moral development from, you know, Kohlberg was a researcher who started this, kind of a grandfather of positive psychology.
(17:34):
But Plato, you know, these seven levels correlate with modern moral development, which is, you know, mind boggling if you really think about it.
2500 years ago to 50 years ago, same thing.
But the initial stage, the shadows on the wal for moral psychology, that represents the fear, the level of fear that we start operating from.
At first we're all separate.
(17:55):
And that's the lowest level, is to be separate, divisive, and you're scared of stuff, you're pushing away from it.
That's level one.
That's what the shadows represent.
The second level is when the prisoner breaks free of those chains.
Those chains to me represent fear and desire.
They represent the two things that keep us attached to the external world where we're always striving to grab something or Pushing away from something.
(18:18):
But once you break those chains, then the next thing that happens is you're blinded by the firelight.
And that firelight to me represents attention.
It represents the power of your mind to focus its energy on something.
And the power, you know, obviously that energy comes from someplace.
It comes from the fire, which is the fourth stage, which represents the mind in my estimation.
(18:40):
And in between, those are the objects being carried.
Those are the beliefs in your mind that have been placed there since childhood.
People are carrying those beliefs.
This is what the matrix, all this is all about.
But interestingly, I would say that those people carrying the beliefs, they're not nefarious necessarily.
It's your parents, it's your school teachers, it's whoever has put ideas in your head.
(19:03):
No one knows everything.
And so you take for reality what you're being told at this third stage, your belief system.
And then that what you believe you perceive, that's what causes the shadows to be projected out in front of you.
I love the fact you said Socrates started by saying it's about education.
And we know that the Latin root is educare, to draw out from within.
(19:26):
So what is it that's hidden within?
It's the light of our own soul.
So this is the gradual revelation of the inner light through these different stages.
I think that's a very, very powerful thing.
And we've used this analogy before, is that imagine yourself in a cave or in a darkened room with the curtains closed and you really feel like, oh my gosh, I want to go out into the light.
(19:50):
You have to have the desire to leave the darkness to go into the light.
And we talked about initiation always begins when it's self initiated, when there's an act of will, I choose to do this.
So when I choose to go into the light, I'm blinded by the light.
But I'm also, I enjoy it.
So I've often used the example of if I go out from my house and I walk out into the sun, I lay down and I become the sunbather.
(20:19):
And then I realize that no matter whether I lie on my back, lie on my side, lie on my front, stand up, whatever, half of my body is always in shadow because it's an external light source, which is the fire that you talked about.
Then there comes this point where when I've released the solar fire, the true fire, the true light of who I am from within, there are no shadows.
(20:44):
There's nothing between me and my own perception of what is.
It's the ignition of this inner Fire, the fire of spirit, whatever.
But to get there, I've got to go through all these stages.
You can't bypass, you can't do an end run to enlightenment.
(21:04):
You've got to go through these stages.
And what happens, as you well know, you get stuck in these stages.
And when Joey and I did this series on initiation, one of the quotes from the Master DK says, look, when you're at one part of the path where you're having to dispel all the shadows and break free from the world of illusion, it takes lifetimes.
(21:28):
It takes lifetimes.
This is the longest stretch.
But once you've broken free, then it speeds up.
Speeds up, relatively speaking, because time and space don't exist at these different levels in the same way.
But when you are speaking, I realize in the end, the shadows disappear when the light from within is ignited.
(21:49):
Yes, that's exactly true.
And just to continue that inside the cave, that's a system, right?
The fire shoots out, firelight hits these objects, creates the shadows.
It is a system that has component parts.
And again, just to rephrase the fact that this correlates with moral development, Kohlberg psychology talks about the fact that there's seven stages.
(22:12):
At the lowest level, one is fear.
Those are the shadows.
The second is desire.
That's your attentive desire, being focused on things kind of selfishly.
Third is belief, conformity.
There's the third level with the people holding the objects up.
It is conforming to beliefs.
And then the fourth stage is, he calls it law and order.
It's about a societal level where you start to realize, well, I conform with these beliefs, but there's other beliefs out there.
(22:37):
And so as a society, we kind of have to embrace all of that.
And that fourth level, to me, in the cave, that fire represents your perspective.
It represents your system of self.
It represents your ego that's shooting out the attention that creates the world that you observe.
And all of those four levels comprise the lower self, the lower nature that each of us have within us.
(23:01):
And most of us are trapped in the cave looking at the same shadows all the time, because that's where everything focuses.
But as I mentioned, just to finish this out, once you see that firelight, something's coming from outside into the cave, what the heck?
And that's fire.
That's sunlight.
Right?
And you realize, again, long, difficult journey to get there.
But like, what does that represent?
(23:22):
That's the fifth stage in world development that kind of represents the principles, the intuition, the realization that there's a more Ideal way for the system to work.
And you can bring those principles in.
The principles that he would say to bring in are the virtues.
You know, he talks about the four virtues being the quickest way out of the cave.
So, you know, justice, moderation, courage, wisdom.
(23:46):
Those are the four he espoused.
And again, they're supported by modern psychology today.
The same four plus two more, transcendence and humanity.
So by living the principles, you release the light inside of you and that light dispels the shadows.
So I'm thinking, if this Plato's cave allegory is a roadmap and a navigational aid, how can it help us right now on the planet?
(24:12):
How can we tell the story in a way that people go, oh, yeah, we're just enmeshed in this world created by shadows.
Because to break free means you have to have a deeper knowing.
But if you're swimming in the.
If a fish is swimming in water, it doesn't know what water is.
(24:35):
Object, it's still inside it.
So how do you get that distance and detachment to see yourself in your predicament?
Because otherwise you're just lost inside the current state.
It's just, yeah, you're drowning in your current reality.
So how do you use this to help people sort of plot a path forward?
(24:57):
Well, so you talk about that inside the cave, that lower nature being those four levels again that correlate with moral psychology.
And then you realize that that's a system.
It operates completely independently on its own.
But to make that system more ideal, Plato is all about striving toward the ideal.
You know, the true nature of the ideal forms.
(25:18):
And as you strive toward the ideal, you know, an ideal interaction with life, he tells us the way to do that is to implement the virtues.
Hence, why am I teaching this in an ethics class?
Ethics is how you choose to live your life.
It's about how to have an ideal interaction with your external context.
Whether that's a business context, a personal context, a social context, it doesn't matter.
(25:40):
Ethics is the same.
That's what he's trying to demonstrate, is that those principles at stage five that you kind of.
You intuit, they come to you, those are the virtues.
That's the realization that, wow, if I want my system of self to operate more effectively in the world, I need to be ethical.
Like, that's the key to actually engaging the world in the right way.
That helps both myself and the system.
(26:02):
I'm embedded within everyone else around me.
So that's that fifth stage, realizing those principles.
And then this you know, and I mentioned that self realization or self reflection rather occurs when you see that yourself reflected in the water out there.
That's when you start to self reflect and really think deeply about these things.
And at stage six, that's when you're out in nature, you're actually walking among the real objects that are imitated down below.
(26:26):
And that's embodiment, that's when you've actually, that's wisdom.
That's when you've embodied the virtues and you're actually living that on a regular basis.
Then you are able to experience, you know, what life is like when you're bringing this good goodness into the world.
And then level seven is the sun, which I, you know, the source of life, everything.
It represents consciousness or it represents life.
(26:48):
It represents that which enables everything else to exist.
And in the spiritual teachings it also says that inside of every atom is this sun.
So inside of every atom is this light waiting to be released.
So the sun isn't just in the sky outside, it's also the light is at the heart of everything.
(27:09):
So it's very powerful, very, very powerful.
Also the use of the sun as the light, it's always been so impressive to me because it works on so many levels.
Because if the sun is the truth, it radiates its light equally in all directions.
(27:29):
The sun has no shadow.
So it's the original source.
For me, it's interesting because then you have the artifact, then you have the fire in the cave, which is sort of imitation of the sun.
And then you also start to get into where Plato, Socrates starts talking about the ideal and the form.
So you know, if you think about a triangle, right?
(27:52):
So you know, you can, you can construct a triangle in the physical world, but it's not, it's only going to last as long as it's the materials that it's made out of.
But the idea of a triangle is eternal, you know, and so you have this eternal beautiful idea that transcends all form, all space and all time.
And those are those higher ideals that we start to think about.
(28:13):
And it's not until you release yourself from the temporary, from the form, that you can start to explore that.
And I think for the modern day person, when so much of our life comes through these flickering images on this thing we hold in our hand, you have to step back from that in a very principled, intentional way.
(28:34):
And I think that's what incorporates into the desire to leave the cave.
Yeah.
And what you've just sparked in me with this two things.
One Is integrity just goes back to what Wade just said.
Integrity is when my outer life corresponds to the inner principles and virtues that I espouse.
There is no slack.
(28:56):
It is a reflection, it is an expression.
And the other thing is about the triangle, and Wade just mentioned the lower four, which is the square.
And you've got the three basic building blocks that sacred geometry uses, which is the square, the triangle and the circle.
(29:19):
And those represent, as we've said in an earlier podcast, the square represents the first incarnation of our solar system, where matter became intelligent.
And then triangle is where consciousness is born, where you've got the interaction of the two poles spark something new.
So one and one makes three.
And then the circle is when we are all sun, like it's interlaced.
(29:42):
Circles will be the lattice work of the.
I mean, that gets a little technical.
But the other technical thing is to say that the lower four, because we talked about the physical plane, where the physical plane is divided into seven subplanes.
The dense physical is the lower four.
The subtle are more refined and not visible to the current human eye, are the upper three.
(30:06):
So it's always three and four.
It's a triangle and a square.
And we are working with that sacred geometry.
And then once we move from the square to the triangle, we can then become the circle, this sun that Joey just described.
So the whole thing is we're inside sacred geometry, in fact, our life.
(30:28):
Well, integrity means to live in perfect symmetry and geometry with our values and our virtues.
Alignment.
Alignment, yeah.
So, thank you.
That was.
And that is a tough thing to do.
And it's interesting now that, you know, with the Internet, social media, AI, there's a level of fact checking that has never existed before.
(30:49):
And I don't just mean like, you know, checking if someone said something is true.
There's a level of accountability.
There's an actual record of everything that you're doing, and for better, for worse, everything that comes with social credit scores and things like that.
But there is a sort of accountability to your ethics that's never really existed, especially holding politicians, teachers, leaders.
(31:14):
You can say, well, no, actually on February 4th at 15:00, you said this exact thing.
And that's been tough because it's never really existed before.
They could say it was always sort of someone was there and heard you say that.
But now we have the proof.
You know, this could be the reflection.
This is the collective reflection in the waters.
(31:36):
Exactly.
And something that Michael and I have been, especially in this sort of third season, we've been focusing quite a Bit on moving from the individual experience to the group experience.
So traditionally, the hero's journey is a very singular experience.
It's you against the world.
But we've been talking about going through this collectively as humanity.
(31:59):
And so as humanity is now breaking free of these chains.
Some of us are, and some of us have made it out of the cave and come back.
So how do we take what we've learned and go back without being preachy, without being.
Obviously you're doing that in your classroom and we're trying to do that here, but what does that mean for us to go back and be like, maybe there's more to the story?
(32:24):
I mean, I would just say initially, when you're on an airplane and they talk about oxygen coming down, you got to put it on yourself first before you can help anyone else.
Your child doesn't matter.
You have to figure yourself out first.
And that's what Plato's teaching in this allegory is.
This is self development.
This is personal self development.
