A Small Primer on Platonic Surrealism

As taught at the Esalen Institute: a short, warm, plain-spoken introduction to Platonic Surrealism, a philosophy of consciousness that ranks nothing above anything else.

PS starts from one ground, POTENTIALITY, and singles out the part of it that notices anything at all, AWARENESS. From there, Kevin Cann, a retired Navy nuclear engineer who taught PS at Esalen with Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University, takes up the big questions in twenty-three short chapters: why there is anything, what a self is, why there is suffering and evil, what happens when we die, how to live ethically with no judge in the sky, whether machines can have minds, and what comes after postmodernism.

This is the philosophy alone, without the practices, rituals or studies of the anomalous found in the longer PS books. Each chapter ends with an "On a Tuesday" note showing what the idea looks like on an ordinary day, when the bill arrives or the dog throws up on the rug. An appendix sets PS beside materialism, idealism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Gnosticism, Nietzsche and more, and names its own weak points.

Written for curious readers with no background in philosophy, and footnoted for those who have one. PS is meant to be used, and it answers the oldest charge against philosophy: that it is mere sophistry.