Finitude
Identification with the body alone leads to a feeling of our being finite: limitedness, helplessness.
Our minds then feel limited to the physicality of the body alone. Our mentality is defined by the experiences of the body. We get trapped in the box of our physical experience, referred to as the individual ego in psychology. Trapped within the bounds of our limited experience, we develop a feeling of finitude and helplessness in shaping our lives. There is no original thinking or creativity in resolving life problems. We feel undesirous and incapable of freeing ourselves from the safety of the limited box of our physical experience which prevents us from exploring the big and vast universe outside of it.
In this connection, attention is drawn to the allegory of Plato's Cave (see Figure below) in his book entitled Republic.
|
The Figure pictorially illustrates the allegory of Plato's Cave containing a group of people who spent all their life chained in the cave facing a blank wall showing shadows of things moving in front of a fire behind them. For the prisoners, the shadows represent reality, in fact their only reality. Imagine what happens to the reality of a prisoner who is freed from the cave and taken to experience the real world outside! Our box of individual experience is like our personal Plato's Cave in the safety of which we end up living our entire lives. |