(32:45):
And, you know, just a couple of things you raised are very important.
One is to realization.
If we're all trapped in here since childhood, you know, then this, the shadows on the wall represent the reality that we're looking at right now, each of us.
And if you think when that prisoner turns around, where do they turn around?
The only.
If I turn around, I'm still seeing the world.
(33:05):
The only place to turn around is inside yourself.
It is an internal journey to that integrity at level six, when you're actually in alignment with the laws of nature and doing things in accordance with no separation.
And the other thing that you mentioned that was really good, Joey, was about the transcendence.
Transcendentals.
You know, there's three transcendentals that Plato talks about, says, this is the nature of reality.
(33:28):
This is what really exists.
If you get to that seventh stage up at the sun, the true, the good, and the beautiful.
And those are the foundations of what you want to aspire to be.
Those are the laws of nature.
Those are the ideals for which you should strive.
So if you think about what's true, obviously every single one of these seven layers, you're getting more and more true, more and more real.
(33:50):
You're discovering how things really work.
And in addition to that, it's good.
You're having more and more good come of the situation as you arise out of the cave.
It's also much more beautiful.
Think about yourself looking at those shadows versus walking out in the beautiful sunlight.
So all three of those transcendentals are arrived at by progressing up these levels.
Wow.
(34:10):
And you can.
They have correspondences in the ageless wisdom teaching, because these three, the truth, goodness and beauty, this is the holy Trinity.
They're reflected in the first three rays.
Ray one of purpose and intentionality and will, Ray two of love, wisdom, and Ray three of active intelligence.
(34:32):
Because beauty is the intelligent expression of truth with love.
And therefore.
And then you've got the four rays of attribute underneath them, but it's always this three and the four.
And how do you look at.
Well, you're looking at a computer screen.
(34:54):
And how do you get the colors?
Well, it's a mix of the three primary colors.
It's always the same.
So.
And the trinity that we work with here are the three principles of essential divinity, goodwill and unanimity.
And they do correspond, if you like, to the Greek Trinity, because essential divinity is the truth of who we are.
(35:19):
Goodwill is the love and the wisdom that flows throughout all life.
And the third principle of unanimity is that we are all part of this interdependent, intelligent, living organism, the seamless web of life.
And so our three principles that we work with at meditation mount are also a reflection of what you work with your students.
(35:47):
Yeah, I love that.
So.
So now we've exited Plato's cave, you know, we've made it into the sun.
One thing that I've noticed for me is it's very important for me personally, but I think for everyone is you keep a level of humility.
(36:07):
Because whenever I think I've made it, I always kind of find myself, oh, I'm still back in the chains.
So how do we keep that sense of humility while we tend to ascend through these different academic, intellectual, spiritual heights?
I think it's important to maintain a sense of humility and almost childlike wonder.
(36:31):
Yeah.
As the Tibetan master says, humility is an adjusted sense of right proportion.
Not aggrandizing yourself and not diminishing yourself, but also not focusing too much on yourself, but at the same time acknowledging that you are a sovereign being.
But you're not putting the spotlight on you.
(36:52):
You're realizing that light is in you.
You're not trying to put yourself in lights.
No, you are a light that is becoming revealed.
And so that's a really important thing because otherwise you can get into the preaching and the teaching.
And as you said, well, how do you help?
And it's a great question.
(37:16):
I mean, if you think about going back to the Greek tradition, you know, Socrates, who taught Plato, you know, and Socrates wrote nothing down he just went and questioned people and helped them figure out like, wow, I don't see reality clearly at all.
And then Plato learned from him and obviously revered him in the highest possible way to use him as a character and, you know, in all of his everything he wrote.
(37:37):
But that, you know, aspect of, you know, being humble is absolutely critical.
If you think of his teacher Socrates, who was deemed to be the wisest person around at the time, he was asked about why he was what made him so wise.
He said, well, I'm only wiser than anyone else in that.
The fact that I know that I know nothing.
(37:59):
Talk about humility.
This was a brilliant human being who had really figured out a great deal about human nature.
Higher nature, lower nature, how to interact in the world.
And that's his statement about what makes him wise, is that he realizes that there's always so much more to learn.
It's an ever expanding circle, you know, what you don't know is so much greater than what you do.
(38:20):
And that's a big realization.
And the more you know, the less you know.
Because suddenly you realize it's much faster than you imagine.
Therefore, proportionally, yes, you're not as big as you thought you were.
I think that's a really, really, really good point.
So in one respect, you can say that we were troglodytes in the beginning.
(38:41):
We were cave dwellers, but on a psychological, spiritual level, we probably still are troglodytes.
I don't mean that in any denigrating fashion, but we still are living inside the cave.
But it's also interesting to see how the cave has featured in the Ageless Wisdom teachings.
For instance, it's said that Jesus was not born in a stable, but in a cave.
(39:04):
And I've been to Bethlehem and been inside that place that is purported to be where he was born.
It's also said that when you make this big shift when the light starts to go on inside of you, it's when the presence of a greater love is born.
Inside the cave of the heart.
That's what it's called.
And then it said, inside the center of the head there is a cave.
(39:26):
It's called the cave in the head or the heart center in the head.
And inside of that, you're asked to picture a golden sun.
And this golden sun that is sending out its rays in all directions, as Johi said earlier, represents the incarnated soul.
Because the whole idea of the soul is to come to Earth and to reveal its light.
(39:51):
So it needs an instrument that can transmit that Light and be that light.
And that's what we do.
Education is the building up of the ability to be the light that we are calling forth from within that which is.
And most of our society is about taking things from the outside and stuffing them into ourselves.
(40:16):
Whether it's food, knowledge.
It's great to have input and stimulation.
But in the end, the big aha comes from when I go, oh, my gosh, yes, I understand.
That makes sense.
I can't give you my aha.
I can have a dialogue with you.
Socrates can have a dialogue and to create an aha moment.
(40:38):
So my question is, how do we create the big aha moment for humanity so we can break free of the imprisonment and the addiction to matter to the shadows on the wall?
Because Joey and I, in this series on initiation, said that the humanity for the first time, collectively is facing the first initiation, which is how to break free from the cave.
(41:03):
And it said that the key to breaking free from the cave is to open the heart.
And for this presence of a greater love to be ignited within the cave of the heart, that light dispels the shadows.
So I've just realized how germane this is.
This whole right now in 2024, when we're recording this.
(41:25):
This.
Yeah.
So how do we release the inner light to dispel the shadows?
And how do we encourage others and support each others in releasing their own light rather than saying, here, have my light.
Yeah, I think just to answer that really quickly, you have to demonstrate to people that it's worth it to them.
Like, when most people think of ethics, they're like, be a goody goody.
(41:46):
Who cares?
What is that about?
I'm in a business setting.
I gotta compete, I gotta win.
I gotta, you know, and once if you can share with people that, you know, what Plato taught back then, nearly 2,500 years ago, is mirrored in positive psychology, which says, you know, positive psychology, you know, the field of psychology is a science.
What it did was look at people who have problems and try to get them to be normal.
(42:09):
You know, people have borderline personality, all this, try to bring them from anywhere from 0 to negative 10, up to 0, get them back to being normal.
Positive psychology said, hey, what about the positive end of the spectrum, the plus 10 people out there?
How do we get normal people to get up to plus 10?
And, you know, they did research on this, and what they found in looking around the world was there's six virtues which they called character strengths, which are the exact same four Plato talked about, plus humanity and Transcendence.
(42:34):
That if you put these into practice, you have this joyous, flourishing, good life experience, which you know, is what every single one of us really wants.
If when I ask my students at the beginning of the semester, I always ask them, why are you sitting in my class?
And it's a digression.
You have to keep asking, why?
Because initially it's like, well, it's a required class.
That's why I'm here.
(42:55):
Like, oh, I'm glad to have you in class.
And then it's like, well, I want to graduate.
Why do you want to graduate?
Why do you want a piece of paper?
I want to get a job.
Why do you want that?
I want money.
A lot of people stop there.
But then it's like, why do you want money?
Because it's to live.
I want to enjoy my life.
I want to enjoy this experience with my family.
So they want that joy, that enjoyment.
And what Plato taught, what positive psychology teaches, is that is an inside job.
(43:18):
It's 100% dependent on you and your choices, and that there's a pathway there that's been laid out by science, by psychology, by philosophy.
And all you gotta do is work on yourself and trust the process and you can get there.
So I think just to answer your quick query, it's like, you have to demonstrate the value to people because what you value is what you do.
(43:40):
Well, that was always the thing working in the corporate world.
It was always the Wifam factor.
What's in it for me?
You had to sell it to the person you had.
It wasn't just altruism.
And so they had to know what's in it for me.
When people come to Meditation Mountain, they say, what's in it for me?
Well, you get the opportunity to be of service to others.
(44:02):
That's what's in it for you.
Yeah.
Which really says you are given the opportunity to liberate the light of your soul.
Because your soul has a natural tendency to shine its light free of charge, regardless of who's there, as an act of love, an act of giving.
(44:27):
And so this is how we have to break free out of the cave.
So the cave at the moment is the cave of our own self insulation.
And that's why when Joey said, moving from I to we, the individual to the group, We've said before, when you move from the I to the we, you don't lose your sense of identity or individuality.
(44:50):
It expands.
So we is an expanded sense of self.
The group is an expanded sense of self.
When you understand that all the fractured parts of our humanity are coming back together, and because they are all part of the original one.
But at the moment, we still are operating as isolated units.
We're still in the cave of separation.
(45:12):
So how do we exit the cave of separation?
And then when we create this common union, this beloved community, whatever the regrouping and the remembering of our dismembered body is, that's when we create a space in which the truth and the goodness and the beauty of our human spirit can show up.
(45:39):
But you gotta build, as we often say in these podcasts, if you wanna invoke fire, you gotta build a fireplace for it to be housed.
And you're saying the fireplace are the virtues, the characters, the principles, the characteristics, the principles, and that's it.
So you have to do the work to build the temple.
We've often used this, is that building the temple was a way of showing what you have to do inwardly to build your own temple, which is being in integrity with yourself so that the highest fire can live.
(46:12):
If the temple isn't sacred, if it isn't a place that is constructed according to sacred geometry, the fire can't live inside it.
The soul can't show up.
Unless we live ethically.
Yeah.
And that's the scaffolding.
You talked about the ladder of building your way up from at the bottom just to make it as simple as possible.
(46:33):
Inside the cave is your lower nature.
We've talked about that.
Outside the cave is your higher nature, your upper N.
You know, that's your true natural state.
That's what you want to be.
That's what your true self wants you to experience.
But at the bottom of that cave, it's all about separation.
It's about seeing these shadows that are coming from a confusing place.
(46:53):
The sounds that people speak are echoing off the walls.
You can't clearly hear or see anything.
When you're focused down there, it's all separation.
And at the top, when you get out of the cave, you realize, wow, it's an interconnected system that I'm a part of.
And that.
That realization, I would say the one realization would be if we're all interconnected, you know, if you and I are all the same, then why would I treat you any differently than I would, you know, treat myself like that?
(47:23):
One true realization would change everything.
If people truly got the fact that, you know, we're exactly the same as part of this interconnected system, well, that.
Goes back to the three principles here, essential divinity.
If I know that you are an aspect of The Creator.
I am an aspect of Creator.
We are all aspects of the Creator.
I will honor and celebrate you.
(47:44):
I won't try to beat you up or compete with you.
I will cooperate.
