In this paper I would like to take Parmenides at his word, as Peter Kingsley has presented it. By this I mean that I wish to take two aspects of his poem to heart in interpreting another – that of the proem. In order to do this I must discuss first his ontology that is presented in that part of his poem that Kirk, Raven, & Schofield refer to as "Signs of Truth." (Kirk, page 248) Then I wish to touch on the admonition of the goddess as she begins to discuss the opinions of mortals as to the deceptive ordering of her words. After which it is necessary to return to his ontology again to refine our interpretation of it. Then at last we can take a fresh look at the introductory proem. I follow this course because I accept Kingsley's position that Parmenides' poem is an esoteric work that presents us with a puzzle that can be misunderstood if not contemplated in its entirety. This is of course the mistake that philosophers who have studied this work tend to make – they selectively analyze parts of the work according to their own set of presumptions, prejudices, and desires. For instance, Kirk, Raven, & Schofield describe Parmenides poem work as consisting of two parts, with an introductory proem whose sole purpose “…is to lay claim to knowledge of a truth not attained by the ordinary run of mortals.” (Kirk, page 243) I think that by doing the analysis in the manner that I have outlined, it is possible to arrive at some fairly interesting results. Whether they are of any value or not is strictly in the eye of the beholder, because without walking the path that I have set out – really walking this path and trying to internalize what I am saying – it will just be so much noise.







The puzzle of the poem of Parmenides, I believe, lies in the need for the goddess to take things a step at a time. She must get Parmenides to suspend his disbelief, so natural for a mortal human faced with the extraordinary circumstances that Parmenides is faced with, no matter how receptive he is to it. Then she must show him the path his thought must take in order for him to arrive at the truth. But this is no easy trick, as to do so she must use the very thing that entraps him to begin with – mortal language. Thus she begins her presentation of the ontology by warning Parmenides: "And don't let much-experienced habit force you to guide your sightless eye and echoing ear and tongue along this way, but judge in favor of the highly contentious demonstration of the truth contained in these words as spoken by me." (Kingsley 2003, page 140). So the goddess begins to dismantle the conception of reality possessed by mortals, using cutting logic and biting interrogatory – a very contentious way of driving her point home to Parmenides. In fact, she cuts him no slack whatsoever. She leaves him with nothing familiar to hold onto. As Kingsley puts it: "She is demolishing our whole view of the world, undermining our deepest assumptions; has just been saying that we know nothing and are lost." (Kingsley 2003, page 149). The challenge of the puzzle for us is to see the steps she is taking, which are shown to us in Parmenides' poem, while never assuming that a divine goddess must follow the logical ordering of our temporal natures in her effort. Divinity has no need to walk as we walk, from beginning to end, and she herself points out to us that there is only Now – that before and after do not exist. Kingsley says: "In a few brief words, almost before you can blink an eye, she has got rid of the past and the future. And now is the only thing left: all that exists is now." (Kingsley 2003, page 164). Thus the solution to this puzzle is to see the pieces of the puzzle as the goddess sees them and not as a mortal would. While philosophers see a clearly delineated beginning, middle and end to the poem, for us to understand it in its entirety as intended, we must forsake such simplistic orderings and instead contemplate the rebounding effect her words must have.







She begins: "There is only one tale of a path left to tell: that is." (Kingsley 2003, page 160). Here she introduces Parmenides to the path he must take; not physically, not even mentally, because it is his deepest unspoken assumptions that must be loosened from his very being. And then she lays it all out on the table: what ‘is’ is: “…as well as being birthless it’s also deathless and whole and of a single kind and unmoving – and neither is it incomplete.” (Kingsley 2003, page 160). This is so far from the reality that most of us hold to be true that it is no wonder that Parmenides must be first taken to the underworld before being presented with it.







