PARADOXICAL

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A Parable:The Prisoner In The Dark Cave

There once was a man who was sentenced to die. He
was blindfolded and put in a pitch dark cave. The cave was
100 yards by 100 yards. He was told that there was a way
out of the cave, and if he could find it, he was a free man.

After a rock was secured at the entrance of the cave,
the prisoner was allowed to take his blindfold off and roam
freely in the darkness. He was to be fed only bread and water
for the first 30 days and nothing thereafter. The bread and
water were lowered from a small hole in the roof at the south
end of the cave. The ceiling was about 18 feet high. The opening
was about one foot in diameter. The prisoner could see a faint
light up above, but no light came into the cave.

As the prisoner roamed and crawled around the cave, he
bumped into rocks. Some were rather large. He thought that
if he could build a mound of rocks and dirt that was high
enough, he could reach the opening and enlarge it enough
to crawl through and escape. Since he was 5'9", and his reach
was two feet, the mound had to be at least 10 feet high.

So the prisoner spent his waking hours picking up rocks
and digging up dirt. At the end of two weeks, he had built
a mound of about six feet. He thought that if he could duplicate
that in the next two weeks, he could make it before his food
ran out. But as he had already used most of the rocks in the
cave, he had to dig harder and harder. He had to do the digging
with his bare hands. After a month had passed, the mound was
nine and half feet high and he could almost reach the opening
if he jumped. He was almost exhausted and extremely weak.

One day just as he thought he could touch the opening,
he fell. He was simply too weak to get up, and in two days
he died. His captors came to get his body. They rolled away
the huge rock that covered the entrance. As the light flooded
into the cave, it illuminated an opening in the wall of the
cave about three feet in circumference.

The opening was the opening to a tunnel which led to the
other side of the mountain. This was the passage to freedom
the prisoner had been told about. It was in the south wall
directly under the opening in the ceiling. All the prisoner
would have had to do was crawl about 200 feet and he would
have found freedom. He had so completely focused on the
opening of light that it never occurred to him to look for
freedom in the darkness. Liberation was there all the time
right next to the mound he was building, but it was in
the darkness.

How many of us, as survivors have to grapple with that
darkness, and how many of us want to run from it, to hide
from it: when our very survival, if not quality of life
depends upon our finding that freedom from and within the
darkness?

I am reminded here that without the darkness we cannot
appreciate the light and that the light in sharp contrast
to this darkness is not always as it first appears to be.
There is an authenticity waiting to be claimed, re-claimed,
born and re-born in your heart, soul and mind and it seems
to me that it is through the light within the darkness
that this path to freedom leads one to find......self, core
self.

Run not from the darkness of your life. Run not from the
past that the darkness in your life hold you prisoner within
while endless shadows upon your soul are cast...follow your
darkness to the light of soul: it is the pathway toward an
ever-deepening understanding of authentic self which
in and of itself leads to an ever-increasing freedom.

© May 28/97 A.J. Mahari

posted by Resty Odon  # 10:49 PM