Peter Kingsley Interview

it started for me for the thirty years it was a really a very private affair it was just me and Parmenides empiric Lee's two ancient Greeks who hardly anybody even knows about and they were alive for me but they died two and a half thousand years ago and they became my teachers and they would take me through life events they would put me through all sorts of experiences most of which he would take me years and years to start to start to understand but it was to begin with it was always always something personal because I couldn't even start to describe the impact the significance of this people to anybody else I tried I went to Cambridge University afterwards I got a special scholarship to go to Cambridge and I thought this is my perfect chance to speak to the people who are experts in ancient philosophy who are historians of philosophy who translate these ancient Greeks and they didn't want to know because basically what I discovered was these people from two-and-a-half thousand years ago who only a few specialists know about and consider rational intellectual thinkers that they were very very great spiritual beings with a a quality of power of presence that's actually still alive and how can you describe that to most people you can't and so it was really just for thirty years it was an internal process of them working on me working on me working on me I left my studies altogether I left academia I'd work in hardware stores I'd work in restaurants you know mopping up all sorts of things and I think one of the very important things for me was I believe it was in the late 1980s and again it was an accident maybe you know the bookstore in North London compendium did you ever go there with my Dania yeah I don't know if it still exists probably doesn't and I went in there one day and literally a book just fell on me you know one of those situations you walk into a bookstore and somehow you know book falls off the shelf and I pick it up and it was open at this page where there was a sixteenth century Persian Sufi describing how his Sufi lineage went back not to Mohammed but to empirical ease and the ancient Greeks who he's very careful to say were not philosophers or rationalists but they were great spiritual beings they were the greatest spiritual beings of their time empirically and Parmenides I came to understand much more clearly over the years these were not just mystics who happened to live two-and-a-half thousand years ago at the time when Western civilization was coming into being in the shape of the form that we know it now these were the people actually created Western civilization they very consciously seeded they planted the germs of what was to become Western culture and even if you look at the word culture actually culture it has to do with an organic growth and this is one of these mysteries that's there in the language we use but has been completely forgotten that civilizations cultures are organisms and this organism was seeded it was created he was actually literally was bought brought into existence from another world and planted in this world by these great spiritual beings they brought and they described very clearly how they did it they brought a divine teaching divine laws divine principles from another world an unseen world into this physical world and they planted those teachings and out of those seeds that they planted a Western civilization came into being and here is this tremendous paradox that I started to realize that Western Civ wasn't an accident and you know really if you look at it especially if you look at histories of culture or modern New Age whatever stories of evolution either Western civilization is described as something that just happened oh you know people get together and they start making experiments and inventing the wheel and inventing chariots and inventing BMWs you know it's all a process of gradual invention and discovery and exploitation and that's supposed to be civilization that gradually we mess through and things happen and things come into being and I realized that's not the way it works civilizations are brought into existence very consciously by spiritual beings for a very specific purpose and so Western civilization didn't happen it was there planted as something with an intention from the very beginning with a purpose and we don't know that anymore and the only people I found outside myself who talked about this were Persian Sufis were people from the east from another culture it's actually people in the east it's people in Iran who understand the origins of Western civilization and this is a tradition with Sufis that has gone through two recent times it's been forgotten in the West and it's preserved in the East why is that from the east to the west back to the east to the west there's always this movement this natural tide this movement in and out and again it's a natural process you know I'm talking about organisms plant seeds tides it's all natural and I feel that this natural very very very deep process that we're all apart apart of it's not really understood anymore it's like somehow what happened is we've gone so much to sleep in the West whether it's North America or Europe we've we've just fallen into this quite unconscious belief about what we are and where we come from and where we're going and that actually sends us collectively to sleep they could somehow we are on a course in the West now a course of forgetfulness of course of not understanding our sacred origins and it's wonderful we can romanticize about the sacred origins of Tibetan Buddhism and South American shamanic traditions and anything as long as it's not our own origins and that's a part of this tremendous misunderstanding this tremendous resistance we and this is one of the paradoxes I find with this if you like this ideal of oneness bringing together different traditions we bring together every single tradition except our own because we don't know that there's a sacred tradition of the origins of Western civilization we don't know that there's a sacred tradition that gave rise to logic and biology and chemistry and weapon read engineering design of weapons and all of this everything was designed with a sacred purpose even battles 2,500 years ago were fought with an awareness of another world and we just don't understand there's so much that's been lost it's unbelievable and we live so much you know when we discover in the West our own sacred tradition this sacred tradition I've been talking about that lies at the origins of Western civilization at Western science of Western thinking once we have a firm grounding footing in our own Western sacred tradition then we can relate to other sacred traditions and that's what other sacred traditions practitioners of other sacred traditions whether it's indigenous shamans or elders or Tibetan Buddhists that's what they want from us it's fine for them to discuss their sacred traditions but that's not really connection that's not really oneness it's talking about oneness but to me the real oneness comes when the different traditions come together experientially and if we can come together with other cultures and traditions from our own sacred tradition then it seems to me there can be a real experience of oneness that goes beyond the discussion the debate the good intentions and there's a tremendous transformative power in that tremendous power and a tremendous sense of mutual recognition and so it's fine what's going on in terms of coming together and bringing different traditions together and this idea of a new global oneness global harmony but to me