Please read the entire text below and view the attached lecture document on the topic. Then use the directions below to respond. In-text MLA citations and reference. 300 words min.

Sacred Spaces and Sacred Times

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

This week’s Learning Resource, Sacred Places names “gardens, groves, caves, and hidden shelters” found in the world’s religions, and suggests that myths have the power to transform places:

Such places are often sacred places in myth. Typically, gardens represent paradise, as in the Garden of Eden in the biblical creation myth of Genesis. In part they derive their mythic energy from their association with the earth, perhaps with the earth goddess herself. Like temples and walled cities, they are protective places, metaphors for cosmos in the face of chaos. They are places of birth or rebirth. Jesus is born in a humble stable; the Buddha is born in a grove. Muhammad receives revelation in a cave; the Buddha finds enlightenment under a tree in a grove; Jesus prepares for his death and resurrection in the Garden of Gethsemane. As in the Adam and Eve myth, the protective, even paradisaical space that is the garden can be corrupted by outside forces, represented in Genesis by the Devil as serpent.

In older, goddess-based myths, the serpent in the maternal garden would have been the natural companion of the goddess—perhaps a trickster, perhaps a symbol of the fertilizing phallus. It might be said that generally what comes to the hero in the garden represents archetypally that which comes from within as opposed to that which comes from outside, or “above” in mountain revelations.

Myths provide places with symbolic meaning, and allow a person to gain special power that comes from ritually participating in the myth. In this week’s discussion you study the Allegory of the Cave presented in the Week Three Learning Resource, Plato, Socrates, and the Cave Allegory. You will understand how the cave of ordinary life becomes sacred space through new eyesight / insight developed by contemplating Plato’s myth. Among Joseph Campbell’s Four Functions of Myth (studied in Week One), this discussion shows you the Mystical Function of Myth.

The Allegory of the Cave of Plato’s Republic is among the most famous passages in the history of philosophy. This “cave” is as meaningful in its own cultural context as the sacred spaces mentioned in the above quote, such as the Garden of Eden, the cave in which the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation, and so forth. For Plato (writing the teachings of Socrates), the myth of the cave is powerful enough to bring a kind of enlightenment, a deep wisdom about the nature of reality. The sunlight seen by characters in the myth is symbolically an inner light discovered through the educational process outlined by Plato.

The Allegory of the Cave text is your entire reading assignment for the week, so read the material several times with care. (Some key points from the other learning resources are noted in the Lecture Overview of this week.) Then post your answers to the following questions, found in the table presented in the final section, “The Matrix: A Modern Take on the Allegory of the Cave.”