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Reality, by Peter Kingsley
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The mystical tradition that lies at the root of Western culture and the magic of the ancient masters of wisdom who laid the foundations for the world we now live in are introduced in this book. Containing lost and forgotten ancient Greek texts in modern translation, this book relates the teachings of Parmenides, Empedocles, and others like them—spiritual guides and experts in other states of consciousness, prophets and magicians, and healers and interpreters of dreams. Based on texts from more than 2,000 years ago, it also documents the process that led to their work and teaching being distorted, covered over, and forgotten.
- Sales Rank: #162271 in Books
- Brand: Brand: The Golden Sufi Center
- Model: 1087145
- Published on: 2004-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.48" w x 6.00" l, 1.94 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 600 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Kingsley (In the Dark Places of Wisdom) attempts to restore the meaning of reality by focusing on the fragmentary writings of Parmenides. In simple and direct language, free of philosophical cant, the author argues that modern translations of this sixth-century B.C. philosopher’s work "bear little real relation to the meaning of his original Greek." This revisionist view may not persuade everyone, but students of mysticism will find plenty of food for thought. There’s an extensive notes section at the back for the more scholarly inclined. FYI: Kingsley is an honorary professor at the University of New Mexico and at Canada’s Simon Fraser University.
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Review
“Stunningly original, and momentous in its implications, Reality is aimed at one of the highest ends I can imagine—to restore to us the understanding that the original purpose of Greek philosophy was to launch the Western mind on a profoundly spiritual course.” —Huston Smith, author, The World’s Religions
“It would be difficult not to conclude that, through his research into our past, he has found the key to the modern world impasse.” —Robert A. Johnson, author, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology
“Reality contains the purest and most powerful writing I have ever read.” —Michael Baigent, author, Ancient Traces
About the Author
Peter Kingsley is an honorary professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico and an honorary professor in humanities at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He is the author of Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic and In the Dark Places of Wisdom. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Most helpful customer reviews
125 of 130 people found the following review helpful.
A Magnificent, Stunningly Original Achievement
By Dr. Richard G. Petty
For over half a century many people in the West have looked to the Eastern world for spiritual insights and practices. There are many reasons, but many, including the Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Carl Jung, have suggested that it is difficult for Eastern practices to take root in the Western mind. Many of us have never been taught that there is a vigorous Western mystical and contemplative tradition that goes back thousands of years and existed even before the Christian era.
This book is about one of them.
Most of us would probably agree that there are many ways of knowing, the power of reason being but one of them.
Some books are to be understood by the use of this reasoning, by making sense of the data, the meaning and interpretations of the author. Others create images in the mind and stir the emotions. There is yet another group - and it is by far the smallest - that communicates at many levels, producing shifts and insights in the reader. You can enjoy Shakespeare for his masterful use of the English language, or for the ways in which his words suggest and conjure profound meanings. More than one person has found that Shakespeare has the power to transform and change them.
This is Peter Kingsley's third book about the ancient Greek philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles and it is most definitely in that third group. It is his belief that over the centuries rational philosophers have edited, distorted and corrupted their work by ignoring the non-dual mystical and shamanic origins of their insights. So what we have is a neat and tidy rationalism, rather than the profound and challenging works that would mark the beginning of a process of initiation.
Kingsley could have played it safe, and produced an academic treatise. Instead he decided to re-create the works of the philosophers as they were meant to be. So the book is mystical, subversive and passionate: it is an intense and direct appeal to the reader to enter a transformative path of initiation. It is a direct esoteric transmission of a teaching that has been largely forgotten or emasculated by later writers who only understood parts of it.
Most people, even those involved in spirituality, have been lead to believe that the only ways to achieve insight and enlightenment are through meditation, prayer or perhaps by using mind-altering drugs. But it was not always so, and we have many traditions that are alive and well today, in which the path of enlightenment and initiation involves challenges to the mind and the ego. Even one of the great sages of the last century, Sri Aurobindo, did not sit and meditate. His spiritual practice was writing. The whole of Kingsley's book is an invitation to awaken, and for the person who is ready, he provides the tools for doing so. Not through sitting and thinking, or through stilling the mind, but by trying to come to terms with what he has to say. And then will come the stilling of the mind and the understanding. It is rather like a huge kõan.
