Maybe not today, certainly not yesterday, but maybe tomorrow we will all leave the cave. By a trick of nature, its invisible and unseen hand shoved us back into the cave this year. Most were unprepared for such a primordial act and could not understand that there was a cave to be shoved back into, though I often believe that many of them never left the cave in the first place. The modern sheltered world had become a new form of Plato’s Cave with HD moving pictures on the walls, and even though the masses thought they saw daylight, they were still cowering near the flickering light of fading embers that barely illuminated their existence. To leave the cave again requires a strategy, but we are stunned that we must negotiate this exit that is so unfamiliar. The door we entered through is gone, closed by a seismic event called COVID-19. Yet we can feel the wind blowing in from somewhere, so we know that out in the darkness, a path must exist which we may be able to negotiate ourselves back into the light of day.

Our minds should be washed clean by this isolating power and safety found in the shelter of the cave, but it will require extraordinary strength to expose ourselves to the danger of being among the elements of a changing world that requires new tools to navigate our path forward. The gatekeepers of the old way were few, while the masses representing the bulk of the tribe wandered within the darkness of the false luminance of our artificial world. The controllers stood hidden at the edges, obscuring the exits; they are our politicians, the wealthy, the 1% we trusted to stand between our exposure to the larger hostile world and our safe harbor. Celebrities joined them as dancing jesters, asking us to avert our gaze from finding something within ourselves. The jesters have shown us their foolishness, and the politicians have put on display their decrepitude, their calcified minds, and spirits, which grew comfortable while keeping others from navigating between the known and unknown.

Nature, oblivious to our tragic plight, ransacked the stage on which the same old show had been playing well beyond its best by date, kicked the actors off their platform, and showed the people that these privileged few were fragile just like us. We are now witnessing that their amassed wealth offered an illusion of power, propelling them to tower like fanged beasts on gilded thrones over those who dare challenge their status. The rules of life, though, are not a complex of arcane hoops and treacherous passages; they are observances of graciousness, respect, cohesion, collaboration, and, above all, love.

We lost love. Our minds and hearts have become machines that do what we are told. We find our purpose in adopted personas that are contrivances of the mediocre within an echo chamber that affirms benign affability. The creature of discovery, music, and poetry has been rendered useless, a prop in the servitude of a system that cannot reward the unknown, the difficult, the other. Pledge allegiance to your brand, your team, your colors, or your colored ribbon, but do not give to your mind and soul.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Plato warned us that society decays and eventually becomes a tyranny, but we blurred that image by throwing up caricatures such as mass-murdering lunatics with funny mustaches or evil overlords in the movies as being the perpetrators of mayhem, not the benign fatherly figures of polite men who are refined non-vulgarians. We were massaged by our media until this point today, where we are being bludgeoned with a total uncertainty of what is real. This frantic grasping at deception is because the cave door exit was beckoning, and the politicians themselves have become the jesters trying to ward off the commoners. We, humans, must once again pass from darkness to light and rebalance the roles of society due to the abdication of our souls and love. Those trusted to govern are frightened tyrants in love with the luxury rendered out of an insipid culture of idiots.

Think back to the days, if you are old enough, when we were convinced that love was old fashioned, sappy, ephemeral, new agey, gay, pedophilic, betraying, and impossible to find in its true form. Love, you were told only exits on the ethereal plane between you and your creator; it isn’t available to those who are unclean and still walking the earth. Love was being diminished and relegated to the afterlife while substituting career, money, and obligation to the state as the cure-all for the gravity of existence in an uncaring, cold world wrapped in fear and potential war. This was and maybe still is the fabric that those in power would like us to cling to, but who among us doesn’t feel right now that our politicians and celebrities look nakedly ineffective and inept? Have they become largely impotent as we are being asked by nature and a virus to reconsider just what it is we are doing, who we are, and how we want to continue?

There are troglodytes among us who are unevolved and afraid of life in the light of the mind and discovery. They are begging for a return before we’ve even left the cave, as watching the shadows on the walls is enough reality for their liking. Sadly, we have a media that is in step with power, trying to convince us that we do not understand enough about self-governance and money to be trusted with living our lives. Maybe they are right? Maybe with our current level of education, we would act like locusts and decimate all remaining systems on our planet; we have seemed bent on doing just that. So either we recognize our shortcomings and start elevating one another with the encouragement of finding knowledge, or I guess we’ll just have to sit back and watch this redundant and boring shadow puppetry we are all so accustomed to.