JUAN CECILIO MIRANDA

Juan Cecilio Miranda Pedrosa
MOO-06-2430
Humanistic Studies
Prof. Daniel Vega Lamendola
February 8, 2020

Auto-biographical recreation of the Allegory of the Prisoner in the Cave through the eyes of a person who has sought wisdom all his life and paid a heavy price to achieve it.

Imagine, if you will, how life goes on inside a psychiatric hospital ward.  It is clean, it is atmospherically sterile, for lack of a better description.  There is a door at the end of the hall, but you cannot exit that door.  All you can ever see is the door and all you ever wonder is who makes noises outside the clean hall.  How does the door open?   What lies beyond it?  Do I want to know what lies beyond? Or am I content with the clean hall?  To want to see the world beyond the door, you have to want to see beyond the veil in your mind first.  How do we do this, you ask.  I will tell you how I did it and how I wound up in this quest in the first place.  I will tell you how I walked past the door and how others refused to follow me past it, much to their own self-deterioration and stagnancy.

My name is Juan Cecilio Miranda Pedrosa and this my journey through the ward and into the realm of the enlightened few who ever contemplate the question of our purpose here and what to do about it.

My story starts at my eleventh year of existence.  I do not say life for I had not yet begun to truly live, I simply existed, I was simply there.  Many people simply exist, very few truly live, but as I was to learn ever so tragically, all people, whether they live or exist, they die all the same.  Death makes no distinction; it is the end of a journey in one realm and the start of a new journey in another.  But if you tell that to an eleven-year-old child who suddenly found out he would never see his grandmother again just because “God willed it to be so”, then you will probably get the same reaction I had.  Your reality will cave in, and you trap yourself in a clean hall where no one bothers you.  One day the clean hall became more than a mere construct of my mind and I was invited to “take a vacation” at a special place for people as “special” as myself.  You would think I cried out about being confined to a small space, but I had already confined myself in my mind.

So began a lifetime of treatment that for the most part, I was oblivious to what was happening around me.  For me this was bliss.  I could skip school just by letting my hallucinations and voices run rampant and even faking that I was having a crisis just because I didn’t like the class I was taking. 

I became a lone wolf who needed nothing and no one except for one small luxury: video games and action cartoons.  Those I craved like nothing I ever had up to that point and that lasted for more than a decade unchanged.  I lived to play, and that was the end of the matter, or so I thought.  

Around the year 1999 to 2001 I received a book authored by a friend whose life had been turned upside down by a supernatural experience which led him to write his opus.  As soon as I grasped it, I too wanted to share this experience. I felt like nothing mattered except to live that experience.  At the same time, I began correlating the games I played to concepts of history, metaphysics and the arcane lost to the sands of time.  I was rewarded with a revelation: the games were making hidden referrals of lost history, but not all of them contained this valuable gnosis and it could not be transformed into logos and distilled into Sophos without the proper preparation.  The clean hall had outlived its usefulness and I wanted out. 

I had a surprise waiting for me, this was Hotel California, I was free to check out, but I could never return to being the eleven-year-old who knew no restriction, nor could I ever leave behind my clinical condition.  I had to grow not just with it, but also despite its hindrance in my way.  That was when I beheld my fellow prisoners in the clean, sterile hall.

To put it simply, they welcomed the prison they were in because they gave up responsibility for their own thoughts and deeds and assumed this was all life offered.  I, however, now knew otherwise.  So, I began to try to find a way out that door, compelled to discover wonders that no one else had ever beheld before.  But I couldn’t grasp it all at once.  There was simply too much to absorb.  Moreover, I had just begun my trek into a new world.  I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything that I saw because I had never seen them in the light of contemplation and analysis.  Some things were meant to remain mysteries until I grasped more basic concepts.  But the journey had begun.  I would not turn back once I saw what was in front of me.  I had learned how to open the door and now nobody was going to put me back where I had fought my way out.

The reaction of the other patients in these halls and psychosocial rehabilitation centers was one to be expected of those who give up on evolving.  They all thought I was chasing shadows, my shadow to be precise.  They all thought they knew what to do and what was expected of them.  That great labor consisted of being docile, taking pills at intervals, smoking cigarettes, and keeping their beds orderly.  Such great work, indeed.  I began to loathe the clean hall which now stank of stagnant humanity, nay, sub-humans who sought nothing, but a comfortable life paid by the government and health insurance.  I could never belong to such debasement of intellect.  I raged against their ignorance and made a vow to strive to leave that hall and never return.  I have kept that pledge to this day.  Now I look back and feel pity, not anger, at those who mocked me and still do.  They say, “he could have just stayed still and let all those troubles pass him by with a cup of coffee.”  “He’s off chasing some stupid dream he had because he read a dumb book that said something about destiny, let’s play dominoes and laugh at his folly.”  Well, I don’t see them evolving, I don’t see them having any meaning to life.  They are content to see cars go by the road day in, day out as they turn their lungs into coal.  I could not be sicker of such a life.

So, I began searching for clues as to what it was that I was truly after.  I knew it had something to do with being one with Creation but truly, what was Creation to me?  It took me a while, but I attained a solid grasp on what the Light was and how precious it was to learn from its emanations.  To reach this phase I had to sacrifice something though.   One does not get something from nothing.  It is an alchemical law that to receive something you must relinquish something of equal value to that which you seek.  The sacrificial offering was obvious.  I got rid of my video games and never went back to them.  I can see others play but I will never do so because it became a hindrance and an addiction rather than a soothing agent or a source of knowledge. 

My sources now came from other founts.  That would be a short, thin man with an enormous moustache who loved to dress up flamboyantly, at least in his opinion.  He’s an interesting German by the name of Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote books full of knowledge far ahead even of modern society.  I sought to learn his philological formulas and his maxims like an apprentice spell caster seeks to reach the rank of magus.  To me this man was no mere mortal; he was truly the last prophet of the age by cloaking his teachings cleverly so that they could not be abused.  To this day his ideas are debated and very few can say that they understood what he meant.  I will be one of those. 

I will learn those things so that I will never find myself in that clean, sterile hall ever again.  I will never return to those who can never hope to grasp what I have because they ignore its existence.   It took me far too long to realize the marvels that stood before me, but I have finally done so.  That hall, so clean, quiet, and sterile, will never again become my present.  I am my present, my future is what I make of it with my efforts and insight, and my past will only serve to remind me the pains I endured to reach this far, never to take one step back.

I am Juan Cecilio Miranda, the sum of the Light that I have sought and become One with it.  If this sounds difficult to comprehend, maybe you should look around to see if you are in that clean hall and whether you want out or not.