Society has consensus on Cave Allegory narrative. It is about "not trusting narratives and seeing reality". Sounds pretty ironic that original writing Cave Allegory conflicts with that narrative.

Here's the list of conflicting and useless concepts I was able to detect. I will appreciate additions.

Highlighted head fixation ("cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads", "never allowed to move their heads"); Socrates labelling himself as a prisoner too ("like ourselves"); self and each others shadows visibility is highlighted ("they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another"); sun, the metaphor of reality, is somehow illuminating the cave ("mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den"); horizontal rotation of the soul introduced as special term reused, not single-time metaphor; extra highlight on looking at the light specifically (if it's about reality vs shadows, why it's not enough to look on figures?); specific highlights that real world is above cave ("underground", "steep and rugged ascent", "soul which comes from below into the light", "turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below", "who returns from above", and right after metaphor "beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs'", "upper world"). I am also confused why nobody applied emission theory to cave fire, but that's different topic.

And two most concerning for me:

• If it's all about shadow vs reality, why there's multi-stage setup with shadows-figures-ascent-shadows again-reflections-moonlight-sun?
  Yes, it is related to divided line analogy, but still too complex for "shadows vs reality"
• Why specific highlight made on temporal pattern prediction capabilities?
  "And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them?"

This all makes famous metaphor non-parsimonious; it's adding too much details, mixes concerns and just does not serve its purpose in that over-inflated state.

Platonic Framework

I have a reading of Plato that does one thing - applies Occam's razor. This hermeneutics framework is capable of interpreting mystical, rational, and political passages as single coherent material without adding labels like "it's mystical", "greeks were irrational", "we are unable to understand full context", "it's separate political statement", "it's many topics explained one by one".

TL;DR

• Plato's divine madness is flow state (phenomenologically and behaviorally)
• Multi-domain (preferably 5+) aestetics and harmony education builds pre-conscious ethical framework (a.k.a. moral compass)
• Prolonged presence in deep flow state, accompanied by ego dissolution, relies on that "moral compass" leading to behavioral changes towards automated virtue

Claim Status

Proof of that claim is mostly connect-the-dots type; multiplication of entities was reduced to minimum possible, reusing mostly classic deductive syllogisms.
In addition, ethics and virtue problems with flow on its own is explained.

Primary statement (theia mania, or divine madness, or "out of self" is flow state) is well backed by most of Plato's dialogues (see paper). Comment on anachronistic issue is given further in this article.

Secondary statement has multiple strong empiric arguments towards interpretation of Plato's claims on education if primary statement is taken into account; yet, experiment is required to verify the statement. Argumentation provides even an explanation why such an experiment was never even suggested to be done before.

Tertiary statement needs experiment from second one to be confirmed, but presents existing research results that arguments towards the correctness of that statement if induction logic is applied.

Back to the Cave

To prove the point by example, I will use that framework to interpret the Cave allegory^[1].

Only additional information to be considered for that reading is a rather niche but widely confirmed hypothesis.^[2]

Flow is characterized, among other phenomenology, by time distortion and dissolution, and ego suppression; this class of phenomena, observed at multiple kinds of altered states, is explained as a suppression of the Temporal Functional Binding process that normally bind experiences together into a coherent narrative self and coherent time stream.

In short, symbolic perception of "I" and "now" has shared origin, and that origin is switched off during flow.

Setup

Cave described has following setup, based on original description:

• exit with light above
• X axis: wall, then prisoners forced to look on wall, then raised way with figures, then fire
• Y axis: figures and shadows movement.
  Y axis also works as time axis in that allegory ("quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future").
  Horizontal Y movement itself, on other hand, is not used non-metaphorically, as coordinates and not temporality, and assumption of "Y axis represents time axis" is coherent.

Prisoners have head strictly fixed ("being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads", "never allowed to move their heads"). If Y axis is treated a time axis, this can be interpreted as "forced attention at the now moment".

Both shadows of figures and self shadows are observed. Classic interpretations do not explain those shadows of selves at all. Framework interprets those shadows as narratives - they way our narrative self is explaining to our minimal self what we see. This may sound speculative, but there are many interconnections of many kinds about language being just a shadow, projection, or reduction of reality. Cleanest one is Laws: "...by customs and praises and words, that just and unjust are shadows only...".

