REALITY by Peter Kingsley: Waking From A Dream

[Music] hey [Music] today and against the grain what if we are all living an illusion i ask this in all seriousness what if the way we pass our days running around madly grasping at things pursuing this or that does nothing to fulfill our human potential i'm cs song we'll talk with peter kingsley about his thought-provoking book entitled simply reality [Music] and you are listening to against the grain on kpfa 94.1 fm and kpfa.org my name is cs song it reminded me just a bit of the matrix you know the film series where people live in a certain reality but what's really happening to them is dramatically different something shielded from the consciousness of all but a tiny minority of people who learn the secret and try and do something about it what peter kingsley suggests in a provocative carefully researched book entitled reality is that we you and i and pretty much everyone live under a kind of spell we are spinning around in a daze deaf and blind to what's really going on to what can liberate us and truly fulfill us and make us effective participants in life sure we've got our plans for accumulating this and attaining that and changing him or her but that's all part of our self-deception our misunderstanding of what's essential as peter kingsley writes so often we try to convince ourselves we are living a full contented life but there is always something pulling at our heart ambition and restlessness are just its shadows and it will go on tearing at our hearts until we start to acknowledge what is missing peter is an internationally recognized thinker and lecturer in the areas of western philosophy and spirituality his most recent book is reality and we're happy to be joined by him in studio welcome peter thank you hi hi so this book focuses on two early greek thinkers uh parmenides often called the founder of logic and empidocles a a foundational thinker in the areas of of science and cosmology why focus on two people who lived such a long time ago twenty five hundred years well ago past is important history is important to a degree and if you look back at history there are so many so many thousands and millions of data that you can look at and study and really study the whole of your life but when i started out as a teenager having a feeling that i had to get back behind modern philosophy behind the history of recent philosophy behind the recent history of ideas and religious ideas even political ideas i had a gut feeling i had to get back to the greeks and then it was a strange experience one day after another it was like finding a nerve are all these different parts of your body that are really important in different ways but we know when we hit a nerve it matters it hurts there's a great deal of sensation there and i discovered that primaries and emphatically is these two greeks who i knew nothing about were very very they were on the main line they were right at this nerve that plays at the very very beginnings of western culture as we know it and it was the people after them in the century or two after communities and empirically in particular who realized how important they were but then gradually the renown the fame the reputation of parmenides and emphatically was eclipsed by the reputation of the people who came after and really in a way to my mind weren't doing something quite as important or fundamental at all so let's take parmenides the founder of logic as you say in this book uh kind of considered a father of rationality of rational discursive thinking uh in in broad strokes and and then we can perhaps get more specific what did you find about kind of that legend of him and whether it was accurate well there are many many problems and i guess i've always been ever since i was very young been looking for something authentic and feeling that there has to be something authentic even offered to us and we can maybe talk about this later about even in our own western civilization which is dismissed so much as materialistic rationalistic especially in today's kind of post-modern deconstructionist era as passe and finished i knew there must be something hidden at the beginning of this culture because it didn't make sense to me the way things have been going and with palm energies it was really a matter of stage by stage looking looking now okay here we have a guy supposedly according to all the histories of philosophy of the history textbooks he is a rationalist not only a rationalist the founder the father of western rationalism the originator of logic but to begin with he wrote a poem and that's a bit weird because harmony logicians nowadays would write a poem it doesn't really add up and then when i started looking at this poem itself and getting enough knowledge of ancient greek to be able to really work my way around it i realized first of all that he isn't the bad poet that he's sometimes in fact really all the time made out to be nowadays and there were incredibly skillful uses that parmenides made of poetry which had effects that eventually i was able to track down and say yes these effects tie him in with religious traditions spiritual traditions mystical traditions incantatory magical traditions but they'd been put aside and totally ignored because people just want to look at him as a philosopher if you look at a philosopher for philosophy you're not going to see anything else that was the beginning then the other very very important thing which wouldn't leave me alone was the very beginning of this poem describing the origins of so-called logic families describes how he was given all the knowledge that he presents in the rest of his poem as the result of a journey into another world and what was that world specifically he describes it in all the language in the terminology of his times as a journey into the world of the dead which is where first of all it's where we go when we die but also for the greeks this world of the dead hades and even beyond hades this is where originally the physical world came out of so he's being taken to a point which nobody basically except for a couple of heroes hercules orpheus odysseus is allowed to get to while alive so that already puts families in a very very special place he is an initiate but this world gives him the secret of what is beyond life as we know it and of course immediately that opens up the whole area of what is the purpose of life and how does it exist what does it mean in relation to death which we tend to ignore and push aside as much as we can and when you talk about things like uh purpose of life and meaning of death this seems so far away