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Plato warns about the compulsory elements of incarnation and mystical experience: There will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others.

Again, the issue of compulsion surfaces. Here we differ slightly. Coercing the Kings is not such a simple matter as Plato assumes: they are fiercely independent, by design and training, even to the will of Plato�s divine �founders of the State,� his angelic or Upper World �legislators.� Liminate joiners, the Kings are also edges. Provoke them at risk -- their blade both cuts and heals.

What Plato overlooks in discussing compulsion is that the Philosopher Kings, in the end, take up their burdens not by coercion, nor even through love of the Great, but mostly out of empathy with suffering Creation.

When the child screams, they pick her up. It's the true human impulse.

The Kings love the Queen of Heaven, and they love Earth. Having lived as matter, having suffered as matter in human bodies, they grieve for matter, for the billions trapped and terrified in its whorl. They would see matter, and its creatures, freed and raised like a victory chalice.

Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth.

The �general underground abode� to ancients like Plato meant all of the sub-lunary realms -- all matter below the moon�s furthest orbit from Earth. Out-of-body experiencers commonly bump into this astral barrier. It is known as the �angelic shield,� keeping certain things in, and certain things out. Plato�s �abode� also signifies Tartarus, the Greek underworld.

The underworld is an archetypal construct expressed through the psyche and myth of every major human culture. The underworld is not merely real, it is meta-real because its existence crosses and obliterates temporal and cultural limits, re-appearing in humanity�s transpersonal psyche over and over. Archetypal �sets� like the underworld do not persist because they are reflections of evolving human consensus. They persist, as Plato suggested, because humans are reflections of, and participants in, their elemental numinosity and reality.

The encounter with the numinous crushes the ego and relativizes the individual. The �downsized� status of the individual becomes clear upon contact with any such entity or �setting.� One is immediately and consistently dumbfounded, struck with drooling astonishment. If one is not properly prepared for such an encounter � and many are not -- one will often interpret the experience as threatening and terrifying. Then angels look like aliens, and the opening of the inner realms deliver nightmares. Properly prepared individuals � William Blake, for instance � walk into hell in gnosis, and instead of eternal damnation, see genius at ecstatic work.

The Hellenic world referred to the process of descent to hell or Tartarus as �nekyia.� Nekyia is the twin of the ascent experience. It is the �other half� of the caduceus and the uroboric snake, the downward shafts that Er witnessed. The result of the descent and harrowing of hell is provision of the Philosopher King with a second sight, with which he can interpret eternal, mythic imagery and see through appearance, applying the principle of paradox to heal the opposites. Descent ciphers the runes, burns them into flesh.

It is the infernal -- not the heavenly -- hand of experience that confers in-sight, understanding. �Understanding� means standing beneath the problem -- crawling into the hole and observing from an inferior position.