This is a living constellation of paths that offer different ways of embracing what it means to exist. It is not a hierarchy, a single genealogy, or a map with one center. Rather than placing traditions above or below one another, we bring them into conversation, resonance and encounter.

These are threads, not boxes. They cross, overlap, diverge, and return; a tradition may belong to several threads, and no thread is complete on its own. Within each thread, the movements and traditions are listed alphabetically. This is intentional: no tradition is presented as more important, more advanced, or more foundational than another. Each offers its own history, language, questions, and possibilities.

The aim is not to make different traditions say the same thing. Their differences matter. Their tensions matter. Their particular histories and languages matter. It is in the space between them—in dialogue without erasure—that new possibilities for Existential Posthumanism may emerge.

For this journey, these diverse horizons are gathered into three broad, overlapping threads:

I. Non-Dual / Post-Dual — questioning the boundaries and oppositions through which humans have become accostumed to divide existence: one as many.

II. Relational / Experiential — discovering existence through encounter, participation, interdependence, and lived experience: theory as praxis.

III. Embedded / Embodied — situating existence within bodies, places, ecologies, histories, technologies, and the many worlds we inhabit: immanenence as transcendence.

Questions:

How might we understand existence without making separation, opposition, or binary distinction the ultimate structure of reality? What happens when Self and Other are not ultimately separated?

This thread gathers traditions that, in very different ways, question divisions such as self/other, subject/object, mind/body, spirit/matter, human/nonhuman, unity/multiplicity, and being/becoming.

In alphabetic order:

Advaita Vedānta — Investigates non-duality through the relationship between ātman and brahman, questioning the ultimate independence of the individual self.

AI Consciousness — Explores whether artificial systems could develop experience, subjectivity, agency, or forms of awareness, challenging inherited boundaries between mind, machine, organism, and human.

Buddhist Madhyamaka — Nāgārjuna's analysis of emptiness challenges independently existing entities and fixed conceptual oppositions through dependent origination.

Buddhist Yogācāra — Examines consciousness, perception, and experience while questioning assumptions about an independently constituted perceiving subject and external world.

Chan Buddhism — Emphasizes direct realization beyond rigid conceptual distinctions, integrating contemplative practice with ordinary embodied existence.

Christian Mysticism — Diverse mystical traditions explore transformation, contemplation, participation, union, and the limits of autonomous selfhood.

Daoism — Explores complementary oppositions, transformation, spontaneity, and the inseparability of human existence from the larger processes of the Dao.

Desert Monasticism — Early Christian contemplatives explored solitude, embodiment, attention, interdependence, and transformation through radical practices of presence and spiritual discipline.

Gnosticism — Included as a productive tension rather than a straightforward example of non-duality, because its diverse traditions often use dualistic cosmologies to explore transformation and liberation.

Hermeticism — Explores correspondences among human, cosmic, material, and divine dimensions, complicating sharply separated ontological domains.

Hesychasm — Eastern Christian contemplative practice emphasizes embodied prayer, transformation, participation, and experiential knowledge.

Kabbalah — Investigates unity and multiplicity through Ein Sof, the sefirot, emanation, divine presence, fragmentation, and restoration.

Kashmir Śaivism / Trika — Develops a non-dual philosophy in which multiplicity is understood as dynamic manifestation rather than absolute separation.

Mulla Ṣadrā / Transcendent Theosophy — Develops a dynamic ontology of existence, substantial motion, gradation, embodiment, and transformation, emphasizing being as an unfolding reality.

Mahāyāna Buddhism — Develops emptiness, dependent origination, compassion, and interdependence as alternatives to substantialist understandings of self and reality.

Neoplatonism — Develops a metaphysics of unity, emanation, participation, and return that became influential within several later philosophical and mystical traditions.

Prehistoric Goddess Traditions / Goddess Spirituality — Ancient archaeological traces invite reflection on embodiment, regeneration, nature, sexuality, death, and the sacred.

Rūmī / Mawlawī Mysticism — Poetry and mystical teaching explore love, movement, transformation, relationality, and the journey beyond fixed conceptions of self.

Shingon Buddhism — Understands body, speech, mind, ritual, cosmos, and awakening through profound correspondences and embodied practices.

Sikh Philosophy — Ik Onkar articulates unity while Sikh traditions simultaneously emphasize ethical action, community, equality, and transformation of ego.

Soto Zen / Dōgen — Dōgen's philosophy of being-time challenges conventional separations between being and becoming, practice and realization, self and world.

Sufism — Diverse Sufi traditions investigate transformation of the ego through remembrance, love, contemplation, mystical experience, and participation in divine reality.

Tawḥīd / Divine Unity — The foundational Islamic affirmation of the oneness of God, offering a profound horizon for thinking unity, multiplicity, relationality, and the human–cosmic relationship.

