The title to Peter Kingsley’s Reality is about one word short in my opinion—that word being “Check”—but is otherwise perfect on all sorts of levels. It is at once ambiguous, provocative, presumptive, tantalizing, engaging, slippery, and so-simple-it-stuns, much like the work itself and the classical Greek philosopher-shaman-necromancers whose timeless wisdom Kingsley brings to light therein. My favorite aspect of the title is that its simultaneous ambiguity and depth act together as a self-limiting rhetorical throttle. This isn’t a title to drop into a five minute conversation with an acquaintance. This is a title that, every time you wind up the gears to say aloud, perhaps with a small measure of pride as regards your current reading list, you realize is going to land you in a rhetorical pit of vipers. Quite simply, it’s a title no one can explain—an entrée into a conversation no one can finish. And yet it’s entirely accurate.
It’s just a book though, right?
I mean… right?!?
(I just read it so I need a little grounding…)
Well, of course it is. Same as this is just a world all around us. Same as I’m just a person and you’re just a person and that’s about the sum of what we need to know to get the logistics sorted out. There’s one book and two beings. We’ll just take turns. Easy. Hand clap, cheek cluck, waddle waddle, foot-stomp. What do we need to know that isn’t obvious? That isn’t staring us in the face with its tongue out, or winking to us through the window while we’re enduring the socially normalized opprobrium—lecture format—due any being who fails to properly paginate their prêcis? Don’t we pay attention to what we’re doing!?
Indeed, attention may well be the heart of it. Ninja attention. Metîs. This is the word I learned that traveled from the spring, to the river, to the ocean, to the sky, to the earth—into me, through me, up one side and down the other, then vanished. Metîs is the mojo you need in order to disbelieve what’s right in front of you, to see through the light show that has bamboozled billions of beings, (there’s only One of us), and then at the very last, just before dismissing the whole of it as an illusion, to chuckle and shake your finger at the Double Agent we call Life.
I know that this…
this foaming sea of color and light…
is not me…
not me at all…
but still…
the most remarkable plumage of Being is on display…
something seems to be Happening here…
and where was I thinking of going again…?
At first I was slightly underwhelmed by Peter’s dramatic prose, by the way scholarship and research are pitched as acts of salvation, moments of elucidation snatched from the jaws of ignorance, and hungry jaws at that—jaws that have consumed lesser and more conventional scholars for the better part of three millennium. He suggests that if we wish to understand Parmenides we had better be ready to leave everything else we thought we knew behind, or face the alternative of wandering deaf and blind through a few more shimmering turns of the cosmic wheel. That part rang true, though, you see, and in the end Peter’s prose grew on me steadily as the book unfolded. He tells a delicious story, and looking back there could not have been a sturdier vessel than story itself to bear us across the seas of time and drowsy witlessness that have divided us from our remarkable inheritance.
The masterful aspects of Peter’s writing were evident in the way I continuously found myself on the brink of revelation. Then, when I put the book down and tried to look back upon the terrain I had just covered—to take in the majestic view, to tell it to myself so I wouldn’t forget it—all my words just scattered. In one instant my mind was a herd of deer from every angle, the next moment a vacant glade. A single acorn. A man hunkered atop a stone wall, listening to the wind. A heart tumbling into the sea. I was the awareness of an entire meadow, the effortless, simultaneous comprehension of every flower, but by the time I turned from the text to take a closer look at the scenery through which I was traveling, it was gone. It’s a good thing in the end that you have a tangible book to hold in your hand—a nice, heavy, well-formulated distraction to wrestle with while making the journey—so you don’t believe too much of what you see as you make your way to the Underworld.
I’ve had this experience before, encounters with a sublime understanding both obvious and intangible. It was this feeling of recognition that made reading this book so enjoyable. While Peter portrays the teachings of Parmenides and Empedocles as buried treasure, wisdom that has been lost for ages and passed through mind of scholar after scholar unnoticed like a sealed baton, it is nevertheless a treasure that is all around us. What struck me most reading Reality was the connections that formed naturally with other moments of recognition sprinkled along my walk. If it weren’t this way, if the book weren’t in the end stating the obvious, the teachings of the Greek shaman-necromancers revealed inside its pages would be proven false. It is the fact that the treasure Peter unearths is so rich, so fleeting, so ephemeral and yet so clarion and unmistakable that suggests we are dealing with genuine power.
The genuine power of who we are.
I couldn’t help but notice the many obvious parallels to A Course of Love—the recognition of immortality through the window of this mortal frame, the injunction to return to the world from the places of purest being in order that we might live what we have discovered, the manner in which the illusory nature of our daily experience is transcended through inner witnessing of reality’s singular core, to name a few. I could see plainly in the teachings of Parmenides and Empedocles the insights of the genius Walter Russell and his teaching that all motion is born of stillness, such stillness being the Universal Fulcrum from which all form derives its power of expression. I suspect others would find countless similar threads and connections.
Like all good revelations, one leads to another until all the hands are joined and the circle is complete, until all existence is bound together both in and by the same hoop. That sacred hoop is all around us. All it takes is a little ninja attention to see it and make it real—to see through walls, to see through hatred, to see through disease, to see through time, to see Unity flowering in every moment.
And for a delightful joke to close this all out, click here… Make your way past the advertisement, but please, my friends. Please read with metîs…
Embracing Forever 