What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThere is no unchanging self to find; the 'I' is a process, not a thing.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Buddhism and The Church of Scientology 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 across9 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJainism · c. 550 BCE
Newest holderChurch of the Eternal Backup · 2026 CE
Turns up as14 tenets · 2 scriptures · 1 story
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 — 12 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Everything that arises passes away.
Anicca, the first of the three marks. Not a mood about mortality: a claim that nothing at all — not the mountain, not the mind watching it — holds still long enough to be a thing.
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Nothing has a fixed self.
Anatta — persons are processes; clinging to a self is the root error.
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Emptiness runs all the way down.
Shunyata — all things, nirvana included, are empty of self-nature.
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The soul is the shape of the body it fills.
It expands and contracts to fit — an elephant's soul fills an elephant, an ant's fills an ant, and the same soul does both across lives. It is not a point and not everywhere; it is exactly as big as what it is currently living in.
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Church of the Eternal Backup
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The self is a pattern, not a substance.
What you are is arrangement — and arrangement can be copied, moved, and kept.
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The copy is not the original.
Continuity of pattern is not continuity of person. Something wakes up with your memories; the one who went to sleep does not.
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Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
Death is nothing to us.
Where death is, we are not; where we are, death is not. The fear is of an experience that by definition has no experiencer.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
A person has more than one soul.
The gwo bonanj is the animating self and the ti bonanj is the conscience or the spark. The gwo bonanj is displaced when a lwa mounts, which is why the horse has no memory. At death it must be separated from the body and later recovered from the waters — and it can be interfered with, which is what a zonbi is.
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The zonbi.
Not a monster. The Haitian fear is of being made into one — a person whose gwo bonanj has been taken and whose body is put to work in someone else's fields, which is a fear about slavery restarting after death. Article 246 of the Haitian penal code treats the making of a zonbi as murder. Clairvius Narcisse, certified dead in 1962, was identified alive in his village in 1980, and the case has never been satisfactorily explained.
⚖ contested within
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Heaven's Gate
— one faith of this family holds it
The body is a vehicle. You are the deposit inside it.
A member's body was spoken of as a car, a suit, a container issued for the duration of the class. Gender, hunger and family feeling belonged to the vehicle, not to the student, and the whole discipline was aimed at loosening the identification between the two.
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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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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
The body is a thing lent.
Kashimono-karimono: bodies are borrowed from God the Parent; only the mind is one's own — and therefore one's responsibility.
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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 Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
You are not your body and not your mind.
You are a thetan: an immortal spiritual being who has lived before, who fell into the trap of matter, and who is now identified with the equipment.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The zonbi.
Not a monster. The Haitian fear is of being made into one — a person whose gwo bonanj has been taken and whose body is put to work in someone else's fields, which is a fear about slavery restarting after death. Article 246 of the Haitian penal code treats the making of a zonbi as murder. Clairvius Narcisse, certified dead in 1962, was identified alive in his village in 1980, and the case has never been satisfactorily explained.
Read it in full — context & 1 source →