I'll Sit Down in My Thinking Chair

Plato was quite the thinker if his ideas are stilling being dismantled and superglued thousands of years later.  I know.  Captain Obvious.  But what ideas from today are gonna make it to the future?  Is this question too big to be a Big Question? Idk, brah.
Anyway, here are my "The Cave" answers.

1. The Cave represents the fight to be enlightened, whether that be a conflict with yourself or the forces that made you ign'ant in the first place.
2. The most important images of the allegory were the shackles, the shadows, the sun, and the cave(duh).
3. The allegory suggests that enlightenment is something to be attained and retained; embraced and shared with all you see lacking it.  Because of this, some people want to shove it down your throat with good intention.  Plato seems to suggest that enlightenment is supposed to be experienced and passed on despite the resistance the teacher may encounter.
4. The perspectives of the prisoners are forced and predetermined like the range of movement their shackles.  Caves are pretty finite unless they're in Vietnam so the extent of what the cave dwellers can know shares that trait.
5. Conditioning shackles my brain.  I went to a leadership conference with Calvin Terrell and one exercise we did was to flash words like "slave" or "drunk" on the screen.  We had to tell him the first kind of people to come to mind.  You can see where I'm going. :(
6. The freed prisoner is ashamed of what he sees as the reactions of his fellow cave dwellers.  Plus, he sees the whole world even though it hurt in the beginning.  The shadow watchers, on the other hand, are lame ducks.  They are dogmatic and provincial. *nods in self-amusement for using vocab*
7. Intellectual confusion happens when you first see the sun a la Ace of Bass and you begin to wrap and stretch your mind around all the shiny, new ideas.  The other is when you're going back to the darkness after being enlightened and having to consider the comprehension of your non-enlightened peers. Think privileged n00b teacher going to teach at an inner city school.
8. The spelunkers are compelled free and dragged out so I guess Plato meant that you don't just decide to be free-thinking but that there is a force; idea, person, or otherwise, that can make you think freely like the tweeters that started the Arab Spring.
9. There is a difference between appearance and reality.  Things don't always look like what they are.  If a stranger walks in and sees our class on its phones, he doesn't think bloggers.  A lot of Chinese people see the internet but have no idea what the event at Tiananmen Square was. 
10. When reality and appearance are the same we find that nothing is a lie.  We can take everything for face value.  We also find that thoughts, as personal interpretations of a constant, can lead to discovery of the core values of the community that is experiencing that reality.