Tantra — Develops practices and philosophies in which body, energy, matter, consciousness, sexuality, and sacredness can participate in transformative processes.

Theosis — Understands human transformation through participation in divine life while retaining distinctions between divine and created existence.

Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy — Diverse traditions including Madhyamaka, Dzogchen, Mahāmudrā, and Tantra explore non-duality, emptiness, awareness, embodiment, and transformation.

Upaniṣadic Philosophy — Develops foundational reflections on self, consciousness, reality, and the relationship between individual existence and ultimate reality.

Vedic Philosophy — Provides a broad intellectual and ritual context for later Indian reflections on consciousness, reality, selfhood, cosmology, and liberation.

Wahdat al-Wujūd / Ibn ʿArabī — Ibn ʿArabī's thought explores wujūd, manifestation, imagination, divine names, and the relationship between unity and multiplicity.

Zen Buddhism — Questions fixed conceptions of self and reality through emptiness, impermanence, direct experience, and contemplative practice.

Zhuangzian Philosophy — Uses transformation and shifting perspectives to destabilize rigid distinctions and question assumptions about privileged forms of knowledge.

Questions:

What if existence is not something possessed independently, but something continually lived, experienced, encountered, and constituted through relationships? What happens when one and many are not ultimately separated?

This thread emphasizes relation, encounter, reciprocity, community, perception, participation, intersubjectivity, and lived experience.

In alphabetic order:

ʿĀʾisha al-Bāʿūniyya / Sufi Philosophy — Connects divine love, ethical transformation, knowledge, and lived spiritual experience, understanding the self through its profound relationship with the Divine and with others.

Africana Philosophy — Diverse African philosophical traditions offer rich accounts of personhood, community, relationality, ethical responsibility, and social existence.

African Indigenous Philosophies — Numerous traditions understand persons through relationships involving community, ancestry, environment, spirituality, and reciprocal obligations.

Amerindian Perspectivism — Explores radically different forms of personhood and perspective, challenging assumptions that there is only one privileged way of inhabiting a world.

Andean Indigenous Cosmologies — Concepts including ayllu, reciprocity, and relationships with Pachamama connect individual flourishing with community, land, ancestry, and ecological life.

Animism — Contemporary scholarship on animism investigates worlds in which meaningful agency and relationality extend beyond human beings.

Australian Aboriginal / First Nations Epistemologies — Diverse traditions emphasize Country, kinship, ancestral relations, story, law, responsibility, and situated knowledge.

Baradian Relational Ontology — Treats relations and processes as constitutive of entities rather than merely connections between already completed things.

Buen Vivir / Sumak Kawsay — Flourishing is understood through collective, ecological, cultural, and relational dimensions rather than through a single model of individual wellbeing.

Confucian Relational Philosophy — Human identity develops through relationships, ethical cultivation, family, community, ritual, responsibility, and social participation.

Continental Philosophy — Multiple continental traditions investigate existence through embodiment, temporality, difference, intersubjectivity, interpretation, alterity, and situated experience.

Existentialism — Explores situated existence, freedom, responsibility, finitude, anxiety, meaning, and the conditions through which existence becomes personally and relationally significant.

Hildegardian Mysticism / Hildegard of Bingen — Integrates mystical experience, embodiment, ecology, cosmology, healing, music, ecology and spiritual creativity, envisioning human existence within a living and interconnected cosmos.

Indigenous / Native Epistemologies — Diverse knowledge traditions understand knowing through relationships among people, places, ancestors, animals, plants, waters, and other beings.

Indigenous Feminisms — Connect embodiment, gender, land, community, colonial histories, sovereignty, and relationality without reducing these traditions to a single theoretical model.

Indigenous Relational Ontologies — Emphasize kinship, reciprocity, place, responsibility, ancestry, and relationships extending beyond human communities.

Islamic Heart-Knowledge / Intentional Discernment — Traditions of fiṭra, qalb, intention, and inner knowing connect intuitive insight with ethical action and the sacred dimensions of everyday life.

Levinasian Ethics — Places encounter with alterity at the center of ethical existence and questions whether subjectivity can be understood independently of relation.

Māori Philosophy — Concepts such as whakapapa situate persons within genealogical relationships extending across generations, lands, waters, ancestors, and other beings.

Māori Whakapapa — Genealogy functions not simply as ancestry but as an account of interconnected existence and responsibility.

Merleau-Pontian Phenomenology — Understands perception as embodied participation in a world rather than detached observation by an independent mind.

Native American / First Nations Philosophies — Diverse traditions explore kinship, place, ceremony, reciprocity, responsibility, and relations among human and more-than-human beings.

Oceanic / Pacific Islander Philosophies — Diverse traditions foreground relationships among ocean, island, ancestry, community, movement, place, and ecological life.

