Yogaswami didn't hand these sayings down as conclusions. He flung them — at people who came to his hut by the water expecting answers and instead got a riddle that would take the rest of their lives to crack. "All is truth," muḻudum uṇmai, is the gentlest-sounding of his four great sayings and maybe the most total in what it asks of you.
On the surface it reads almost like a shrug: everything's true, fine. But sit with it the way he meant it and it stops being a platitude and turns into something closer to vertigo. The ordinary spiritual instinct is to look through the world — to treat what's in front of you as a veil, a distraction, a lesser thing standing between you and some truer Reality hidden behind it. Neti, neti, the old path says: not this, not this, peel it all away. Yogaswami's lineage knows that movement and honors it — he also said summa iru, be still. But "all is truth" is the current that flows the other way. Not neti, neti but iti, iti — this too, this too. There is nothing behind the veil because there is no veil. The thing you keep straining to see past is the truth, fully, with nothing held back.
This is the distinctly Shaiva yes. Where some traditions call the world an illusion to be dissolved, this one says the world is real — not real instead of Śiva, but real as Śiva, His own shakti pouring itself into form. The crow on the wall, the smell of the cooking fire, the person you can't forgive, the dull Tuesday, the grief sitting in your chest right now — none of it is a lie you have to get behind. All of it is Him, manifesting, true. Sarvam Sivam. There is no second thing anywhere for any of it to be false against.
And here is where it stops being comforting and starts being demanding, which is how you know it's real. If all is truth, you lose the one move the ego loves most — the right to say this shouldn't be. You can't hold the present moment at arm's length anymore and call it a mistake, an interruption, a wrong turn in the order of things. The karma that arrives is true. The moment is true. Even your own confusion, even the stretches of the path that felt like failure — true, exact, nothing wasted, nothing out of place. To actually receive "all is truth" is to set down the lifelong argument with reality. That's the freedom in it. It's also a kind of death, because the self that's forever rejecting, correcting, reaching elsewhere is left with nothing to do.
That's why he could be so fierce and so still at once. He wasn't waiting for life to become something other than what it was in order to be at peace with it. He'd already seen there was nowhere else the truth could possibly be hiding — not in a better moment, not behind the appearances, not after enlightenment. It was here, it was this, it was all of it. The search ends not when you finally find the truth somewhere far off, but when you realize you were standing in it the whole time, and never once stepped outside.