The Unfolding Wings: The Way of Perfection in the Platonic Tradition

By Tim Addey.

The ancient philosophic tradition of Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus and many others was a living yoga of enlightenment. This book attempts to present to both the newcomer and those who have already studied aspects of the tradition the means for pursuing its truth and beauty as a way of perfection.

The author uses a wide range of extracts from the sages of true philosophy to illustrate the many aspects of the path: chapters on Dialectic Meditation, Contemplation, Theurgy, Initiation, the Guardian Daemon, Mythology, Virtue and Love demonstrate the richness hidden within this long-neglected yoga of the ancient west.

The book offers to the reader a starting point for a lifelong discipline which leads to the discovery within his or her own soul of the most profound wisdom, the broadest understanding of the self and the cosmos, the highest happiness, and, ultimately, a friendship with divinity. It does not, however, suggest any shortcuts—as Plato wrote in the Seventh Epistle: "For a thing of this kind cannot be expressed by words like other disciplines, but by long familiarity, and living in conjunction with the thing itself, a light as it were leaping from a fire will on a sudden be enkindled in the soul, and there itself nourish itself." The book is for those who are prepared to live the life, and for those who prize above all mere possessions the light enkindled in the soul.

192 pages. Paperback.