Sit for one minute first. Then read it slowly, out loud.

Okay, so this is one of the oldest poems we have. Three and a half thousand years old, maybe more, and it's about where everything came from. And you'd expect it to tell you. That's what a creation hymn is for, right? It tells you.

This one doesn't.

And it starts by saying there was neither existence nor non-existence. So already you're in trouble, right, because those are the only two options. Then it asks who really knows. And then it says the gods came after the creation, so they can't know either, right, because they weren't there.

And then the last verse does the thing. It says the one who watches from the highest heaven, he knows. And you relax. Finally. Somebody knows.

And then the next line says, or maybe he does not know.

Now look at what just happened to you. You were reaching. The whole poem set you up to reach, verse after verse, and then it took the last rung out. So that drop you feel isn't the poet failing to finish. That's the poem working, right? It put you in the state it's about, which is not knowing, and it did it by making you want to know first.

Anybody can write I don't know. It takes something else to build six verses of ladder and then remove the top one while you're standing on it.

Read it twice. Once fast, once slow. Then stop reading and sit for a minute.

So Zhuangzi dreams he's a butterfly. Happy butterfly, doing butterfly things, no idea it's a man. Then he wakes up and he's a man again.

And then he says he doesn't know whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or he's now a butterfly dreaming he's a man.

And then he stops.

That's it. That's the whole passage. And I want to sit on that for a second because this is the part everybody skips. A philosopher would keep going. A philosopher would say, well, here are the three possibilities, and here's how we test them, and here's my conclusion. Zhuangzi puts the question down and walks off.

People read it as a puzzle about dreams. It isn't. Look at what he's actually taken away from you. Not the answer. The ground you'd stand on to look for one. Because to work out which one is real, you need a you that's outside both of them doing the working out. And the passage has quietly removed that person.

And that's why he stops where he does. If he'd resolved it, you'd have your footing back.

Read one out loud. They were sung, so silent reading loses half of it.

Milarepa didn't write. He sang, in caves, to whoever showed up, usually because somebody had turned up to argue with him. Other people wrote them down afterwards.

And you can see that in the songs. There's no drafting audible in them. No place where you can hear somebody going back to improve a line. The diagram runs level because the whole thing came out at one temperature, in one go, in front of a person who was standing there.

And compare that to how you were taught a poem gets made. You have an idea, you write a draft, you revise, you find the good line and you build toward it, right? That process leaves a shape. There's a peak.

These have no peak because there was no revision to make one.

And he walked around Kailash, which is where this whole page started. So the mountain that four religions put at the centre of the world produced the poems at the beginning of this index, and then a hundred generations later it produced these. Same rock.

Read it. Then wait ten seconds before you read anything else.

Old pond. Frog jumps in. Sound of water.

That's the whole poem. And look at what's not in it. There's no I. Nobody is watching. There's no verb of perception , nothing is seen or heard by anybody. And there's no statement about what it means.

So it's just three things placed next to each other with gaps between them.

So who connects them? You do. And that's the point, right? It's why the last node in the diagram is you and not water. The event the poem is about doesn't happen on the page. It happens in the mind that supplies the connection, which is yours, three hundred years after he put the pieces down.

And this is a completely different technology from Kabīr. Kabīr argues you into vertigo. Bashō just leaves out the wiring and lets you do it.

Read it out loud. It was made to be said, not looked at.

Now this one has a story. In 1945 a farmer in Upper Egypt is digging for fertiliser and he breaks open a sealed jar. Inside are books that had been in the ground for sixteen hundred years. Somebody buried them on purpose. This is one of them.

And it's a poem spoken in the first person. I am the first and the last. I am the honoured one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one.

So here's what's strange about it. Normally when a poem says I am, over and over, it's building you a picture. You accumulate. By the end you know who's talking.

This one cancels. Every line takes back the one before it. Honoured, scorned. Whore, holy. Mother, daughter. You can't assemble anybody out of it, and you're forty lines in before you notice that's deliberate.