Kingsley points out that: "To understand what the goddess is saying you have to keep a firm grip on yourself, not allow your mind to wander. And to learn this can take years." (Kingsley 2003, page 164). What a curious thing to say, "not allow your mind to wander;" yet it is exactly this which serves as the goal of many meditation systems of the East. For it is in the silence that one finds through these systems, between the thoughts that arise incessantly in our minds, that we discover the inherent awareness that each of us has – it is there like a theatergoer sitting attentively in her seat, watching the drama unfolding before her – it exists and becomes noticeable to itself when we still our minds. And it is at this point that we can begin to understand fragment 3 of Parmenides work.







"For what exist for thinking, and being, are one and the same." (Kingsley 2003, page 70). Yet it is not "thinking" that Parmenides meant when he wrote this line. The Greek word he used is noein which Kingsley clarifies by pointing out: "This one word referred as much to the act of perceiving as to the act of thinking: to direct, intuitive perception as well as perception through and with our senses. And, beyond that, it described exactly what nowadays we would refer to as consciousness or awareness." (Kingsley 2003, page 77). So it is being and awareness that together form the perfect sphere of reality. The goddess continues: "See how it is that things far away are firmly present to your mind. For however much you want to, there is no way you will manage to cut being off from clinging fast to being." Kingsley then says: "Her words are so direct that, as always, they evoke incredible confusion. But all she is describing, the one thing she is concerned with, is the abolition of separation." (Kingsley 2003, page 79). There is no distance between being and awareness; yet we create a false dichotomy even by saying this, evoking in our minds the picture of two halves of a sphere swirling together, one denoting being, one awareness. Yet how can that be, since what ‘is’ is whole and of a single kind? ‘Being’ is the present participle of the verb “to be” – it denotes an action. The dimensions of being are the attributes of that action. Awareness is not being, in the way that a runner is not the running, but you cannot have the one without the other. Awareness has no attributes – no time, no extension in space, nothing describable at all – as these belong to Being, the activity of Awareness. Awareness is not a thing either, as it is ineffable. It is also an action – that of being aware. So that it is what might be called the inner aspect of being; the outer aspect being the perceptible world. But we mistakenly treat both of them as objects, even to the extent of calling them a sphere. What is important to understand here is that without Awareness there is no Being, for Awareness is what gives Being its phenomenological value, i.e. existence. However, there is no ‘it’ anywhere – not in reality – not in Parmenides’ poem – that is the point; there is only awareness of being and the being of awareness. Thus we come to the goddess' words as Kingsley has translated them: "What exists for saying and for thinking must be. For it exists for it to be; but nothing does not exist. You ponder that!" (Kingsley 2003, page 83) But we must remember that even as Kingsley says himself, it is not 'thinking' but awareness that is meant in the above line, and then the pieces will literally fall together – into one whole.







We think we understand the words of the goddess. As difficult a concept as she has presented in fragment 8, it is possible for us to see what it is she has described, imagining it in our minds. But this, of course, is completely misleading. It just can't work this way. It cannot be that easy, for if it were, one would be hard-pressed to call this an esoteric work. And this is clear from where the goddess next takes Parmenides that this is so.







At the end of "The Way of Truth," the goddess admonishes the youth by saying: "With this, I stop for you the convincing discourse and the thought-upon around the truth. Hereupon opinions of mortals learn, listening to the disguising cosmos of my words." (Manchester, page 227) The questions that are of interest to us here are a) is the goddess being deceitful, whether out of need or malice? Or b) is it not the goddess that the phrase applies to, but the words themselves, and if so, are they deceitful because of some inherent quality, or have they been framed that way on purpose. The latter alternative in (b) could be seen as just a restatement of (a), in that the malice spoken of would have to come from somewhere, most likely the goddess; however, it could be that the words themselves have a malevolent intent, an idea not without precedence in the world of magic. For the purposes of this work, however, I will let that one go. I have already noted that the ordering of the goddess' words, that she first speaks of what is and then of mortal opinions is a path she must take for her purposes, but that to see this ordering as just the simple continuity of going from one subject to another is deceptive. We must see the rebounding effect that her later words have on her earlier words. And to do this, I propose that it is very important to take to heart the knowledge that we have gained from the “Way of Truth”, which is that reality is non-dual, as it will help to shed light upon what the goddess' admonition is speaking of.







