Plato's "Story of the cave"

This is a famous Gnostic story told by the Greek philosopher Plato.
Some prisoners have been held in a cave since childhood.They are all chained in such a manner as they can only stare straight ahead at the cave wall.A fire burns in the centre of the cave behind them,which casts shadows onto the walls.The shadows they can see are cast by various animals and plants that the jailers carry along a raised walkway on the other side of the fire.The prisoners play a games,naming the shadows, and when the jailors respond,the prisoners believe it is actually the shadows who are speaking.The prisoners,being unable to more or turn around,mistake the shadows and the voices for the only reality.
What would happen,asks Plato,if one of the prisoners was forced to stand up and turn around?He would be blinded by the fire,which he would at first take to be less real than the shadows to which he's been accustomed to for so long.And what if then the hapless prisoner were to be taken outside the cave altogether?The sunlight would have an even greater disorientating effect upon him.Eventually,once the prisoner has realised the enormity of what he has experienced,he will understand that the world he has lived in for so long was unreal,with the greater,true reality being above and beyond him.It is a reality to which he can gain access,but first he must be freed from his confinement.
The prisoner then goes back into the cave and tells the other prisoners about what he's seen and found out.But they believe they are better than him because he can no longer see the fine details in the shadows and they have not seen this "outer world" for themselves.That's basically the gist of the story.
The sad thing about today is that most people are prisoners in the shadows,just like in the story.These people will not even begin to believe anything they have not seen or experienced for themselves.The only way to escape this world and become free is to achieve Gnosis and to know who and what we are.
This mythic sensibility,which enabled the Gnostics to understand Plato,would have almost certainly informed their way of reading the old testament as well.Stories,the Gnostics understood-even biblical ones-do not have to have actually happened in order for them to have profound meaning for us all.As the gospel of Philip acknowledges,the truths of Gnosis have to be transformed into poetic and mythic language in order for us to understand them:
"Truth didn't come into the world naked but in types and images.Truth is received only that way.There is rebirth and its image.They must be reborn through image."