I understand "the cave" in Plato's Republic to be the world as we understand it through the senses. (AKA "the natural world"). Leaving the cave is going into a

I understand "the cave" in Plato's Republic to be the world as we understand it through the senses. (AKA "the natural world"). Leaving the cave is going into a deeper "gnosis" that, perhaps, resembles pure mathematics, or something else, he doesn't make clear, but it was certainly mystical and thereby ultimately "occult" (or fundamentally "hidden"). Consider this tradition survives even in Newton, who was an avid alchemist, wrt The Philosopher's Stone and obsessed with the numerology of the dimensions of Solomons Temple even as he worked on his Principia.