Among other examples, Seventh Letter highlights "weakness of language" and refers to Cave and Divided line with 4-stage progress: "The first is the name, the second the definition, the third the image, and the fourth the knowledge". Cratylus: "reducing all things into letters and syllables". Statesman: "but when the elements are transferred into the long and difficult language of facts, is again ignorant of them?"

From that perspective - that shadows are inner narratives and labels - highlight of self-shadows casted - it start to work. Self shadow becomes "narrative of self" that is always seen, prisoner is forced to look at it.

Release

Then, release happens. What's important - there's nobody who releases, it just happens.

"Look again, and see what will naturally follow it' the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows;"

Framework reads this as: "turn his neck round" matches time distortion and acknowledgement of reality beyond "now"; the narrative self suppression removes the capability to label things. And he also turns away from his "narrative about self" that lies exactly in "now".

This passage also fits in framework explanation, radically changing its meaning from "validation should be done" towards "narrative self labels should be acknowledged":

"they only dream about being, but never can they behold the waking reality so long as they leave the hypotheses which they use unexamined, and are unable to give an account of them"

Without shadows/names/labels, it is actually really hard to interact with reality for many. Willoughby Britton's "Varieties of Contemplative Experience" (VCE) great work (3000+ pages of transcripts, 100+ interviews) demonstrates it:

"The principal impairments in the cognitive domain were problems with executive functioning (inability to concentrate for extended periods, or problems with memory) and the disintegration of conceptual meaning structures, where percepts and concepts became disconnected."

Many reports from practitioners are also sharing the problems with nonduality:

“I often couldn’t understand what people were saying – all I would hear is the weird texture of their speech patterns, there was no meaning to any of it.”

“At times I would hear myself speaking and I had no idea where the words were coming from or what they meant. I felt like an imposter.”

Enlightenment’s Evil Twin

"I would look at other people and interact with people, and they would say regular things like, 'Oh, I like that type of ice cream' or 'Oh, I like that thing.' And I remember hearing that, and I'm like: 'Wait, how do you know that? How do you know what you like and dislike? How do you know who you are?' It was like I couldn't figure out who I was, what I like, or who I am. I felt like I had no identity."

I Have This Feeling of Not Really Being Here

"I feel like my consciousness became a kaleidoscope. So I remember when I first came out of retreat, someone would say something, and then it's like I would experience a million different ripples... it was like I could become aware of all the different conceptual dimensions, emotional dimensions, spiritual dimensions, energetic dimensions, interpersonal dimensions, and I wouldn't know where to land. [...] We can become aware of those different layers, but there's usually a unifying principle or like a magnetizing principle or a midline so that we can find our way through."

Sense of Self Domain Summary

This release process described, observed from framework perspective of suppression of inner narrative, actually starts to resonate with Bahiya Sutta beautifully:

"When, Bahiya, for you in the seen is merely what is seen... in the cognized is merely what is cognized, then, Bahiya, you will not be 'with that.' When, Bahiya, you are not 'with that,' then, Bahiya, you will not be 'in that.' When, Bahiya, you are not 'in that,' then, Bahiya, you will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two. Just this is the end of suffering."

Ascent

Topic of movement orthogonally (Z) to the time plane (Y) or setup plane (X) is highlighted many times, as mentioned above.

Prisoner is dragged vertically specifically: "reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent."

And ego death experience is actually really bad for many first-time. VCE captured it great:

"The periods of terror grew longer and the periods of sukha grew shorter until it was only terror and no sukha at all. [...] When things would switch into terror my body was so agitated, I really couldn't sit still. But in that first week it would switch back and forth, and I would switch it back into sukha. [...] When it was in the terror state, I was so agitated that it was not possible to sit—I could barely make it through a sitting."

"It was not fear; it was complete, utter terror. It's a feeling that I still have a lot of difficulty articulating because it took over my body. It wasn't just a feeling that: 'Oh, something happened. I saw something fishy on the street. I was afraid. I just left.' It's not that kind of fear. It was much, much, much deeper, and much more organic this time, so it manifested in each and every cell of my body."