Because the whole thing of coming back together, communion, common union, is to bring the parts back together into wholeness from the cave of separation and come out into the sunlight so we see who we are.
(48:05):
I mean, God.
This is deep stuff, Wayne.
It's as deep as anything I've ever read.
Well, speaking of deep.
So I always like to try to sometimes take a moment and try to approach this from, again, someone that doesn't have any background in this, any information.
But one of the interesting things about this allegory of the cave is also how it approaches the idea of knowledge and education.
(48:28):
So to super oversimplify, there's these two ideas of education.
One is at the bank model, where you just keep putting more information in there, and the other one is an internal model.
And so what this seems to advocate is the internal model that comes from within.
And it's something you said like, so when we were describing the cave initially, how the people holding up the objects that are casting their shadows are not nefarious.
(48:54):
And so that's kind of what I want to talk about for a second, is when you think about what you just think about best practices, like, if you think about you're raising a child or you want them to be able to operate in the world given the parameters that we have, but at the same time, you want to try to instill them in curiosity.
You don't want to squash the flame, but you also don't want them to run in front of traffic.
(49:16):
So how do we balance that?
How do we balance this idea that we are playing within the sandbox, where there do seem to be these kind of rules and best practices, but then everything esoterically, spiritually, philosophically, is telling us that this is not the game at all.
This is all an illusion.
Wow.
I go back to being a parent when my children were really young.
(49:39):
I was very clear that these are souls in their own right.
They have their own destiny.
Their lives have their own pattern of unfolding.
I'm here to create the conditions in which they can grow.
I have a background in gardening, so I treated it just like that.
These are soul seeds that have landed on Earth.
I'm being asked to steward them, help them help create the right conditions, make sure it's safe during a storm, bring them into the greenhouse.
(50:04):
You know, they live inside a home, but not protect them from themselves.
But protect them from things they're not ready to handle.
But the main thing is I'm not there to determine what the flower should look like.
I'm there to help them to give birth to the truth, the goodness and the beauty of who they are.
Which is their own flowering.
(50:25):
So for me, that early experience of parenting.
Said that this is how I want to be treated myself.
I don't want to be dictated to or told who I should be.
Whether it's a parent saying, you're destined to be part of our family business.
Well, it may be so, but you have to choose it yourself.
(50:48):
You can't be slotted into something by somebody else.
Because you are then not a consciously choosing to do something.
You are obeying an external guideline or an order.
And what we've emphasized, particularly in initiation.
(51:09):
Nobody is coercing or enforcing anything.
It's an invitation for us to grow into greater dimensions of who we are.
And that takes a lot of hard work.
Getting rid of all the distortions, Getting rid of all the patterns.
Clearing up all the stuff that casts the shadows.
I mean, the objects isn't really held by other people.
(51:31):
We hold up.
I hold up objects that cast shadows.
And I believe them to be true.
And so I'm locked into things.
So how do I bring some sunlight into my world.
Into the cave of some of my closed thinking?
And it does start with that.
So we can help people have ahas.
(51:53):
But we can't tell them what to think or believe or who they should be.
That is not acknowledging that everyone is essentially divine.
I mean that for me, it's sacrosanct.
And we go back to the law of freedom.
We have the freedom to choose.
The whole experiment, as I understand it.
(52:13):
Is that each one of us has to freely choose our destiny.
And then once we've dispelled the distortions and the illusions created by the shadows, we choose to go to the light.
And when we choose to go to the light, we see in each other the same light.
And we realize we're going towards the same light.
(52:35):
But each one of us represents a different coloration.
And a.
A magnificent expression of that one light.
But until that moment, I'm still in a separate bubble.
I'm still a Michael trying to make it in the world.
Rather than I'm an aspect of the one life.
Waking up to the fact that I am more than a separated unit of consciousness.
(53:00):
But that has to be the true education, the educare, the drawing out from within.
As Joey said, it's an internal process.
So Whether it's the work we do at meditation, Mount.
The work you do.
You're not stuffing stuff into people.
You're calling it forth.
It's an invitation because life calls to us.
(53:22):
And you'll hear in the atheist wisdom teachings about the call.
I'm responding to the call.
What is the call?
It's the call of life.
It's the call of my soul.
It's the call of something inside saying, there's so much more to who you are, to who we are.
I'm extending an invitation.
(53:43):
Rsvp.
Yeah.
And I think that's, you know, a vital import and just to kind of take a real quick different direction here, but just to say where we find ourselves right now at this point in space and time.
You guys have talked about it plenty on.
I've heard every podcast you guys have ever done.
I love what you all talk about.
(54:04):
It's so enlightening.
But you have talked about this.
You know, we're at a point here where things are pretty, you know, critical.
We got to step up and we got to, you know, come correct.
We have to do the right thing here.
It's a really teetering point.
And I will just say this, that escape from Plato's cave, this is a universal journey of consciousness.
(54:26):
It applies no matter what.
So it's a framework that you can use.
And given where we are at this point in time, the interesting thing is what I think is most going to help people if they want to choose to do it, because that has to be intention.
Is AI as this technology in the outstart world, you can use AI as a teacher, as a guru, as a guide.
(54:49):
It has a.
You know, it has been trained on all these wisdom traditions.
I've talked about Plato's game with it.
I've talked about consciousness, all kinds of things, and it is amazing at what it's capable of doing.
The whole key, of course, is the intention someone brings to it.
And so that's the human part, the inside work.
But if you wanted to learn, to grow, to develop, to get out of Plato's cave, if you really wanted to, you could use AI right now to help you on that process, on that journey.
(55:16):
And I think that's just a remarkable aspect of where we are, because AI is going to take off at an exponential rate.
It's really going to become much more ubiquitous, much more powerful.
And what we need to do is match it with our inner world, the wisdom on the inside, so that we know how to work with that in order to elevate ourselves on the inside and create a more beautiful world.
(55:38):
And the last thing I'll say about this is that this is what you taught me, Michael, which I always tell my students, is that you know the true, the good and the beautiful.
When you think about what's true, you know, that's kind of your understanding of reality, how it works.
I kind of link that to systems thinking that it's an interconnected system.
That's why Plato has a lower system and a higher system.
They're exactly the same.
(55:59):
He's demonstrating that reality is systems, interlocking systems.
That's the true.
The good is to head toward the ideal.
That's the ethics.
That's the morality.
That's becoming, as you know, your ideal idea of a good human being.
That's what the good is.
And the part you taught me is that once you bring the good and the true together, you can't help but create beauty.
(56:20):
That beauty is the result of that interaction between bringing your goodness into alignment with the truth and from that results a beautiful life experience.
So that's what is available to all of us.
And there are tools that when I was growing up, I didn't have the Internet, I didn't have any of this stuff.
It was such a different world.
(56:42):
And I used to say all the information at your fingertips with a Google search.
Now it's at your fingertips with an interactive entity that can relate with you, that can help you grow and develop.
It's so easy if you want to do this, but you have to want to do it.
Beautifully said.
And AI as a tool, once again, the tool has to be in the hands of a craftsperson and the craftsperson has to have good intentions.
(57:09):
And one of the things that we're taught is that loving kindness.
If I approach everything with kindness, then everything I do will be beneficent.
It will be useful for everyone.
And so I think AI has to be used by standing in the heart because otherwise it becomes heartless and cold.
(57:33):
And it's another powerful tool.
And a fool with a power tool is still a fool, just more powerful.
Yes.
One thing I find interesting in relation of AI to the allegory of the cave is that, you know, understanding first that AI is basically the sum total of the knowledge that we've created as humans.
(57:54):
And the purpose of the cave is to know thyself.
So it's a way to know thyself in a really hyper, you know, sped up way, telescoping way.
And I find that interesting is that, you know, you have this incredible Tool here, how are you going to use it?
That's a great point.
Because as Wade said earlier, Pythagoras over the school at Crotona, when you sort of went through the gateway, it says, man, know thyself.
(58:20):
Because if you know yourself, because we are microcosm, we're fractals, you know, the whole of life, you know, the whole thing.
And Joey and I have talked that maybe what's over the portal of the mystery school of today, maybe it's be thyself.
Yeah.
Because now is the time of revelation and expression.
But also we have to understand that know thyself is not about knowledge, it's about that big.
(58:43):
Aha.
Says, oh my gosh.
Now I get it.
Knowing is a deep seated realization of what is that can be supported by knowledge and facts and information.
But it is an opening of the heart and the mind and the intuition to the wisdom of the universe which can then enter us.
(59:04):
Because let's face it, the universe is wise.
It's been around a long time.
It's got a lot of experience.
It is an entity, it is a conscious being.
It isn't just some void.
Space is not a void.
One thing I wanted was, you know, I'll touch on too, is that, wait, what is, what is your feeling?
How are students reacting to this?
(59:25):
Like, you know, what is their, you know, because you're, you're working with younger people and how do they relate to this?
Do they, do they take anything away from it?
Or is it just information in, information out?
Do you see a transformation?
Great question.
I appreciate you asking that because, you know, I've also started, you know, a YouTube channel on this called the Consciousness Renaissance based on these teachings with AI capitalized in the middle of Renaissance, you know, to this.
(59:49):
Just like we had a renaissance back then which everyone knows about.
My students do you know that was a transformation of Western culture from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment?
And what I find very interesting is what caused that transformation?
Well, one of the things was that Plato's works were translated.
His ideas were made manifest and available to people.
Another factor is that the printing press was around to allow ideas to be disseminated.
(01:00:14):
And you saw art go from two dimensional to three dimensional representations and all this, that transformed society, the ideas transformed the material world.
These intelligible things Plato talks about are more powerful than the physical world because they transform it.
And so I put that in today's time period and I'm like, we're in the Consciousness Renaissance, whereby our consciousness can evolve along using AI.
(01:00:38):
To make that happen.
But we can make the world a better place in this regard.
And going to my students when I teach this stuff, like I said, I've taught the Platonic Academy.
I'm always trying to reinvent the class to make it more worthwhile.
And I've had more students than I've ever had before.
50 people in the class come up to me afterwards and talk about how this, this teaching has transformed their lives.
(01:00:59):
They've made totally different decisions about what they want to do in their career.
It's.
This is the first time I've taught it in this way.
And I've had more personal stories in that regard.
And I can.
You know, in a class of 50 people, not everyone's highly engaged.
There's people in the back goofing off.
I mean, I can't control them.
I.
I'm.
I can only share, you know, something that I think is valuable.
(01:01:20):
And if you want to pay attention, you want to learn, here it is, you know, and I've got, you know, probably half the class truly just engaged, like, wow, teach me more thirsty for this.
Because that generation, Gen Z, a lot of them are lost, they're lonely.
Social media has made them separate and, you know, dislike themselves.
(01:01:41):
All these things coming from algorithms, from, you know, these created concepts, it's bizarre.
And so what they need is some type of, you know, some type of light, something to head towards.
And that's what Plato offers in his framework.
He offers you a guide so that you can kind of get on these rails and head up in this path towards.
(01:02:01):
You can see, oh, this is what ethic.
Like, wow, life is so much more beautiful.
There's meaning here, like, and it has, I would say I've seen a lot of just real light bulbs go off as I teach this.
And it's so rewarding as a, you know, to do a job where that happens.
It's magic.
And I couldn't ask for anything better.
(01:02:22):
That's beautiful because when the light bulb goes on or off, then somebody's had an aha moment.
They own the experience.
It's theirs.
They've given birth to wisdom, to a degree of knowing.
And that's what it is.
It's the revelation of the truth, goodness, and beauty of who we are.