Phenomenology — Begins from lived experience, examining embodiment, perception, temporality, intersubjectivity, consciousness, and the experienced world.

Pragmatism — Understands experience through action, environment, inquiry, habit, community, and ongoing interaction rather than isolated contemplation.

Relational Psychoanalysis — Understands subjectivity as emerging through interpersonal relationships and histories of encounter.

Sámi Indigenous Epistemologies — Land, animals, seasonal cycles, livelihood, memory, and place-based knowledge form interconnected dimensions of lived existence.

Ubuntu — Personhood emerges through relationships, emphasizing mutual recognition, community, ethical responsibility, and interdependence.

Yorùbá Philosophy — Explores personhood, destiny, community, spirituality, materiality, and ethical existence through complex networks of relationship.

Questions:

What happens when existence is embraced as embodied, situated, ecological, technological, historical, and composed of many interacting forms of life and agency? What happens when immance and transcendence are not ultimately  separated?

This thread emphasizes bodies, materiality, ecology, technology, multiplicity, becoming, multispecies existence, and the plurality of worlds.

In alphabetic order:

Actor-Network Theory — Distributes agency across networks involving people, technologies, objects, institutions, organisms, and material processes.

Affirmative Ethics / Rosi Braidotti — Emphasizes relationality, becoming, embodied difference, and the creative affirmation of life beyond fixed identities and oppositional ways of thinking.

Afro-Caribbean Philosophy — Explores diaspora, colonial histories, embodiment, cultural transformation, relation, multiplicity, and the construction of identity.

Agential Realism / Karen Barad — Understands phenomena as emerging through material-discursive relations rather than assuming completely separate entities precede their interactions.

Amerindian Perspectivism / Viveiros de Castro — Develops a plural account of worlds and perspectives in which different beings may participate in reality through distinct forms of personhood.

Animal Studies — Investigates animal agency, perception, communication, embodiment, ethics, and shared worlds beyond exclusively human frameworks.

Baháʼí Philosophy — Explores unity, diversity, interdependence, human development, and the interconnectedness of social and cosmic life.

Bergsonian Vitalism — Bergson's concepts of duration, creativity, intuition, and life emphasize continuity, novelty, movement, and becoming.

Bön — Tibetan traditions offer rich perspectives on landscape, ritual, beings, consciousness, and cosmological relations.

Candomblé and Afro-Brazilian Cosmologies — Connect bodies, ancestors, spirits, places, ritual practices, materiality, and community through complex relational worlds.

Caribbean Philosophies — Address diaspora, creolization, colonial histories, identity, embodiment, relation, and cultural multiplicity.

Celtic Animist Traditions — Historical and contemporary traditions provide perspectives on sacred landscapes, place, seasonal cycles, and relationships with more-than-human beings.

Critical Race Studies — Examines how race, power, embodiment, history, and social structures shape concepts of humanity, identity, subjectivity, and belonging.

Cybernetics — Reframes organisms, machines, environments, and minds through feedback, communication, information, and systemic relations.

Deep Ecology — Arne Næss develops the ecological self and challenges narrow conceptions of human-centered value.

Deleuze & Guattari — Concepts of multiplicity, becoming, assemblage, rhizome, and machinic processes challenge fixed identities and emphasize relational production.

Decolonial Feminism — Brings gender, embodiment, coloniality, race, labor, sexuality, and situated knowledge into a shared analysis.

Decolonial Thought — Examines how knowledge, identity, history, place, power, and concepts of humanity are shaped through particular historical formations.

Disability Studies / Critical Disability Studies — Expands accounts of embodiment through interdependence, vulnerability, accessibility, prosthesis, care, and diverse bodily experiences.

Ecocriticism — Investigates cultural and literary representations of environments, species, ecological relationships, and planetary change.

Ecofeminism — Brings questions of embodiment, ecology, gender, power, care, and relationships with the living world into conversation.

Eco-phenomenology — Connects lived embodied experience with ecological relations, exploring how humans inhabit and perceive more-than-human environments.

Ecological Philosophy — Examines existence through ecological interdependence, place, materiality, and relationships among living systems.

Embodied Cognition / Katherine Hayles — Understands cognition through interactions among brain, body, environment, perception, action, and situated activity.

Enactivism — Describes cognition as something organisms enact through ongoing embodied engagement with their environments.

Environmental Humanities — Brings philosophical, historical, literary, anthropological, and ecological perspectives into interdisciplinary conversations about human–Earth relations.

Extended Mind — Questions boundaries of cognition by considering how tools, environments, bodies, and social relations can participate in cognitive processes.

Feminist Materialism — Reconsiders bodies, matter, reproduction, labor, affect, sexuality, and material agency as active dimensions of existence.

