Here is a metaphor in three parts.
Part One
Imagine you spent your whole life in an underground cave. You were born in the cave and you grew up there. You were unaware that anything existed outside your cave. All the people and all the objects in your life were lit by dim lights on cave walls. The air was humid and still. Your skin was pale and your eyes were sensitive to faint movements in shadows.
Then one day, you discovered a passageway leading to an area that you had never noticed. After some further exploration, you arrived at a place that was different. It was brighter and the air was dryer. You pushed on, and eventually you came out to a place that was lit by a harsh shaft of sunlight shooting through a gap in the cave ceiling. You had never seen sunlight, never witnessed such brilliant brightness. It blinded you. It filled you with awe, and it frightened you. So you fled back underground.
When you returned to your friends, one of them pleaded, “Where were you? We were worried about you!”
“I found a new place, a different place. It is very bright and the air moves.”
“Oh, no!” cried another. “You went there?! You went to the bright place?”
“What’s the bright place?” another friend asked.
“The bright place is a dangerous place. I found it one day when I was out with Brinker. You remember Brinker. He was the one who was always trying new things. More bravery than brains. Always living on the brink. He went out into the light and he never came back. I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. I hear he went blind and his skin was burned from its flesh and he died a horrible death. Poor Brinker. You should never go back there.”
The story frightens you and you agree, you should never go back to the bright place.
There’s only one problem. Once a mind stretches to a new idea, it never goes back to its original dimensions.
Days go by, but you can’t get the bright place out of your mind. It burns your brain with an insatiable curiosity. What is that place? What goes on there? How big is it? What is the source of all that light? You continue your daily life, but the mysteries of that bright place haunt you. You lay awake in bed wondering about that place.
One day you cannot contain yourself and you decide to retrace your footsteps back to the bright place. You wish you didn’t have this curiosity, but it has become such an obsession that you would go crazy if you didn’t explore it. You are nervous. It could be dangerous, but you press onward.
When you return to the bright place, it is every bit as overwhelming as you remembered it. The light forces you to shut your eyes tight, but this time you don’t run away. You just sit there for a while feeling the movement of the air around you. It’s an unusual sensation.
Eventually, something interesting begins to happen. Your eyes slowly adjust to the light. Soon you can open your eyes just a crack. You look at the backs of your hands. It’s as if you are seeing them for the first time. They appear clearer to you in the bright light. You can see they have little veins under the surface of your skin and tiny hairs and pores.
Then you turn your palms upward and you notice that your fingertips are not completely smooth as you had always believed they were. Rather, you see in this new light that your fingertips have tiny swirling ridges on the skin. The light has revealed that your fingers have fingerprints.
Part Two
When you get back to the cave, you describe your fingerprint discovery to your friends, but they don’t believe you. You try to show them. Unfortunately, the light is too dim. And they don’t get why you’re so excited about some mundane detail that seemingly has no impact on anyone’s life.
On the next visit to the bright place, you notice some new things about the cave walls. Contrary to the common knowledge that all cave walls are uniformly grey in color, you see that different areas of stone have different colors. Some have tiny mineral deposits. Others appear to have stripes like layers that had been eroded away over time.
Subsequent trips reveal there are complex, vibrant ecosystems living on the cave walls. Under this light you see the stone wall is teaming with tiny, busy bugs. There are little insect fossils embedded in some rocks. You discover patches of cave fauna and irregular splotches of slime made of god knows what.
You go back to the bright place regularly. Every time you visit, you discover new things. But what good are these discoveries if you can’t put them to use? So you begin thinking of how you could use your time in the bright place to help others. You begin offering to do things for the cave community that can be done more easily in the light. Eventually, you become the community’s most skilled threader of sewing needles and darner of socks.
By now the community has come to regard you as an eclectic a half-nut who spouts fanciful proclamations about an undiscovered world. They grant you your eccentricities because you darn a good sock and you’re useful at repairing small objects.
The bright place has become an important influence in your life. You explore it as often as you can. Intuitively, you have the sense that you are just scratching the surface. There are so many unexplained details in what you’re discovering, and they raise all manner of curious implications.
Sometimes the bright place is brilliantly bright, and other times it is only a little brighter than the dim light deep inside the cave. Through repeated visits, you discover the bright-dark-bright-dark cycle follows a 24-hour pattern.
One night you are lying on your back in the bright place and the light coming in through the hole at the top of the cave is relatively dim. You notice for the first time something curious. Outside the hole there are three tiny bright pinpricks of light. For some reason you had never noticed them before. Are your eyes playing tricks?
As you concentrate on the one closest to the edge, you notice that is seems to me moving, creeping, very slowly towards the edge. The movement is almost imperceptible. In fact, all three tiny specks of light appear to micromeander their way across the opening. As one pinprick moves out of site to the right, eventually another one enters from the left. The whole process unfolds in ultra-slow motion. It’s fascinating.
The next night when you return, you notice the same pinpricks as the night before. What are they? Why do they move like that? What is out there?
Part Three
You decide you must do something bold, otherwise you will never find explanations for the mysteries you are discovering. Back below the opening, you spelunk your way to the top of the cave where the pale night light glows. If you stretched to your limit, you could just reach the lip, and you could possibly pull yourself up and out through the opening. It would be risky. It’s not clear that you could get back in safely, and you remember the stories about Brinker who left the bright place and died a horrible death.
Racked with nervous excitement, you decide to do it. There’s no going back now. You stretch, grasp hold of the rock lip, and swing your leg to catch a toehold at the opening. You push yourself up with your foot, set your balance, and then you scramble up and out of the cave.
Where are you? What is this place? The air is fresh. Looking up, you are filled with awe and wonder. You see there is a vast, open night sky all around you. It seems to go on forever and it is filled with hundreds of pinpricks of light, maybe thousands. And far off to one side of the horizon you see the crescent-shaped light of the moon. You have truly discovered a new world. There’s no way anyone in the cave would ever believe this.
Then, something catches your eye. It is an object on the ground that appears to be out of place in the natural environment. It has sharp edges and it looks man-made. Crouching down you see it is a sign. It has been fashioned in the shape of an arrow pointing down the hill. How strange. Looking closer under the moonlight you are able to make out the words written on the sign.
“Welcome, explorer! Please come down the hill to tell us you have arrived. We look forward to seeing you. Yours truly, Brinker.”