from the conventional understanding of what logic is what what it constitutes not at all and this is one of the strange strange paradoxes for us in the west because we tend we can go back century after century and look at the history of philosophy to see why it's a really strange story but for us logic has come to mean a justification basically of the rationalistic worldview that we live in this already goes back to aristotle logic is used to confirm certain perceptions essentially it's based on certain rational rules which have been invented to justify and substantiate the way that we see things anyway but now if you look at say buddhist logic in the east which i came to long after discovering the same principles and promenities as logic you see that their logic plays a very very different role it's actually a tool which is designed to undermine our ordinary perceptions and our ordinary values first of all it's designed to not only make us question but to make us see that this physical world doesn't quite add up and this is something that prime energies and also his successor zeno talked about very very beautifully they basically say look let's take this world on its own terms but when you take it really seriously and look at it truthfully and honestly and carefully it doesn't make sense in what way in what way would he characterize the human condition the way that we tend to live our lives well this is a very good question because it's something that promenities and emphatically go to quite a lot of trouble right at the beginning of their respective poems both of them to describe the human condition specifically and just here i have a few lines from parmenides where he describes humans all humans as i quote knowing nothing for helplessness in their chests is what steers their wandering minds as they carried along in a daze deaf and blind at the same time indistinguishable undistinguishing crowds now it's not a very flattering way to describe people and it's funny to see also how century after century of scholarship has really tried to deflect this criticism away from being a criticism of humans in general because that would even include academics or scholars god forbid and put it somewhere else but this is parmenides his way and also empedocles is a way of saying look life as it is lived is aimless and however much you think you're achieving it's insubstantial it's just like leaves in the wind it's going to blow away and before you know it it's gone and so are you and this knowing nothing reminds me quite a bit of socrates and the dialogues he had with people and of course you write about it in your book reality this idea that he he would keep asking questions and eventually the the person who was holding a certain opinion who was trying to justify certain opinion would would realize that that opinion might not have any justification and socrates would maybe leave them and they might be confused and a little bit dismayed is this all part of it is socrates part of this lineage of you think you know but you don't know very very much and what i actually did in this book reality for the first time in modern scholarship is to demonstrate the very very specific links between communities femininity is his successor zeno this prime minister's tradition and socrates because usually socrates is considered the beginning of socratic platonic philosophy in a way that the so-called pre-socratic philosophy was quite separate and different from and one of the important points in this book is actually to show that there is a continuity but of course what is this continuity and that is something that i try to make as real for the reader as i can because we have somehow through so many hundreds and thousands of years we really have forgotten we've lost the sense of what promenities and socrates and these people were actually doing we get into very very difficult water here because we in the west especially with with democracy we all assume that we have the right to our own opinions and of course on one level that is absolutely 100 150 percent justified and necessary that's how our democratic society works but what's actually been forgotten is that socrates for example or permanently wasn't just coming in with more opinions he was coming from a depth of awareness inside himself which he had earned which he had discovered and i have to emphasize there were very very specific ways and practices in greece in that time for coming to that state of consciousness and becoming stabilized in it and the point about that state of consciousness is it's not actually a state of believing it's a state of knowing and that's very very difficult because if you come into a democratic setup whether it's ancient athens or modern san francisco the question is going to be well why do you say you know something that i don't why do you have something to contribute that's only better than my opinions and this is a very very delicate area very very delicate very wonderful to look at because socrates really wasn't putting out new opinions new beliefs he was aiming at and he succeeded in undermining people's beliefs about themselves their superficial beliefs and of course he got into a great deal of trouble so much that he was put to death let's talk about about thinking and rational thought um there's something that both parmenides and empedocles were trying to convey about its deficiencies what it doesn't accomplish for us how it's perhaps counterproductive to getting to to to real meaning you point out how thoughts lead to division and separation and i'm going to throw another vivid image of the book at you you write that our minds are like a dog's bladder could you uh elaborate this is again it's a huge huge area because we live here in a world of thinking not just of opinions but all the time of ourselves where we think and think about everything and everything is done on the basis of thinking and what parmenides said was you can't understand thinking unless you get beyond thinking i mean this is actually impossible you can't understand thinking by thinking about it and i think that a lot of modern philosophers get caught in this trap of thinking about thinking about thinking and it just doesn't work and this is why when parmenides describes being carried at the beginning of his poem being carried into another world which is the origins of this world as we know it which lies behind this whole visible universe he's also talking about getting behind the structures of perception that actually maintain this world and keep it intact and so this is the path of initiation that you have to get behind thinking