Moreover, this even has neurobiological explanation:

"Insular seizures or direct cortical stimulation of the insula can induce intense fear and anxiety, sometimes accompanied by uncontrollable screaming."

Fear and Terror in Buddhist Meditation

I will not add quotes about ego death experience during psychoactive substance uses. I believe at readers capabilities to discover that corpus on their own, and probably being aware of that examples of even stronger intensity. I'm not promoting any kinds of such usages for Realm of Forms access, yet I need to note that Csikszentmihalyi explicitly acknowledged that drugs are bad, but possible route to flow state, labelling them "shortcuts to flow".

Sudden Problems

Word exaíphnēs is mistranslated across Plato's texts as "suddenly"/"instant". It is generally translated as  quick transition within time, while Plato explicitly explains that term unrelated to the time and is makes it part of his special thesaurus:

"The instant seems to signify something such that from it change takes place in both directions…this strange thing, the instant, lies between motion and rest, being in no time at all"

Parmenides

It is used across Plato's texts, including Cave allegory ("liberated and compelled suddenly", "no, not immediately", "suddenly coming out of the sunlight"), but not limited to it - "suddenly perceives a nature of wondrous beauty" in Symposium, "suddenly a light is kindled" in Seventh Letter.

Quote from Parmenides from perspective of framework reads not as a smart wordplay like Zeno's paradoxes, but explicit reorganisation of temporal binding. When the retention-protention (just-past and just-future that create continuous "now") integration that creates the narrative self releases its constraints, consciousness operates in a different temporal mode. The specious present expands to contain what normally requires sequential processing.

Sudden, "being in no time at all", from framework perspective is explicitly handled in Cave allegory, as a vertical movement orthogonally to the timeline plane.

Framework allows to read this section not as "it's hard to get towards the truth" but more as "the dissolution of now and escape from linear time is hard".

Escape

"Not all in a moment... first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven"

Standard reading for that is "truth is hard to see, requires gradual adjustment." Framework has more interconnected explanation: when ego is finally fully suppressed, the cognitive machinery that constructed "I" and "now" stops - meaning "what I see now" question pointless because there's neither "now" nor "I". When temporal binding suspends, the filtering suspends too. Raw perception is overwhelming. Too much signal, no familiar compression, no way to handle signal vs noise.

The narrative self was doing work. Maybe bad work, distorting, biased work, but it was capable to explain everything at least somehow. Language was used to compress, categorize, label, model, predict. Without it, the released prisoner faces what meditators call "bare perception" - and it's not peaceful clarity. It's chaos. 

Tim Ferris described the strong example: a woman returning from retreat stopped at a red light, saw the red color, but didn't register what it meant. Perception without the narrative self's automatic labeling. The color was there. The concept "stop" just didn't bind to it.

The stages Plato describes are not "gradually seeing more truth." They are learning to perceive without the scaffolding.

More Shadows

First stage of actual escape is shadows, again. But different this time - prisoner look at them and understand they are shadows. This changes a lot: now, knowing they are shadows, he can try to reconstruct the entities that cast shadows in his mind.

Plato highlights it - the cave ones are "shadows of shadows":

"the images in the water (which are divine), and are the shadows of true existence (not shadows of images cast by a light of fire, which compared with the sun is only an image)"

Then reflections come - still incomplete, but now it's projections instead of silhouettes.

This matches with further explanation: geometry works with Forms, but geometers are incapable to understand what they are looking at (unless they don't go certain abstract level):

"geometry and the like—they only dream about being, but never can they behold the waking reality so long as they leave the hypotheses which they use unexamined"

Dialectic, on other hand, is capable to interact with Forms consciously.

Plato's Dialectics Protocol RFC

If adapted to modern terminology^[3], dialectics is something like a Diffie-Hellman handshake, but with Forms. (consider Forms a mental concepts for simplicity. They are not, but it is handy model)

In Diffie-Hellman, Alice and Bob establish a shared secret over an untrusted channel without ever transmitting the secret. Each holds a private key. They exchange only public values derived from those keys. If both computations converge, they've verified shared access - without the secret ever crossing the wire.

