350 passages from 24 traditions, embedded as points in 768-dimensional space. Click any point to explore. Drag to rotate.
Click a passage. See where else in the world — and in history — someone said the same thing.
We tagged each passage by how it points: negation, affirmation, experience, or paradox. Then measured how tightly each group clusters across traditions.
Paradox is the most universal language. When mystics hold contradiction without resolving it, they converge most tightly — regardless of tradition, century, or continent.
The doctrinal cluster is more scattered. Laws, rituals, and cosmologies are where traditions diverge. The paradoxical center is where they meet.
The most surprising connections aren't between mystics — they're between poets, scientists, and novelists who landed in the mystical core without trying.
Every passage above was analyzed in English. But many of these texts were written in Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Ancient Greek. What happens when we embed the originals?
We ran 16 passages through a multilingual model that maps all languages into the same vector space. Then we measured how far each original landed from its English translation.
Arabic and Persian translations are nearly perfect — Rumi's ocean metaphor scores 92% similarity to the original Persian. But Sanskrit is dramatically unfaithful — the Mandukya Upanishad scores just 21%. English translators of Sanskrit texts are adding enormous interpretive scaffolding.
The implication: when the Chandogya Upanishad appears to cluster with Plotinus in our analysis, some of that similarity may be the translator — not the original author — reaching for Neoplatonic framing. The finger pointing at the moon is partly the translator's finger.