If reality is non-dual, that is, if it does not consist of separate things that together comprise the cosmos, but rather, it is "whole, monogeneric as well as untrembling” (Manchester, page 225) then what are we to make of language, which rigidly requires a subject and a verb? A subject to denote that part of the cosmos to which we (another separate part of the cosmos) are referring, and a verb to specify the action or movement that is, will, or has taken place. Are these not completely at odds with the goddess' statement? She goes on: "It is not divisible, since it is all alike." (Manchester, page 226). "Again, quiescent in the bonds of great restraints." (ibid). The goddess is just nailing the coffin shut on us, and our mortal language. It is completely defective -- at odds with reality itself. No wonder everything that we say or think, using the syntactical structures of language is deceptive. From the get-go our statements are defective because they impose an ordering where none apply. They imagine things and acts that cannot truly be real. Yet language is extraordinarily effective in enabling the transmission of ideas that allow us to understand and manipulate the world around us. So this raises the question: are the ideas contained in the words themselves, allowing us, upon hearing or reading the words, to perceive the idea; or is it the act of uttering the words that which gives rise to the idea in our minds? This is a subtle point, so I will try to be more explicit about it. Is the meaning that is communicated somehow inherent in the unuttered words themselves – unuttered in the sense of dictionary entries replete with possible meaning waiting to be deployed in combinations that together provide a desired meaning? Are words just symbols for meaning? Or is it the act of uttering the words with a particular intent, as typified in the uttering of magical spells, that which creates the meaning? A few points need to be made here:







First, if the meanings are inherent in the dictionary entries for words, then shouldn't it be possible to take the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, and construct a computer program to combine these words in all possible combinations, taking into account all their alternative meanings and shades of meaning, thus once and for all, writing out all possible human knowledge? What need do we have of poets and philosophers? Of course there will be a lot of junk spewed out, but it is far easier to separate the junk from the pearls of wisdom than to handcraft the pearls themselves. Rather than use hard to find people of great ability, we can just hire a bunch of 'trained monkeys', as any corporate business dreams of, to do the grunt work of filtering. Of course this is nonsense. The meanings are not inherent in the words themselves. The dictionary merely provides a contemporary snapshot of how words have been used in the recent past, giving us some guidance on what word will work in a particular context. The actual meaning depends upon the intent of the one uttering the words in each individual instance of use – i.e. upon the context. That is the reason that machines have such a difficult time interpreting human language. In the absence of a consciousness there is no context.







Second, the treatment of words as just repositories of abstract concepts that can be strung together to create meaning is rather recent in human history. Aristotle remarked: “Spoken words then are symbols of affections of the soul and written words are symbols of spoken words. And just as written letters are not the same for all humans neither are spoken words. But what these primarily are signs of, the affections of the soul, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our affections are likenesses.” (Aristotle, De Interpretatione, 16a3-8) Prior to this treatment, words were held to be not just representative of the things they "meant" but were held to be the things themselves. It is hard for us to imagine this now. In the Iliad, for example, words were “winged” and could magically come true. In many religions the name of a god was not just a label for that god it was the god. The utterance of the word summoned the god to appear. Thus one did not use a god's name in vain, or for that matter, utter it very frequently at all. This reverence for words is the basis for magic spells, in which the utterance of certain words, in particular sequences, had real-world effects. At least it once did.







