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Title: Reality
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| Reality by The Golden Sufi Center the best and most important book of this century | This is the best of Kingsley's books. His work is the most important in philosophy in the modern history of the Western world, and it is among the most important work of history in the last fifty years.
And all that pales in comparison to what he has accomplished in terms of writing clearly about "mysticism", for lack of a better term. He is the best and most lucid writer on the esoteric since P.D. Ouspensky, and the clearest thinker on consciousness since Krishnamurti. But unlike either of those two, he is also a real scholar, who proves everything he says beyond any doubt whatsoever - - at least to anyone who has the sensitivity to even know what he is talking about.
Of course, there are very few who will understand this. The kinds of people who write books and book reviews for mass consumption or for academia are the definition of unconsciousness. Just as bad, or worse, are the pseudo-intellectual new-age types who will hang one of their silly labels on this so they can put it away in their mental filing cabinets. Then, they can go back to reading Ken Wilbur or some phony-baloney garbage like that and pretend they are accomplishing something.
There is only one way, and Empedocles knew it. It was passed down from him to the Sufis and likely the Hindus, and from there to the modern West by Gurdjieff and others. But of course there is no need for tradition, as it is rediscovered over and over by independent individuals. How could it not be? Nevertheless, it is important for us to know how it manifests itself, over and over, throughout history, if we are to act properly in the mundane world. Kingsley has a key.
You either have what it takes to want, to need, to appreciate, this book, or you do not. No one can give that to you. But a part of you already knows you need it, if you do. I'm just here to tell you if that's the case, this book is exactly what your intuition tells you it is, and it has what you are indeed looking for.
| | Reality by The Golden Sufi Center A Magnificent, Stunningly Original Achievement | 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. | | Reality by The Golden Sufi Center Aphrodite vs. Hekate/Persephone | Aphrodite; She who binds so freely & beautifully not even the Gods know they are bound nor are they capable of recognizing it. Surely we can nowise come to our senses as they've been filled to overflow with th sound, light & fury of "the real world' with all it's societal conventions & trappings that pull us closer to Her& bind us even more tightly.
That's the path most of us in the West tread- sometimes reluctantly but then other times gleefully as we close in on new car, higher social status, or some other form of material attainment. Most just rumble along this path with the herd taking what scant pleasures get too close to escape our desperate grasp & allow the path to dictate the terms of our aquiessence; " Paris Hilton is a Star!/OldNavy makes Fashion/GeorgeBush is a president". The sheeple nod & go along, convinced that the world is outside themselves.
I mean no judgement- I was there too. I used to think that being a caucasian/hetero male meant I always had better ideas than any woman or minority in the room & if one of them used a word I wasn't familiar with, I just assumed it probably was NOT a real word.
The only thing that can pierce the veil is Death.
Hekate/Persephone; She who holds the keys to Death & rebirth is the one who cuts through bindings- ALL of them & the more tightly you have wound yourself in illusions, the more merciless She seems to you. "We're all in control, until we're not" as the saying goes & then happens a breakup/divorce, loss of job, wealth, or most dreaded- health. Suddenly, all those things which were the axis upon which your world turned, (what the neighbors/your friends etc. thought of you, getting into "the right school", owning a pair of Jimmy Choos et al) must be abandoned & your old identity burned. Her force separates the dissimilar & makes like things go together & contact upon themselves in Her Helish cold. And it is here we learn to reconcile ourselves to the many Deaths we all experience throughout Life which preceed rebirth.
Reality by Peter Kingsley is a transmission- possibly for ANY who can read (&reread) it start to finish, but surely for those who've familiarized themselves with ancient symbolism & "the occult". If you're looking for practicality, checkout the Chilton's car repair manuals. It's unlikely that humans were meant to evolve toward practicality- it's just one of the first rungs on the ladder of development- important for sure but a poor arbiter of value in matters of higher learning.
I look forward to several subsequent rereadings. | | Reality by The Golden Sufi Center Idiosyncratic and interesting | 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. | | Reality by The Golden Sufi Center Will read again | I finished this book the other day and as soon as I digest it a bit, I will read it again. To me this is a very important book.
For someone interested in witchcraft and shamanism this is essential reading. | | Reality by The Golden Sufi Center Book Description | | 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. |
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