Epistemologies of the Oracular Blind

CHAPTER TWO - HEARTH SCIENCE: PHENOMENOLOGY OF AN EMBODIED NEUROSCIENCE

Plato’s cave allegory – surely one of the most stunning examples of metaphorical brilliance in the cannon of western philosophy – tells the teaching story of Reality, capital R, behind the apparent facade of the real. The allegory explains that we (humans, seekers of wisdom) are like cave dwellers chained behind a fire, staring at the shadows cast from outside the cave upon the blank wall above the fire. We sit, entranced by the dance of shadows, thinking that we are looking at reality, while Reality is in fact outside of the cave. What we must do, Plato teaches us, is turn our attention wholely from the shadows toward the mouth of the cave.

Plato is inaugurating, in the Greek tradition, a line of Seeing. But because what we are seeking to perceive is the Real, capital R, we must See, capital S. In Indigenous centro-American cultures, the shamans, those who are trained to see through the apparent surfaces, to be able to look through reality to its beating heart, as though all of us have become cavefish with transparent bodies, are known as mura’akames.

The translation of mura’akame? One who Sees.