Study first. Then output.

Many traditions that never agreed on doctrine describe the same shape: a hidden source, an outflow into many forms, a way of forgetting where we came from, and a method for getting back. Hermeticism calls the source the All. Kabbalah calls it Ein Sof. Plotinus calls it the One. Vedanta calls it Brahman, and Taoism calls it the Tao.

I'm working through that shared grammar slowly and from the primary texts: Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Christian mysticism, Egyptian religion, Sufism, Vedanta, Taoism and Stoicism. The reading list is 46 texts in four phases, about three years of work. I'm in the first phase.

I try to hold it honestly. Buddhism's teaching of no-self doesn't fit the "return to the true Self" that most of these traditions share, and I don't pretend it does. That tension has lasted two thousand years and I don't expect to settle it.

This is why the rest of the site is built as one thing. The body, the market and the back office are the places I test whether the principle holds in practice. Writing about it comes after the study, not instead of it.