And they go, well, that's just paradox, that's a technique. Okay. But look at the diagram. Every node is the same weight. Most poems have a moment. This one has no moment, because there's no place in it where somebody stopped and composed a line about what they saw. It's all one temperature.

Nobody knows who wrote it. There's no doctrine attached to it and no tradition claiming it. It got buried in a jar and that's the only reason you can read it.

Read the sentence once. Then read it again and count the eyes.

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

One eye. One seeing. And he does it inside a single sentence, just by refusing to let two verbs have two subjects.

And this is why they put him on trial. Not because he said something offensive about the church. Because the grammar of that sentence has no room for two parties in it, and the whole theology he was preaching under required exactly two.

Now, he preached this in German, not Latin. That matters more than it sounds. Latin meant clergy. German meant the woman who sold you bread could hear it on a Sunday.

So he took a sentence that dissolves the distance between creature and creator and he said it out loud, in the street language, to people who had no training to soften it with.

He died before the verdict came in.

Read the poem before you read a word of the commentary. Any commentary, including mine.

So here's the situation the poem was written in. He's locked in a cell nine months wide. His own order put him there. They flogged him weekly.

And the poem he writes is in the voice of a woman, slipping out of a house at night, in the dark, to meet a lover.

Now the commentary came later. Everybody reads the commentary , the dark night of the soul, the purgation, the stages. And that's all his, and it's all afterwards. The poem is the primary document and the theology is downstream of it.

So he had the experience, wrote a love poem about it, and then spent years explaining to his own order what the love poem meant. And they go, wait, why a woman? Why at night? Why a lover?

Well, because that's what it was like. He used the vocabulary that fit, and then built a doctrine to make it survivable.

Read the poem first. Once you've read the commentary you can't unread it, and the poem stops being able to do its own work.

Laugh for one minute. Then sit still for one. Then read.

The river and its waves are one surf. Where's the difference between the river and its waves?

So look at who's asking. That's a person standing outside something, trying to work out the relationship between two things. That's a seeker. And he's asking somebody , tell me, sir. That's a student putting it to a teacher.

Then the pivot. Because it has been named as wave, shall it no longer be considered as water?

And that's the answer, and it arrives as another question. The difference you've been suffering over got built. Somebody named it into existence. Before the naming there was water moving.

Now notice what he did to you. He used the dualistic mind to take apart the dualistic mind. A wave is asking how to tell itself apart from water. So the question dissolves its own footing while you're leaning on it to help.

And most people get a little vertigo right there, right? You lean in to solve it and the floor of the problem just goes. That empty-handed moment is the understanding. Don't rush past it.

And then he breaks the frame. One line, no bridge: within the Supreme Brahma, the worlds are being told like beads. You just went from a river to all the worlds. There's no argument that gets you from one to the other. You can only be suddenly there.

Say it aloud three times before you look at any English.

Ik Onkar.

So Ik is the number one. Not the word one, right, the digit. It's still printed as a digit at the front of the scripture. So the book opens by counting, and it stops at one.

Now here's what's missing, and this is the whole thing. There's no verb.

English can't do that. Every translation has to put something in. There is one God. God is one. And the second you put in is, you've made a sentence with a subject and a thing said about the subject. That's two. And the line was refusing to have two.

So every English version has to lie a little bit to be grammatical. That's not a translation problem you can fix with a better translator. It's built into the languages.

And notice what's in front of it. Nothing. No introduction, no and Nanak said, no run-up. The whole scripture opens already inside the thing it's about.

Try saying it and meaning it without quietly supplying a verb underneath. Most people can't, the first hundred times. The place where you fail is exactly the habit the line was built to take apart.

Say it three times before you think about it.

By a way I came, but I went not by the way.

Read that again and look at the tenses. Came is past and finished. Went not is also past, but it's a different past. It's a not-happening held inside a happening.

So both of them are true at the same time. She arrived and she didn't travel. And English can barely hold it. You keep wanting to fix it into a sequence, first this then that, and the line won't let you.

