That Greek of great renown, Plato, lived about 2,500 years ago in the same historical period as Lao Tzu and the historical Buddha. He gave us the records we have of Socrates' demolishing of the rhetorical constructs of his fellow Athenians, but his most famous essay is that of "Plato's Cave"
Plato postulated a society of cave dwellers chained to their seats. Their only referents were shadows on the wall cast by a flickering flame behind them, and his cave dwellers would discourse at great length concerning the significance, the meaning, and the import of these shadows. He then has one of his cave dwellers somehow slip from his chains and make his way to the mouth of the cave where he sees for the first time the "real" world, and who then rushes back to inform his fellows that there is a visceral world of reality of which they have no knowledge: a visceral world that is "real" as opposed to the shadows with which they are familiar.
Our now "enlightened" chap is of course considered (and dealt with) as a dangerous lunatic.
I have often thought of the view that comes with Enlightenment as seeing in the infrared. And that all attempts to describe the ensuing image of reality is an attempt to explain color to someone who sees only black and white, or to explain vision to a cave fish. This, while all the while swimming in a miraculous sparkling sea of crystalline formations of Pristine Awareness.
For me it remains an open question whether or not the ability of Pristine Awareness to awaken and live frolicking in the sun is a genetic mutation available only to an emergent specie of humanity. But one thing of which I am quite certain is that in the present circumstances the practice of meditation is an absolute necessity.
