Abstract

This enquiry attempts to establish Walter Pahnke's categorization of the mystical experience as the specific phenomenological process Socrates refers to as dialectic in the Republic's allegory of the cave. Aside from a comparative analysis of the numerous connections between Plato's most prolific allegory and Pahnke's mystical experience, I define the symbol bearers as oppressive religious authority and tie the symbols of the cave to the post-industrial drug-war and for-profit organization of spirituality observable throughout a world so far removed from the holistic model of the Eleusinian Mysteries.