The Otherworld lies all about us, an earthly paradise ... if we would but cleanse 'the doors of perception', as Blake put it, and see the world as it really is, 'infinite'.

Plato illustrated the unreality of our normal perception of the world by an extended analogy. We are like people in a cave, he says, who sit facing a wall with a fire burning behind them. As people and objects pass to and fro in front of the fire, we see only their shadows, and the shadows of ourselves, as they are cast on the wall. We mistake these shadows for reality. (It is as if we mistake a film at the cinema for reality.) To achieve a truer perception of reality we have to turn around ... to revert our point of view ... and see both the fire and the objects in front of it directly. This is perhaps as close to reality as most of us ever come.

~~~Patrick Harpur~~~