From the ancient philosophies of being, of the East and of the West, the idea of the "who" or even the "thing" arises and the answer is univocal and does not admit objections: One and only, without beginning and without end, it is the philosophy of Parmenides like that of Saṅaṅkara, the concept emerges, the affirmation of thought, of the mind, the very birth of philosophy, as we are used to considering it in "our" West. 

If it were not for Plato it would not seem possible to go back to something antecedent, yet Plato tells us that this thought that contains everything is only the shadow of truth and we are prisoners in the "cave" cut off from the creative and illuminating "light" of truth and the mythical continent which has disappeared, also speaks to us of Atlantis.
Is there anything before and beyond the "matter", the mind, the rational concept, is "knowledge" possible? History, Philosophy, Science tell us no, Religions but not only tell us yes, for them there is something beyond matter, or rather it depends on something superior: The Spiritual, the Animate, the Etheric .

Religions, perhaps in different ways, testify to the heavenly worlds of "life" after the life, of Divinity.
The Mystics of Religions have "seen" and something transpires from esoteric secrets: an Ancient Philosophy a "knowledge" that rewrites the history of the Universe of Man and his relationship with It.
I would like to give some "indication" of this because we should know this aspect that can help us to have a representation of ourselves and of our most complete and reasonable life, which helps us to form a different "sense" of orientation.

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SANKARA 
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Śankara, Śankarācārya, ankara, also Adiśankara or, in the Anglo-Saxon adaptation, Shankara (788? - 820?), Was an Indian theologian and philosopher, as well as the founder of the advaitavedānta school (advocate of the doctrine called kevalādvaita).
Lived between the 7th and 8th centuries e.v. (or between the sixth and seventh centuries; traditional dating not confirmed today: 788-820) [2] had a profound influence on the development of Hinduism through its non-dualistic theology.

During his life he also devoted himself to writing commentaries on Vedic Upaniṣads, Brahmasūtra and Bhagavadgītā. He defended the greatness and importance of the sacred Hindu scriptures, the utirutes, or Vedic literature, giving new life to Hinduism when Buddhism and Jainism were spreading their own doctrines, which he considered heterodox.
The doctrines elaborated by this hindū saint and theologian have the primary purpose of achieving emancipation from karmic ties to sasāra, and thus obtaining liberation from these (mokṣa). And the only way to achieve this is, for aṅkara, the right knowledge (jñāna) that allows complete and immediate liberation, which becomes definitive after death.

To reach these conclusions, Śaṅkara analyzes three instances of reality / truth:

• the first, called vyāvahāriksatya ("truth / conventional reality") is the waking world consisting of the continuous flow of perceptions to which man gives coherence through the dimensions of space, time and causality;
 

• the second said pratibhāṣikasatya ("truth / reality around which one can speak") is the dream world, or that of hallucinations and mirages, which, devoid of the coherence that the waking world possesses, achieves its level of reality as long as this is attributed to it;
 

• the third, and last, called paramārthikasatya ("truth / ultimate reality") is the realization of the brahman, devoid of perceptions, images and attributes (nirguṇa), therefore devoid of the continuous becoming of the vyāvahāriksatya and the fragmentary becoming of the pratibhāṣikasatya.
Man, undergoing the influence of māyā, sees the Brahman, unique, as multiple, as if, in a dim light, he exchanged a rope for a snake and frightened himself.
There are therefore three "views":
 

• that of avidyā, ignorance / nescience, which supremely accepts worldly truths and perceptions, suffering impermanence and contradiction, identifying itself with the physical body and condemning itself to the becoming of saṃsāra;
 

• that of "knowledge", but still in the world, which starts to understand through meditation, or rather that the world "more than" being "real," seems "real";
 

• that of the profound "intuition" which, with the conquest of the meditative goal, discovers the unreality and the illusory nature of the world and the worldly, penetrating the "sacred mountain", looking at the world by reading the underlying unity, beyond the names , concepts and perceptions. Everything is reabsorbed and disappears in the eternal light of Brahman, the "without attributes" (nirguṇa):
"Other than brahman there can be no other material cause in the universe. It follows that there is nothing but brahman and nothing else. "
(Śaṅkara Aparokṣānubhūti, 23-28; translation by Gianluca Magi, p. 10052)

 

 

 

PARMENIDES
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Parmenides of Elea (in Ancient Greek: Παρμενίδης, Parmenídēs; Elea, 515 BC / 510 BC, 544 BC / 541 BC - 450 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher.
 

 

Biography
Parmenides was born in Magna Graecia, Elea (Velia in Roman times, today Ascea), from an aristocratic family [no source]. There is little information about his life.
According to Speusippo, Plato's nephew, he would have been called by his fellow citizens to draw up the laws of his city. According to Sozione he was a disciple of the Pythagorean Aminia, for others he was probably a disciple of Xenophanes of Colophon.
He also founded a school for Elea, together with his favorite disciple Zeno. Plato in Parmenides reports of a journey that in the years of Parmenides old age he undertook to Athens, where he met Socrates as a young man with whom he had a lively discussion.
 

 

The poem on nature
The only work by Parmenides is the poem in hexameters entitled On Nature, of which some parts are cited by Simplicio in De coelo and in his comments on Aristotelian Physics, by Sesto Empirico and by other ancient writers. Nineteen fragments of this poem have reached us today, some of which are in a state of pure excerpt, which include a Proemio and a two-part treatment: The Way of Truth and The Way of Opinion.

In the Poem on nature Parmenides maintains that the multiplicity and changes of the physical world are illusory, and affirms, contrary to common sense, the reality of Being: immutable, not generated, complete, immortal, unique, homogeneous, immobile, eternal.
 

While not specifying what this being is, Parmenides is the philosopher who first explicitly discusses the concept; on it he expresses only a lapidary formula, the most ancient testimony on the subject, according to which "being is, and cannot not be", "non-being is not, and cannot be":

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• Being is eternal because there cannot be a moment when it is no longer, or is not yet: if being were only for a certain period of time, at a certain moment it would not be, and there would be contradiction.

 

• Being is therefore not generated and immortal, since otherwise it would imply not being: birth would mean being, but also not being before birth; and death would mean not being, or being only up to a certain time.

 

• Being is indivisible, because otherwise it would require the presence of non-being as a separator element.

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