Third, what of the fact that there is only the single sphere of Being and Awareness? What then does it mean to say something is communicated? What is it that is being communicated? From whom or what to whom or what is it communicated? In the actual being of reality is it not the case that there cannot be such movement as that implied by a 'communication'? So what are we to make of this situation? Clearly, our current conception of language and communication is wrong-headed and the ancient idea, just mentioned above, of words 'conjuring up' reality is much closer to the truth, although my perspective would structure it a little differently. Rather than words conjuring up reality, the words, their utterance, the thought communicated, the parties communicating, are all just images thrown up against a "wall" of perception; an act, as in a play, arising from some deeper process within the single sphere of reality, like some mystical vision. And it is this conception of our perceptible world of existence that gives us a hint of what the proem of Parmenides is conveying to us, which we will see later.







The goddess in Parmenides' poem gives us an additional clue about our mortal opinions, and since our opinions are stated in language, this clue applies to our language also. She says: "this too you will learn – how beliefs based on appearance ought to be believable as they travel all through all there is." (Kingsley 2003, page 277) Kingsley clarifies this by explaining: "What he (Parmenides referring to the goddess) is saying is that human opinions can possess a certain validity provided they reach all the way through this world of appearances to its furthest limit; as long as they touch its peirata, the ultimate boundaries of existence." (Kingsley 2003, page 279) What this implies is that the closer to the heart of reality – whole, monogeneric and untrembling – our language and the opinions that we express with it is, the more validity they have. Out at the fringes where we normally move, dancing around our made-up subjects, and our imagined actions, to the metronomic beat of our made-up time, our opinions hold no water at all. Thus, the less dichotomizing our use of language is and the less it imposes movement upon these artificially separated parts of reality, the closer to the truth it speaks.







We see then that it is mortal words that are imposing a deceptive ordering upon reality and not any malice of the goddess, and it is this that undercuts our ability to reflect any truth in our opinions. Dzogchen expresses the same truth in the following way: "Although the nature of phenomena is primordially pure, immature people – unaware that what is ultimately meaningful has nothing to do with acceptance or rejection – are attached to their own views and so are continuously imprisoned. How emotionally afflicted they are – their ideas reify the characteristics of things. How confused they are to misconstrue what is ineffable as having identity." (Rabjam, page 54, 59) How then does this new understanding about language shed light upon the nature and purpose of the proem of Parmenides; what rebounding effect do they have? First, it is necessary to return briefly to the beginning of fragment 8 and the goddess' ontology.







With our new-found understanding of the deceptive ordering that our language imposes upon our thoughts, we should look once-again at the Ontology presented by Parmenides and realize that even here the words being used by the goddess cannot be exactly true, only close to the truth because they "travel all through all there is." But it is important to understand that even here, the goddess is not disclosing the complete truth to us. She cannot, because she is using mortal language. Now it is very often the case that humans, desiring to be in possession of the truth, claim that words spoken by a divinity can relate the truth to us. We call this revelation. This is possibly correct, but I think we deceive ourselves when we anthropomorphically believe that a divinity uses words as her divine language. And it is here that we can begin to see another clue as to the meaning and importance of the proem. Why would a goddess stoop to using words when it is in her power, in fact, it is her normal way of being, to use human experience to communicate her meaning? Why say something like: "Parmenides, you are all confused" when she can instead subject Parmenides to experiences that make him realize that he is all confused. Which has the greater ability to communicate a meaning that will stick? Yet, we mortals believe that the words of a divinity have validity, even over the divinely crafted worldly experiences that one is subject to, because the latter are considered to be just that – subjective experiences. This prejudice explains why the goddess uses mortal language to communicate a hint of actual reality in the Ontology – a faint whisper of the truth rather than an actual experience of the truth – because her words will be believed more so than any experience that Parmenides would relate or even could relate using language. And this expectation is borne out in the way that scholars have dismissed the proem itself for over 2,000 years. It is only an experience of his, or a plot device, or a setting of mood for the poem; nothing important to our understanding of his work, they say. Thus in fragment 2, the goddess instructs: “I will do the talking; and it's up to you to carry away my words once you have heard them” (Kingsley, page 60) because she understands the ways of mortal humans. She gives us a faint echo of the truth, because that is all that we will accept.







