REALITY Peter Kingsley, The Golden Sufi Center, Inverness (Calif.), 2003. Paperback, 591 pages, £17.99. ISBN 1-890350-09-5. Distributed in the UK by Deep Books, East Dulwich, Telephone: 0208 693 0234

Around 2500 years ago a Greek philosopher named Parmenides travelled to the underworld. Quite literally. At least, that is how he described his experience. Once there he met with ‘the Goddess’ who gave him a message to bring back to the world of humanity. So Parmenides returned and wrote an extraordinary poem, an initiatory text, a sacred guide to the path which leads to stillness. And through stillness - and focussed awareness - to reality.
    Parmenides had a successor, Empedocles, who also travelled to the source of all Being and, like his teacher, also wrote an initiatory poem. After these men came others; and long after others came mystics such as the Persian Sufis who touched the heart of the message and expressed it to those who wished to understand. For, what is clear, most people do not want to do so; they choose to remain in ignorance of the true possibilities of humanity.
    In particular, the later philosophers such as Plato and worse, Aristotle, took these experiential and initiatory teachings and changed them to a philosophy founded upon argument, dispute, mental reasoning, as if thinking alone could lead one to the sacred grove where time no longer reigns. Dr. Peter Kingsley, in this blunt, forceful and truly wonderful book is dismissive of such philosophers, they are ‘show-offs and entertainers’ he says and he is particularly caustic about Aristotle whom he describes as ‘disarmingly superficial, disastrously influential’.
    Kingsley is one of the greatest experts on the subject of the early Greek Philosophers, the so-called ‘Pre-Socratics’, and author of several books and many academic papers on them. But this book is not aimed at academics; it is aimed at those who wish to understand the timeless immediacy of the poems of Parmenides and Empedocles.
    He shows how they have been wilfully mistranslated in order to make them fit within academic philosophy; how they have been wilfully misunderstood by scholars who refused to confront the absolute challenge to our perception of reality that they express.
    These poems are tough, blunt, demanding, unforgiving, yet as honest and clear as any writing could possibly be. They are, themselves, an experience - even without the rhymes and rhythms of the ancient Greek which must have rendered them ritualistic in their presentation.
    What can I say? Read this book.
    Michael Baigent