Exploring the Dark Places of Wisdom - Ancient Philosophy Books for Self-Discovery & Enlightenment | Perfect for Meditation, Book Clubs & Spiritual Growth

Through In The Dark Places of Wisdom, Peter Kingsley covers the roots of the Western system of thought as revealed through the lives of Plato, Pythagoras and Parmeneides. Essentially, the Phoenicians brought eastern spiritual traditions with them when they fled the Persians. Through the methods of `incubation', simply sitting quietly, these Greeks developed the most revelatory discoveries that we accredit to them.In our current rational systems we would instantly discredit anyone bringing `laws from the gods delivered by dreams' but not so in Greek society. The rational faculties we have celebrated in those we attributed early rationality to are heavily misplaced, shaking the foundations of our own systems.Perhaps the most significant failure of current humanity is the inability to experience incubation in our daily lives due to strict schedules. This quiet meditation of the heart is a core aspect of all mystical schools and a severe afterthought in the blueprint for modern existence. Truthfully, philosophy isn't arguing about thoughts or existence, its is the love of wisdom. Mysticism has been relegated to the fringes of culture and the more it gravitates outward, the more we push it away because we have to fill the void with some new substitution. I won't list those substitutions because you know what they are. The ways we avoid the `path to the underworld' undertaken by Parmeneides are numerous. Only by facing the depths of the human existence do we become human. By avoiding the dark side we come to fear it, it manifests as latent dissatisfaction, depression and terror.Sadly, many of us will "come to the point of our death and find ourselves still wanting the thousand substitutes we aren't able to have". Kingsley posits, "...because there's no knowledge left any more of how to find access to what's beyond our waking consciousness, we have to take anesthetics and drugs. And because there's no longer any understanding of powers greater than ourselves we're denied any meaning to our suffering. So we suffer as liabilities, die as statistics." If that sounds familiar it is because he describes the way we observe the world around us. The promise of reviving methods of subconscious exploration like incubation has significant advantages."Life for us has become an endless affair of trying to improve ourselves, achieving more and doing more, learning more, always needing to know more things. The process of learning and being taught has simply become a matter of being fed facts and information, receiving what we didn't have before, always being given something different from ourselves. That's what whatever we learn never touches us deeply enough; why we sense this the more we rush around trying to find substitutions for the void we feel inside. Everything pushes us outside ourselves, further away from the simplicity of our humanity. "Where does the knowledge for growth lie? Inside ourselves: "We already have everything we need. We just have to be shown what we have. This is why the greatest teachers are often utter nobodies. In some circumstances they might introduce you to a new system of knowledge or change your lifestyle - and yet that's not what their teaching is basically about. It's just a trick to keep your mind focused while the real work is being done somewhere else... we think that being practical means keeping busy, getting on with our lives, rushing from one distraction to another finding more and more substitutes for what we dimly sense."As Parmeneides said, `human beings wander along, knowing nothing'. What Kingsley effectively argues is that Parmeneides was referring to us. What I took from this book is that the reality before us must be valued for what it is, even if it undermines some of the notions we have about the past and our most intimate nature.