Projects

A Man Playing a String Instrument in a Forest

Give back to the Earth!

If you are taking care of a garden, some trees, a plot of land, and your neighbors are doing the same, you are already advanced in your relationship with Mother Earth! We are joining our homes to restore forests, bring back lost species, and let the soil be nourished and alive again. We have not learned how to take care of nature, so we are turning to indigenous societies old and new. Although Indigenous voices are still silenced, they rise up in each one of us as we discover the Indigenous being in ourselves. the rich of the modern world are the generous ones, the kind ones. The ones that take care of everyone and everything are abundant. The ones who only take care of their own, live in poverty.

caterpillar, bug, vlinderrups

THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE

SOCRATES: Compare our nature in respect of education and its lack, to such an experience as this.

PART ONE: SUPERSTITION: The people have been in this dwelling since childhood, shackled by the legs and neck, unable to turn their heads around.

People like this have never managed, whether on their own or with the help by others, to see anything besides the shadows that are [continually] projected on the wall opposite them by the glow of the fire. They regard that which they saw on the wall as beings.                                                                                                                                           Whenever one of the people walking behind those in chains (and carrying the things) would make a sound,  the prisoners would imagine that the speaker were the shadow passing in front of them?  Consider nothing besides the shadows of the artifacts as the obvious truth.

PART TWO: THREE STAGES OF LIBERATION

STAGE ONE: A prisoner gets free. They would be able to do this only with pain. Because of the flickering brightness they would be unable to look at look into the glare of the fire, thenj would her eyes hurt her.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          In addition she would consider that what she previously saw [with her own eyes] was more real than what was now being shown [to her by someone else].                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 She would then consider nothing besides the shadows of the artifacts as the obvious truth. Wouldn't she thus be unable to see any of the things that are now revealed to her?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Now, however, if someone, using force, were to pull her away from there and to drag her up the cave’s rough and steep ascent and not to let go of her until he had dragged her out into the light of the sun..would she then feel  pain and rage?                                                                                                                                                                           And when she got into the sunlight, wouldn't her eyes be filled with the glare,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             It would obviously take some getting accustomed, I think, if it should be a matter of taking into one's eyes that which is up there outside the cave, in the light of the sun.

STAGE 2: Shadows and reflections: And in this process of acclimatization he would first and most easily be able to look at                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                More easily during the night by looking at the light of the stars and the moon, more easily  than by looking at the sun and its glare during the day                       

STAGE THREE: THE SUN. Thoughts about the sun: its nature and functions:                                      SOCRATES: But I think that finally she would be in the condition to look at

(4) the sun itself, not just at its reflection in water or wherever else it might appear, but at the sun itself, as it is in and of itself and in the place proper to it and to contemplate of what sort it is.         GLAUCON: It would necessarily happen this way.

SOCRATES: And having done all that, by this time one would also be able to gather the following about the sun:

(1) That it is that which grants both the seasons and the years;

(2) It is that which governs whatever there is in the now visible region of sunlight; and

(3) That it is also the cause of all those things that the people dwelling in the cave have before they eyes in some way or other.

 

Scroll to Top