What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionSomething of the divine is present in every person, and can be consulted directly.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Urantia Movement are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfHow truth arrives
Travels across16 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderTaoism · c. 500 BCE
Newest holderOrdinary Time · 2026 CE
Turns up as13 tenets · 4 codes · 4 rites · 4 figures
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 20 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 4 faiths of this family hold it
Let your yes be yes.
A ban on oath-taking, read literally by Quakers and Anabaptists and figuratively by nearly everyone else. English Quakers went to prison rather than swear in court, and the affirmation now available in most common-law countries exists because they kept refusing.
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The meeting is silent and has no occasion.
It happens weekly for no reason, which is the reason.
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The unremarkable meeting.
An hour of silence with no occasion attached, ending when someone stands.
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Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Every child is born on the fitra.
People arrive already oriented toward God; upbringing turns them elsewhere. The hadith says the parents make the child a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian — which is why Muslims call conversion to Islam reversion rather than conversion.
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When consultation works.
Participants describe a point at which nobody can remember who proposed what, and a conclusion emerges that none of them brought into the room. That is the stated objective rather than a happy accident, and the mechanism is the instruction to release ownership of your view the instant you have spoken it — which is the hardest of the rules and the one most often broken.
held by most
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Church Universal and Triumphant
— one faith of this family holds it
The I AM Presence is above you, and it is you.
The Chart of Your Divine Self shows three figures on one axis: the Presence, the Christ Self, and the person standing here. The practice is closing the distance.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Human nature is good — or it is not.
Mencius says the four sprouts of virtue are innate and that anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well feels alarm before calculating anything. Xunzi says nature is crooked and that ritual and teaching are the steaming and bending that straighten it. Mencius won the orthodoxy; Xunzi has the better account of why education is necessary.
⚖ contested within
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Seven days looking at bamboo.
Taking Zhu Xi's instruction to investigate things literally, the young Wang Yangming and a friend sat in front of a stand of bamboo to find its principle. The friend collapsed after three days; Wang lasted seven and made himself ill. He concluded that principle is not out there in the bamboo, and built a philosophy on the failure.
⚖ contested within
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Deism
— one faith of this family holds it
There is no service.
Deism has no congregation, no sabbath, no sacrament and no clergy. Paine wrote that his own mind was his own church, and it is the most accurate one-line description of what a deist does.
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Eckankar
— one faith of this family holds it
The ECK can be heard.
The life current is described as an audible sound — flute, bees, thunder, depending on which plane — and as light. Hearing it is the practice's first checkable result.
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Jediism
— one faith of this family holds it
Sitting with the Force.
The daily discipline, and the one thing every Jedi organisation agrees on. It is meditation with a specific target: noticing anger early enough that it does not become the reason for the next thing you do.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Makoto — a sincere heart.
The nearest thing to a first principle, and it means the absence of a second, concealed intention rather than intensity of feeling. A rite done correctly with a divided heart is held to be worth less than one done clumsily with a whole one, and no one can check which you did.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Ritual without the heart is theatre.
Asa ki Var takes apart the sacred thread, the ritual bath, the pilgrimage and the fast in turn, and asks what any of them actually changed in the man performing them. The tradition then built rites of its own, and has spent five centuries arguing about which of them went the same way.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
De — what accumulates when you stop grabbing.
Usually translated virtue, which imports a moral tone the word does not have. It is nearer to potency or standing: the effectiveness a thing has by being fully what it is. The Daodejing's point is that it grows in the person who is not accumulating it.
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The Brahma Kumaris
— one faith of this family holds it
You are a point of light behind the forehead.
Not a body with a soul in it somewhere: a soul, sized and located, wearing a body. The practice starts by holding that fact rather than believing it.
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The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
Every person has worth, and it is not conditional.
Not because they were made by anyone or are going anywhere afterwards. The claim is asserted as the starting point rather than derived, which is the movement's most criticised move.
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The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
— one faith of this family holds it
Nobody else is doing this to you.
The one demand under a teaching that made a virtue of dropping demands: your anger, your boredom and your devotion are your own production.
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The Urantia Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
A fragment of God lives in your mind.
The Thought Adjuster arrives in childhood, is genuinely a piece of the Father, and survives with the person who chooses to survive. It is the book's answer to where God actually is.
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T
The Universal Father.
One source, never depicted, reachable only through a described hierarchy — and simultaneously present inside every mind as a fragment of himself. The book holds both without apology.
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Vedic Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
Awakening is uncovered, not acquired.
Buddha-nature: the thing you are trying to reach is already the thing looking. Practice removes rather than adds. East Asia built whole schools on this; the elders decline the premise.
⚖ contested within
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
Character is the thing being measured.
Iwa is what the orisha weigh. The odu say repeatedly that a person may have wealth, children and long life and still have got it wrong, and that gentle character is the only thing that holds any of the rest in place. A rich man of bad character is described as poor.
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Feeding your own head.
Cool water, gin, kola, honey — whatever your Ori was told it takes — pressed to your own head with your own palms while you speak to it. No priest, no shrine, no money, no permission. It is the most private act in the religion and the one that addresses the only divinity that is yours alone.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Awakening is uncovered, not acquired.
Buddha-nature: the thing you are trying to reach is already the thing looking. Practice removes rather than adds. East Asia built whole schools on this; the elders decline the premise.
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Human nature is good — or it is not.
Mencius says the four sprouts of virtue are innate and that anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well feels alarm before calculating anything. Xunzi says nature is crooked and that ritual and teaching are the steaming and bending that straighten it. Mencius won the orthodoxy; Xunzi has the better account of why education is necessary.
Go deeper — context →
Seven days looking at bamboo.
Taking Zhu Xi's instruction to investigate things literally, the young Wang Yangming and a friend sat in front of a stand of bamboo to find its principle. The friend collapsed after three days; Wang lasted seven and made himself ill. He concluded that principle is not out there in the bamboo, and built a philosophy on the failure.
Read it in full — context →
W
Wang Yangming.
He sat in front of bamboo for seven days trying to investigate its principle as Zhu Xi seemed to instruct, made himself ill, and concluded the method was wrong: principle is in the mind, moral knowledge is innate, and knowing and acting are one thing rather than two. He also won wars, which his critics found difficult to argue with.
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