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Sciborg_S_Patel
The Spiritual Tradition at the Roots of Western Civilization
Parmenides [of Velia, a.k.a. Elea] wrote a poem.
It would be easy to imagine the father of philosophy producing very different things.
But he just wrote a poem.
He wrote it in the metre of the great epic poems of the past — poetry created under divine inspiration, revea1ing what humans on their own can never see or know, describing the world of gods and the world of humans and the meetings between humans and gods.
And he wrote it in three parts. The first part describes his journey to the goddess who has no name. The second describes what she taught him about reality. Then the last part starts with the goddess saying, Now I’m going to deceive you; and she goes on to describe, in detail, the world we believe we live in.
With the goddess, things are very different. . .
Her words are spoken not out of restlessness and searching but out of completeness. And this is why they keep exerting such an uncanny attraction: because we long for that completeness even while trying to analyze or tear it apart. Her awareness, itself, is complete. She starts from being and ends exactly where she began — with being in all its perfection and completion. And this is just how things have to be, because in reality we never find out more or discover anything with time.
Everything is already present in the beginning.
Reality is perfect, complete. But we are lost in its perfection, trapped in its completeness while imagining we are free. And there is nothing we can do to change it — to make it less perfect, or more — except by making one decision. The only choice we have, our single real freedom, is to decide whether to participate in it consciously or be at its mercy; whether to help complete the circle through our own awareness or just stay lost inside it.
Reality is our problem and also our answer. For, as always, the answer to the problem lies not in running away from it — there is simply nowhere to run to — but in turning to face it.
But there were a few other scholars who had a little more respect for what Parmenides actually says. They saw the craziness of this supposed solution and realized there is not the slightest reason for doubting that, when the goddess mentions ‘mortals’, she means exactly what she says she is referring to: humanity as a whole. They even went on to define these mortals with the finest eloquence as ‘all who are unacquainted with the divine’; ‘who unconsciously get confused into contradictions because they take the changeable world for true reality’; ‘who only see their daily surroundings but cannot see through them’.
And this is the furthest anyone has ventured to go.
All the elements of the equation are there. The figures are waiting to be added up. But nobody has wanted to see the result — which is that Parmenides is not describing some theoretical abstraction, some sample cross-section of humanity, any more than he is pointing the finger at one isolated figure in the past.
He is describing us.