What you have in your hands is an extreme distillate of the truth as the author has come to see, know and love it after 40 years of seeking the truth as a common thread in the world’s predominant religions, philosophies, psychologies and metaphysical systems. As a poetic compilation it has been further distilled through a multi-phase selection process that has gone on for nearly two years and involved nearly 70,000 pieces. Although offered in a poetic style the author believes serves to enhance potential understanding, each haiku  conveys a rather simple insight that might just as easily be read as a wisdom saying.

 

As to why a collection of haiku was chosen as the first offering in the series, the author would suggest that haiku has an unparalleled potential to overcome the loss of fidelity that normally occurs when relative words and thoughts are used to convey non-relative insights. As such, haiku has a remarkable capacity to evoke direct experiential understanding without the mental noise linguistic communication normally entails. Seen in this light, haiku might be rightly characterized as a kind of “intellectual judo,” in which a simple arrangement of words is used to throw the thinker beyond thought and occasion direct insight.

 

The author further suggests that each of the haiku offered contains a nugget of the truth–some pure gold, some nearly pure and some in need of additional refinement. Some will occasion immediate recognition, some will need pondering, and others will require cross referencing before they reveal their message. The best, at least traditionally, will be those that evoke a surprise, a smile, a laugh. Still others may require extensive contextual correlation with the background information provided in the appendices before they surrender their insight. Of course, an individual reader’s response to any particular haiku will depend on his personal experience and perspective. Even so, each should contribute to a degree of conceptual triangulation that may serve to expand the reader’s mental box, upgrade conceptual software and facilitate direct seeing.