Kingsley overturns centuries of scholarship, and you quickly realize that he is trying to turn the reader inside out in the process. The philosopher Parmenides held that our rational sense of familiarity is an illusion that has to be challenged. Echoing him, Kingsley says near the beginning, "if you want to keep a grip on what you know, you will have to dismiss what I say." He translates the Greek word "Noein," not to mean "Thinking," but to mean a "whirlpool of subtleties," that implies a direct intuitive perception beyond the senses. The implication is that this direct perception allows us to the see beyond separation and duality to understand the Universe as it is, whole, interconnected and undivided.
Another piece of mind twisting comes in the section on Empedocles' two principles of Love and Strife. Kingsley proposes that Love traps the soul in matter, while Strife sets it free. This is similar to the Gnostic concept that love, pleasure and sex can make the soul forget its real identity by drawing it into incarnation. In Kingsley's interpretation these Greek philosophers believed that the development of witness consciousness: being able to watch the mind and its perceptions, is a step toward releasing the wisdom that has been waiting at the root of the world for more than two thousand years. This could have come straight out of any piece of Eastern teaching about non-duality, but he claims that it developed independently.
And what are the implications for this non-dual view? It is that in the end reality perceives itself through you. The notion of personal transcendence has to be re-framed: if all is One, then there is nowhere that we need to get to. The ultimate Reality lies within us, and the methods of these Greek philosophers were designed to awaken us to that realization. The trouble is that even after this extraordinary work of scholarship and insight, not all of their methods are available to us.
Reality is a large, thick and demanding book and not everyone will be ready for it. If you skim the surface, you will miss the point of it. Understanding the book and the treasures that it contains is an experiential rather than a rational process. But be warned that Reality requires stamina and perseverance if you want to go on the inner journey that it reveals.
117 of 127 people found the following review helpful.
A book worth buying in Hardcover
By James M. Corrigan
Peter Kingsley's book "Reality" is that rare kind of book that comes along every once in a while that will kick the legs out from under you and leave you precariously holding onto the thread of the reality that you once took for granted. But do not read it unless you are ready to live without the reassuring substance of the material world and the cozy little circle of thought that we in the West have built for ourselves, cutting off the otherwise disquieting pieces of our experience that cause us to question our surety that we have got it right.
Kingsley, who is a master philologist, takes us on a voyage to rediscover the man Parmenides and the man Empedocles -- not the abstract Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers of crusty old books, but the men who were more than just philosophers. They were participants in, and indeed prophets of, a sacred tradition -- a way of life -- that existed for hundreds of years, perhaps longer, and which, according to evidence presented by Kingsley, was shared across the known world, at that time. In short he presents the human sacred tradition that predated what we now call the "West" and the "East." And he presents it as a story that will sweep you along, if you are open to the truth about these men, and leave you gasping at the treasure that was stolen from us in our march to rationalism.
In the ontology of Parmeneides, uncontrived and elegantly expressed in his poem which Kingsley provides a more accurate, contextual, translation of, is a foundation that has tremendous ethical and practical implications for human society and what it means to live a human life. For over 2,000 years we have stubbornly refused to see the holes in the fabric of Western Materialism. And I think it is fair to say that nothing would survive a reanalysis that took into account reality as Parmeneides presents it to us. Kingsley shows us how this tradition, which Parmenides and Empedocles shared, is in fact the foundation upon which our Western intellectual tradition is built; a fact which has been successfully pushed into the background or glossed over -- until now.
Kingsley's work presents a fundamental challenge to the edifice of Western intellection as it strips the past of its convenient shrouds and lays bare an imperative to once again contemplate the Sacred in Philosophy and in our lives. It is not just the clarity that he brings to the works of Parmeneides and Empedocles that lends a powerful force to this "striping bare," but that he connects disparate cultures in a once-widespread, shared, sacred way of life that existed before the transistor and integrated circuit. But beware: Kingsley is not some latter-day prophet bringing the Good News to us here in the 21st Century. Rather, it is up to us to take what his scholarship offers and find our way forward. The work of Parmenides and Empedocles represent an esoteric tradition which requires committed study, but which provides us all that we need, now that Kingsley has given them back to us.
