Inside the cave as one of the prisoners, I'd imagine it to be a quiet, safe, and predictable place. Even though I’m bound and limited from the things normal people do, I would not know it to be different because this is my “normal”. Day by day, I see the same thing. I guess about which one of the same shadows will pass next. I expect to hear things and see certain forms and shapes. I’m safe and comfortable with my reality.
After being released from this, however, and after walking out of that cave and seeing the sun and the Earth for the first time, it’ll be too much of an overwhelming sight that it would be so impossibly irresistible. Stepping out and discovering another reality would be astounding. I cannot perceive what I’m seeing— the sun, the outside of the cave, the people—as the truth. I would be doubtful, skeptical, and feeling unsure and uneasy about my new and unbelievable surroundings. But, no matter how foreign, the place would be so magnetic.
Upon returning to the cave after what I have witnessed for myself, it would be almost hopeless to try to communicate about these new discoveries. It would seem absurd to them the idea that what they have believed to be truth all their lives is simply not. And attempting to make them believe and trust things they have not seen for themselves would be difficult. What they see is not real, and what they don’t see that is not there is amazing and real. It’ll be incomprehensible to them, just like it was to me the first time I’ve seen it. But I would rather see and engage with an incomprehensible truth, rather than stay in the safe and incomplete darkness.
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