"Interesting. I have some other sources of information about 5th C BCE Greece and just exactly that kind of intentional creation. I'm certain in my depths that's exactly what happened."

He also has another book, A Story Waiting to Pierce You, which links up the early Greeks with Mongolia, via an emissary who travelled all the way from Mongolia to Greece to deliver an arrow to the Greeks. I kid you not

The idea is that there's a back-link to the great Asian schools (because of course the Mongolian stuff is basically the same kind of "shamanism" that eventually later becomes Tantrism throughout Asia).

This is sort of reminiscent of the Black/Yellow/White school idea (also perhaps some of Blavatsky's ruminations). Perhaps they were all more interlinked prior to Christianity (with the equivalent in the East being, I think, the co-opting of some of the Eastern schools by their own political shenanigans), and it's only recently that we've all "joined hands" again, as it were.

Kingsley's a fascinating, powerful and (I would say, but what do I know) quite Thelemically respectable mystic. It's like the type of idea at the beginning of LXV, where you can acknowledge other great schools of thought, wave to them, as it were, even if you don't actually subscribe to their methodologies (although the methodology Kingsley outlines from Parmenides is basically good old Mindfulness, which Kingsley believes was the original meaning of "Common Sense", nous, which I think all genuine schools everywhere share, and have somewhere in their curriculum - the equivalent in Tibetan, for example would be Rigpa).

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@gurugeorge said
"As Jim pointed out, if the sphere is infinite, the centre is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere (this idea was actually first mooted by mediaeval scholastic IIRC, can't remember his name)."

Older than that, even. I tracked it down to Empedocles, a Greek philosopher from early 5th Century BCE, who we also can thank for his articulation of the doctrine of the Four Elements, and their combination and recombination by forces of attraction and separation. Interesting dude."

Ah, if you've discovered Empedocles, you must read Peter Kingsley's book Reality, which goes into both Parmenides as a non-dual mystic, and Empedocles as a Magician. Kingsley's take seems to be based on sound scholarship (his first book was OUP published, but I'd guess scholars probably think he's gone off the rails now). Basically, he's taking some of those pre-socractics as mystics who deliberately created Western civilization as a gift from the gods, for which they were conduits. Something evidently got screwed up in the message, but it's all recoverable

(It's a sort of alternative genealogy of "hidden/secret masters" and Maguses to the Thelemic - tracing those ancient Greeks through to Sufism via Egypt, essentially.)

"As Jim pointed out, if the sphere is infinite, the centre is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere (this idea was actually first mooted by mediaeval scholastic IIRC, can't remember his name)."

Older than that, even. I tracked it down to Empedocles, a Greek philosopher from early 5th Century BCE, who we also can thank for his articulation of the doctrine of the Four Elements, and their combination and recombination by forces of attraction and separation. Interesting dude.

"I've seen this mentioned a couple times. i'm finding it hard to get my around the concept. Does this mean that every point is the same soul/individual?"

As Jim pointed out, if the sphere is infinite, the centre is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere (this idea was actually first mooted by mediaeval scholastic IIRC, can't remember his name).

The full text is:-

In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found.

Roughly, in concrete everyday terms, this means something like, "I, considered as pure consciousness, am always the centre of my sphere of phenomenal experience (Nuit), and there is no limit to possibilities of stuff to be experienced." (Only "phenomenal" isn't necessarily restricted to "mental" here, it includes all the very real 3-d stuff we experience, IOW this isn't Idealism.)

And every "I" is in the same boat (so to that extent you're kind of right in your surmise, only it's not that the whole of space is filled with "centres", just that wherever there is a centre, wherever there's reality experiencing itself, it's in that position relative to its sphere of phenomena).

Or as as the Buddhist John Kabat-Zinn recently wittily noted: "wherever you go, there you are"

There's also a hint that "whereness" itself (spacetime?) is constituted by consciousness in this high sense - as it were, a net to capture possibility in. This is perhaps also related to Kant's point about some kind of spacetime matrix - or as Schopenhauer even more concisely put it, causality - being a logically necessary condition of possible experience.

"I've seen this mentioned a couple times. i'm finding it hard to get my around the concept. Does this mean that every point is the same soul/individual?"

You're thinking in three-dimensional space. Get outside of time and rethink it.

Or, another angle: The center of a sphere is the point equidistant from all points on the sphere's surface, right? Well, one of the consequences of this geometry is that in a sphere of infinite size, evbery point is simultaneously its center.

I also wrote the following in my book Pearls of Wisdom:

@Pearls of Wisdom said

"Hadit is symbolized by the center point of a circle or sphere... Yet this single point at the center of the universe is not stationary: It is constantly in motion, even as each person’s point of view is constantly in motion, witnessing reality through a continually shifting panorama of unique experience.

It is the nature of experience to be inevitably individual. Looking at the same object from two different points in space will always produce a different impression. The same is true when looking at an idea from two different psychological “positions.”"