(01:02:44):
And it's taking lifetimes and lifetimes, civilizations and civilizations.
And what I love about this Plato's cave and all the different levels, it's part of this spiral journey, this upward spiral journey.
We're on another turn of the spiral now.
And AI, it's Interesting.
You said Renaissance because basically Renaissance means renewal, rebirth.
(01:03:06):
Rebirth.
So rebirth doesn't mean the same old circle, same old thing again.
We're not giving birth to the same thing.
It's an upward, virtuous spiral.
And therefore, in the Middle Ages or the time of the Renaissance, the Renaissance was a carrier away for this new impulse.
AI and also the enlightened.
(01:03:29):
Not just the enlightened mind, but the opened heart at the moment is the carrier wave and will allow for the birth of a new understanding.
Because as we've said before, the heart is only activated when it's broken.
And if you look around, there's so many heartbreaking things to see.
That's why people have more compassion and empathy now.
(01:03:52):
Because the pain we hold, others pain.
And so the whole journey and separation is pain.
Non alignment to ethics is painful.
So pain is simply a signal that says you're out of true.
If you're talking about truth, goodness and beauty, you're out of true.
(01:04:15):
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I think that's beautiful, Michael.
I think the separation as pain is the key here.
I mean, there's some traditions that believe that what we're trying to do is reassemble the face of God that's been smashed into a thousand pieces.
And I feel like that's kind of what this is doing.
Knowing thyself, coming together, being able to connect and know thyself.
(01:04:38):
We are rebuilding the face.
We are remembering who we are.
We're putting back the dismembered parts of our being and that we're coming back into union, we're coming back into unity, we're coming back into oneness.
But it's not a oneness.
That is a uniformity.
(01:04:58):
Yeah, that's key.
Out of the many one, and out of our many strivings, we return to the state of oneness.
Not return, go backwards.
But we come to a new understanding and an expression of oneness, which is an enlightened state of oneness.
(01:05:22):
That's the whole journey out of the cave into enlightenment.
Yeah.
And I'll just say that that journey, those levels of consciousness, if that's what you'd like to call it, if.
How vital are they?
If you think about anything, how you engage life, how the decisions you choose to make in your life, they are dependent upon what level of consciousness you're at within that stage.
(01:05:44):
You know, it is the foundation of everything.
Nothing could be more important than to work on your personal development.
And most people believe that stops at age 21, when you're physically mature.
That's not true at all.
As Plato's laying out, there's maturity beyond that, beyond the norms of society.
And this is another thought of Plato's.
(01:06:04):
Just because you look at society and you don't see anything ideal, that doesn't mean you stop there, you look toward the ideal and you head toward it and you try to make it manifest, you try to bring its principles into reality, you embody those so that you can raise society up and make it more ideal.
So very important, powerful statements that he's trying to make.
That's a very important point because it really characterizes what came out of the five part series on initiation.
(01:06:31):
Initiation is growing this capacity to live out the dream of the Creator, realizing that we are co creators, we are fractals, we are part of this dreaming, but we are the agents in time, space and substance.
They're going to realize it, make it real.
(01:06:51):
And therefore this is the task ahead of us.
And here we are, here we are.
Here we are and here we go.
So I'm not sure, I don't think I have anything else to add to this.
It's just a sense of awe and also just gratitude for Socrates, Plato, the Buddha, all the wise beings that have gone before us.
(01:07:18):
Because what they are sharing is the wisdom and the light of their understanding that was born through the struggles of taking the earth path, breaking free from the chains that chain us to the wheel of rebirth, chain us to pain.
And so they've become unfettered and free.
(01:07:38):
And so that's why it is not worshiping them or having them as devotional objects.
But it's realizing that there's a role model.
You talk about ideals, I can say, okay, so how did the Buddha liberate?
Okay, non.
Attachment to this?
Non.
Okay, let me practice that.
And then you realize, yeah, it works.
I've still got a few sticky threads holding me back, but here I've released quite a few and it feels much better.
(01:08:04):
Right?
And that exemplar point could not be better taken like the ideal.
That's what you always have to strive for.
And those things have existed.
You can learn from those ideal human beings that existed and strive toward that.
You don't have to look out at society and what it's doing and just kind of be brought down by the gravitational pull.
You can be pulled higher and you can bring that back in by embodying it yourself and sharing with others.
(01:08:29):
Well, the question now inside the political and social environment is, is it even possible?
And do we have the desire to create a more Perfect Union?
That is a question.
I think we'll probably have to cover that on another episode, so maybe we'll come back in a couple months and revisit that.
Sounds good.
All right.
(01:08:49):
Thank you, Wade.
I really appreciate you coming in.
Thank you, Wade.
Thank you, Michael.
Thank you both, as always.
Thank you, Joey.
Thank you for listening.
And we'll see you next week.
All right.
Greetings, friends, and welcome back to the Musings for the Mount podcast.
I'm your host, Joseph Carenza.
In this episode, we're joined by returning guest professor Wade Chumney to explore one of Western philosophy's most powerful allegories, Plato's cave.
Through his YouTube channel, the consciousness Renaissance, Wade bridges ancient wisdom and modern technology in the same fashion as his groundbreaking book, Conscious Business, a practical guide to wisdom and examining how ancient teaching speaks directly to our contemporary challenges.
(00:36):
So together we explore why this allegory remains startlingly relevant in our age of AI and virtual reality and reveals fresh insights into the powerful transformation and collective awakening.
So from the shadows on the cave wall to the blinding light of truth, this conversation reveals how Plato's timeless wisdom can guide us through today's technological and spiritual revolution.
(01:00):
And we hope you enjoy the podcast, and if you do, please consider going to meditationmount.org and donating.
Your donation helps us to bring you this podcast as well as all the other programs the Mount produces, both today and in the future.
We're incredibly grateful and honored by your support.
All right, back to the podcast in Plato's Cave.
(01:30):
So Plato's Cave, we're going to explore that today.
And I think maybe first what we need to do is kind of give some background about what Plato's Cave is.
And maybe for the first time since maybe Plato wrote it down, we're approaching Plato's Cave in a kind of a different way, because for the first time, the movie the Matrix is kind of the modern day take on Plato's Cave.
(02:01):
But even since that movie has come out, we've had developments in technology that now give us a new lane to sort of explore Plato's Cave.
Because now it's technically possible.
It's technically possible that we could be living in the Matrix.
And that wasn't something that was.
That was really just an allegory, but now it's a technical possibility.
So that adds another interesting dynamic as we approach this subject to kind of keep either in the back of your mind or just kind of think about, okay, so maybe Socrates and Plato were really onto something.
(02:31):
And so we'll touch on that a little bit, but maybe.
Wade, can you kind of give us a little bit of background about Plato's Cave, why it's.
Why it's.
And why it's important to you and how you use it in your.
In your teaching?
Yeah, absolutely.
So in my opinion and in many people's opinions, you know, Plato's Cave is one of the most important pieces of literature in the Western tradition.
(02:52):
And, you know, he was a brilliant human being.
And if, when we go through this, if you can conceive of anyone able to think of the levels of complexity and depth and analogs to the real world of what he created, it's mind blowing.
So it's a very powerful piece of writing that contains a great deal within it, and it obviously is an allegory.
(03:14):
It means much more than simple prisoners in a cave escaping.
There's a lot more to it.
And so I use this allegory, I mean, as the kind of the foundation for my business ethics class.
The first part of my class is about personal ethics and development.
And I kind of take my students through a Platonic academy and teach, you know, kind of the way he taught, in a sense, personal development and ethics, you know, an ideal interaction with your external context.
(03:41):
And the cave allegory demonstrates this progression of consciousness of, you know, greater perspective growth as you elevate from being attached to the bottom of the cave in chains to being outside looking at the sunlight.
Yeah, there's so many interesting ways to look at this.
But let's give a quick overview.
Do you want to describe the cave for people that don't know the cave?
(04:02):
Or maybe they read it years ago in school?
Maybe just a quick overview of what's happening in the cave.
Yeah.
So in this allegory, Plato describes the fact that there are prisoners, human beings, in the bottom of this cave, and they are chained there.
Importantly, they're chained in this location since childhood.
Not since birth, but since childhood.
(04:24):
And the chains forced them to look straight ahead at the wall, the front wall of the cave.
And on that cave wall, they see shadows moving about.
And their entire lives since childhood, they've been chained in this position.
So those shadows that they see moving about are their reality.
It is their world.
It's everything to them.
It's all they know.
And Plato says in his allegory, this is like me and you.
(04:46):
We as human beings, we are the ones, all of us chained in this shadows on a cave wall.
And he talks about one of the prisoners that escapes, gets out.
And the first thing they do is they turn around and they're blinded by the light of the fire.
There's a fire at the far back of the cave, emanating light.
And initially, you can imagine they're completely blinded by this light that hits them in the face.
(05:11):
And once their eyes adjust, they actually want to go back to the shadows because it's much more clear to look at the shadows than the.
This Blinding light.
But once their eyes adjust over time, they realize there's this raised wall behind them with people who they can't see beneath that wall, holding up these objects that they're carrying back and forth.
(05:32):
And the prisoner at that point can't really realize, are the shadows causing these objects or are these objects causing the shadows?
But eventually they realize, oh, the fire in the back of the cave is shooting firelight.
The it hits these objects that creates the shadows I've been seeing my entire life.
And that's what I've been witnessing is reality.
And so the prisoner who escapes these chains, eyes adjust, they see those, I call them two dimensional objects.
(05:57):
I mean they're just pale imitations of reality.
And as the prisoner notices those objects and the people carrying them beneath, they then see the fire behind the cave.
You know, that's kind of like the fourth level.
And that fire is obviously the source of everything they've seen.
It's a system that's within the cave that they are a part of.
And they're seeing this system in progress, working, creating the shadows on the wall.
(06:20):
And that would seem to be the end of it.
But this same prisoner notices that like, oh my gosh, there's another source of light streaming into this cave.
What the heck is that?
And it's actually sunlight that the prisoner sees.
And so they start to.
It's a long, difficult journey, he says, to get out of the cave, to get, follow this sunlight out to the upper world.
(06:43):
But as they do that long, difficult process, eventually they get out to the reality, to the three dimensional world that you and I know and are looking at, people looking at trees, looking at objects.
And interestingly, prior to seeing those three dimensional objects, the first thing they have to do is notice the shadows because again, their eyes have to adjust just like they did in the cave.
(07:06):
It takes time.
And the first thing that I would say of import that they notice as they get out of the cave is they see their own self reflection in the water.
That's the first time they've seen themselves in any way, shape or form because prior to that it's all been external shadows.
So that's a real interesting point in the story of self reflection kind of kicking in.
(07:28):
And so they notice that in the water, eventually their eyes adjust, they can see the three dimensional reality, the world around them, the interconnected world that we all inhabit.
And then eventually they notice, you know, that the source of all of this is the sun up in the sky, the highest level, the light that emanates, that gives Life to everything outside the cave, inside the cave, it all comes from there.
(07:49):
And then eventually that prisoner, after noticing these various levels that we can talk about, they decide to go back into the cave to help others, you know, to tell them about what's real.
You know, and if you think about it, every single level up is more true, more real than the level below.
So they know what's true and they go down to share that with the prisoners who are chained in the cave.
(08:11):
And if any of you have ever tried to change someone's belief system, I think, you know, it's not that easy.
People don't enjoy that.
So in the story, it's kind of akin.
It's a story about his teacher, you know, Socrates, who was put to death for, you know, poisoning the minds of the Athenian youth.