James Corrigan
An Introduction to Awareness
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
Idiosyncratic and interesting
By kaioatey
Peter Kingsley is a man who believes he knows what is Real. In Reality, he is passing his knowledge through the mouths of two famous pre-Socratics that lived in Southern Italy ~700 BC. Parmenides and his follower Empedocles were Pythagoreans and, according to Kingsley, iatromanteis - healer-prophets and sorcerers who combined techniques of shamanic ecstasy with what eventually became, through Plato, the disciplines of philosophy, rhetoric and logic.
Kingsley dissects a famous Parmenides poem, pointing out evidence ostensibly suggesting that the poem - thought by most scholars to represent a foundation of what was to become `logic' - is in fact an account of a mystical journey and a blueprint aimed at guiding the `mystes' on his/her own descent into a shamanic Underworld. Kingsley stands on increasingly firm ground with respect to his hypothesis that Greek philosophy originates in shamanic practices. Greeks encountered shamanism from Central Asia through their contacts with Scythians and Thracians as well as through Persian 'Magi'. Plato himself talks in Phaedo how "first prophecies were the words of an oak" and that "everyone who lived at that time found it rewarding enough to listen to an oak or a stone, so long as it was telling the truth". Pythagorean descent into the underworld was apparently practiced through `incubation', a form of shamanic `dreaming' first practiced by the Sumerians (the Sultantepe fragments), Babylonians (the stela of Nabonidus) and Egyptians, later to be inherited by Gnostics and Hermetics.
Kingsley seems to be comfortable with ancient Greek texts and provides a number of novel (idiosyncratic?) translations of key terms such as logos, mythos, elenchos and metis (awareness) which seem to have had different meanings for the pre-Socratics than they did for classical Greeks. He also provides a number of intriguing readings of fragments from the Illiad to support his translations.
Kingsley's approach also has a number of disconcerting elements mainly to do with classical scholarship as we understand it. While he lets us know, in literally dozens and possibly hundreds of places, that he, PK, is first person to ever correctly interpret these pre-Socratic texts whereas other scholars had it all wrong, direct references to these `others' are unfortunately very skimpy. Attribution is not PKs forte. Many important contributors are never mentioned. Heidegger, who had a similar approach and in fact seems to have had many of the same general ideas is not even mentioned in the text. More worrisome is PKs need to adapt pre-Socratic ideas to fit his own theory rather than what we know from the ancients themselves. If Kingsley's interpretation disagrees with Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Plutarch (who one would imagine knew Parmenides and Empedocles rather well), Kingsley simply tells us the information these ancient guys provide about P and E is wrong - because of their jealousy (Plato), ignorance (Plutarch) or their self-promoting philosophical agendas (Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus).
There are many extremely interesting pieces of information here about the ancient Greece. I personally liked the chapters on Phocaea and those describing links between pre-Socratic texts and Sufi orders of the 9th century. The Sufis apparently held their own `Empedocles circles' and used Empedocles' ideas as a foundation for their alchemy and `magic'. The speculation about the role of the shamanic underworld in Pythagorean practices is in itself a supremely interesting and juicy subject matter. One has to give credit to Kingsley for his boldness and idiosyncrasy, as well as for his decision to eschew a classical scholarly approach for a more poetic, and evocative one. One has an impression that his main motivation for writing the book was less a desire for promoting scholarly dialogue than teaching the reader about the foundations of what constitutes our reality and techniques one might use to liberate oneself from the bondage of the preconceptions and expectations foisted on us by our fellow man. I liked that.
Finally, one has to acknowledge the tricksterish quality of "Reality". The book meanders the reader through a maze of ideas, metaphors, allusions and alliterations designed to evoke an altered state, a poesis where things are seen as what they are as well as what they feel like. And those feelings are like a veil drifting in the wind, never making it clear whether they reveal or conceil, enlighten or deceive. I liked that as well.
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