When I run out of the Cave!

When I first read about the THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE, I thought for a moment and start thinking how can I apply this concept in my own life and my work.

It is a short excerpt from the beginning of Plato’s book, The Republic.

Plato explains that a man who is a slave is born in a cave and spends his entire life chained inside the cave.

He has never had any experience in the open and has never even seen the sun except through a small opening that comes into the cave just a few hours every day.

During these brief encounters with the outside world, he and his fellow slaves see shadows of birds flying on the cave wall, and the slave gets curious.

One day, he breaks his chains and runs to the opening of the cave to see the outside world for the very first time.

He sees real birds with feathers flying through the air and is amazed. So excited, he returns to his fellow slaves to explain what he has seen.

Of course to the slaves, a bird is not a feathered, flying animal. It is a black spot that hovers on the rocks a few times a day.

To them the shadow is their reality of what the bird is, and they think that the returning slave has gone mad. He is so uprooting their reality of what truth is that they have to stop him, and the mob kills him.

Socrates says, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

This metaphorically represents our arduous ascent to higher learning.

It calls for our undying drive for the truth.

The prisoner that escaped from the cave questioned all his beliefs as he experienced a change in his view of the world rather than just being told an alternative.

Being a passive observer, as the prisoners who wish to stay in the cave, would generally prefer to keep things as they are.

According to Plato, education is seeing things differently
Plato's point is that the prisoners would be mistaken. For they would be taking the terms in their language to refer to the shadows that pass before their eyes, rather than (as is correct, in Plato's view) to the real things that cast the shadows.

If a prisoner says "That's a book" he thinks that the word "book" refers to the very thing he is looking at. But he would be wrong. He's only looking at a shadow. The real referent of the word "book" he cannot see. To see it, he would have to turn his head around.

As Scrum Master, I was passionate to go out of the prison and explore the world. My experience, I have started noting down for myself.

I was getting better value when I shared the original story from my experience with others. I commenced working out the same more and more.

I believe we all require to explore the experience as a Scrum Master or Agile coach or Product owner in real time.

Let us go out of the prison by working out level best and explore the real Sun, not the shadow.

You can read about more stories of my life from the book, The Agilist's Guidebook.