Science01
Physical processes. Reality, as science claims to know it, is what can be observed, measured, and used to predict.
Asked of every system
Twenty-two questions
The same questions, asked in the same order. Read down a question to see where they rhyme and where they do not. No establishment is rewritten to fit the others.
- 01Where are we?
- 02What is reality made of?
- 03What is a human being?
- 04What is consciousness?
- 05Where did humanity come from?
- 06What happens at death?
- 07Does consciousness return to embodiment?
- 08Where is consciousness between lives?
- 09Are there nonhuman intelligent beings?
- 10Can those beings become human or appear human?
- 11Are there multiple realms or worlds?
- 12Is there a central mountain, tree, pillar, axis, heart, or sacred center?
- 13Is the world itself alive?
- 14Has civilization or the world been destroyed or reset before?
- 15Does history operate linearly or cyclically?
- 16Is there an opposing positive/negative force?
- 17What is humanity supposed to become?
- 18Is reincarnation a destination, punishment, school, growth process, or something else?
- 19What lies beyond the visible world?
- 20How does this tradition claim humans can know any of this?
- 21Does the structure or motion of the heavens correspond to events, conditions, or consciousness within the human realm?
- 22Why did humanity forget?
02 / 22
What is reality made of?
- Judaism02
Creation by God. The world is made, contingent, and ordered — not self-existent.
A created cosmos under divine order, including heavenly and earthly layers.
Creation by God. The cosmos is made and contingent.
- Islam05
Creation by Allah, encompassing the seen and the unseen.
Varies enormously by school. Reality is expressed cyclically; ontologies range across ātman, Brahman, prakṛti, and other accounts.
Conditioned phenomena arising through dependent processes. No permanent independent substance or single creator is required.
The Dao underlying or preceding differentiation. The ten thousand things arise as process, not as a single made artifact.
An ordered cosmos that emerges from a primordial state.
Order established by the gods — the world as a divine achievement of organization.
A cosmos organized from primordial processes.
Reality understood relationally: living relationships rather than inert material alone. Accounts vary.
Successive ordering of creation. Reality is made through divine work and cosmic obligation.
Ordered creation opposed by a destructive force — a dual moral-cosmic structure of spiritual and material creation.
Eternal or preexistent elements and intelligences. God organizes creation rather than producing it from absolute nothing.
Spiritual beings (thetans) precede present embodied existence. The material universe is not ultimate identity.
An interconnected order. Celestial configurations are traditionally understood to correspond with terrestrial conditions and events.
Not stated as one substance. The filed texts speak of gods, clay, the me, cities, and a netherworld. They do not say what reality is made of.
Not one substance. Myth is peopled. Philosophers later argue for elements, forms, or a world-soul. Those arguments are not Homer.
- Jainism20
Souls and non-soul. Matter, karmic bondage, and the rest of the categories are taught; Digambara and Śvetāmbara analyses are not identical.
- Sikhism21
God’s creation, pervaded by God. The world is not an illusion in the sense of being dismissible, and it is not itself the final reality.
- Shinto22
Not stated as a material theory. The world is where kami are present.
Often qi, patterned by yin-yang and the five phases, under Heaven. That classical picture is not every popular account, and it is not a laboratory physics.
In many systems, a material or psychic cosmos made by a lesser power, unlike the spiritual fullness. The inventory of substances changes from text to text.
A cosmos from divine Mind, sometimes said to be living and ensouled. Treatises differ on how matter stands to God.
Not a substance doctrine. Ayé and òrun, àṣẹ, and the òrìṣà are the working terms, and they are not one metaphysics.
Country is not ‘made of’ a neutral material in this record. It is shaped by ancestral beings and known through law.
A world of reciprocal persons — mountains, dead, and deities among them — more than a single material. Imperial Inca language is not every valley’s.
God’s creation. The writings do not offer a physics, and they do not call the world an illusion to be discarded.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed. Hózhǫ́ names balance and right relation, not a physics.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
Working synthesis · not a verdict
Reality itself is alive — an organism, not a dead mechanism.