Reality Paperback – April 1, 2004

I am midway in the process of reading the 2020 edition of this book. For someone interested in the classics I would recommend beginning instead with Kingsley's "In the Dark Places of Wisdom". It is more disciplined and convincing. Something strange has happened with "Reality" however. Kingsley is more concerned with marketing himself as a mystagogue than serving the text. For those who need to huddle around the warmths emanating from your guru's feet or if you are a member of QAnon for the classics world, this may be the book for you. It seems a little silly to me. A third of the book is devoted to Parmenides and the detailed options available in translating the greek, a third to how important and awsome and mindblowing all of it is, and a third to how stupid and insensitive all the other classics scholars throughout the ages in have been in misinterpreting what is so obvious to our author. As original as "Reality" can be at times, the author has issues that an "enlightened" person would have left aside long ago. If I change my mind as I go along I will gladly change this review as quickly as possible. It gets only 2 out of 5 stars because only 2/5ths of the books is worth reading. But please, I strongly encourage anyone to read the other, shorter "Dark Places" first. The editor on this book should lose his editing license.

The text is penned in the style of a Sorcerer; It is verbose, but it has to be, as Dr. Kingsley is attempting to lead the reader to a lost, forgotten and ultimately rejected path. This path, should a person take the time to discover it, will lead back to the roots of Western Civilization.The signs he points to, on the way to this lost tradition (Incubation, Conscious Sense Perception, Noting Of Maya) can all take the reader to the same road Dr. Kingsley has rediscovered.But in rediscovering this path yourself, you might lose everything you think is yours; and be thankful for it.

Kingsley seems to have an interesting perspective on ancient Greek thought, and I was eager to learn what he had to share. However, I found that with every chapter I finished, I had been told little to nothing. I would blow through numerous chapters per sitting and find that after an entire section, he had shared what could have been reasonably encapsulated in a couple chapters. It seems to be a common complaint that Kingsley could have chopped this thing down, but it's likely more to do with editing; Kingsley is not a bad writer, he's just in need of an editor more willing to make him compress his prose.That said, despite Kingsley's credentials, I didn't get much out of this one. Perhaps I need to read another of his works, but it seemed to me to be somewhat akin to popular-level self-help New Age material than an avant-garde though academic review of Parmenides and Empedocles. I found his thesis, the connection between Parmenides' own cultus with ancient shamanistic traditions, to be intriguing, but even at a popular level, Kingsley does little to expound on his argument. He is certainly detailed in his Greek as well as his history, but much of the academic side of the text seems dedicated to (increasingly tiresome) references to how colleagues in his field have overlooked some hidden subtlety or even a glaringly obvious datum. I think I would have appreciated this more had it been more concise and more academic, rather than how it now stands.That said, if you're interested in ancient Greek thought and don't mind a text somewhat overstaying its welcome, so to speak, then I would certainly recommend this.

The subject matter and the arguments presented earnestly by the author and are worthy of consideration. I sincerely appreciate the author's efforts to share his insights. However, this is a somewhat of a tome that could have been a pamphlet.I can forgive most style issues if the content is engaging and free-flowing, but I find the writing style of this book to be overly verbose, repetitive and unsophisticated. There are far too many long "verbal pauses" -- usually consisting of multiple pages of repetition in a conversational tone -- in between new ideas and information.After I saw this pattern repeated so often and so predictably over the first couple hundred pages, I could no longer escape the feeling that I was reading a high school writing assignment where the student was trying desperately to pad his essay to meet the teacher's requirement.Again, there are some worthy insights here, but I feel this book could have been written in 200 pages or less, and would have been much more enjoyable.

I recently watched a documentary on Greek sculpture and architecture. They bring to mind an austere milky beauty. The fact is though they were originally painted in lurid colours and gold. Even the Parthenon in Athens. When you’ve seen computer generated possibilities of how they might have been coloured you’ll never look at them the same way again.Kingsley has done something similar with two old dusty Greek philosophers, two Pre-Socratics who are credited with being at the beginning of Western rationality and philosophy: Parmenides and Empedocles. Only fragments of their woks exist and they have been fitted into a particular cultural narrative. This process has been going on since Aristotle.Kingsley upends this.It is a Herculean task and he could easily be accused of a degree of hubris but he brings the requisite degree of scholarship. He also does not miss out or downplay those aspects of the fragments that other scholars might find uncomfortable.This book though is not primarily about such scholarship. Much of the groundwork was done in previous publications. All scholarly footnotes are discretely positioned at the back of the book and the main text is uninterrupted by superscript symbols. The scholarship is not allowed to disrupt the measured flow of the book which consists of Kingsley’s own meditations on the fragments. And although it looks like a large book someconsideration has been given to the font and line-spacing making it a very unstressful read.And what of the title ‘Reality’?Kinsgley describes Parmenides’ poem as an initiation and the book itself is an attempt to bring out the whole force of this. It consists of a journey to the Underworld whereby we die to everything we know in order to enter Reality itself. Indeed it could be said that this initiation is into Life Itself and that what we currently call ‘life’ is actually death in the Underworld.Parmenides and Empedocles were not philosophers in any modern sense of the term. In common with Socrates they were priests of Apollo. Kingsley identifies them as shaman-sorcerers. And they are relevant to us in the here and now. Kingsley clearly feels this transformative personal connection with them and he shares this with us so we too can make the same connection.The book has the imprimatur of Huston Smith – a respected scholar of religion - and Eckhart Tolle – a popular modern mystic - amongst many others.'Reality' is a unique undertaking, a supremely satisfying and enriching journey not only into the dawn of Western civilisation but into our own immediate being.