Our experiences can provide us with the fodder which we need to nourish our understanding, but only if we partake of them. If we stand off, if we try to objectify them, we are wasting the opportunity we are given; that is the point of Parmenides’ teaching. Kingsley puts it this way: “There is no need to go anywhere else looking for it (the goddess’ famous, unnamed ‘it’); no point in speculation. If you want to see what she is referring to, all you have to do is look at everything around you.” (Kingsley, page 198). If we accept our experiences, in all their variety and dimensions, without feeling the need to categorize or rationalize them, and by the last I mean to make them acceptable to ourselves by giving a reasoned explanation for them that fits into our current view of reality, and not dismissing those that we are not comfortable with, then we are prepared to understand. At this point, a few mortal words spoken by a divinity can put us over the top; they can add just the right soupçon of comprehension to make the whole picture fall into place -- to open our minds to the truth; but only if we are already open to it. Otherwise we just go round-and-round asking more questions, getting more answers, becoming more confused. In the end, it can leave one feeling disillusioned, or aporetic; which is what so often happens. So the goddess gives us words – mortal words – but she also gives us more. She points out to us that our living experiences are where the true meaning is and her words are merely meant to put us on the correct path and act as signposts. And so it is important to understand that the words of the goddess in the Ontology are merely signs: "There is only one tale of a path left to tell: that is. And along this way there are many, many signs..." (Kingsley 2003, page 160). Kingsley explains this as: "They are signs pointing to oneness, stillness, completeness. And if you dare to look, you will see them lighting up the whole night landscape so that you don't have to rely on a little flashlight any more." (Kingsley 2003, page 162). But we must be wary of losing sight of the admonition of the goddess about the deceptive ordering of words. "Oneness, stillness, completeness..." these are just words that can deceive us if we forget that they are merely signs that point us to the truth – they show us the path to the truth. But they predicate what is ineffable. It is here, at this point, that we can most easily become lost, to once again fall back into mortal opinions. Close as we are to the truth, if we take these words for something more than just "signs", as pointers to the true reality, which we must experience, first-hand; and instead see them as denoting what is real, then we are lost. We must bear this, not only in our thoughts, but also at the very core of our being if we wish to gain all there is to be gained from Parmenides' poetry. In a scriptural commentary in the Dzogchen tradition it is pointed out that: “Those who have no realization of awareness in all its nakedness instead think, ‘It is unborn like space, beyond the extremes of positive and negative.’ They speak off the tops of their heads, using enormously potent words to discuss ultimate reality without basing what they say on personal experience, and since they place confidence in such speculation, their behavior remains crude.” (Rabjam 2001, page 170).







And so we come to the beginning. Is the Proem of Parmenides a record of an actual experience? Did Parmenides go down into the underworld? Did a goddess speak to him? First, we must remember that there is only Awareness and Being, entwined within each other. There is no "it," there is no ego, there is no "I." These are just plot devices in the divine language of experience – the Logos of reality. Atomized, fractured, and hacked-up, as we so like to think about Being, separated from Awareness, there arises the need to define what is "real" and what is not. But that is only because we have dichotomized everything. Absent the artificial separation, to define something as real or not real is merely empty speech. Thus, the proem must be two things. It is mortal words that describe the experience of Parmenides; whether in 'reality', in a 'dream', or in a 'vision', makes no difference as to its effect. This is the path that Parmenides took to reach his understanding of what is real. It is mortal words faintly echoing the divine language that was uttered for him, which became the world – the reality – that he experienced. In this experience, Parmenides reaches the underworld and there, through its gates, the goddess that took him by the hand, welcoming him, spoke a few mortal words to him; words that "put him over the top" after he had passed through to the farthest reaches of reality. It is where he got to when he got to the end of his path. Without an understanding of the proem and what it is, we lose our tenuous grasp on the reality that is presented to us in the ontology and merely fall back into comforting mortal opinion, echoing the goddess’ steps – experience, explanation, and opinion. We do not take the truth into ourselves; we merely entertain ourselves with one more interesting, ancient, opinion.







