The journey Ron embarked upon began when he was a young man, exposed to the harsh realities of frontier life in Montana, "with its do-and-dare attitudes, its wry humor, cowboy pranks, and make nothing of the worst and most dangerous." His early education exposed him to the works of Greek philosophers and the other great traditions of Western thought. Through his treks across the Montana range, Ron also encountered the remnants of the once-proud Blackfeet nation. Their ancient lore and philosophy became no less an influence.
By the age of twelve, he was exposed to an altogether more modern attempt to reconcile man’s existence: the works of Sigmund Freud. Under the tutelage of a student of Freud’s, Commander Joseph "Snake" Thompson, Ron spent many afternoons examining then-current theories on the nature of the human mind. But despite all he gleaned from Thompson, Ron knew that there was more to life than Freudian theories -- that there were answers to the questions he asked, and that the solutions to the problems of life were contained in life itself.
Seeking to broaden his understanding of man, Ron next took advantage of an unusual opportunity to study the cultures of the Far East. His father was a US naval officer serving in Guam. Using Guam as a base, Ron visited China and the Orient, where he examined a tradition of wisdom that pre-dated even the Greeks. Surely some answers could be found here?
And yet, when all was said and done, when he had passed out through the gates of the last Tibetan lamasery, Ron could not ignore an inescapable fact: in spite of all the ancient wisdom in all the ancient texts, the East remained, though vibrant and mysterious, a place of misery and sorrow. In the whole of Eastern religion, Ron found no evidence of a workable means to improve the human condition.
Returning to the West in late 1929, Ron intensified his search to find the truth, comparing and analyzing the works of philosophers from both East and West. He entered one of the leading American universities where he studied engineering principles and atomic physics to gain more insights into life. He also studied modern theories about the mind. But once again, he found assumptions, theories, hypotheses and wrong answers with nothing even faintly workable. Moreover, he found an unparalleled oversight that undermined every philosophical work: How could a man hope to grasp knowledge when he didn’t even understand the mind that was attempting to grasp it?
In this, the first issue in a series of Ron The Philosopher, we follow his initial steps on this road of discovery -- a road that led not only to the world’s most profound philosophical truths on man’s identity and origin, but one which also pointed out how all men could know these truths.
