Comparing "The Allegory of the Cave" to a Real Life Experience

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Is what we understand the same as what it really is? In Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” we see prisoners who are presented with shadows that in reality are not what they seem. The men in the cave perceive the shadows to be objects in their minds, when it reality they are distortions or hints of what they actually are. I could compare this to a real situation I have endured. Having a mood disorder and dealing with self-injurious behavior is like being in a mental cave. It’s dark, and therefore, I couldn’t see things clearly. Everything is in a fog, and images are unclear in my head. Plato states that “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” (Plato 450). It simply means that what we see is what we believe to be true because we’ve never seen anything to suggest it to be otherwise. But what we see is not the truth. We know nothing but what we’ve experienced, so the reality, such as happiness in my case, doesn’t seem to be possible. Leaving for me, was similar. After dealing with a mood disorder for five years, I was unsure of how thing really looked when I wasn’t stuck in the cave and prisoner to my own mental illness. I was so used to the fake smiles and fake lives that the real thing baffled me. I was unsure of how to approach this new world of realness and happiness that I’d never felt before. When I escaped into the real world, I was much disoriented. It was painful and horrible for me to leave the cave, as it was for the man, because it was like being in a whole new world of things I’d never experienced, such as joy. I had been creating shadows unconsciously in my head that warped my reality. We assume all things of the mind to be true. Plato’s writing shows that the creators of the cave scenario created a sort of alternate reality in the cave. The fire stands for the sun, and the man’s leaving the cave would symbolize the ascent

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