You won't read anything else like this. It does hover in the mind; indeed I'd say it becomes a part of how you see the world. That said, it is infuriatingly overwritten and overlong. The tone is at times enough to make you want to throw it across the room. He writes as if he's selling something - his is the authorial voice of a film trailer: melodramatic, overblown, at times it sounds absurd. In terms of the history - of what where and who Parmenides was, and what he knew and taught - it is absolutely fascinating. That's what sticks with you. I would love to have heard more about the Goddess 'cults' and their destruction, and the institution of the 'reason' of the Old Testament and how these events related to what Parmenides taught and knew. I think the addition of a much more detailed historical context would add a depth - a relevance- that's lacking. As it stands, there's an irritating anti-academic current which feels like a personal issue for the author, and doesn't make for good reading.

I wanted to read this after reading a review in Mawlana Rumi Review, which was totally different in tone compared to the snapshot reviews at the end of the book, most of them by people I had never heard of, let alone, the books they have authored. So the text is targeted to a specific readership, and it must be meeting their needs/interests because it is now in its thirteenth printing. When I started reading it I could not put it down because I was finding it so interesting, going back as it did to the world before Plato. But then I found it beginning to get wearing and repetitive, and then the narrative moved from Parmenides to Empedocles, and the interest was reawakened. It is actually quite scholarly, but is in way, anti-scholar, because scholars can fall into the same trap as everyone else, by thinking that they know, or indeed like some in the modern world assume the prerogative that they know. Virtually all of Plato's dialogues start off with the typically Greek question: what is it? A lot of ground gets covered, but there is no conclusion. Peter Kingsley does not offer conclusions, only different readings of the two poems by Parmenides and Empedocles.It is a big book, printed in a large font, presumably to discourage reading in our normal manner, and encourage a more reflective and slower reading. With some aspects, the famous penny dropped, for example, the fact that the Sufi dictum of 'Die before you die' it would appear, pre-dates Islam, but with a totally new nuance. Others, that the Greeks did know that the world was round - he cites the Phaedo, and had temperature zones, but later scholars thought it was fantasy; Plato's Gorgias is presented in a totally new light, etc. Some things are half mentioned: Empedocles was not the only Greek who put forward the notion that creation was cyclical and was formed and destroyed by the conflict between love and Strife; the Celtic sea routes are mentioned, but not long for; we even get a mention of Avalon, a tendency to name-drop but not really connect. Any connection between say, the Druids and Shamanistic tradition that Parmenides and Empedocles appeared to have belonged to, is not developed, but it is mentioned in accessible books by pre-Socratic scholars. I would have liked to see the exact passage from the Illiad that he refers to - in print! The first half of the book centers on his translation of Parmenides poem -why could not the translation be included as an appendix? The translation I have, is markedly different, and I must admit I prefer his.The final point is I wonder what Feminists would think of his reading of the role that Aphrodite plays.(Empedocles)? I felt much more at home, in a strange kind of way with Persephone (Parmenides), but I am only a mere male! And I did note Athena's absence. One word that is central, it is almost like a thread, and that is 'metis' - cunning, deceit, treachery. Every body mentioned is at it, including, I suspect Peter Kingsley. Tonally I sometimes found it too didactic, other times, the prose has obviously been 'given', but throughout the occasional marker buoy appears - and there are a lot of them - 'For all that binds us is our illusory ideas of what it is to be free.' (p.495), and they are what we can reflect on to find out what they mean within ourselves. And he does talk about signposts being misleading in the first of Reality.

I absolutely loved A story waiting to pierce you, but reading Reality is tedious and quite a struggle. In my opinion could have said everything he needed to say about Parmenides and Empedocles in a book one third the size of this. I am not saying that what he says isn’t important and quite fascinating, it is just in my opinion seriously overdone.

Don't buy this book, get a copy from a library or friend and you'll see it is not up to the outrageous claims on the back. Kingsley wants to prove he is RIGHT by showing how others are WRONG, just another ego trip in Academia. This is not of the quality of Eckhart Tolle as spirituality, and is not proper research in sharing insights. Kingsley just knows it all. Having said that, his approach to see Greek philosophy as a way to become conscious of Reality is entirely right and should be the direction of academic research and inspired writing, but not in this way.