In Plato's dialectics, channel is not untrusted, but corrupted. Language is formal, lossy, compressing, biased, uncertain on some terms, and constraint, having statements that are ineffable.

"the power of dialectic alone can reveal this, and only to one who is a disciple of the previous sciences"

Logic is similar: Alice and Bob confirm a shared Form identity over an corrupted channel without ever transmitting the Form. Each holds their own access to the Form. They exchange only public statements derived from that form. Only behavioral difference is that instead of single exchange, multiple projections are shared to verify that original structure is matching.

The protocol only works if both parties have done the preparation. You can't Diffie-Hellman with someone who has no algorithm.

Byzantine Generalized Statements

Alternatively it can be explained using Byzantine generals problem. Dialectics solve the situation when each general is a single sentence expressing certain "Form projection cast".

No individual statement is trusted. Any one might be ambiguous, misheard, sophistry, honest error, personal unnoticed bias, dictionary mismatch, or one of "unknown unknowns". 

"unless he can run the gauntlet of all objections, and is ready to disprove them, not by appeals to opinion, but to absolute truth, never faltering at any step of the argument"

Through structured exchange - question, answer, refutation, revision - consensus emerges that no single message carried. The protocol survives Byzantine failure of its components; the gauntlet is a tolerance test. Enough probes from multiple aspects produce redundancy large enough to observe both coherence and reconstructed shape, while also stress-testing the stored structure.

Moreover, dialectics is something that is bypassing the Gödel's limitations of geometry as a formal system, as a dynamic protocol that shapes for specific task. Lack of formality becomes strength more than weakness.

The Sun: Greek Tragedy of Ineffability

This whole article is dialectics, clearly. Hofstader's corpus of works is dialectics too (way greater than mine): he's doing projections, explanations, metaphors to kindle the spark of Form of Strange Loop^[4]. Yet, even he expressed the disappointment on GEB in I am a Strange Loop preface:

That book, which appeared in 1979, couldn’t have enjoyed a greater success, and indeed yours truly owes much of the pathway of his life since then to its success. And yet, despite the book’s popularity, it always troubled me that the fundamental message of GEB (as I always call it, and as it is generally called) seemed to go largely unnoticed. People liked the book for all sorts of reasons, but seldom if ever for its most central raison d’être!

Plato admits himself of his incapability to express the most important things in words in one of his last written materials, the Seventh Letter:

"...there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining."

Seventh Letter was written around 353 BC, and Republic, including Cave Allegory, at 375 BC, meaning that "no way of putting it in words like other studies" is a reflection of 20-year history of message delivery attempts.

Direct access to Realm of Forms is something that is explicitly ineffable - not due to my, or someone else's capabilities, but out of definition. Forms are something that is representing pure, uncompressed ideas, something that exists beyond the shadows of language-constructed narratives; they are Gödelian Loci of human languages. Heptapod B can potentially help, but I'm not fluent speaker of alien languages.

Through centuries, many philosophers were expressing struggle not about out-of-the-world experience but about ineffability specifically. They all highlighted a fact that language and the words were the the constraint, not metaphoric experiences they cannot even acknowledge as earthly being.

Tying it to the flow state can sound naive, but the problem is, flow has drifted from its original meaning while being still most studied of all states with shared phenomenology.

Moderate Ecstasy Issue

What Csikszentmihalyi was able to describe phenomenologically was not some "special productivity state". He was drawing parallels between flow and historical states from Wu Wei from Taoism and Mushin (no-mind) from Zen Buddhism to actual ancient greek eudaimonia and ataraxia.

Yet, current definition drifted from the original one. One of most accurate critiques out there is done by Abuhamdeh in 2020:

"'Low flow' is a contradiction in terms, just as 'mild rage' and 'moderate ecstasy' are, given that level of intensity is built into the construct."

Flow is not about doing more in less time; what we currently consider as flow is actually first steps towards the original definition of that state. Definition had drifted, and we're having blurry optics again - but this time we have this logs of that drift done with academic rigor and each record has DOI.

Philosopher Who Returns

This last part of Cave allegory - on philosopher-king - is way more complicated in explanation than everything above, but for different reason. It requires the multiple frameworks being merged - the education theory, virtue studies, neurobiology, aestetics perception - and reasoning is pretty complex. It is explained in paper, but explanation takes ~20 pages with dozens of citations, and is clearly going beyond the article format. Please, refer to the source for claim proofs and full citations.

