Allegory (Plato’s Cave)

[Prologue]
This is a song that I wrote, though the credit for this song and the words in it belong to a man far greater than me. Nearly twenty-four hundred years ago today, a philosopher named Plato wrote an allegory of what it meant to be a human being and how we view this world. It’s a beautiful work and I have the immense honor of giving it to you, in musical form

[verse 1]
Can we imagine that we are bound at the neck and legs
In a matter that we can’t seem to move our heads
Sitting shackled and ensnared on a cave floor
And behind us lies some form of light source
But we’re stuck staring blankly at the cave wall
Angled perfectly to see where that light falls
And that’s the biggest past, these shadows are cast and our minds have to try and decipher what our eyes saw
This is our only known reality
The world’s small with the prisoner’s mentality
We struggle to make sense of the specters
So naive, we let our ignorance protect us
But everything we’ve seen is a lie
At least this skewed version of the truth
And if we just opened up our eyes, then
Maybe we can search for the truth

[Chorus x2]
I’ve seen something new
The greens and the blues
I’ve opened my eyes, and I’ve seen the truth
And I’ve learned of life
And I’ve learned to feel
And closing your eyes doesn’t make it less real

[verse 2]
Now lets imagine that we’re set free
But all the other prisoners are let be
And when we finally turn our heads and we see the light
It’s overwhelming and we can’t see to use our eyes
But over time our sight adjusts and refocused
See this cave as we never would have noticed
And the world that we’ve known since our early youth
Are simply just shadows of a bigger truth
Now suppose that we are carried all the way out
Far from the prison and the darkness of the cave’s mouth
We take it in and we wonder what it all means
Don’t have the words for the world that’s gone unseen
Come to know that this place is the only truth and that everything before was a foolish lie
And that the sun is the only proof of the prisoners we left behind

[Chorus x2]
I’ve seen something new
The greens and the blues
I’ve opened my eyes, and I’ve seen the truth
And I’ve learned of life
And I’ve learned to feel
And closing your eyes doesn’t make it less real

[epilogue]
Once a man obtains true enlightenment, he will be viewed as an outsider by those he once considered peers, for they cannot comprehend the world he explains, but it is the duty and the responsibility of every enlightened man to bring those people in the dark out to the world he has seen