Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: An adaptation in clay from Michael Ramsey on Vimeo.
This video made me think about a saying that my friend told me
(it might have been a First Nations saying, or a spiritual teacher advise, I forget)
“Go to the beyond.
Go beyond the beyond.
Go beyond the beyond the beyond.
Hail to the one that goes.”
We live in a world so vast and magnificent that our human mind can hardly comprehend it. It is a bit like digital technology, as soon as you understand something and conceptualize it, it becomes old and if you follow life’s constant renewal process you would move to the next level of understanding. The problem I see is that as an extremely mental society we have gotten stuck to the concepts once we understand them and instead of using them as a stepping stone for the next level of understanding, we use them as the absolute truth.
We used to live in a society of religious dogma and now we live in a society of conceptual intellectual dogma.
In my career (documentary filmmaking) I face the Three Act Structure Dogma. This is how good films are made…they all have the same structure and God help you if you question that. Not only that but documentary films are not seen as “art”. ” Art” is a dirty word in this industry. I have actually been told by a funding agency when I pitched them Green Dream: ” This is Art, we fund social issue documentaries.”
When I started planning the Green Dream Mapping Project I was also given the advise that I should not do art, but stick to something pragmatic that will help.
Art to me, gives us the capacity to step outside the cave and imagine the world where the beyond is always changing and we are always expanding our understanding. It breaks through the pragmatic dogma into unknown and not yet rationalized territory. It is one of the most powerful agents of change that can reunite our fragmented world.