What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThe apparent many are ultimately one; separateness is the illusion to see through.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Islam and Transcendental Meditation 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 across13 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJudaism · c. 1000 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as22 tenets · 8 figures · 6 scriptures · 5 storys
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 — 21 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 7 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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Atman and Brahman are one — the self is the absolute.
Advaita affirms this; Dvaita holds the opposite — that self and God are eternally distinct. Both are Hinduism, and their argument is eight centuries old and still running.
⚖ contested within
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All things arise dependently.
Pratityasamutpada: nothing stands alone — everything arises with conditions and ceases with them.
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All things are empty of own-being.
Sunyata: emptiness is not nothingness but the absence of independent existence. Nagarjuna pushed it all the way — even emptiness is empty, or it becomes one more thing to hold.
⚖ contested within
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Emptiness runs all the way down.
Shunyata — all things, nirvana included, are empty of self-nature.
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Five forms, one Brahman.
Vishnu, Shiva, Devi, Ganesha, Surya — worship any; all resolve into one.
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Judaism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
God contracted to make room for the world.
Tzimtzum. Isaac Luria taught in Safed in the 1570s that the Infinite withdrew from a point so that something not-God could exist, and that the vessels made to hold the light shattered. Every commandment kept lifts one fallen spark — which is where the word tikkun comes from.
⚖ contested within
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Matter, sickness and death are errors of belief, not facts about the world.
God is All-in-all and God is Mind, so what is real is mental and spiritual; the material universe reported by the five senses is a misapprehension. Sickness is therefore not a condition to be fought but an error to be seen through, and healing is correction rather than cure.
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Pantheism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Deus sive Natura — God, or Nature.
One substance, infinite, self-caused, of which every rock and thought is a mode. There is no outside for a creator to stand in.
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T
The one substance.
Not a person, not a mind, not a maker — and therefore not something that can want anything from you. Spinoza still called it God, and meant it.
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Deus sive Natura — God, or Nature.
One substance, infinite, self-caused, of which every rock and thought is a mode. There is no outside for a creator to stand in.
Go deeper — context →
T
The one substance.
Not a person, not a mind, not a maker — and therefore not something that can want anything from you. Spinoza still called it God, and meant it.
Meet them — context →
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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Cynicism
— one faith of this family holds it
The cosmos is a single rational animal, and you are a part of it.
Providence is not a plan made for you; it is the fact that the whole is ordered. Living well means agreeing with how it is already going.
held by most
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Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Order and disorder are both things you are doing.
The Sacred Chao is drawn with a pentagon on one side and a golden apple on the other — the Aneristic and Eristic Principles, order and disorder. Neither is a property of the world. Both are grids people lay over an undivided reality, and the grid is not the thing.
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Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
Fana.
The sense of being a separate person doing the remembering drops away. The Sufi map puts baqa after it — subsistence, coming back and being able to function. Jurists watch this territory closely, because it is exactly where al-Hallaj said the sentence that got him executed.
⚖ contested within
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Jediism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Force is real and it is not a person.
An energy generated by living things and binding them, attended to rather than prayed to. Jedi doctrine is careful on this point: the Force does not intend, answer or judge, and treating it as a god is a category error the Temple corrects in new members.
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T
The Force.
Taken from a film and then taken seriously. Jedi do not claim the films are scripture; they claim the films described something the tradition had already noticed, in the same way a novel can describe grief accurately without inventing it.
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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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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Sahaj — the state that holds by itself.
The word means natural, easy, without effort, and it is what the practice is aiming at: a mind that has stopped seesawing without being held still. Sikh writers are careful to say it cannot be produced on demand, which is what separates it from a technique.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The useless tree.
A carpenter passes an enormous ancient tree and does not even look at it: the wood rots, the branches twist, it would make a bad boat and a worse coffin. That night the tree appears to him in a dream and points out that every useful tree in the district was cut down young, and asks what exactly he means by useless.
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The Zhuangzi.
Thirty-three chapters of stories, jokes and invented dialogues, including several in which Confucius is made to argue the Taoist side. It is funnier and stranger than the Daodejing and has done at least as much work: Chinese landscape painting, most of its poetry and a good deal of Chan Buddhism come out of this book.
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The Neo-American Church
— one faith of this family holds it
Life is a dream, and enlightenment is noticing.
Kleps's doctrine is solipsist rather than theist: what is ultimate is the dreaming consciousness, and the world is its content. He held that this is not a metaphor and not consoling.
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The Order of the Solar Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
What you are is not the body, and it goes back to the Source.
A gnostic frame in Templar dress: consciousness gathered on Earth is a deposit to be returned. The teaching made physical death a formality, which is exactly the load-bearing point when the Transit was called.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Fana.
The sense of being a separate person doing the remembering drops away. The Sufi map puts baqa after it — subsistence, coming back and being able to function. Jurists watch this territory closely, because it is exactly where al-Hallaj said the sentence that got him executed.
Go deeper — context →
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 →
Atman and Brahman are one — the self is the absolute.
Advaita affirms this; Dvaita holds the opposite — that self and God are eternally distinct. Both are Hinduism, and their argument is eight centuries old and still running.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The world and every soul are God's body.
Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita: one reality, but a qualified one — Vishnu as the self, souls and matter as the body he animates and rules. It keeps the unity the Upanishads insist on and the relationship devotion requires, which is why it became the theology of the largest devotional network in the south.
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