Plato, among many others, was convinced that there were such things as absolute beauty and truths. He believed that what we call the ‘soul’ was eternal, and that all knowledge was simply a form of remembering things that our soul knew before birth. To explain his view, he wrote the parable of the cave, where people are sitting around a fire watching shadows of the outside manifest themselves on the wall of the cave. For their entire life, they watched these reflections, and to them, it was a representation of the real world. One day they ventured out of the cave, and the real world was finally revealed to them.
Today, this is happening on multiple levels, so much so that the truth is so ‘painful’ and unbelievable that many prefer to venture back into the cave of ignorance.
Plato believed that, before birth, the soul possesses knowledge, but that knowledge is lost when we enter into the world at birth. Our senses cloud the remembrance of real truths as we enter into the world of illusion and eventually become slaves to our senses. Perhaps this is why many spiritual practices like Buddhism and several yogic philosophies preach the abstinence of sensorial pleasure to an extent, because the more we engage in our senses, the further we drift away from the knowledge of our soul.
This is very interesting because the idea of the soul being an eternal entity is nothing new. Take reincarnation, for example, which is the idea that we experience many different lives not only on our own planet and dimensions, but other ones as well. The topic and research that’s gone into reincarnation is extremely fascinating to say the least, so much so that Carl Sagan stated that reincarnation deserves “serious study” because “young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way other than reincarnation.” ...read more>>>...