you have to get past this world that we exist in in order to understand it it doesn't mean leaving anything behind it doesn't mean that you leave thoughts behind after that you have to come back and do the best you can in this world of thinking and in this physical world but actually to be able to experience another state of consciousness which i have to say my experience is quite objective it's not a matter of well different mystics or different people in different traditions say that there is something that exists and i know many people would like to disagree with that but it's it's just something very very simple and once you experience that simplicity then you can come back and do the best you can in this world of complexity and continual thought and division and i can just say one thing which for me is very very beautiful about the teaching of communities and emphatically in particular and i really have to emphasize the primaries as well as making this journey into another world and coming back with a very very strange formulation the earliest formulation of what logic actually is he also was presenting extraordinary scientific discoveries in his poem which hadn't been talked about or mentioned or even known about by other people when he was writing so the point i want to make is that for permanentes and pedicles nothing is excluded thinking always tends to exclude things and when we think we have an opinion and that automatically excludes someone else's opinion and this is why it's very difficult trying to convey what someone like promenities was talking about because there is always room for the opposite the opposite is always included and this is why it's so beautiful how in the first half of his poem parmenides will say this logically is the way things are this is the reality but then in the second half of his poem he will actually go on and say well that's the truth now i'm going to deceive you am i going to talk about this world of illusion he doesn't leave it out of peter kingsley's book reality houston smith who is author of the world's religions and forgotten truth he calls the book stunningly original reality is momentous in its implications the book 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 thomas more author of care of the soul and dark knights of the soul says of peter kingsley's book there are a few writers today you must read peter kingsley is one of them with absolute clarity he writes about the most challenging issues and at the same time as inspiring in the most ancient sense filling us with spirit and hope his words will change the way you imagine your life the times moving quickly there is quite a bit of discussion particularly in the section on empedocles in this book about the consciousness the awareness that you were talking about what they are asking us or inviting us to do in the way of of sensing things of being aware of perceptions what are they what are they inviting us to do on a concrete level in terms of where we focus and how we focus our consciousness well to begin with there's the quality of silence of inner silence and they both made as it were a condition for coming to these practices the need in an individual to be aware that something is missing already in their lives and if we just come to this in the same spirit that we think we can accumulate some other experience it's not going to work there has to be some sense of of a lack in one's life there has to be a some somehow a sense just have a little place somewhere inside us of something that's missing something that doesn't quite add up something that's not right maybe a sadness and empathically states are very beautifully where he describes how there's actually a place we need to come aside to inside ourselves it can be inside or outside which is different which is a place apart which is somehow outside of this perpetual round of acquisitive existence because if we just come to this with the same acquisitive mentality we can get all the different black belts in martial arts and in meditation techniques but it's not going to be going into the right place inside us as human beings so this element of silence was very very important somehow for there to be a pause so we can actually hear there's something missing it's like if you are silent you can actually hear the silent voice of something inside us asking for something else and we usually smother that call what is so beautiful about the practices themselves and i i really i feel i need to emphasize that this is something quite unknown now i need to preface this for a moment the practices we in the west are now in a situation thanks to the opening up of the world in so many ways i have to say not in new ways because the world has always been open there has always been a tremendous amount of travel two thousand three thousand years ago people were already traveling from tibet in central asia down to greece from the other way around i have to emphasize that there have always been these connections certainly the western world the mediterranean was not closed off from the rest of the world as people tried to say before alexander the great and so on this is all not true there were always the puzzles and people did travel remarkably fast as well but what has happened now in the west is that somehow there's this very very deep mindset which is become very very concrete it's there underneath our everyday thoughts our everyday ideas our politics so much and that is this notion of western civilization as something materialistic or something rational and so what has happened for the last 200 years in particular is that when people get a spiritual craving when they feel something is missing in their ordinary everyday life they look well first of all they look to hinduism buddhism and then to more esoteric traditions theosophy and recently to the wonderful native american traditions south american traditions and really if you like the nerve of my own work the core of it is to be saying ah there is a sacred tradition of the roots of our own western world and that it's really fundamental for us now at a collective level to get back to that sacred core of the western world behind all the misunderstandings behind all the rationalizing the materializing to get back to the sacred court because otherwise there really isn't much of a future for this western civilization we have to somehow get back to the beginning and so the reason why i'm prefacing what i'm going to say in this way is here we have at the roots of western civilization in so-called philosophy the very birth of western science not just a series but a whole system