Holds that death is the permanent end of the person and of all experience — and, distinctively, argues this means death cannot actually harm the person who dies, since harm requires an experiencing subject and death leaves no subject behind to be harmed.
Holds that a person consists of two distinct substances — a physical body and a non-physical mind or soul — and that because the soul is not made of matter, it is not necessarily destroyed when the body dies, leaving open the possibility of conscious survival.
Not a single theory but a family of beliefs describing consciousness or the soul persisting beyond bodily death — heaven, hell, and purgatory in Abrahamic traditions; reincarnation and liberation from rebirth in Hindu and Buddhist traditions; ancestor veneration and continued presence among the living in many other traditions — presented here descriptively rather than as an endorsement of any one account.
Holds that mystical experiences across very different cultures, religions, and eras share a common underlying “core” — a direct, unmediated encounter with a single ultimate reality — with each tradition’s specific doctrines simply being different cultural interpretations layered on top of the same essential experience.
The foundational framework most later scholarship on mysticism responds to: James proposed four marks that qualify an experience as mystical — ineffability (it resists being put into words), a noetic quality (it feels like a direct insight into truth), transiency (it doesn’t last), and passivity (the person feels acted upon rather than in control).
A sequence of progressively deeper, highly stable states of meditative absorption described in the earliest Buddhist texts, cultivated through sustained concentration practice and traditionally treated as a tool on the path to liberation rather than an end in themselves.
Not a single theory but a comparative pattern: many religious traditions independently describe a state of direct union with, or dissolution into, ultimate reality as the highest goal of contemplative practice — unio mystica in Christian mysticism, fanā’ in Sufi Islam, moksha in Hindu traditions, and nirvana in Buddhist traditions — presented here descriptively as a shared structural pattern rather than as evidence any one tradition’s specific interpretation is correct.
Holds that numbers, sets, and other mathematical objects exist as real, abstract entities independent of human minds — meaning mathematicians discover mathematical truths rather than inventing them.
Holds that mathematics is not about an abstract reality at all, but is a game of manipulating meaningless symbols according to agreed-upon rules — true only in the sense of being validly derived, not in the sense of describing anything.
Holds that mathematics is a construction of the human mind, not a description of an external reality or a formal symbol-game — so a mathematical statement is only true if a mental construction proving it actually exists, which leads intuitionists to reject some classical logical laws.