Now here's the thing about Lallā. She wasn't writing. She was a woman who walked out of a marriage and walked around Kashmir saying these, and they got passed mouth to mouth for centuries before anybody wrote them down. Hindus kept them. Muslims kept them. Both.

And that tells you something. A poem that survives centuries with no book, no institution and no fixed copy, carried by people who disagreed with each other about God, is doing something for them they couldn't get anywhere else.

And it's four lines long.

Read one line. Stop. Then the next.

Willing to experience aloneness, I discover connection everywhere.

Now this is a contemporary poem, written by somebody who isn't in the old anthologies, and I want it here next to the old ones on purpose.

So look at the construction. It's just a completed transaction. Willing to do the thing you're avoiding, I found the thing you were chasing. There's no argument in it, no persuasion, no working out. It's a report from after.

And she does it again. And again. Every line in the poem is that same shape, which is why the diagram has no turn in it.

That's the Aṣṭāvakra move, which is many centuries older. The student says he's arrived by verse eleven, and the rest of the text elaborates from inside the arrival with no seeking anywhere in it. Same posture. Different century, different hemisphere, and no lineage connecting them that anybody can trace.

Which is the argument this whole page is making, and here it is happening in California in English in your lifetime.

Read it slowly. It moves faster than it looks.

There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken.

So she takes the word and turns it inside out in a single line. Not brokenness healed. Not brokenness survived. Brokenness that the unbroken comes out of, which means the breaking was the door and not the damage.

Now here's what I find remarkable about this one. That poem has been circulating for about forty years, in hospices, in grief groups, in twelve-step rooms, mostly with nobody's name on it. People hand it to each other on photocopies. Many of them have no idea who wrote it.

And they go, well, that's just what happens on the internet.

No. Look at Lallā, six hundred years earlier, in Kashmir. Same thing. No book, no institution, no fixed text, carried by people who needed it and gave it to the next person who needed it.

And that's not a metaphor for transmission. That's just the mechanism, still running, in English, now.

This one you look at before you read anything. Give it thirty seconds first.

A red square. Down at the bottom, small, a figure sitting in lotus made out of about four shapes — a circle for the head, a wedge for the body, two knees. That's it. That's the whole human being.

And out of the top of that head, a thread. It rises, and as it rises it thickens, and what it thickens into is the syllable om, printed over and over, scaled and rotated, thousands of them, and then near the top it opens out into two arcs that sweep away sideways like water leaving a fountain.

Now look at where you can actually read it. Down near the head the glyphs are so small and so crowded that they're just a yellow filament. You can't see a letter. Halfway up, individual oms start resolving. At the top they're clear, and they're also flying apart.

So legibility increases with height. Which is a completely counterintuitive thing to build, right, because the reading eye wants the important part near the subject. He puts the unreadable part next to the body and the readable part out at the far end of the ascent.

And the title is a joke. Omphaloskepsis. Navel-gazing. Greek, omphalos, the navel, and skepsis, looking. Except he's caught that the word already has om sitting inside it, so the mockery and the practice are the same string of letters and you can't separate them.

That's the sophisticated part. He's pre-empted you. Whatever you were going to say about a middle-aged man in California making mandalas out of Sanskrit, he's already put it in the title, in Greek, and gone on working.

Now here's what I think is the real argument in it. Kempton says the poems arrive — that he's a scribe taking dictation, and that when he sits down and tries, he gets what he calls echo chambers of emptiness. This picture is a diagram of that claim. One body at the bottom, not producing anything. A channel. And the material getting more articulate the further it travels from the person.

He spent those same decades editing his teacher's tape-recorded discourses into books. Somebody else's voice, transcribed by two other people, corrected, laid out, published. Scribe there too.

So this isn't a poem about spirituality. It's a picture of a working method, made by somebody who used the same method twice — once on his own aha, once on a swami in Lompoc — and it says the same thing both times, which is that the interesting part is not happening at the level of the person.