What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionRelease from the cycle — the freedom that ends the wandering.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Transhumanism 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.
Travels across21 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJainism · c. 550 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as33 tenets · 13 storys · 5 figures · 4 codes
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 — 30 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 6 faiths of this family hold it
The world is an appearance you have mistaken for a fact.
Maya, in Shankara's Advaita: Brahman alone is real, the world is neither exactly real nor exactly unreal, and ignorance is the only thing that ever needed removing. Ramanuja and Madhva both rejected it outright — for them the world is God's and therefore real.
⚖ contested within
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The self is reborn until liberation.
Samsara is the default condition; moksha — release — is the shared goal the schools define differently.
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Judaism
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
The kingdom has arrived and has not arrived.
Jesus announced it as present and then taught his followers to pray for its coming. Every Christian ethic since has lived in that gap: the world is already claimed, and visibly is not yet what it was claimed for.
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The Exodus.
Christianity did not write this story and could not do without it. Passover became Easter, the sea became the font, and slaves in the American South sang it back at their owners while the owners were preaching obedience out of the same book.
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Cynicism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Virtue is enough, and everything else is weight.
Diogenes threw away his cup after watching a child drink from cupped hands — not a gesture but an audit, one item off a list he was trying to empty.
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D
Diogenes of Sinope — the dog.
The nickname was an insult he kept: a dog eats in public, sleeps anywhere, has no shame and bites its friends. Asked what philosophy had given him, he said he was prepared for any fortune.
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also here
Stoicism
Transhumanism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Death is optional.
The second of the four Truths, and the operative one: if a person is a pattern, then recording the pattern now and running it later is a survival strategy rather than a memorial.
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also here
Transhumanism
Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Liberation can be engineered.
Aum's pitch was that meditation has measurable stages, that a competent teacher can tell you which one you are on, and that the sequence can be accelerated. It is precisely this promise of technical certainty that drew engineers, doctors and physicists, and it is the shape of the group's whole later behaviour.
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Church Universal and Triumphant
— one faith of this family holds it
Balance your karma in this embodiment.
The teaching says the account can be settled and the ascension made in this life. The violet flame is offered as the instrument for doing it.
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Eckankar
— one faith of this family holds it
Soul does not need to be saved. It needs to travel.
Soul already exists and already is what it is. The problem is that it identifies with one body at a time; the practice is learning to leave and come back on purpose.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Ginen is under the water.
The ancestral homeland, Africa, is located below the sea, and the dead go there for a year and a day before being drawn back up. A religion made by people who were carried across an ocean in ships put the place they came from at the bottom of it.
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Under the water.
Ginen is Africa and Africa is beneath the sea, which is where the dead go and where they are called back from. The Middle Passage is the geography: people taken across an ocean built a cosmology in which the homeland and the land of the dead are the same place, and it is downward.
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Heaven's Gate
— one faith of this family holds it
The kingdom of heaven is a physical place and you get there in a craft.
The group read the gospels as a literal account of visitors: the Next Level is a real civilisation, its members have bodies, and the resurrection was a transfer. This is why the teaching has no mysticism in it at all — it is closer to an emigration procedure than to a devotion.
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The twenty-two years were a classroom.
The group dated itself from 1975 and described everything after as coursework. The final statements use the language of a term ending — graduation, closure, the crew arriving — and members recorded farewell videos in which they say, repeatedly and cheerfully, that nobody is making them do this.
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Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
The soul goes on, and keeps going.
It comes into being at conception, is not pre-existent, does not return to another body, and after death continues to develop through worlds the living cannot picture. Heaven and hell are conditions of nearness or distance from God, not places, and progress after death remains possible.
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The Seven Valleys.
Written to a Sufi judge in the language and imagery of Persian mysticism, tracing the soul through search, love, knowledge, unity, contentment, wonderment, and finally true poverty and absolute nothingness. It is deliberately in the register of 'Attár's Conference of the Birds, addressed to a reader who would recognise the form.
held by most
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Love Has Won
— one faith of this family holds it
Earth was moving from 3D into 5D consciousness.