of meditation techniques if you like you could call them yogic techniques because they include breathing practices and so on and this is really quite extraordinary that the founder of western logic the father of many many aspects of science even and within pedicles of cosmology and so on was giving meditation techniques yogic practices as a prerequisite for understanding the teachings that would come later and i just also put in here because this is something i touch on in reality and also in the dark places of wisdom the book before that there is now remarkable archaeological evidence which cannot be denied but has been very very strangely silenced for the last 50 years demonstrating parmenides this father of logic was in fact a priest of apollo and he was involved in very very specific ecstatic practices to do with dreams dream interpretation so-called incubation rituals and these are the real foundation these are the background for western logic not what we like to believe but these practices to get onto the techniques themselves what do they offer if you want to come to them again they offer everything because nothing is excluded on the one hand they offer techniques for going into this other state of consciousness this other world that promanity is described this world of tremendous stillness a physical stillness if you like of meditation of certainly of mental stillness but they didn't just ignore the world of the senses as i said earlier on they also gave the most remarkable techniques especially in pedicles for really becoming aware through our senses and for realizing for the first time and it's quite a shock when you start to do this that normally we are not aware we go through the day we drive our cars we make breakfast we talk with people go out to dinner watch television but when you start to do these practices you actually start to realize that that is not being aware we don't know how to see or listen and this is something we believe we do but it's like we are sensed we don't sense we don't really sense perceive it happens to us but there's a whole level of waking up which brings the world together and gives it a much much deeper meaning through these practices you made certain allusions to inside and outside to nothing is excluded and we have a pitifully small amount of time to really go into the nature of reality to try and and grasp even a small portion of what that means of what we are missing in our daily human lives the parmenides and emphatically and other people are trying to tell us so if i were to ask you very simply what is reality and how does it relate to my internal state my sense of being independent and separate from other things how could you begin to answer that how do they begin to answer that question well we're not separate this is the problem we start from the apparent sense of separateness which really we westerners have native american people don't have that we are not separate and this eventually brings with it the rather beautiful realization no one can start off by doing practices by if you like meditating and i have to say that these meditation techniques are very specific remember they're being given by the founder of logic these are not airy theory otherworldly techniques these are very very specific you can begin by saying i am meditating but then after a while you start to realize you are being meditated because everything is one and everything is connected so it's very difficult for me in a way to start off as it were from this assumption that we are separate because it doesn't really work it's a part of the illusion that we were talking about earlier you know this is a this is a difficult thing because it's hard to get beyond the sense that we are autonomous so that there's an external world and we somehow interact with it uh and in fact when you are describing reality what came to mind for me was the dao in taoism this is kind of uh motionless featureless expanse that that we're all a part of and we participate in and and it's it's not separate is it are there similarities between the tao and and what they're trying to tell us about very very much and one of the principles that i find so beautifully similar in parmenides and in taoism in love is that the more we try to get something for ourselves the less we end up with it's this very very strange paradox that by trying to accumulate things for ourselves we diminish ourselves and by somehow becoming nothing and of course there are many misconceptions that can come up around that idea or that reality of becoming nothing then everything is given because you do become a part of everything which is what we are in our essential natures anyway so yes and there is the flow this is something that i again find so beautiful there is this constant sense both in taoism and in communities is an empathic thesis teaching of something natural of something organic we tend to think of spiritual practices often are somehow unnatural as needing sacrifices asceticism abstention giving up this and that but again they say there's nothing to give up it's a matter of including but it's a matter also of including our deeper needs our deeper longings our deeper urges and not leaving those out which can so easily happen we only have a a couple minutes left i'm going to read something in the book reality there is nothing left to grasp or learn all we need has already been given and lies quietly within us and there will be no separation no loss unless you are careless enough to let it go so the nub of the idea is that that everything we think we want or think we need or are attaching to is already internal is already internal we really don't have to struggle for it or fight for it because there's something so clear and definite inside ourselves that we don't need to struggle for it outwardly and just to give one very very brief final example maybe which i find so interesting these people promenities in particular and many others from around his time and before and after [Music] in the mediterranean two and a half thousand years ago they were law givers and it's very very strange that for them laws were actually given from this other world and this is something really inconceivable to us now because we think that if someone was to come along and say that they they were given some laws and a dream you say yeah what leg are you trying to pull and what are you trying to get away with but these laws that were brought from this other state of consciousness they were selfless they weren't concerned with what my party can get with what i can acquire and it's wonderful because again it's like at the