We have seen how words, when uttered, are more than just abstract containers for meaning. Realizing this, when we view the proem of Parmenides, crafted in magical hexameter verse, relating his path to reality, we should also see it for what it is: a magical incantation. Kingsley notes: "this dismissal of Parmenides as a poet stems from an assumption that the basic aim of poetry is to entertain. As we will gradually see, Parmenides' poem served a very different purpose." (Kingsley 2003, page 24). It serves the same purpose that Buddhist mantras serve, when repeated over and over, conjuring visions in one's mind. In this case, Parmenides means us to open ourselves to the reality of Awareness and Being, entwined, singing the song of our experiences to herself, singing the songs that are us, so that we can learn. But even here, in the proem, there is a trick, for Parmenides has put the equivalent of speed bumps in his verse. He breaks the proper flow of his hexameter verse, missing a beat here, raising discordance there. As Kingsley points out: "His poetry seems oddly to limp and falter, until you realize that this rhythmic effect is chosen because it mirrors the sense of what he is saying. There is no poor craftsmanship here; on the contrary. At each step he breaks any ordinary sense of continuity and creates a space of utter stillness and simplicity instead, keeps drawing the listener out from the details of the narrative rather than into them." (Kingsley 2003, page 36). These breaks in the proem's flow protect us from becoming just mesmerized by his words; they keep us conscious of our path and the goal towards which we travel, which we must keep firmly in our minds. For as the goddess has told us, when she did away with separation, that when we are in a non-dual state we would: “See how it is that things far away are firmly present to your mind. For however much you want to, there is no way you will manage to cut being off from clinging fast to being.” (Kingsley 2003, page 79). How different these words now sound.







Kirk, Raven, & Schofield point out that: "It is sometimes suggested that Parmenides' journey to the goddess recalls the magical journeys of shamans. But it is doubtful how far a historical case can be made for an influence upon Archaic Greece from Central Asian shamanistic cultures, or to what extent an institution central to the life of politically primitive nomadic peoples could in any case illuminate the activities of a Greek sage in the more complex society of a rich and powerful city state." (Kirk, page 243). Yet Kingsley has described in detail, pointing up myriad facts of historical evidence, exactly how this was the case. We have seen how the Tibetans point to the West as the place of origin of Dzogchen. Parmenides was part of a sacred tradition, a cult of Apollo, where practitioners used incubation to enter the underworld. And far from it being the case that such a shamanistic practice would find no place in the "more complex society of a rich and powerful city state," Kingsley points out that the practitioners of incubation were also known as law-givers to some of those very same city-states. So leaving our rational skepticism aside, we must face up to the true nature of the journey described by Parmenides.







Parmenides' Proem is the poetic description of an experience, a process that he went through in order to reach his comprehension of reality. Just words. Yet they describe, in human words, using a poetic diction, the journey that Parmenides was allowed to take, by the divinities of the underworld. The actual experience he was given was in the divine language of a human experience, what we might call a vision, a dream, or a life. Just like any other of our experiences, it is true; yet different in that it was perceived with the heightened acuity of a human being who had acquired mêtis – that enhanced state of perception that allows us to break away from the mortal opinions that limit our ability to understand. Opinions in many ways shaped and structured by our mortal language and its deceptive ordering. Thus we must not get mesmerized by Parmenides’ proem, nor ignore it as just a plot device to introduce the body of his 'real' work. Rather, we must accept it as a magical incantation – a Pre-Socratic Greek Mantra – that reflects another state of consciousness, if one is prepared to understand it in the light shed by the later parts of his work. Otherwise, it is merely a story, something to be lightly dismissed before getting to the ‘real meat’ of Parmenides' thought; but like meat, once we come upon it in this way, it is lifeless, although enjoyable for some. This is how an esoteric teaching is: both leading and misleading. It all depends upon us.







Copyright 2006, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved



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