Facing the Sun

 This week's quotation comes from Chinese wisdom sources, "Always turn towards the sun, then the shadows will fall behind you."

And there is a certain amount of wisdom in that. Reading it reminded me of Plato's famous allegory about the prisoners in the cave, which he used to think about the nature of belief versus knowledge. You may be familiar with it: There were some prisoners chained together in a cave, facing the cave wall. Behind them is a fire, and between them and the fire are people carrying puppets and other objects, which cast their shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners, who can only see these shadows, believe they are real.

Plato goes on to wonder what would happen if one prisoner finally managed to free himself, see the fire and realise that the shadows are not real. He escapes from the cave and discovers there is a whole world outside, which he was previously unaware of. He believes that the outside world is more real than that of the cave. So he decides to go back to the cave to try to free the other prisoners. 

In a weird twist, he is blinded on his return, because his eyes aren't used to real sunlight. The other prisoners see his blindness and believe they will be similarly blinded if they try to leave the cave.

Most of us believe that what we see is true.  So most of the time, it makes sense to face the sunlight, to see what is real, rather than relying on the words of others to tell us what is true.

On the other hand, when we ignore the shadows in our lives, we are not living authentically. Because all of us have shadows - the things in our lives we do not want to face up to, the parts of our personality we are in denial about. Dealing with these aspects of our lives is called shadow work, and I have blogged about it here. I do believe that it is only when we go deep that we can understand ourselves fully. Doing this necessary shadow work can be very painful, but it is necessary, if we are to be whole. Life isn't all sunshine and rainbows and it is by learning from the shadows, from the sad or painful things that happen to us, that we grow.