Dr. Asangba Tzudir
The present ‘Naga condition’ that finds ‘hopelessly’ and ‘helplessly’ caught in the interplay of ‘conceptual problems’ shrouded in the various issues can be aptly explained through an allegory from Plato. Plato’s allegory of the cave or the cave world brings a conversation between his mentor Socrates and one of Socrates’ students Glaucon. The cave is very dark because there is little light inside the cave and hardly seen the objects. In it, Socrates describes a group of prisoners who cannot move easily because they are chained on their necks as well as feet for their entire lives. Similarly there is another world out of the cave world and between is a raised wall to which they are chained. On the wall, there are people from the ‘real’ world moving around but since the prisoners cannot raise their heads completely, they can only see the shadows of the people on the walls of the cave like an illusion which they believe is real but it is just their illusion.
Now, if the prisoners are released from the cave, at first their eyes may dazzle in the light but slowly and surely they will begin to identify things and realize that the outer world is the real world and the cave world is the unreal world of illusions. Now, being used to a life in the cave in chains, will they think of going back inside the cave?
The allegory contains many forms of symbolisms in relation to the world of perception. The cave represents superficial physical reality and also symbolical of a ‘world’ of ignorance. The chains that prevent the prisoners from leaving the cave represent that they are trapped in the caved world of ignorance, and being chained prevents them from seeing and learning the truth. The wall symbolizes the mental block which causes limits to our thinking and the shadow suggest the world of sensory perception.
Similarly, the ‘Naga condition’ is such that we are living like kings and rulers in the ‘caves’ of our own comfort zones hardly lending mind to the cornucopia of identity dilemmas, issues and problems and which has brought together various ‘concepts’ confronting the Nagas today. The Naga Caravan ironically, finds itself chained within a dark cave of ignorance. The prisoners need to be freed, but who will free the prisoners? It’s not ‘they’ but ‘us.’
The prisoners should free themselves to go beyond the sensory world of perceptions and how things are perceived to be, and encounter the ‘truth,’ a world of reality beyond perceptions which in the case of the Nagas, are blinded by the present socio-political and material conditioning.
Like the prisoners in the cave that can only see shadows and where they are also made to think that it is the real thing, they need to unshackle the chains and free themselves to see the true nature of reality.
(Dr. Asangba Tzudir contributes a weekly guest editorial to The Morung Express. Comments can be mailed to asangtz@gmail.com)
