Thinkers such as Rene Guenon and Aldous Huxley have argued for Perennialism on metaphysical grounds. This work tries to formalize those arguments using the language of generative modeling to better reason about them. You can check out the full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2602.11368
The ELBO optimization objective reveals two coupled demands on the practitioner:
• Orthodoxy: Reconstruction term
• Self-transcendence: Regularization term
Ideal contemplative practice is thus a balance involving fidelity to form without losing the self-emptying trajectory...
What survives the elimination? Perennialism, in which there is one latent source, decoded through many tradition-specific revelations, and re-encoded through tradition-specific mystical practices. What is perennial is thus the capacity to recover the source in varying contexts...
Can you extract the "common core" of all religions as is done in Universalism? It turns out that stripping away tradition-specific structure discards the information needed to recover the source. The result is posterior collapse and an undirected shallow contemplative practice...
Why can't you just mix traditions as is done in Syncretism? Religious practices lie on non-linear manifolds. Interpolating between any two lands you off both, with no guarantee of recovering the source. It is like averaging images in pixel space: you get ghosts, not faces...
To back this up, I point to Thomas Metzinger's empirical work, which found a shared 12-factor phenomenological structure across traditions. With separate unrelated sources, this convergence on the part of mystics would be a massive coincidence...
I first argue that Exclusivism can not explain cross-traditional contemplative convergence. Buddhist jhanas, Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, and Sufi maqamat describe strikingly parallel progressions, all developed in isolation... x.com/stephen_zer...
In the paper I compare four generative setups based on different models of how religious traditions may relate:
• Exclusivism: separate sources
• Syncretism: mixing in observable space
• Universalism: one source, one decoder
• Perennialism: shared source, distinct decoders
The task of a devoted religious practitioner is then to train an "encoder" through contemplative practice to recover that hidden source (the Esoteric). Meditation, prayer, and ascetic discipline are therefore all methods of inference within this generative process...
The core idea is that religious traditions work like generative models. A low-d unified source (the Absolute) gets projected through tradition-specific "decoders" (Revelation) into the complex high-d forms we observe: doctrine, ritual, scripture, sacred art (the Exoteric)...
New preprint: "The Manifold of the Absolute: Religious Perennialism as Generative Inference"
If religious traditions seem to contradict each other, can they still point to the same truth? And if so, how? To better reason about it, I modeled the question using the math of VAEs...
Link to references: bit.ly/4q3tEna
Link to slides: drive.google.com/file/d/1yw-Q...
Happy to finally share a new recorded version of the talk I gave at MAPS Psychedelic Science 2025!
It’s a fun, non-technical intro that uses machine learning concepts to explain both how entrenched pathological beliefs form and how psychedelic therapy may help to dismantle them. youtu.be/bRX80ByWT1A
I'm trying to figure out where to live next, and one big consideration is the climate. So naturally I made a tool that represents monthly average temperatures for cities as 3D rings so they can be compared more easily. Check it out: awjuliani.github.io/weather-expl...
Though notably not, according to Tomberg, divine magic. But magic nonetheless.
For any aspiring Christian mystics who might find it of use, here is the guide: awjuliani.github.io/tarot-carous...
Like many others, Claude Code has completely transfixed me. I can just think of an idea (such as "interactive guide to Meditations on the Tarot"), picture it clearly in my mind, put it into language, and then minutes later have it materialize fully formed. It truly feels like magic.
While reading Meditations on the Tarot, I was struck by this passage.
It applies just as much (if not more) to many modern day "psychonauts" as it did to the mystics of the author's time.
Chasing the state without the integration or application, and going nowhere as a result.
Oh cool. I read the experience of god earlier this year!
I'm curious; Is he a writer, or someone you know personally?
you are now the third person who told me they aimed for classical theism and got pure land buddhism! fwiw they are in roughly the same neighborhood...
The quiz, taxonomy, and tools around it are all open source and available at the link below. If you are a philosopher (armchair or otherwise) and have feedback to improve or extend the taxonomy or site, please feel free to submit a GitHub issue or PR! 7/7
github.com/awjuliani/m...
I encourage you to try it and share the results. Despite practicing Buddhism for many years, through developing the quiz I learned that I'm actually more of a Neoplatonist. You might discover something new about your beliefs as well!
Take the quiz -> awjuliani.github.io/metaphysics... 6/7
Models were all over the place in terms of how well they could introspect their true beliefs. For example, Gemini 3 Pro was way off with its declared Spinozism. The exception was GPT-5.1, which was convinced that it is a scientific materialist and indeed scores accordingly. 5/7
It's also 2025, so of course I had to give the quiz to a bunch of the top LLMs. I first ask them what metaphysical system they claim to subscribe to, then give them the quiz and compare the results. Unsurprisingly, Claude Opus 4.5 has the most eccentric beliefs of the bunch. 4/7
This Tetralemma structure creates a high-D representational space of belief systems which can then be projected down onto a 2D plane. The space preserves a lot of interesting relationships between systems, such as the materialists forming an archipelago in the bottom right. 3/7
The taxonomy is based on the logical structure of a Tetralemma, where each of the eight quiz-axes has one of four values: A, B, both A and B, or neither A nor B. For example, the ontology axis has the options: idealism, physicalism, dualism, and neutral monism, respectively. 2/7
What is the fundamental nature of reality? We all have metaphysical beliefs, but they are often implicit or unexamined. I built a taxonomy and short quiz to help you (and your favorite LLMs) discover what existing systems you are most aligned with! Read on to learn more... 1/7
We often blame "sycophancy" for AI-induced delusions, but the problem is more fundamental.
In my latest essay, I explore those deeper roots through the concept of a narcissistic enclosure, drawing on neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
Read the full piece here: awjuliani.medium.com/beyond-sycop...
Linked is a fun short story I wrote recently that grew from my interest in the strange coincidence that both Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism were born within a few decades of one another. The question the story explores is: what if it wasn’t a coincidence?
awjuliani.substack.com/p/the-dragon...
