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

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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.

ISBN 9781898910947.

  • About the Series

    The Prometheus Trust’s Students’ Edition Series offers to the newcomer to the Platonic tradition a number of introductory works. The Series is aimed at introducing philosophy within the framework of its original purpose – which was nothing less than the unfolding of the soul’s powers, the conjoining of the inner and outer life, and the restoration of the soul herself to her divine source. Philosophy as practised by its founders was a yoga of enlightenment, and constituted a most beautiful and well-ordered path towards the very highest goal of human existence – friendship with divinity.

    The Series is produced because that original yoga is still the most sure and direct path to human happiness – both in terms of the individual and for human society as a whole. As Thomas Taylor writes at the beginning of his General Introduction to the Philosophy of Plato,

    “It may be compared to a luminous pyramid, terminating in Deity, and having for its basis the rational soul of man and its spontaneous undistorted conceptions, - of this philosophy, august, magnificent, and divine, Plato may be justly called the primary leader and hierophant, through whom, like the mystic light in the inmost recesses of some sacred temple, it first shone forth with hidden and venerable splendour.”

    The tradition has nourished men and women through the ages as they pursued the ways of wisdom and they, in their turn, added to that tradition, adapting its immutable truths to the needs of their own times. In that spirit, the Prometheus Trust offers this Series, not as a final answer to our quest, but as another small light on a long and arduous path which constitutes the life of soul as she plays her part in the divine cosmos.

    See all Students' Editions