Into the Transcendent Light

<p>Each year worldwide people spend millions of dollars on self-help books motivational lectures and life coaches trying to improve their lives. What people don’t realize is that 2500 years ago Plato one of our greatest philosophers provided a guide on how to integrate mind body and spirit as the means for living a flourishing life. That guide is Plato’s dialogue the <i>Republic</i>. But modern readers miss the relevance of Plato’s central message. Why? They miss it because Plato has Socrates considered the wisest man in all of ancient Greece fill the <i>Republic</i> with bad arguments. Readers follow those bad arguments and conclude that the <i>Republic</i> is about the constitution of an ideal society. Instead the <i>Republic</i> is about how to constitute character to live that flourishing life. <br /></p><p>In this work of creative nonfiction through a fictitious conversation between Plato and three of his students Jack Crittenden explores and redeems those bad arguments. By doing so and by reinforcing his interpretation with excerpts from the <i>Tao Te Ching</i> and the Upanishads Crittenden shows that all of us and not just philosophers can learn from the <i>Republic</i> how to live authentic rich full lives by searching out the transcendent light.<br /></p>