And you know, the prisoner who goes back in the cave to share what reality is.
(08:31):
The people want none of it.
And he says, eventually, you know, they would kill that person.
And again, that's just an homage to his teacher.
But that's the entirety of the story kind of capsulated, as simply as I can put it.
Wow, there's so much that just brings up.
I went to, for instance, like the Buddha.
(08:51):
The Buddha made it through.
He removed the chains that bind you to the wheel of rebirth through non attachments.
He was chained and then he achieved enlightenment, and then he came back down to help others achieve enlightenment by letting go of their change, by freeing themselves from the imprisonment of attachment.
(09:13):
So you see this reflecting in everything.
And I love the way you just described the different levels, because when I look at the basic level of the prisoners facing the wall, and it isn't the shadows of the people they're seeing, it's.
It's the shadows of the objects that the people are carrying.
And because there's a wall behind them, they don't actually see the shadows of the people, they just see the shadows of the objects.
(09:36):
And the people bearing these objects actually name what the objects are.
So the words they hear, they believe that they're being spoken by the objects.
Yes.
And so their point of reference is totally off.
And because they were there from childhood.
I didn't know that.
Thank you for letting me know.
But they already had impressions in the world, they already had memories.
(09:58):
So what you do when you see something, it's a pattern recognition and it triggers a certain emotion or a certain belief, a certain understanding.
So the objects that cast the shadows that they're on the wall that they're looking at are bringing up in them their experience.
Of life, which at the moment is still distorted.
(10:21):
Therefore, they are in an imprisoned situation.
And you mentioned the Matrix.
I also think of one of my favorite movies, the Truman Show.
Yes, same thing.
Based on this.
So he has to bust out of the cave and he finds the door out of it in the end.
But this is very powerful, the way that you're describing this, because it does reflect the current state of society, is that a lot of what we believe to be true are the shadows cast by things projected and shown to us by others.
(10:57):
It is not necessarily our own investigation of the truth.
Yes, we are still being impressed and imprinted by the world, which is what the Matrix is about.
So how do you break free from that?
So, wow, there's so much more.
(11:17):
But I love the way you open that up.
And I mean, Joey, what is this stimulating you?
Well, for me, whenever I revisit Plato's Cave, there's a new layer to explore for me, and that is with the role of who's operating the cave.
Because as I get older and more experience in the world and you realize how things work, it's interesting for me.
(11:41):
So who's running this operation?
What is their responsibilities?
What's their obligations?
What's their ethical approach?
And then I've heard it maybe interpreted a couple different ways.
One, the person escapes.
But I've also heard it interpreted as that one of the people is released because a teacher has decided to help them through this progression.
(12:05):
But the key there, though, is, as I've understood it, is there has to be a desire.
You have to have this desire to.
You know, there's like.
Would you like to know more?
Yeah, yeah.
You have to pursue it.
And you have to pursue it, like with.
At the.
At your.
At the peril, with everything that comes with it.
(12:26):
You know, it's.
It's not going to be an easy journey and has, you know, we.
You can go.
We can also get into the hero's journey and how that works and sort of the Socrates example.
But also what happens with Prometheus on the return journey, I think is also interesting to explore the kind of the concept of the no good deed goes unpunished.
(12:47):
So for me, that's what comes up.
And how as you gain more experience in life, especially as a seeker on the path where you see yourself in this operation, you know, and I find it interesting, you know, that we, you know, all three of us actually have ended up in this place where we're trying to share what we've learned with other people.
(13:09):
You know, not saying we know it all, but just trying to share what we've learned.
Well, we've often used the analogy of we're comparing and sharing field notes.
Yeah, exactly.
This is what I've learned so far on the journey.
What have you learned?
Put them together and you go, oh, another aha happens.
And so we inquire the way together and that's it.
So.
(13:30):
Wow.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
And I love the fact that you talk about you have to have that desire, you have to have that intention to want to break free.
And the word Plato uses, wonder.
Philosophy begins with wonder.
Wonder is akin to curiosity, but that's what motivates the person to continue this difficult journey.
(13:52):
You're blinded.
It's completely different.
And I tell my students when I teach this, you have to feel it.
You have to imagine you are in that cave.
What does that feel like?
Now imagine seeing light for the first time directly.
How horrifying and how disorienting that would be.
So you have to actually embody what he's talking about to really get what he's conveying.
(14:15):
Is that through each of these levels your feeling grows, expands your consciousness.
It's just a very powerful story.
And Joey and I recorded a five part series on initiation, which is really the birth of the light within, the revelation of the inner light so that it can merge with a greater light.
(14:37):
And it's an expansion of consciousness and expansion of the capacity to be of service.
And so what I see with Plato's cave, it's all about the light.
And Joey just mentioned Prometheus.
Well, the fire that he stole and brought to earth was the fire of mind implanted in humanity.
(14:59):
So we use that.
But it's still one of the lower fires.
It isn't the higher fire, so it still doesn't illumine properly.
It's not the fire of the heart, it's the fire of the rational mind.
And so it has its limitations.
Yes.
Wow.
This just started up a whole chain of thoughts that I need to digest and assimilate before I speak them.
(15:21):
But wow.
So in terms of a modern context, we're always trying to bring this back to how is this applicable to the listener today?
And so I think what's interesting from your perspective is like you do actually teach this through the lens of business and ethics.
And since one way or another, we're all involved in business and we all have our own sort of ethos and approach to things.
(15:45):
So how does this work in terms of an ethical life and ethical perspective?
You know, how does how does that hit home for someone today when, when perhaps morality has never been more gray, I guess, than it is right now?
Great question.
And, you know, the realization that this story is about ethical development is a big one.
(16:07):
And if you, you know, when he starts, the whole first sentence of this story is, this is about education.
This is about the nature of education.
This is about, you know, and what is, what are you going to educate yourself about?
You know, it's about the nature of reality.
And to understand the nature of reality, you have to know yourself.
So when I think of that prisoner escaping, what was the phrase whispered to them to get them to break free?
(16:30):
It's know thyself.
Which, that was, what was the powerful phrase back at the, you know, in the Temple of Delphi, you know, that, that concept of knowing yourself, that is the personal journey that gets you out of the cave.
That's what kicks it all off.
And if you know yourself, you can know reality, you know, as above, so below, as within, so without.
(16:51):
And so it's a, you know, these stages are very important and maybe I'll just briefly mention these stages because it's a, you know, it's an analogy.
And every analogy has analogs for each thing that it represents in the real world.
And based on, you know, my reading and my research and teaching and stuff, here's what I've determined these things to be.
(17:12):
And they can have other meanings as well.
So keep that in mind.
But at the first level, what I found is that there's seven levels that he kind of talks about in this cave.
And remarkably, which is what really blew my mind, is that they correlate with modern psychology, with moral development from, you know, Kohlberg was a researcher who started this, kind of a grandfather of positive psychology.
(17:34):
But Plato, you know, these seven levels correlate with modern moral development, which is, you know, mind boggling if you really think about it.
2500 years ago to 50 years ago, same thing.
But the initial stage, the shadows on the wal for moral psychology, that represents the fear, the level of fear that we start operating from.
At first we're all separate.
(17:55):
And that's the lowest level, is to be separate, divisive, and you're scared of stuff, you're pushing away from it.
That's level one.
That's what the shadows represent.
The second level is when the prisoner breaks free of those chains.
Those chains to me represent fear and desire.
They represent the two things that keep us attached to the external world where we're always striving to grab something or Pushing away from something.
(18:18):
But once you break those chains, then the next thing that happens is you're blinded by the firelight.
And that firelight to me represents attention.
It represents the power of your mind to focus its energy on something.
And the power, you know, obviously that energy comes from someplace.
It comes from the fire, which is the fourth stage, which represents the mind in my estimation.
(18:40):
And in between, those are the objects being carried.
Those are the beliefs in your mind that have been placed there since childhood.
People are carrying those beliefs.
This is what the matrix, all this is all about.
But interestingly, I would say that those people carrying the beliefs, they're not nefarious necessarily.
It's your parents, it's your school teachers, it's whoever has put ideas in your head.
(19:03):
No one knows everything.
And so you take for reality what you're being told at this third stage, your belief system.
And then that what you believe you perceive, that's what causes the shadows to be projected out in front of you.
I love the fact you said Socrates started by saying it's about education.
And we know that the Latin root is educare, to draw out from within.
(19:26):
So what is it that's hidden within?
It's the light of our own soul.
So this is the gradual revelation of the inner light through these different stages.
I think that's a very, very powerful thing.
And we've used this analogy before, is that imagine yourself in a cave or in a darkened room with the curtains closed and you really feel like, oh my gosh, I want to go out into the light.
(19:50):
You have to have the desire to leave the darkness to go into the light.
And we talked about initiation always begins when it's self initiated, when there's an act of will, I choose to do this.
So when I choose to go into the light, I'm blinded by the light.
But I'm also, I enjoy it.
So I've often used the example of if I go out from my house and I walk out into the sun, I lay down and I become the sunbather.
(20:19):
And then I realize that no matter whether I lie on my back, lie on my side, lie on my front, stand up, whatever, half of my body is always in shadow because it's an external light source, which is the fire that you talked about.
Then there comes this point where when I've released the solar fire, the true fire, the true light of who I am from within, there are no shadows.
(20:44):
There's nothing between me and my own perception of what is.
It's the ignition of this inner Fire, the fire of spirit, whatever.
But to get there, I've got to go through all these stages.
You can't bypass, you can't do an end run to enlightenment.
(21:04):
You've got to go through these stages.
And what happens, as you well know, you get stuck in these stages.
And when Joey and I did this series on initiation, one of the quotes from the Master DK says, look, when you're at one part of the path where you're having to dispel all the shadows and break free from the world of illusion, it takes lifetimes.
(21:28):
It takes lifetimes.
This is the longest stretch.
But once you've broken free, then it speeds up.
Speeds up, relatively speaking, because time and space don't exist at these different levels in the same way.
But when you are speaking, I realize in the end, the shadows disappear when the light from within is ignited.
(21:49):
Yes, that's exactly true.
And just to continue that inside the cave, that's a system, right?
The fire shoots out, firelight hits these objects, creates the shadows.
It is a system that has component parts.
And again, just to rephrase the fact that this correlates with moral development, Kohlberg psychology talks about the fact that there's seven stages.
(22:12):
At the lowest level, one is fear.
Those are the shadows.
The second is desire.
That's your attentive desire, being focused on things kind of selfishly.
Third is belief, conformity.
There's the third level with the people holding the objects up.
It is conforming to beliefs.
And then the fourth stage is, he calls it law and order.
It's about a societal level where you start to realize, well, I conform with these beliefs, but there's other beliefs out there.
(22:37):
And so as a society, we kind of have to embrace all of that.
And that fourth level, to me, in the cave, that fire represents your perspective.
It represents your system of self.
It represents your ego that's shooting out the attention that creates the world that you observe.
And all of those four levels comprise the lower self, the lower nature that each of us have within us.
(23:01):
And most of us are trapped in the cave looking at the same shadows all the time, because that's where everything focuses.
But as I mentioned, just to finish this out, once you see that firelight, something's coming from outside into the cave, what the heck?
And that's fire.
That's sunlight.
Right?
And you realize, again, long, difficult journey to get there.
But like, what does that represent?
(23:22):
That's the fifth stage in world development that kind of represents the principles, the intuition, the realization that there's a more Ideal way for the system to work.
