All things are known to all and All has not been born yet?
Victor Vahidi Motti
The attributed saying by the Persian sage Boozargmehr — 6th century CE
“All things are known to all and All has not been born yet”
— has a remarkably dense metaphysical flavor despite its brevity.
One way to unpack it:
“All things are known to all” suggests a deep underlying unity of mind or being. Knowledge is not isolated inside separate individuals; rather, every being participates in a common intelligible reality. It resembles themes found in:
the Stoic logos,
the Vedantic Atman–Brahman identity,
Neoplatonic participation in the One,
and even modern ideas of collective or distributed cognition.
“All has not been born yet” introduces incompleteness and becoming. Reality is still unfolding. The totality of existence, understanding, or consciousness is not finished. The cosmos is participatory and evolutionary rather than static.
Together, the line creates a paradoxical vision:
there is already a shared ground of knowing,
yet existence itself is still in the process of emergence.
It combines:
unity (“all things are known to all”)
withopen futurity (“All has not been born yet”).
That is unusually sophisticated for such a short aphorism. It avoids both strict determinism (“everything already exists fully”) and radical separation (“everyone is epistemically isolated”).
Historically, Boozargmehr is often portrayed in Persian literature as a wise counselor associated with the court of Khosrow I, though many sayings attributed to him were probably shaped through centuries of later transmission and interpretation.
