This is perhaps the most mystic and cryptic verse of all; the language is deliberately dense, a double negative used for more than Shakespearean emphasis. It runs: “It is not that I was not, nor that you were not, nor that these kings were not; nor shall we ever cease to be.” The naïve, positive reading is that these kings, you and I existed in the past and shall exist in the future. But the verse is richly suggestive. It may mean that, in the past, there was no distinction among my non-existence, yours and theirs — for non-existence only appears to be heterogeneous. It may mean that in the past we all existed as one homogeneous being; that only in the present do we see distinct variety; and that in the future we shall again be one. In that sense, before these bodies were born they existed as a single whole (“the unmanifest in the beginning,” 2.28), and after death we shall exist, perhaps not embodied but as one whole (“the unmanifest in the end”). It may finally mean that we have always been present as manifestations of the one Truth spoken of in 2.16: the kings are the Truth, you are the Truth, I am the Truth, and by the transitive law all of us are the one same Truth, the apparent differences dissolving with time. The great sayings of the Mahāvākyas, and the highest claims of the saints — Gārgī, Madālasā, Janaka, Ādi Śaṅkara, Gorakṣanātha, Kabīra, al-Hallāj, Rūmī, Nāmadeva, Dattātreya, Ānandamayī Mā, Sadāśiva Brahmendra, Ramaṇa Maharṣi, and, to some degree, even the Buddha and Jesus (“I and my Father are one”) — all point to the riddle of this puzzling verse.