Plato's Allegory of the Cave - Perspective from a Folklorist
Someone says he believes in fairy folk. Another says--convince me. Someone says he believes in ghosts. Another says--convince me. For you see, these folk are chained by the neck and cannot see outside of their cave. What is reality to one is but a shadow to another.
The lesson in this seems to clarify that which separates visionaries from the rest of humanity. Instead of saying--that's impossible, a visionary says--what if. In his book, Hyperspace, Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at U.C. Berkeley explaines why people should not dismiss the possibiltiy of other dimensions. He wrote that we should not limit ourselves to our knowledge which is often incomplete. To illustrate his point, he used the example of fish in a pond. If the fish could talk and were told of the land, air, and sky, they would scoff at it. From their perspective, experience, and knowledge, the world is made of water. What if we are like the fish? Does Kaku's example not mirror the inhabitants of the cave? There is a distinct similarity between Kaku's similitude of fish in a water environment, and Plato's underground people.
Could Plato's being, had he escaped the cave of living death, have survived in a new world of different elements? How can fairies and ghosts, if they exist, survive outside of their elements, or why would they want to? These are deep philosophical and scientific questions that seem to be unanswerable, or avoided.
Consider human beings. They are not free to change their individual and collective genealogy nor are not free to transcend the limits imposed upon their body's skeletal and muscular systems; and who among them has the power to change the natural laws of the universe? Humans cannot become fairies, angels, trolls or gnomes, nor can these other entities evolve into human beings. And who among any has the ability to unring a rung bell?
The same holds true with fairies, angels, trolls, gnomes and other supernatural beings, even Kaku's fish. Regardless of their place of habitation, are other beings, too, bound within their life force laws?
The Sidhe of the Mounds are one race of presumed fairy folk who are believed to inhabit the subterranean. Theirs is an unmitigated existance, if they exist at all, while we, in our human realm have been given some unlimited freedoms: to live where we choose, to come and go as we please, to change behavior and even
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