democratic level the thinking process which is absolutely beautiful and fine you can work out laws but there is this other level where laws can come through which i have to emphasize were laws for a whole society laws for cities and also laws for the individual the laws that we have to live by peter kingsley he is the author of a number of books including in the dark places of wisdom and ancient philosophy mystery and magic his latest book is reality and we thank you very much for joining us in studio thank you thank you again it's peter kingsley with an e k i n g s l e y dot o r g reality is a sumptuous uh big book it's very accessibly written with large type it's it's kind of a funny thing it's a quick read and yet it's a very thoughtful read you'll stop and you'll think and you can tell hopefully from what you heard from peter kingsley today that he puts a lot of thought and research into what he writes again let me just read a couple of things that people have said about this book reality houston smith said stunningly original reality is momentous in its implications this book 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 michael begen author of ancient traces writes this book contains the purest and most powerful writing i have ever read larry dossey md author of healing beyond the body reinventing medicine and healing words writes peter kingsley is a successor to carl jung and joseph campbell his lectures and writings especially his latest book reality reveal hidden dimensions of consciousness and how it manifests in the world his message conveys hope and meaning and reveals majestic qualities of the mind we have forgotten and which have been ignored by western authorities quote authorities for centuries peter kingsley is a transformative and life-changing force in our world never have we needed such a message as now and finally from the bryn mawr classical review both well-reasoned and revolutionary reality is a work of rare genius it is both a brilliant scholarly argument and a fascinating read a story that takes us far outside the boundaries of scholarly conventions kingsley has brought to life a tradition that lies at the roots of western culture and is dared to reveal its foundation stone perhaps it is time for us in the west to learn to speak again kingsley has already started a lot of people stand behind what peter kingsley is trying to say this is not some as he said airy fairy fad this is about urging us to wake up this is suggesting daring to suggest that we're somehow living in a daze that were confused that were uh deaf and blind to what's really going around we are running around acquiring things consuming information getting pulled in by all the stimuli and phenomena that surround us there's a this torrent of appearances he calls in his book but but wait a second maybe he's suggesting and he's suggesting these thinkers are suggesting maybe we need time just to breathe maybe we need to wake up from what is in fact a dream world that we're all immersed in without knowing it and maybe we need to access something deeper something infinitely more satisfying something infinitely more fulfilling than the kinds of projects that we pursue every single day but then we maybe achieve that project we buy the car we get our favorite vacation and then we're consumed with more longing for something else we want a better experience we want ultimate reality we want to get beyond our concerns our ambitions supposedly are to help us he's suggesting these thinkers are suggesting our ambitions are our obstacles our obstacles to the kind of stillness to the kind of contemplation to the kind of awareness that allows us to access something much richer this book is not by the way for the complacent to be the satisfied the people who are smug with their reality this book is about challenging the very foundations of your beliefs your worldview what you understand the priorities of your life to be this book is about challenging where you stand the foundations of your your beliefs i want to read you a few more comments about the book jacob needleman san francisco state university philosophy professor says this with its startling blend of spiritual passion and the bold vision of a consummate scholar this remarkable book invites us even to the point of demanding us to open our eyes to the unseen realities nourishing the ancient roots of our civilization of even more importance it invites us to the great work of opening ourselves to the mystical reality that is calling from within each and every one of us author of knowledge and the sacred writes this is not only a seminal study of the origins of western thought it is also a guide to the rediscovery of truths which lie hidden in the souls and minds of men and women today and which urgently need to be brought to light in a world groping and so much spiritual and intellectual darkness it seeks nothing less than to reveal the original nature of western philosophy in its true but long forgotten sense and through doing so it forces contemporary human beings to re-examine what it means to be human there is so much spiritual hunger out there there is so much i'm this is my commentary there's so much a spiritual longing and as he said we we often go to buddhism to hinduism to traditions outside of the western canon he's saying within the western tradition within the western what we call intellectual tradition there are wonderful seeds of thought planted by people who embedded these seeds often in poems that scholars have misconstrued have misunderstood because they don't want to grasp the spiritual the mystical origins of western civilization all our facts all our reasoning are just a facade this book is about and i'm reading now about what they have covered over about the reality that lies behind it's about the buried treasure that is our birthright our heritage and about what we have to be prepared for if we want to reclaim it and one more quote from the book the human mind is a wonderful instrument designed to help us operate in a world of total deception but that also means its power to deceive has no bounds and one thing it will never do is leave alone what lies outside its domain instead it the mind will automatically distort any reality it touches convert it into something else this is a seminal study this is momentous in its implications this is not a a fly-by-night book this is a book to read to cherish to think about to understand and it's very accessible he wrote this not for the scholars in the ivory tower but for people like you and me

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Published: Wed Oct 21 2020