Bernard Conway

  “Can’t you see the game is crooked?      Yeah, but it’s the only game in town .” -Canada Bill Jones There is an odd pattern that seems to emerge in every introduction to the philosophy presented in Plato’s Republic . It goes something like this: 1)  A description of how Plato’s perfect society would be overseen by an elite caste of Guardians, who are selected only after being subjected to exhaustive trials of character and judgement. 2)  An explanation that, above the Guardians, is the Philosopher King, who endures even more grueling trials, and who rules not by his own whims, but by an intimate knowledge of the Forms , particularly the form of good. 3)  An explanation of the Forms, the idea that a perfect version of a given object exists on a removed plane, and of which dense matter can only imitate. Usually, something like an animal is given as an example. Out there, on the plane of the forms, is the perfect and eternal ...

There is in every enduring spiritual legacy, an emphasis on ascetic practice. Why this occurs has been subject to much investigation. And while the investigations themselves may interesting, no single study will sufficiently describe all aspects of asceticism. Nor should we expect one to. For practical purposes, as it is experienced, the subject must be considered on a number of different planes. We will limit ourselves to three examples, along with some further considerations on the subject. A Final Break with Attachment Defined as the act of breaking an attachment, this view of asceticism may be the easiest to understand as that it can be easily translated into terms that require no consideration of its more transcendent features. Although a ‘break’ with some aspect of the material world often is often done in order to look beyond, this need not always be the case. The motivation can be more secular. Many students know well the feeling of what was intended to be five-minute ...