37.40 The Story of Plato’s Caves

So it is with us.
We have all grown in our lives.
Everything that was true for us in the past does not continue to be true for us now.
St. Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I thought as a child…” And he’s right.
We
may want to believe that this isn’t the case – that we have always had
a homogeneous consistent world-view – but it’s simply impossible.
Reality isn’t monolithic.
Reality – as much as we might crave for it to be otherwise – isn’t fixed.
We often come to new understandings.
And once we come to new understandings, we can’t go back to our old, comfortable ways of thinking.
It’s
amazing how often we all willfully pretend otherwise – we continue to
associate with people and engage in activities that we know are no
longer beneficial to us, purely for nostalgia’s sake.
Moreover,
I am amazed by how frequently we all try to “save” people and get them
to see reality as we see it – assuming that they will thank us – only
to discover, yet again, they didn’t want our help.
Spiritual-Religious advice for the week: remember that dealing with reality has been hard for people for at least the past two thousand years.