Into the Transcendent Light

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 2,500 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 Republic. 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 Republic with bad arguments. Readers follow those bad arguments and conclude that the Republic is about the constitution of an ideal society. Instead, the Republic is about how to constitute character to live that flourishing life.

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 Tao Te Ching and the Upanishads, Crittenden shows that all of us, and not just philosophers, can learn from the Republic how to live authentic, rich, full lives by searching out the transcendent light.