Love Has Won taught that humanity and Earth were entering a fifth-dimensional state, described as New Earth or Heaven consciousness.
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Mandaeism
— one faith of this family holds it
The soul is light in exile.
Gnosis survives here: the soul (nishimta) belongs to the world of light and is stranded in matter — religion is the long trip home.
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Pantheism
— one faith of this family holds it
Soul does not need to be saved. It needs to travel.
Soul already exists and already is what it is. The problem is that it identifies with one body at a time; the practice is learning to leave and come back on purpose.
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Pyrrhonism (Scepticism)
— one faith of this family holds it
It is belief that hurts, not the world.
The sceptic gets cold and hungry like anyone else. What he is spared is the second layer — the conviction that cold is bad in its nature — and that layer is where most suffering lives.
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The painter who threw the sponge.
Apelles could not paint the foam on a horse's mouth, gave up, and threw his dirty sponge at the panel. The mark it left was the foam.
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Russian Cosmism
— one faith of this family holds it
The rocket theorist came to the library.
Tsiolkovsky arrived in Moscow as a nearly deaf teenager with no money and was guided in his reading by the librarian. He later described Fyodorov as having taken the place of university teachers.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Liberation happens while you are alive.
Jivan mukti — free while breathing, working and raising children, not after death. Sikh scripture has strikingly little to say about heaven and hell, and treats both mostly as descriptions of a mind.
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Antam Sanskar — the last rite.
The body is washed, dressed in the five Ks, and cremated, usually within a day; Kirtan Sohila is recited, Ardas is said, and a complete reading of the scripture is finished within about ten days. The Rehat Maryada forbids raising any monument over the ashes, which is why Sikh cemeteries barely exist.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
Immortality is a physical project.
Not the soul surviving — the body refined until it does not die. Outer alchemy tried it with cinnabar and mercury and killed several emperors; inner alchemy relocated the same furnace, ingredients and process inside the practitioner. The vocabulary of neidan is chemistry, used deliberately.
⚖ contested within
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The peaches of the Queen Mother.
Xiwangmu keeps an orchard in the Kunlun mountains where the peaches ripen once every three thousand years and confer immortality. Every story about them is a story about someone getting in and taking one — and being caught, and punished, and remaining immortal, because the peach does not care about the paperwork.
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The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
Engrams are recordings, and they can be discharged.
An engram is a moment of pain and unconsciousness recorded whole. Auditing locates it, runs it through until the charge is gone, and the church holds that the ability lost with it comes back.
held by most
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The Church of the SubGenius
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Church of the SubGenius
The Order of the Solar Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Order of the Solar Temple
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The world is an appearance you have mistaken for a fact.
Maya, in Shankara's Advaita: Brahman alone is real, the world is neither exactly real nor exactly unreal, and ignorance is the only thing that ever needed removing. Ramanuja and Madhva both rejected it outright — for them the world is God's and therefore real.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Immortality is a physical project.
Not the soul surviving — the body refined until it does not die. Outer alchemy tried it with cinnabar and mercury and killed several emperors; inner alchemy relocated the same furnace, ingredients and process inside the practitioner. The vocabulary of neidan is chemistry, used deliberately.
Go deeper — context →
Whether a woman can be liberated from a woman's body.
Svetambaras say yes and hold that the nineteenth Tirthankara, Malli, was a woman. Digambaras say no — liberation requires complete nudity, nudity is not possible for a woman, and a female soul must be reborn male first. This is the sharpest doctrinal division in Jainism and it has never been resolved.
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Sallekhana.
The voluntary withdrawal from food at the end of a life, in stages, with the mind held even, taken only with a teacher's permission and revocable at any point. The tradition insists at length on what separates it from suicide — no aversion, no desire for death, no haste, no drugs, no violence. Indian courts have not entirely accepted the distinction.
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