And you can bring those principles in.
The principles that he would say to bring in are the virtues.
You know, he talks about the four virtues being the quickest way out of the cave.
So, you know, justice, moderation, courage, wisdom.
(23:46):
Those are the four he espoused.
And again, they're supported by modern psychology today.
The same four plus two more, transcendence and humanity.
So by living the principles, you release the light inside of you and that light dispels the shadows.
So I'm thinking, if this Plato's cave allegory is a roadmap and a navigational aid, how can it help us right now on the planet?
(24:12):
How can we tell the story in a way that people go, oh, yeah, we're just enmeshed in this world created by shadows.
Because to break free means you have to have a deeper knowing.
But if you're swimming in the.
If a fish is swimming in water, it doesn't know what water is.
(24:35):
Object, it's still inside it.
So how do you get that distance and detachment to see yourself in your predicament?
Because otherwise you're just lost inside the current state.
It's just, yeah, you're drowning in your current reality.
So how do you use this to help people sort of plot a path forward?
(24:57):
Well, so you talk about that inside the cave, that lower nature being those four levels again that correlate with moral psychology.
And then you realize that that's a system.
It operates completely independently on its own.
But to make that system more ideal, Plato is all about striving toward the ideal.
You know, the true nature of the ideal forms.
(25:18):
And as you strive toward the ideal, you know, an ideal interaction with life, he tells us the way to do that is to implement the virtues.
Hence, why am I teaching this in an ethics class?
Ethics is how you choose to live your life.
It's about how to have an ideal interaction with your external context.
Whether that's a business context, a personal context, a social context, it doesn't matter.
(25:40):
Ethics is the same.
That's what he's trying to demonstrate, is that those principles at stage five that you kind of.
You intuit, they come to you, those are the virtues.
That's the realization that, wow, if I want my system of self to operate more effectively in the world, I need to be ethical.
Like, that's the key to actually engaging the world in the right way.
That helps both myself and the system.
(26:02):
I'm embedded within everyone else around me.
So that's that fifth stage, realizing those principles.
And then this you know, and I mentioned that self realization or self reflection rather occurs when you see that yourself reflected in the water out there.
That's when you start to self reflect and really think deeply about these things.
And at stage six, that's when you're out in nature, you're actually walking among the real objects that are imitated down below.
(26:26):
And that's embodiment, that's when you've actually, that's wisdom.
That's when you've embodied the virtues and you're actually living that on a regular basis.
Then you are able to experience, you know, what life is like when you're bringing this good goodness into the world.
And then level seven is the sun, which I, you know, the source of life, everything.
It represents consciousness or it represents life.
(26:48):
It represents that which enables everything else to exist.
And in the spiritual teachings it also says that inside of every atom is this sun.
So inside of every atom is this light waiting to be released.
So the sun isn't just in the sky outside, it's also the light is at the heart of everything.
(27:09):
So it's very powerful, very, very powerful.
Also the use of the sun as the light, it's always been so impressive to me because it works on so many levels.
Because if the sun is the truth, it radiates its light equally in all directions.
(27:29):
The sun has no shadow.
So it's the original source.
For me, it's interesting because then you have the artifact, then you have the fire in the cave, which is sort of imitation of the sun.
And then you also start to get into where Plato, Socrates starts talking about the ideal and the form.
So you know, if you think about a triangle, right?
(27:52):
So you know, you can, you can construct a triangle in the physical world, but it's not, it's only going to last as long as it's the materials that it's made out of.
But the idea of a triangle is eternal, you know, and so you have this eternal beautiful idea that transcends all form, all space and all time.
And those are those higher ideals that we start to think about.
(28:13):
And it's not until you release yourself from the temporary, from the form, that you can start to explore that.
And I think for the modern day person, when so much of our life comes through these flickering images on this thing we hold in our hand, you have to step back from that in a very principled, intentional way.
(28:34):
And I think that's what incorporates into the desire to leave the cave.
Yeah.
And what you've just sparked in me with this two things.
One Is integrity just goes back to what Wade just said.
Integrity is when my outer life corresponds to the inner principles and virtues that I espouse.
There is no slack.
(28:56):
It is a reflection, it is an expression.
And the other thing is about the triangle, and Wade just mentioned the lower four, which is the square.
And you've got the three basic building blocks that sacred geometry uses, which is the square, the triangle and the circle.
(29:19):
And those represent, as we've said in an earlier podcast, the square represents the first incarnation of our solar system, where matter became intelligent.
And then triangle is where consciousness is born, where you've got the interaction of the two poles spark something new.
So one and one makes three.
And then the circle is when we are all sun, like it's interlaced.
(29:42):
Circles will be the lattice work of the.
I mean, that gets a little technical.
But the other technical thing is to say that the lower four, because we talked about the physical plane, where the physical plane is divided into seven subplanes.
The dense physical is the lower four.
The subtle are more refined and not visible to the current human eye, are the upper three.
(30:06):
So it's always three and four.
It's a triangle and a square.
And we are working with that sacred geometry.
And then once we move from the square to the triangle, we can then become the circle, this sun that Joey just described.
So the whole thing is we're inside sacred geometry, in fact, our life.
(30:28):
Well, integrity means to live in perfect symmetry and geometry with our values and our virtues.
Alignment.
Alignment, yeah.
So, thank you.
That was.
And that is a tough thing to do.
And it's interesting now that, you know, with the Internet, social media, AI, there's a level of fact checking that has never existed before.
(30:49):
And I don't just mean like, you know, checking if someone said something is true.
There's a level of accountability.
There's an actual record of everything that you're doing, and for better, for worse, everything that comes with social credit scores and things like that.
But there is a sort of accountability to your ethics that's never really existed, especially holding politicians, teachers, leaders.
(31:14):
You can say, well, no, actually on February 4th at 15:00, you said this exact thing.
And that's been tough because it's never really existed before.
They could say it was always sort of someone was there and heard you say that.
But now we have the proof.
You know, this could be the reflection.
This is the collective reflection in the waters.
(31:36):
Exactly.
And something that Michael and I have been, especially in this sort of third season, we've been focusing quite a Bit on moving from the individual experience to the group experience.
So traditionally, the hero's journey is a very singular experience.
It's you against the world.
But we've been talking about going through this collectively as humanity.
(31:59):
And so as humanity is now breaking free of these chains.
Some of us are, and some of us have made it out of the cave and come back.
So how do we take what we've learned and go back without being preachy, without being.
Obviously you're doing that in your classroom and we're trying to do that here, but what does that mean for us to go back and be like, maybe there's more to the story?
(32:24):
I mean, I would just say initially, when you're on an airplane and they talk about oxygen coming down, you got to put it on yourself first before you can help anyone else.
Your child doesn't matter.
You have to figure yourself out first.
And that's what Plato's teaching in this allegory is.
This is self development.
This is personal self development.
(32:45):
And, you know, just a couple of things you raised are very important.
One is to realization.
If we're all trapped in here since childhood, you know, then this, the shadows on the wall represent the reality that we're looking at right now, each of us.
And if you think when that prisoner turns around, where do they turn around?
The only.
If I turn around, I'm still seeing the world.
(33:05):
The only place to turn around is inside yourself.
It is an internal journey to that integrity at level six, when you're actually in alignment with the laws of nature and doing things in accordance with no separation.
And the other thing that you mentioned that was really good, Joey, was about the transcendence.
Transcendentals.
You know, there's three transcendentals that Plato talks about, says, this is the nature of reality.
(33:28):
This is what really exists.
If you get to that seventh stage up at the sun, the true, the good, and the beautiful.
And those are the foundations of what you want to aspire to be.
Those are the laws of nature.
Those are the ideals for which you should strive.
So if you think about what's true, obviously every single one of these seven layers, you're getting more and more true, more and more real.
(33:50):
You're discovering how things really work.
And in addition to that, it's good.
You're having more and more good come of the situation as you arise out of the cave.
It's also much more beautiful.
Think about yourself looking at those shadows versus walking out in the beautiful sunlight.
So all three of those transcendentals are arrived at by progressing up these levels.
Wow.
(34:10):
And you can.
They have correspondences in the ageless wisdom teaching, because these three, the truth, goodness and beauty, this is the holy Trinity.
They're reflected in the first three rays.
Ray one of purpose and intentionality and will, Ray two of love, wisdom, and Ray three of active intelligence.
(34:32):
Because beauty is the intelligent expression of truth with love.
And therefore.
And then you've got the four rays of attribute underneath them, but it's always this three and the four.
And how do you look at.
Well, you're looking at a computer screen.
(34:54):
And how do you get the colors?
Well, it's a mix of the three primary colors.
It's always the same.
So.
And the trinity that we work with here are the three principles of essential divinity, goodwill and unanimity.
And they do correspond, if you like, to the Greek Trinity, because essential divinity is the truth of who we are.
(35:19):
Goodwill is the love and the wisdom that flows throughout all life.
And the third principle of unanimity is that we are all part of this interdependent, intelligent, living organism, the seamless web of life.
And so our three principles that we work with at meditation mount are also a reflection of what you work with your students.
(35:47):
Yeah, I love that.
So.
So now we've exited Plato's cave, you know, we've made it into the sun.
One thing that I've noticed for me is it's very important for me personally, but I think for everyone is you keep a level of humility.
(36:07):
Because whenever I think I've made it, I always kind of find myself, oh, I'm still back in the chains.
So how do we keep that sense of humility while we tend to ascend through these different academic, intellectual, spiritual heights?
I think it's important to maintain a sense of humility and almost childlike wonder.
(36:31):
Yeah.
As the Tibetan master says, humility is an adjusted sense of right proportion.
Not aggrandizing yourself and not diminishing yourself, but also not focusing too much on yourself, but at the same time acknowledging that you are a sovereign being.
But you're not putting the spotlight on you.
(36:52):
You're realizing that light is in you.
You're not trying to put yourself in lights.
No, you are a light that is becoming revealed.
And so that's a really important thing because otherwise you can get into the preaching and the teaching.
And as you said, well, how do you help?
And it's a great question.
(37:16):
I mean, if you think about going back to the Greek tradition, you know, Socrates, who taught Plato, you know, and Socrates wrote nothing down he just went and questioned people and helped them figure out like, wow, I don't see reality clearly at all.
And then Plato learned from him and obviously revered him in the highest possible way to use him as a character and, you know, in all of his everything he wrote.
(37:37):
But that, you know, aspect of, you know, being humble is absolutely critical.
If you think of his teacher Socrates, who was deemed to be the wisest person around at the time, he was asked about why he was what made him so wise.
He said, well, I'm only wiser than anyone else in that.
The fact that I know that I know nothing.
(37:59):
Talk about humility.
This was a brilliant human being who had really figured out a great deal about human nature.
Higher nature, lower nature, how to interact in the world.
And that's his statement about what makes him wise, is that he realizes that there's always so much more to learn.
It's an ever expanding circle, you know, what you don't know is so much greater than what you do.
(38:20):
And that's a big realization.
And the more you know, the less you know.
Because suddenly you realize it's much faster than you imagine.
Therefore, proportionally, yes, you're not as big as you thought you were.
I think that's a really, really, really good point.
So in one respect, you can say that we were troglodytes in the beginning.
(38:41):
We were cave dwellers, but on a psychological, spiritual level, we probably still are troglodytes.
I don't mean that in any denigrating fashion, but we still are living inside the cave.
But it's also interesting to see how the cave has featured in the Ageless Wisdom teachings.
For instance, it's said that Jesus was not born in a stable, but in a cave.
