18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Journal entry after reading this book, September 29, 2009
This review is from: Parmenides and the Way of Truth (Paperback)
A few loose notes from my journal, after reading this book...
Yesterday while cleaning old software off my computer and installing new, which took several hours, I picked up the book titled "Parmenides and the Way of Life", by Richard Geldard and read through most of it. The book started out slowly, talking about Parmenides, giving some historical background and all. Maybe I was not focused, or read the first chapter or two too quickly. Geldard seemed to be making a lot of important points about this pre-Socratic philosopher, but not necessarily giving me a sense of where he was going with all this information. I felt a little bit amazed and at the same time lost. But about half way through the book Geldard seemed to pick up the pace a little, make some profound statements about Parmenides, his contemporaries, his intellectual philosophical descendants, and then some interesting words about what Parmenides and the Parmenidean life might mean for us today.
Before I say much more about Parmenides and his ideas, I'd like to say that Geldard tells us how deeply enamored he is with this Indian Hindu mystic philosopher named Sri Aurobindo. I don't know the man's work, but I poked around on the internet to try to find out more about him. He wrote extensively and lived in seclusion for years. His perhaps most famous book is titled "Life Divine", and it is supposedly a fusion of western and eastern thought into one new philosophy or cosmology. I read a sample page or two on the internet, and my first impression is that the man has his own ideas about the nature of the reality and the universe, but I think a lot of it is just out of his own head, and is neither from scripture or personal revelation. And if it is from revelation, then I would mistrust it, as Geldard and Emerson both warn us to do when encountering personal revelation. I am really surprised that Geldard has given this guy so many kudos. Maybe there is more going on with Aurobindo than I understand, but my understanding is that rather than spend a huge amount of time trying to study out another person's cosmology or system of thought, that we are supposed to acquire a unique relationship with the universe. That's our key purpose while on earth, to grow and understand the one great mind that we all share, or something similar to that. Geldard is telling us strongly to study this man, while my own intuition says to instead go sit quietly in nature and have my own personal understanding and dialog with the universe. I believe Parmenides would tell me the same thing.
Anyhow, I'll try to say a few more things here about Parmenides that I learned from reading Geldard. First, that he is at the root of Greek thinking and Greek philosophy. He came on the scene at the beginning of the "axial age", which is the age when people turned from mythology as a way of explaining reality to philosophy, instead, as a way of explaining reality. Same reality, but a different approach to it. In Parmenides' approach, he first has a revelation that the universe is all one, that mind and body are one. So the mind we have is the mind of God, or the One, and vice versa. God's mind is in our mind and ours is in God. Something like that. Then Parmenides works out a system of logic to prove the Oneness of the universe, showing that when you have two of something you have fracture and/or division, or dualism. From that logical construct, dualism, you can quickly jump to the modern philosophies of despair that we read in Machiavelli, Sartre, Camus and so forth, which says that there is no mind in the universe other than our own. I skipped over quickly in this journal entry a lot of what Geldard has to say about the concept of one mind and one universe.
And when we read Plato's allegory of the cave, what he portrays there is a dualistic universe, not a universe of Oneness, and one of the points of the allegory, a point Plato learned from Parmenides via Socrates, is that if not all is One then it becomes distorted, and we have people chained in caves looking at what they think is reality, and unable to come out into the light and see the wholeness. Plato's Republic is an effort to explain the universe of Parmenides' Way of Truth.
A lot of Greek thinking along Parmenidean lines kept our concept of the universe in order and kept our civilization, well, civilized. Now that materialists and scientists have discarded a need for One Mind (God), we have experienced the bloodiest and most destructive century, the twentieth. We are no longer accountable to the One for our actions. Christians and other religious as well can join wars, become wealthy and powerful, and then give something of it to charity to appease themselves--because they have lost this sense of Oneness that should be in the front of their minds all the time. The Oneness that the One wants us to have. To be or not to be. The One either is or is not.
Another age is coming, similar to the transition from the mythological to the philosophical transition known as the "axial age". Reality will not change, but man's ability to understand the Oneness will vastly improve and he will be able to experience it more fully with all five of his senses.
I'm not sure what is the most striking point of Geldard's book. Maybe it's the Parmenidean concept that truth is universal and that private knowledge is not universal and therefore is not true. We sprung from the One mind and there is plenty of evidence of this in nature, much of which is found in geometry. The Greeks knew this and had a much more detailed explanation in their ancient mythology than did the Jews in the early Old Testament. When Christianity first came into Greece, it used many Greek terms that people understood clearly, such as Eros and Logos, which is why Christianity caught on, and why Greek Christianity today is different than the more western flavor. Logos and nous in ancient Greece were the terms used to explain the One Mind and how it sort of spoke us into existence, a conversation the One has been having with itself. The Way of Truth Parmenides speaks of is a direct relationship with the One mind, not a philosophy, or a system, or a religion, or a creed. There is no one follower to admire who has neatly codified it all. Emerson was too modest to do that, but gave some pretty broad hints about how the One mind is all around us, and how to perceive it through lowly listening, and also through careful, quiet observation of nature. Unfortunately, our modern age does not understand this and is hell-bent on destroying nature rather than observing and listening. That will change. Poets, philosophers, song writers and, yes, even college professors who write papers on the subject, will help bring about the change. A Parmidean version of Albert Einstein, with fantastic powers of personal revelation, will make a breakthrough in understanding the Oneness so that all human beings will understand the One Being. It will not be a scary, mark-of-the-beast, antichrist, apocalyptic event. The understanding will be public, not private. I would equate it with something like the discovery of geometry. It will manifest in our midst as peacefulness, love, kindness, unity, all the attributes of the Life Divine. This life, the Way of Truth, is already available for all.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
18 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a perfect introduction, March 16, 2008
This review is from: Parmenides and the Way of Truth (Paperback)
You know, Parmenides, a Greek guy who pretty much invented both logic and monotheism (he created the first to prove the second), is probably the most important man you've never heard of. There aren't nearly as many books about him as there should be for the simple reason that the kinds of people who tend to write books like Plato and Aristotle because they left a lot more to write about and footnote endlessly than did Parmenides.
What this world needed was a nice, balanced, introductory text to Parmenides. It needed to be scholarly without being academic, wise without being new-agey. And lo and behold, a book like that is just what Richard Geldard has given us. Of course he is a bit indulgent of his own interests in places, but we can forgive him that for hitting on the Golden Mean (which incidentally is the esoteric core of the divine Plato's and Pythagoras' teachings), for his very nice translation of the fragments of Parmenides' poem, for his insightful overview of the reactions of others to Parmenides, for his accesible writing style, and for general excellence.
Automatic purchase for the library of anyone interested in presocratic mysticism/philosophy and a very nice antidote to all the nonsense that goes on in the name of Parmenides., whether from barking mad moon men like Kingsley or clueless academics like Hermann.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
