Continuing in our deliberations on time & how we as humans explain and understand it, we go back to the dawn of Philosophy to Parmenides & Zeno. Parmenides was born about 515 BC; Zeno about 490 BC. Zeno was a student of Parmenides so their ideas have similarities and we shall lump them together for this one post.
Parmenides had two basic things to say about reality, the "what is":
There is the way of truth, which shows reality is one, there is no change and existence is timeless.
Then there is the way of opinion, this is the senses that perceive change and trick the mind into thinking that the reality of oneness is somehow changing.
In this way Parmenides is an early foreshadowing of an eternalistic view of time. Eternalism states that the all points in time are equally real. Time is merely a dimension so past events are still there just as much as the present is here and that the future is out there only our current spatial dimension hasn't crossed paths with the future dimensions and that our current spatial dimension has already crossed paths with time dimensions we see as past.
Interestingly, if not without a bit of the stretch of the imagination, Peter Kingsley, a bit of a rogue scholar and a self-described mystic has reinterpreted Parmenides as a Iatromantist (Greek Shaman or Medicine Man). In this light, he reinterprets Parmenides as a apocalyptic religious philosopher. Maybe Kingsley is right. Some Greek philosophers have probably been overly stripped of the religious nature by the fragmentary nature of their extant works or by the overly zealous nature of many scholarly people over the last three centuries to make the Greeks as above religion to match the tenor of their scholarly circles.
So where is the story?
Not sure yet. But Time as an illusion seems to fit. I like the Iatromantis angle too.
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