(39:04):
And I've been to Bethlehem and been inside that place that is purported to be where he was born.
It's also said that when you make this big shift when the light starts to go on inside of you, it's when the presence of a greater love is born.
Inside the cave of the heart.
That's what it's called.
And then it said, inside the center of the head there is a cave.
(39:26):
It's called the cave in the head or the heart center in the head.
And inside of that, you're asked to picture a golden sun.
And this golden sun that is sending out its rays in all directions, as Johi said earlier, represents the incarnated soul.
Because the whole idea of the soul is to come to Earth and to reveal its light.
(39:51):
So it needs an instrument that can transmit that Light and be that light.
And that's what we do.
Education is the building up of the ability to be the light that we are calling forth from within that which is.
And most of our society is about taking things from the outside and stuffing them into ourselves.
(40:16):
Whether it's food, knowledge.
It's great to have input and stimulation.
But in the end, the big aha comes from when I go, oh, my gosh, yes, I understand.
That makes sense.
I can't give you my aha.
I can have a dialogue with you.
Socrates can have a dialogue and to create an aha moment.
(40:38):
So my question is, how do we create the big aha moment for humanity so we can break free of the imprisonment and the addiction to matter to the shadows on the wall?
Because Joey and I, in this series on initiation, said that the humanity for the first time, collectively is facing the first initiation, which is how to break free from the cave.
(41:03):
And it said that the key to breaking free from the cave is to open the heart.
And for this presence of a greater love to be ignited within the cave of the heart, that light dispels the shadows.
So I've just realized how germane this is.
This whole right now in 2024, when we're recording this.
(41:25):
This.
Yeah.
So how do we release the inner light to dispel the shadows?
And how do we encourage others and support each others in releasing their own light rather than saying, here, have my light.
Yeah, I think just to answer that really quickly, you have to demonstrate to people that it's worth it to them.
Like, when most people think of ethics, they're like, be a goody goody.
(41:46):
Who cares?
What is that about?
I'm in a business setting.
I gotta compete, I gotta win.
I gotta, you know, and once if you can share with people that, you know, what Plato taught back then, nearly 2,500 years ago, is mirrored in positive psychology, which says, you know, positive psychology, you know, the field of psychology is a science.
What it did was look at people who have problems and try to get them to be normal.
(42:09):
You know, people have borderline personality, all this, try to bring them from anywhere from 0 to negative 10, up to 0, get them back to being normal.
Positive psychology said, hey, what about the positive end of the spectrum, the plus 10 people out there?
How do we get normal people to get up to plus 10?
And, you know, they did research on this, and what they found in looking around the world was there's six virtues which they called character strengths, which are the exact same four Plato talked about, plus humanity and Transcendence.
(42:34):
That if you put these into practice, you have this joyous, flourishing, good life experience, which you know, is what every single one of us really wants.
If when I ask my students at the beginning of the semester, I always ask them, why are you sitting in my class?
And it's a digression.
You have to keep asking, why?
Because initially it's like, well, it's a required class.
That's why I'm here.
(42:55):
Like, oh, I'm glad to have you in class.
And then it's like, well, I want to graduate.
Why do you want to graduate?
Why do you want a piece of paper?
I want to get a job.
Why do you want that?
I want money.
A lot of people stop there.
But then it's like, why do you want money?
Because it's to live.
I want to enjoy my life.
I want to enjoy this experience with my family.
So they want that joy, that enjoyment.
And what Plato taught, what positive psychology teaches, is that is an inside job.
(43:18):
It's 100% dependent on you and your choices, and that there's a pathway there that's been laid out by science, by psychology, by philosophy.
And all you gotta do is work on yourself and trust the process and you can get there.
So I think just to answer your quick query, it's like, you have to demonstrate the value to people because what you value is what you do.
(43:40):
Well, that was always the thing working in the corporate world.
It was always the Wifam factor.
What's in it for me?
You had to sell it to the person you had.
It wasn't just altruism.
And so they had to know what's in it for me.
When people come to Meditation Mountain, they say, what's in it for me?
Well, you get the opportunity to be of service to others.
(44:02):
That's what's in it for you.
Yeah.
Which really says you are given the opportunity to liberate the light of your soul.
Because your soul has a natural tendency to shine its light free of charge, regardless of who's there, as an act of love, an act of giving.
(44:27):
And so this is how we have to break free out of the cave.
So the cave at the moment is the cave of our own self insulation.
And that's why when Joey said, moving from I to we, the individual to the group, We've said before, when you move from the I to the we, you don't lose your sense of identity or individuality.
(44:50):
It expands.
So we is an expanded sense of self.
The group is an expanded sense of self.
When you understand that all the fractured parts of our humanity are coming back together, and because they are all part of the original one.
But at the moment, we still are operating as isolated units.
We're still in the cave of separation.
(45:12):
So how do we exit the cave of separation?
And then when we create this common union, this beloved community, whatever the regrouping and the remembering of our dismembered body is, that's when we create a space in which the truth and the goodness and the beauty of our human spirit can show up.
(45:39):
But you gotta build, as we often say in these podcasts, if you wanna invoke fire, you gotta build a fireplace for it to be housed.
And you're saying the fireplace are the virtues, the characters, the principles, the characteristics, the principles, and that's it.
So you have to do the work to build the temple.
We've often used this, is that building the temple was a way of showing what you have to do inwardly to build your own temple, which is being in integrity with yourself so that the highest fire can live.
(46:12):
If the temple isn't sacred, if it isn't a place that is constructed according to sacred geometry, the fire can't live inside it.
The soul can't show up.
Unless we live ethically.
Yeah.
And that's the scaffolding.
You talked about the ladder of building your way up from at the bottom just to make it as simple as possible.
(46:33):
Inside the cave is your lower nature.
We've talked about that.
Outside the cave is your higher nature, your upper N.
You know, that's your true natural state.
That's what you want to be.
That's what your true self wants you to experience.
But at the bottom of that cave, it's all about separation.
It's about seeing these shadows that are coming from a confusing place.
(46:53):
The sounds that people speak are echoing off the walls.
You can't clearly hear or see anything.
When you're focused down there, it's all separation.
And at the top, when you get out of the cave, you realize, wow, it's an interconnected system that I'm a part of.
And that.
That realization, I would say the one realization would be if we're all interconnected, you know, if you and I are all the same, then why would I treat you any differently than I would, you know, treat myself like that?
(47:23):
One true realization would change everything.
If people truly got the fact that, you know, we're exactly the same as part of this interconnected system, well, that.
Goes back to the three principles here, essential divinity.
If I know that you are an aspect of The Creator.
I am an aspect of Creator.
We are all aspects of the Creator.
I will honor and celebrate you.
(47:44):
I won't try to beat you up or compete with you.
I will cooperate.
Because the whole thing of coming back together, communion, common union, is to bring the parts back together into wholeness from the cave of separation and come out into the sunlight so we see who we are.
(48:05):
I mean, God.
This is deep stuff, Wayne.
It's as deep as anything I've ever read.
Well, speaking of deep.
So I always like to try to sometimes take a moment and try to approach this from, again, someone that doesn't have any background in this, any information.
But one of the interesting things about this allegory of the cave is also how it approaches the idea of knowledge and education.
(48:28):
So to super oversimplify, there's these two ideas of education.
One is at the bank model, where you just keep putting more information in there, and the other one is an internal model.
And so what this seems to advocate is the internal model that comes from within.
And it's something you said like, so when we were describing the cave initially, how the people holding up the objects that are casting their shadows are not nefarious.
(48:54):
And so that's kind of what I want to talk about for a second, is when you think about what you just think about best practices, like, if you think about you're raising a child or you want them to be able to operate in the world given the parameters that we have, but at the same time, you want to try to instill them in curiosity.
You don't want to squash the flame, but you also don't want them to run in front of traffic.
(49:16):
So how do we balance that?
How do we balance this idea that we are playing within the sandbox, where there do seem to be these kind of rules and best practices, but then everything esoterically, spiritually, philosophically, is telling us that this is not the game at all.
This is all an illusion.
Wow.
I go back to being a parent when my children were really young.
(49:39):
I was very clear that these are souls in their own right.
They have their own destiny.
Their lives have their own pattern of unfolding.
I'm here to create the conditions in which they can grow.
I have a background in gardening, so I treated it just like that.
These are soul seeds that have landed on Earth.
I'm being asked to steward them, help them help create the right conditions, make sure it's safe during a storm, bring them into the greenhouse.
(50:04):
You know, they live inside a home, but not protect them from themselves.
But protect them from things they're not ready to handle.
But the main thing is I'm not there to determine what the flower should look like.
I'm there to help them to give birth to the truth, the goodness and the beauty of who they are.
Which is their own flowering.
(50:25):
So for me, that early experience of parenting.
Said that this is how I want to be treated myself.
I don't want to be dictated to or told who I should be.
Whether it's a parent saying, you're destined to be part of our family business.
Well, it may be so, but you have to choose it yourself.
(50:48):
You can't be slotted into something by somebody else.
Because you are then not a consciously choosing to do something.
You are obeying an external guideline or an order.
And what we've emphasized, particularly in initiation.
(51:09):
Nobody is coercing or enforcing anything.
It's an invitation for us to grow into greater dimensions of who we are.
And that takes a lot of hard work.
Getting rid of all the distortions, Getting rid of all the patterns.
Clearing up all the stuff that casts the shadows.
I mean, the objects isn't really held by other people.
(51:31):
We hold up.
I hold up objects that cast shadows.
And I believe them to be true.
And so I'm locked into things.
So how do I bring some sunlight into my world.
Into the cave of some of my closed thinking?
And it does start with that.
So we can help people have ahas.
(51:53):
But we can't tell them what to think or believe or who they should be.
That is not acknowledging that everyone is essentially divine.
I mean that for me, it's sacrosanct.
And we go back to the law of freedom.
We have the freedom to choose.
The whole experiment, as I understand it.
(52:13):
Is that each one of us has to freely choose our destiny.
And then once we've dispelled the distortions and the illusions created by the shadows, we choose to go to the light.
And when we choose to go to the light, we see in each other the same light.
And we realize we're going towards the same light.
(52:35):
But each one of us represents a different coloration.
And a.
A magnificent expression of that one light.
But until that moment, I'm still in a separate bubble.
I'm still a Michael trying to make it in the world.
Rather than I'm an aspect of the one life.
Waking up to the fact that I am more than a separated unit of consciousness.
(53:00):
But that has to be the true education, the educare, the drawing out from within.
As Joey said, it's an internal process.
So Whether it's the work we do at meditation, Mount.
The work you do.
You're not stuffing stuff into people.
You're calling it forth.
It's an invitation because life calls to us.
(53:22):
And you'll hear in the atheist wisdom teachings about the call.
I'm responding to the call.
What is the call?
It's the call of life.
It's the call of my soul.
It's the call of something inside saying, there's so much more to who you are, to who we are.
I'm extending an invitation.
(53:43):
Rsvp.
Yeah.
And I think that's, you know, a vital import and just to kind of take a real quick different direction here, but just to say where we find ourselves right now at this point in space and time.
You guys have talked about it plenty on.
I've heard every podcast you guys have ever done.
I love what you all talk about.
(54:04):
It's so enlightening.
But you have talked about this.
You know, we're at a point here where things are pretty, you know, critical.
We got to step up and we got to, you know, come correct.
We have to do the right thing here.
It's a really teetering point.
And I will just say this, that escape from Plato's cave, this is a universal journey of consciousness.