it's very important actually to be able to say well but that's been there since the beginning and we here are looking towards bringing a greater reality a sense of oneness into these tatters of Western civilization to me it's very very important to say yeah but that sense of oneness not only did it happen to be there when Western civilization was born but it was out of that sense of oneness that Western civilization was very deliberately created so that may sound a little bit abstract but just to give an example I mean one of the foundation stones of Western civilization Western science is the discipline of logic there's nothing really more if you like materialistic that you can get and the lore the rules of logic the hard hard rules of logic that you know I remember a college being forced to learn all these things they put up on a blackboard these terrible symbols and squiggles and however you cannot do it and it's just so counterintuitive it's just it's like I know it can be so harsh this mental almost this butchery of the mind you just have to try and discipline yourself to learn the rules of logic and that is how we try and live in so many respects logically not intuitively but logically and what we don't know is that this man Parmenides 2,500 years ago living in southern Italy he brought the laws of logic into existence and there's no question about that everybody admits that he was the father of Western logic but what they don't see anymore is that he brought these rules of logic from another world he was given all this teaching of about logic by a goddess and what is logic you know now we look at the laws of logic the principles Parmenides didn't really care about because he used logic this was the first ever use of logic in the West he used logic to prove oneness and it was like he was saying here is logic this divine gift and this is a gift that's meant to take us back to a realization to an understanding of deep deep oneness oneness with everything and oneness that isn't just oneness on some rarefied spiritual level where we can leave this world of different colors and different people in different countries and arguments and problems behind and then come to this rarefied spiritual space this in a place of oneness but he used logic to demonstrate that oneness includes everything it includes the senses and this is another very very strange aspect of this tradition that these people had teachings about the senses they were very very grounded they didn't say just leave the world of the senses behind try and find oneness in another world try and find reality somewhere else he said no you have to find reality ultimate reality here where you are in this parent body surrounded by these apparent colors and shapes and forms and sounds and noises and they gave the techniques they gave the methods for using our senses to find oneness all around us because in pedigrees and Parmenides they were very very upfront as most great mystics are and they say at the beginning of their teachings they say everybody's living a totally wasted life everybody's life is a sham everybody is living in a dream we can think we're driving down the road we can think we're shopping we can think we're in a business meeting we are asleep we're never actually using our senses sometimes there can be the brief moment when we look out at a tree or we're driving down the road and just for a brief moment we can say good lord I'm holding a steering wheel I have my foot on the gas pedal or good lord I'm looking at a tree usually we're just looking at a tree and thinking about something else well we're driving down the road and thinking about the argument we just had with our partner it's very very rare that we simply look and are aware that we are looking and that involves being aware of what we're looking at and being aware of ourselves looking at the same time so right now I can be aware that I'm moving my hand and that I'm talking that you there are in front of me but it's actually not a very very common state at all to be aware like that and empirical ease gave very very specific directions for how to start to become conscious through your senses how to look and be aware that you're looking how to feel that feel your tongue inside your mouth and be aware of it not just rather your tongue on the top of your mouth and actually be aware that it's happening and how to do this with all of the senses at the same time and this last stage about how to do it with all the sensors at the same time this is very very powerful it's very very esoteric it is an extraordinarily elegant way of realizing God not by leaving the senses by heart behind but by consciously using all of your senses at the same time if you do that if you actually do that you start to become aware there is your sense of sight there is your sense of hearing there is the sense of feeling where you feel your backside on the chair or you feel your shoes on the floor the hearing the seeing the feeling the tasting touching and it's a difficult enough even to do one of those consciously but if you do them all consciously you become aware of this infinite blackness between them there is a void that connects the seeing to the hearing to the tasting to the tachi and that's eternity and that eternity is totally unchanging but that eternity is also what gives rise to the physical world and it's out of that experience of eternity the people like him ethically so Parmenides his ancient Greeks were actually able to bring the germs of a new civilization because that eternity had never changes but it contains the seeds of all change Western civilization is spread around the globe and this is the source of it and behind the Walkman behind the BMW's behind what are the wonderful technological inventions there is a purpose waiting to be discovered and I'm realizing more and more it's not enough just to turn to Eastern traditions for a sense of purpose a sense of reality a sense of meaning since a fulfillment to find wisdom there we have to dig down into the soil of this Western culture and final walls here and I have to say I'm not talking about learning about the history of ancient Greece I've never been interested in textbooks and I've never been interested in museums museums bore me to death I'm talking here about the essence of something from the past not all the the details of the past but a certain essence that like this seed that was planted and that now needs to be acknowledged before we can take the next step forward so that we can carry that wisdom forward from the past into the present for the sake of the future that there is the longing but how we going to fulfill that long how do we make our longing for oneness real really real how do we prevent it from becoming another dream you

Channel: Global Oneness Project

Views: 47,747

Rating: 4.9281435 out of 5

Keywords: awareness, consciousness, culture, history, meaning, meditation, origin, paradigm shift, philosophy, revelation, sacred, science, society, spirituality, Sufism, western civilization

Id: Ow-_G26lpOk

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 27 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/shamansun]

Kingsley has been popping up everywhere recently. Glad to see! Recommend his interview, "Common Sense", on the origins of Western philosophy.

[u/LeJavier]

Good stuff, never heard of him before, but now I'll be keeping an eye out.

I like that he approaches what would be considered "eastern" ideas from a western perspective. That's what the eastern mystics would want, anyway. How can westerners understand eastern philosophy from the eastern point of view?