There has been much criticism and skepticism of the Desteni message from certain quarters of the fringe and spirituality communities about the “unoriginal” aspects of the Desteni message that this world is an illusion. This is another typical red-herring by critics too defensive to hear the words being presented rather than listening to the message. Obviously, there has never been an assertion that the whole premise of the world being an illusion originated with Desteni. That would be mental, what with thousands of years of religious and philosophical speculation having said as much.
Rather, it is the stated “Destenian” refutation of all the mind has created-the philosophical, religious, technological, societal, psychological and commercial systems that has upset the critics, because in these system they have defined themselves. To completely refute and deem valueless all that the mind has created, even personalities, memories and thinking itself, is nothing but the static of incoherence. It is a stumbling block to self-realization of being that is more than personality or memory or thought. But their criticism is understandable, for the consciousness system is all that they have ever known. It is their universe.
Which brings us to the allegory of Plato’s Cave embedded in Plato’s Republic. The Cave symbolizes the world separated from the Light (“God”), where it’s inhabitants (“prisoners”) dwell in darkness (ignorance of “God”). These prisoners are chained and forced to observe what appears to be a wall. There is a fire behind the prisoners which casts a light on the wall, and in between the wall and the prisoners there’s a raised sidewalk where puppets of plants and animals are moved along, which cast shadows on the wall, all the while making noises, which the prisoners, not aware of anything outside of the darkness of the cave, mistake the antics as “real,” and resort to naming these puppets and compete with each other to see who can “name” things the best.
However, one prisoner manages to free himself from his chains and slowly emerges from the cave. He sees the light of the sun for the first time and slowly gains awareness and understanding of the true condition of his world. He reluctantly returns to the cave to tell others, but the other prisoners do not want to free themselves. They would rather remain prisoners because they couldn’t conceive of any reality other than what they experienced.
In this allegory, Plato proposes that Truth is only accessible thru the intellect as symbols, or “forms.” The light given off by the fire in the cave represents the “copy” or the “true light” of the Sun. The world within the dark cave is a copy of the world outside the cave, and the freed prisoner represents the “enlightened mind,” who realizes the shadows on the wall is an illusion, but cannot convince his fellows of the truth, who are destined to “remain in the dark.” This story is a bit incomplete, however. Who placed the prisoners, the puppets and the fire in the cave in the first place?
Guy Debord, the late Situationist theorist advanced Plato’s allegory of the Cave by examining the effect images have on the perceived reality of the bogus shadow play has on people. ”The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” [Tr. I Situazionisti e la loro storia - Un brano] The prisoners are quite pleased to accept the perceived, shared and bogus spectacle as real. The spectacle has replaced life. And as the old saw goes, “If you can control appearances, you can control reality.”
Jean Baudrillard also makes this distinction between life truly lived and the images of illusion. For example, in the act of watching television, the events and action seen on the television becomes “more real” than the surrounding events that takes place in the living room as you watch. When I was playing “Half-Life 2″ on my Xbox a couple of years ago, I was completely swept up in the reality of running from evil aliens and looking for clues to defeat them. Truth be told, I actually preferred that reality to the boring one I was living at the time. Of course, I knew the difference between the Half-Life world and the one I have to brush my teeth in the morning.
A similar experience occurred when I used to visit the bright lights of the hyperreal Las Vegas. The casinos offered me a completely different world than the one I was living in the Midwest. It was literally a colossus of amalgamated casinos, swimming pools, neon lights, cocktails, buffets, card tables and the ubiquitous pinging of slot machines, every moment calling out a mathematical equation of financial spoils to the “lucky.” Almost to the point of sensory overload is one pushed to participate in a meaningless and empty ritual of throwing money away, something no person in their “right mind” would ever do back home. The normal day-to-day life that existed before my Las Vegas arrival seems like a million miles away, replaced by another prepared reality with a completely different set of rules, assumptions and normalcy.Exactly like the prepared reality that exists in Plato’s Cave. The question no one asks is, who prepared it?
A similar experience occurred when I used to visit the bright lights of the hyperreal Las Vegas. The casinos offered me a completely different world than the one I was living in the Midwest. It was literally a colossus of amalgamated casinos, swimming pools, neon lights, cocktails, buffets, card tables and the ubiquitous pinging of slot machines, every moment calling out a mathematical equation of financial spoils to the “lucky.” Almost to the point of sensory overload is one pushed to participate in a meaningless and empty ritual of throwing money away, something no person in their “right mind” would ever do back home. The normal day-to-day life that existed before my Las Vegas arrival seems like a million miles away, replaced by another prepared reality with a completely different set of rules, assumptions and normalcy.
Exactly like the prepared reality that exists in Plato’s Cave. The question no one asks is, who prepared it?
Of course, as I have said before, the allegory is incomplete. Plato assumed that the Sun, the Transcendent Light of the Creator, was the brick wall at the end of the Universe. Plato could not have known, despite all the clues that was in plain sight all around him, that the Platonic Model of Metaphysics was not a map of the Divine Light, but only of the Mind of Human Beings. The Darkness of the Cave, the Light of the Sun, the Prisoners cruelly bound to their own ignorance, the seeker of truth whom no one can understand, all representations and symbols of the mind consciousness system, a system that does not know from where it came, so it is content to spin fantastic tales of it’s own creation.
The Desteni Material has never claimed to being the originator of the idea that this reality isn’t real. It has said that the mind isn’t real, either. The critics cannot respond in any other way than those miserable fools in the blackness of Plato’s Cave who simply could not comprehend anything outside of their frame of reference, which is both ironic, and sad.