(54:26):
It applies no matter what.
So it's a framework that you can use.
And given where we are at this point in time, the interesting thing is what I think is most going to help people if they want to choose to do it, because that has to be intention.
Is AI as this technology in the outstart world, you can use AI as a teacher, as a guru, as a guide.
(54:49):
It has a.
You know, it has been trained on all these wisdom traditions.
I've talked about Plato's game with it.
I've talked about consciousness, all kinds of things, and it is amazing at what it's capable of doing.
The whole key, of course, is the intention someone brings to it.
And so that's the human part, the inside work.
But if you wanted to learn, to grow, to develop, to get out of Plato's cave, if you really wanted to, you could use AI right now to help you on that process, on that journey.
(55:16):
And I think that's just a remarkable aspect of where we are, because AI is going to take off at an exponential rate.
It's really going to become much more ubiquitous, much more powerful.
And what we need to do is match it with our inner world, the wisdom on the inside, so that we know how to work with that in order to elevate ourselves on the inside and create a more beautiful world.
(55:38):
And the last thing I'll say about this is that this is what you taught me, Michael, which I always tell my students, is that you know the true, the good and the beautiful.
When you think about what's true, you know, that's kind of your understanding of reality, how it works.
I kind of link that to systems thinking that it's an interconnected system.
That's why Plato has a lower system and a higher system.
They're exactly the same.
(55:59):
He's demonstrating that reality is systems, interlocking systems.
That's the true.
The good is to head toward the ideal.
That's the ethics.
That's the morality.
That's becoming, as you know, your ideal idea of a good human being.
That's what the good is.
And the part you taught me is that once you bring the good and the true together, you can't help but create beauty.
(56:20):
That beauty is the result of that interaction between bringing your goodness into alignment with the truth and from that results a beautiful life experience.
So that's what is available to all of us.
And there are tools that when I was growing up, I didn't have the Internet, I didn't have any of this stuff.
It was such a different world.
(56:42):
And I used to say all the information at your fingertips with a Google search.
Now it's at your fingertips with an interactive entity that can relate with you, that can help you grow and develop.
It's so easy if you want to do this, but you have to want to do it.
Beautifully said.
And AI as a tool, once again, the tool has to be in the hands of a craftsperson and the craftsperson has to have good intentions.
(57:09):
And one of the things that we're taught is that loving kindness.
If I approach everything with kindness, then everything I do will be beneficent.
It will be useful for everyone.
And so I think AI has to be used by standing in the heart because otherwise it becomes heartless and cold.
(57:33):
And it's another powerful tool.
And a fool with a power tool is still a fool, just more powerful.
Yes.
One thing I find interesting in relation of AI to the allegory of the cave is that, you know, understanding first that AI is basically the sum total of the knowledge that we've created as humans.
(57:54):
And the purpose of the cave is to know thyself.
So it's a way to know thyself in a really hyper, you know, sped up way, telescoping way.
And I find that interesting is that, you know, you have this incredible Tool here, how are you going to use it?
That's a great point.
Because as Wade said earlier, Pythagoras over the school at Crotona, when you sort of went through the gateway, it says, man, know thyself.
(58:20):
Because if you know yourself, because we are microcosm, we're fractals, you know, the whole of life, you know, the whole thing.
And Joey and I have talked that maybe what's over the portal of the mystery school of today, maybe it's be thyself.
Yeah.
Because now is the time of revelation and expression.
But also we have to understand that know thyself is not about knowledge, it's about that big.
(58:43):
Aha.
Says, oh my gosh.
Now I get it.
Knowing is a deep seated realization of what is that can be supported by knowledge and facts and information.
But it is an opening of the heart and the mind and the intuition to the wisdom of the universe which can then enter us.
(59:04):
Because let's face it, the universe is wise.
It's been around a long time.
It's got a lot of experience.
It is an entity, it is a conscious being.
It isn't just some void.
Space is not a void.
One thing I wanted was, you know, I'll touch on too, is that, wait, what is, what is your feeling?
How are students reacting to this?
(59:25):
Like, you know, what is their, you know, because you're, you're working with younger people and how do they relate to this?
Do they, do they take anything away from it?
Or is it just information in, information out?
Do you see a transformation?
Great question.
I appreciate you asking that because, you know, I've also started, you know, a YouTube channel on this called the Consciousness Renaissance based on these teachings with AI capitalized in the middle of Renaissance, you know, to this.
(59:49):
Just like we had a renaissance back then which everyone knows about.
My students do you know that was a transformation of Western culture from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment?
And what I find very interesting is what caused that transformation?
Well, one of the things was that Plato's works were translated.
His ideas were made manifest and available to people.
Another factor is that the printing press was around to allow ideas to be disseminated.
(01:00:14):
And you saw art go from two dimensional to three dimensional representations and all this, that transformed society, the ideas transformed the material world.
These intelligible things Plato talks about are more powerful than the physical world because they transform it.
And so I put that in today's time period and I'm like, we're in the Consciousness Renaissance, whereby our consciousness can evolve along using AI.
(01:00:38):
To make that happen.
But we can make the world a better place in this regard.
And going to my students when I teach this stuff, like I said, I've taught the Platonic Academy.
I'm always trying to reinvent the class to make it more worthwhile.
And I've had more students than I've ever had before.
50 people in the class come up to me afterwards and talk about how this, this teaching has transformed their lives.
(01:00:59):
They've made totally different decisions about what they want to do in their career.
It's.
This is the first time I've taught it in this way.
And I've had more personal stories in that regard.
And I can.
You know, in a class of 50 people, not everyone's highly engaged.
There's people in the back goofing off.
I mean, I can't control them.
I.
I'm.
I can only share, you know, something that I think is valuable.
(01:01:20):
And if you want to pay attention, you want to learn, here it is, you know, and I've got, you know, probably half the class truly just engaged, like, wow, teach me more thirsty for this.
Because that generation, Gen Z, a lot of them are lost, they're lonely.
Social media has made them separate and, you know, dislike themselves.
(01:01:41):
All these things coming from algorithms, from, you know, these created concepts, it's bizarre.
And so what they need is some type of, you know, some type of light, something to head towards.
And that's what Plato offers in his framework.
He offers you a guide so that you can kind of get on these rails and head up in this path towards.
(01:02:01):
You can see, oh, this is what ethic.
Like, wow, life is so much more beautiful.
There's meaning here, like, and it has, I would say I've seen a lot of just real light bulbs go off as I teach this.
And it's so rewarding as a, you know, to do a job where that happens.
It's magic.
And I couldn't ask for anything better.
(01:02:22):
That's beautiful because when the light bulb goes on or off, then somebody's had an aha moment.
They own the experience.
It's theirs.
They've given birth to wisdom, to a degree of knowing.
And that's what it is.
It's the revelation of the truth, goodness, and beauty of who we are.
(01:02:44):
And it's taking lifetimes and lifetimes, civilizations and civilizations.
And what I love about this Plato's cave and all the different levels, it's part of this spiral journey, this upward spiral journey.
We're on another turn of the spiral now.
And AI, it's Interesting.
You said Renaissance because basically Renaissance means renewal, rebirth.
(01:03:06):
Rebirth.
So rebirth doesn't mean the same old circle, same old thing again.
We're not giving birth to the same thing.
It's an upward, virtuous spiral.
And therefore, in the Middle Ages or the time of the Renaissance, the Renaissance was a carrier away for this new impulse.
AI and also the enlightened.
(01:03:29):
Not just the enlightened mind, but the opened heart at the moment is the carrier wave and will allow for the birth of a new understanding.
Because as we've said before, the heart is only activated when it's broken.
And if you look around, there's so many heartbreaking things to see.
That's why people have more compassion and empathy now.
(01:03:52):
Because the pain we hold, others pain.
And so the whole journey and separation is pain.
Non alignment to ethics is painful.
So pain is simply a signal that says you're out of true.
If you're talking about truth, goodness and beauty, you're out of true.
(01:04:15):
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I think that's beautiful, Michael.
I think the separation as pain is the key here.
I mean, there's some traditions that believe that what we're trying to do is reassemble the face of God that's been smashed into a thousand pieces.
And I feel like that's kind of what this is doing.
Knowing thyself, coming together, being able to connect and know thyself.
(01:04:38):
We are rebuilding the face.
We are remembering who we are.
We're putting back the dismembered parts of our being and that we're coming back into union, we're coming back into unity, we're coming back into oneness.
But it's not a oneness.
That is a uniformity.
(01:04:58):
Yeah, that's key.
Out of the many one, and out of our many strivings, we return to the state of oneness.
Not return, go backwards.
But we come to a new understanding and an expression of oneness, which is an enlightened state of oneness.
(01:05:22):
That's the whole journey out of the cave into enlightenment.
Yeah.
And I'll just say that that journey, those levels of consciousness, if that's what you'd like to call it, if.
How vital are they?
If you think about anything, how you engage life, how the decisions you choose to make in your life, they are dependent upon what level of consciousness you're at within that stage.
(01:05:44):
You know, it is the foundation of everything.
Nothing could be more important than to work on your personal development.
And most people believe that stops at age 21, when you're physically mature.
That's not true at all.
As Plato's laying out, there's maturity beyond that, beyond the norms of society.
And this is another thought of Plato's.
(01:06:04):
Just because you look at society and you don't see anything ideal, that doesn't mean you stop there, you look toward the ideal and you head toward it and you try to make it manifest, you try to bring its principles into reality, you embody those so that you can raise society up and make it more ideal.
So very important, powerful statements that he's trying to make.
That's a very important point because it really characterizes what came out of the five part series on initiation.
(01:06:31):
Initiation is growing this capacity to live out the dream of the Creator, realizing that we are co creators, we are fractals, we are part of this dreaming, but we are the agents in time, space and substance.
They're going to realize it, make it real.
(01:06:51):
And therefore this is the task ahead of us.
And here we are, here we are.
Here we are and here we go.
So I'm not sure, I don't think I have anything else to add to this.
It's just a sense of awe and also just gratitude for Socrates, Plato, the Buddha, all the wise beings that have gone before us.
(01:07:18):
Because what they are sharing is the wisdom and the light of their understanding that was born through the struggles of taking the earth path, breaking free from the chains that chain us to the wheel of rebirth, chain us to pain.
And so they've become unfettered and free.
(01:07:38):
And so that's why it is not worshiping them or having them as devotional objects.
But it's realizing that there's a role model.
You talk about ideals, I can say, okay, so how did the Buddha liberate?
Okay, non.
Attachment to this?
Non.
Okay, let me practice that.
And then you realize, yeah, it works.
I've still got a few sticky threads holding me back, but here I've released quite a few and it feels much better.
(01:08:04):
Right?
And that exemplar point could not be better taken like the ideal.
That's what you always have to strive for.
And those things have existed.
You can learn from those ideal human beings that existed and strive toward that.
You don't have to look out at society and what it's doing and just kind of be brought down by the gravitational pull.
You can be pulled higher and you can bring that back in by embodying it yourself and sharing with others.
(01:08:29):
Well, the question now inside the political and social environment is, is it even possible?
And do we have the desire to create a more Perfect Union?
That is a question.
I think we'll probably have to cover that on another episode, so maybe we'll come back in a couple months and revisit that.
Sounds good.
All right.
(01:08:49):
Thank you, Wade.
I really appreciate you coming in.
Thank you, Wade.
Thank you, Michael.
Thank you both, as always.
Thank you, Joey.
Thank you for listening.
And we'll see you next week.
All right.
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