The transmission
Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher of the Classical period, founder of the Academy—the first institution of higher learning in the Western world—and the pivotal author through whom the thought of his teacher Socrates survives.
Born into an aristocratic Athenian family, he turned from a political career after the execution of Socrates in 399 BCE and devoted himself to philosophy, writing the dialogues that would shape every subsequent age of Western thought.
His ideas on justice, knowledge, the soul, and the structure of reality reached Christianity, Islam, and modern philosophy alike. For the mind-power lineage, Plato is the wellspring. His Theory of Forms holds that the changing, sensible world we perceive is a dim copy of a realm of perfect, eternal, immaterial archetypes—the Forms—which are apprehended not by the senses but by the intellect.
Reality, on this view, is fundamentally ideal and mental: the visible cosmos is the out-picturing of an invisible order of pure pattern. This single move—locating the truly real in mind rather than matter—became the durable foundation that Plotinus systematized, that the Renaissance Platonists revived, and that New Thought inherited as the conviction that mind is prior to and causative of material conditions.
What they gave
The Forms as ideal archetypes: Establishes that behind every appearance stands a perfect mental pattern, framing the material world as the expression of an unseen ideal order rather than self-sufficient matter.
- Reality as intelligible, not sensible: Locates true being in what the mind grasps, making consciousness and intellect the gateway to the real—a direct ancestor of “Universal Mind” doctrines.
- The soul’s recollection and ascent: Treats knowledge as the soul’s remembering of the Forms it once beheld, and philosophy as an inward turning toward higher reality, prefiguring contemplative ascent.
- The Good as the source: Positions the Form of the Good as the sun-like source of all being and knowing, a template for the later One and for the single creative Mind of the mystics.
In their words
Two patterns, my friend, are set up in the world, the divine, which is most blessed, and the godless, which is most wretched.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Socrates (above all); the Pythagoreans (number, harmony, the immortal soul); Heraclitus (the flux of the sensible world); and Parmenides (changeless Being).
- Influenced: Aristotle; Plotinus and Proclus and the whole Neoplatonic tradition; Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch; Augustine and Christian mysticism; Renaissance Platonism (Ficino, Pico); and, indirectly, the New Thought conception of an ideal Mind behind appearances.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- The Republicc.375 BCE
- Symposiumc.385 BCE
- Phaedoc.380 BCE
- Timaeusc.360 BCE