So now you're a prisoner in Plato's cave. You have no idea what's going on. The reality before you is all you can perceive. You don't know true reality. You have no idea that escape from this world is even possible. For all you know this is the true world, there is no other.
Then you manage to read about some fellow named Siddhartha who escaped from this cave. He claimed to have beheld the true world of divine light—not a false or reflected light but the light of lights. But this is hard to accept much less believe in fully.
Your skepticism returns you to the shadows cast on the wall by a fire.
From a Buddhist perspective we are born and die within this cave countless times until we attain nirvana. Putting this into another perspective we are born into an imaginary world and die in an imaginary world, being reborn in it countless times. In the Assu Sutta the Buddha said:
“From an unfathomable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on. Long have you thus experienced stress, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries — enough to become disenchanted with all fabricated things, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be released.”
Death is certainly no release. One is simply reborn into a womb or abides for a certain length of time in a more vivid imaginary world than the present one, call it a heavenly world. Release can only be attained by intuiting what is unconstructed and unconditioned. Nor can release be attained by the use of the imaginary mind which is a constructor of illusion.
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