Plato's cave and a teashop in Thailand
author: Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: April 2024

In the third year of my medical studies in Amsterdam, I was quite fed-up with anatomy and behaviouristic psychology, and so I pushed all mandatory practicals into one semester and took six months off to go to India. There happened to be a flight to Bangkok which was cheaper than any flight I could find to India, and hardly three days after my departure, I found myself in a small village in the far North of Thailand, close to the Chinese border. I was standing on an unpaved, tree-lined square, speaking with a young Buddhist monk, roughly my age. There was a typically Thai, beautifully arranged tea stall in the background. I had asked the monk whether he was not worried the onslaught of modern technology would spoil his Buddhist lifestyle, but he had laughed it away, saying something on the lines of "technology may come and go, but Truth will stay." I wasn't too sure this would work out the way he thought, but then he added: "According to Buddhism, it is Consciousness that manifests the world out of itself." The moment he said that, my entire world stood still. When it restarted, the thought that popped up in my mind was: "This is the first time in my entire life, that anyone has told me something that is true."

Looking back at that moment, I've often thought that this was bizarrely exaggerated, but whenever I would go a little deeper into myself, it would still ring true: If I would put everything I learned in school on one side, and this one sentence on the other, I'd choose for this sentence.

Strangely enough, it took me more than 50 years to fully understand what had hit me so strongly on that day in front of the little tea-stall. Why this one sentence had such an impact began to dawn a little after I had written something about panpsychism, the belief that consciousness is an essential aspect of everything in existence. I had written that Plato shared that view and had recounted Plato's conviction that the world is a shadow play projected by a higher, more eternal world of Ideas. As a philosophy, this comes pretty close to the Buddhist view, and so I wondered why Plato's ideas had never struck me as true when my schoolteachers taught them to me. It was only then that I began to realise that what had hit me over 50 years back in Thailand had not been the content, it had not been the sentence which the young monk had spoken, but the type of knowledge embedded in that sentence and the way he had shared it.

My school's teachers imparted constructed knowledge. Thanks to their senses, they were aware of the physical world in which they lived, and they shared a type of knowledge that -- as my medical teachers never stopped stressing -- their brains had manufactured. They knew, from their history classes, that there had been a man called Plato who had lived long ago in a land called Greece, and they shared what this man had written in his writings. The knowledge they shared was all "evidence-based", factual, potentially practical, but second-hand and in the end meaningless.

With the Buddhist monk, the situation was different. The knowledge he shared was knowledge by identity: he knew the consciousness that manifests the world because he knew, at least to some extent, that he was that consciousness — and somehow he had made me recollect at least a little bit of what that consciousness was.

And so I began to find back a truth and a way of knowing I had lived as a kid, but had lost going to school.