What Parmenides was about

I don't know which came first, Plato's Parmenides or Parmenides' On Nature. I consider it possible that the latter was penned by Simplikios as an essay on that which is suggested in the former.

In any case Parmenides is a code referring to the source of all knowledge.

I've already written a post on Parmenides, but its main purpose is to highlight the relevant sections of On Nature.

Just now I read The Egg Came First and felt that I should make a neat statement of what I think Parmenides was about.

It is this:

As a philosopher you have to be concerned with what you know to exist and this is one and just one, namely that which you perceive while you study it. Be aware of the unity of your awareness in which all of your thought is contained. That which does not change in time, but contains the appearance of time. Flee from idle logic not rooted in what it refers to. Always start with the perception, never the assumption. Do not think that any object could ever be more real than the mind that relates to it. The one, uniform in apparent time, mind.

My best shot at describing this mind in total, although I tried to do so against much inner resistance, is captured in the post Zur Formalisierung des Denkens: Ein Lagebericht. How transcendence fits into this has been described in the relevant sections, but there is a more fundamental point here, namely:

Since we really only know our own mind to exist, it is most logical to assume that the fundamental form of existence is mind like.

And from there it is a very short distance to

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος:

the idea that partaking in a specific assessment creates the world, existence. In holiness our minds bleed out into the divine mind, which creates that which is. Thus we create our own hardships as punishments and opportunities as rewards. And in all of this there is really just one undivided, unchanging thing at work, to which we belong through common nature.

And the only reason I state this is because that is what lies in front of me, what I have always known.