Science01
A biological organism. Consciousness is unresolved.
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?
03 / 22
What is a human being?
- Judaism02
A created human with moral agency.
A human entangled with heavenly rebellion — Watchers, angels, and giants belong to the same story.
An embodied spiritual and moral being.
- Islam05
A human with moral agency, accountable before Allah.
Accounts of ātman/self vary by school. The human is not a single agreed substance across the traditions.
There is no permanent independent self. A human is a conditioned process.
A life that participates in cosmic process — Heaven, Earth, and humanity together.
A being with multiple components of personhood, not a single simple soul-body split.
A human occupying a relationship with the gods.
An inhabitant of one of multiple worlds.
A human embedded within living relationships, including other-than-human persons.
A participant in cosmic obligations, not a spectator of creation.
A moral participant in a cosmic struggle between ordered creation and destructive force.
A being with premortal existence and divine potential.
A thetan — fundamentally spiritual — presently in embodied existence.
A human existing within a larger cosmic pattern. Birth circumstances are traditionally used to map that relationship.
A being fashioned from clay so the gods’ work can be carried. Not a moral sermon in Enki and Ninmah.
A mortal. Homeric persons are composites of life-powers. A rational immortal soul is a philosophical claim, not the whole tradition.
- Jainism20
A jīva in a body, obscured by karma, capable of liberation.
- Sikhism21
A soul bearing self-centeredness, able to remember God and live in hukam.
- Shinto22
A person living with kami and, in many households, with ancestors. Not a soul exiled from heaven.
A being with duties to Heaven and ancestors. Hun and po, or other soul-divisions, appear in some classical and popular accounts and are not universal.
In many texts, a spiritual element inside a body that belongs to the lower cosmos. Other texts do not divide the person that way.
A mortal joined to Mind, able to know God and the cosmos. Not every later Hermetic current keeps that formula.
A person with orí — destiny or inner head — among òrìṣà and kin. The parts of the person are not listed the same way in every lineage.
A relative of country and kin under ancestral law. Nations do not share one theory of the person.
A participant in ayni, reciprocity, with community, dead, and powers of the land.
A rational soul in a body, created to know and worship God and to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization. That is the teaching’s formula, not a biological claim.
People of Sky Woman’s line, in clan, under the Great Law of Peace. A further definition is Unclassified / Source Needed.
Unclassified / Source Needed. A Lakota account of the person is not copied onto Dakota.
Unclassified / Source Needed.
A person who can stand in hózhǫ́. The word is not rendered as soul, enlightenment, or salvation.
People under a covenant to care for the land, organized by clan. A soul-doctrine is 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
Humanity participates in the organism of living reality.