The shadows

Not lies. The prisoners see something real — a genuine effect of genuine objects in a genuine light. What is wrong is not the seeing but the naming: they call the shadows "the world," because they have never had occasion to call them anything else.

The map is not the territory, twenty-four centuries before Korzybski said it — and this bench has a whole other wing (⊞ the reality tunnel) built on the same sentence. The Kabbalistic neighbour is the levushim, the garments: reality clothed, and the clothing mistaken for the body.