In brief: aestetics and harmony perception seems to be defining the "sensitivity area" between domains. Toy example - JS & C++ developer can see problems in Rust, but likely not in bare metal. Embedded engineer that knows JS is capable - partially - to discover issues across whole stack from bare metal to browser. Two domains form a fuzzy "line area" of sensitivity area; three form a triangle. The more domains are present, the more "area/volume within polygon" is covered. Cross-pollination synergy is what matters here - not specific domains.

Current studies are doing 1 vs 2 domains comparison, that is producing "aestetics sensitivity slit" or line-shaped area affecting the interdisciplinary qualities only between two domains Yet, even those studies are capable to accidentally discover impact within those domains.

No experiment on at least 3+ domains compared to 1 domain of aestetics and harmony sensitivity was performed, since 1 vs 2 did not demonstrate impact significant enough to extend search specifically on side effects, while cross-pollination was clearly demonstrated (music boosts math, chess boosts sports), and cross-perceptual influence has strong correlation.

Other empiric observations towards that hypothesis:

• 93% of STEM professionals who founded companies or filed patents reported childhood musical training, versus only 34% of average adults
• STEM graduates who became innovators received up to 8 times more childhood arts exposure than the general public
• When surveyed, 65% of STEM professionals stated their arts and crafts avocations directly impacted their professional scientific work
• Nobel Prizewinning scientists are 15-25 times more likely to engage in visual arts, crafts, or performing arts than typical scientists
• Economics Nobel laureates with two or more domain interests outnumber single-domain specialists 19 to 1
• In a 20-year longitudinal study, all 11 most-eminent scientists practiced artistic avocations, while all 12 least-successful scientists described arts as “a waste of time”

There's no direct proof that "polymaths makes people better/smarter/more successful". What we have now is only correlations observed.

There is No Way of Putting it in Words

This is it. Simple framework of three statements bound to modern research and understanding of the world is enough to interpret Plato's texts - yet still not letting to grok entities Plato was talking about. I'm not claiming that this framework is right; yet, it has significantly higher explanatory power and solves a lot of puzzles and passages simply omitted, like full Clockwork Orange grade prisoners setup, while offering structural integrity of Plato's texts corpus, unification between interpretive schools, and significant parsimony compared to any of them. Interpretation power boost that large combined with significant entities reduction should be at least seriously considered.

The only question left: how to apply rationalist principles to the person who's considered as their origin. Or whether rationalism itself emerged from misreading him.

1. ^{^}

   Disclaimer needed here: I'm not selling enlightenment. I do not have one even for myself.
   
   Since the Cave is precisely about mistaking projections for reality - including one's own projections - I've attempted to remove any personal bias and suggestions here. I'm not going to touch topics of "how it is outside the cave" or "how to exit the cave"; all that will be done here using rationalist tools can be considered - metaphorically - as a geometric mapping of cave and field reports of third parties who are presumably did it at least partially.
   I cannot even claim, either through rationalist methodology or personal experience, that I've escaped it myself. I assume that there are people who can be considered as "escaped and returned" based on their works. Among the living ones, I observe the reasoning that matches the Plato's Realm of Forms direct access in works of Ted Chiang (Heptapod B combined with linear storytelling) and Douglas Hofstader ("Mind's I" and "I am a Strange Loop" dialectics). However, this is my personal belief and should not be taken for granted.

2. ^{^}

   See Edmund Husserl, William James, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dan Zahavi, Francisco Varela, Shaun Gallagher, Peter White

3. ^{^}

   I'm coming to the limits of my expressive capabilities, so I will have to use analogies and parallels starting here. Ironically, this paragraph relates to the dialectics that is exactly "using analogies and parallels to express thoughts".

4. ^{^}

   I'm not going to claim that I understand in full what Strange Loop actually is - yet Hofstader's works lets understand clearly that he's talking about Strange Loop as a Form (in Plato's terms).
   There are some links to temporal binding process described above - yet I'm incapable to express Hofstader's ideas better than he did on his own, and I will not even try.