The Four of Us, St Paul, the Wachowski Brothers and Plato. What do they have in common?
St Paul suggested that, 'Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.' (1 Corinthians 13:12)
Plato's Republic included an allegory which St Paul probably drew on - the idea of a group of people who were chained in a cave so they could only see flickering shadows. Plato mused on how hard it would be for them to grasp the real light if they turned to it, for they would have assumed that the dull light they had experienced up to that point would have been reality. He further speculated that one person, breaking away from the group to find the true light, would find it difficult to be believed on return.
The Wachowski Brothers produced the Matrix Trilogy, a set of movies which began with the premise that everything we think we know is false and virtual.
And the Four of Us? Fine band from the mid 1990s. Their excellent Man Alive album opens with Sensual Thing, a wonderful, up-tempo pop song. They said:
'I want to burst outside this canned reality
I want to turn it round and see it like the way it's meant to be.'
Don't worry. You haven't stumbled into the Mustard Seed Shavings version of the Round Britain Quiz. (How bad would that be?) You have walked into this morning's thought though which is, how do you know that your morning so far has been, and will continue to be, real? Really real.
Have a real good day.
1 comment:
I am relieved. I thought you couldn't count. If 'The Four of Us', as I at first supposed, had consisted of St Paul, Plato and the W Bros (at least two by definition) plus you yourself to make 'Us' viable, you would necessarily have been shown to be considerably mathematically challenged.
'Canned reality.' Spoken from within the song, that's like the image wanting to come out of the mirror. Seeing through a glass darkly, in fact. Oh yes, that's your St Paul quote.
But face to face is challenging and often painful.
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