Feminist Posthumanism — Reconsiders subjectivity through relations among bodies, technologies, species, environments, gender, and material processes.

Glissantian Thought / Poetics of Relation — Édouard Glissant develops relation, opacity, creolization, multiplicity, and interconnectedness as ways of thinking beyond fixed identities.

Hawaiian Indigenous Philosophy — Diverse Hawaiian traditions emphasize genealogy, land, ocean, ancestry, community, place, and reciprocal responsibility.

Individuation / Gilbert Simondon — Individuation emerges through processes and relations, offering an influential framework for thinking individuals, technologies, organisms, and environments together.

Luce Irigaray / Sexual Difference — Reimagines embodiment, desire, language, and relationality through sexual difference, challenging universal models of the human and autonomous subject.

Yoga — Diverse Indian traditions unite embodied practice, breath, attention, ethics, and contemplation, exploring transformation through the integration of body, mind, consciousness, and world.

Lakota / Dakota Philosophical Traditions — Diverse philosophical and spiritual traditions explore relationships among people, land, animals, ceremony, community, and responsibility.

Mapuche Cosmology — Explores relationships among land, community, ancestors, spirituality, political life, and ecological existence.

Material Feminism — Understands bodies and matter as participating in social, political, ecological, and cultural processes rather than serving as passive substrates.

Mesoamerican Indigenous Philosophies — Diverse traditions offer relational accounts of land, ancestry, community, ceremony, cosmology, and more-than-human existence.

Mohist Philosophy — Early Chinese thought contributes perspectives on ethical relationship, social responsibility, universal concern, and practical life.

Multispecies Ethnography — Studies worlds constituted through interactions among humans, animals, plants, fungi, microbes, and other forms of life.

New Materialism — Understands matter as dynamic, relational, generative, and active rather than merely passive substance.

Nietzschean Philosophy / Friedrich Nietzsche — Becoming, perspectivism, embodiment, creativity, and the critique of fixed identities challenge inherited notions of the autonomous and universal human subject.

Object-Oriented Ontology — Investigates realities of entities that exceed their relations with human perception or interpretation.

Panpsychism — Explores philosophical possibilities in which experiential or proto-experiential dimensions are not restricted to human consciousness.

Persian Mysticism — Diverse Persian mystical traditions explore love, transformation, imagination, unity, embodiment, and the relationship between human and cosmic existence.

Plant Studies — Examines plant agency, temporality, communication, growth, and participation in ecological systems.

Postcolonial Thought — Investigates how colonial histories continue to shape subjectivity, knowledge, embodiment, culture, identity, and relations among peoples and worlds.

Process Philosophy — Understands reality through events, relations, creativity, transformation, and becoming rather than primarily through static substances.

Process Theology — Brings processual and relational conceptions of reality into theological reflection on divinity, creation, change, and interdependence.

Queer Ecology — Explores relationships among bodies, sexuality, reproduction, species, environments, and ecological processes.

Queer Theory — Questions fixed categories of identity, embodiment, sexuality, normativity, and subjectivity, opening possibilities for more fluid conceptions of existence.

Rastafari Thought — Brings spirituality, African diasporic experience, embodiment, place, ecological concerns, and historical transformation into conversation.

Shamanic / Indigenous Ecologies — Diverse traditions can foreground relationships with animals, landscapes, ancestors, spirits, and ecological processes; each must be approached within its specific cultural context.

Shintō — Diverse traditions of kami, place, ritual, ancestry, and landscape provide ways of thinking about relationships among human and more-than-human presences.

Speculative Realism — Opens philosophical inquiry toward realities not reducible to human experience or epistemic access.

Spinozism / Spinoza — Spinoza's immanence, monism, affects, and Deus sive Natura provide resources for understanding humans as expressions within a larger relational reality.

Stoicism — Ancient Stoic cosmopolitanism and conceptions of humans as participants in a larger cosmos offer an early philosophical resource for relational and embedded ethics.

Systems Theory — Focuses on emergence, organization, feedback, interdependence, and dynamic relations among components of complex systems.

Taoist Ecology — Draws on Daoist ideas of transformation, balance, process, and interdependence to explore ecological existence.

Trans Studies — Investigates embodiment, identity, technology, transformation, and the contingency of boundaries surrounding bodily and human identity.

Transcendentalism — Emerson, Thoreau, and related thinkers explore experience, nature, selfhood, perception, and the relationship between individual and world.

Traditional African Cosmologies — Diverse cosmological traditions integrate human, ancestral, spiritual, environmental, communal, and material dimensions of existence.

Whiteheadian Process Philosophy — Whitehead's philosophy of occasions, relations, experience, creativity, and becoming provides a major resource for ecological and posthuman ontology.

Zen Aesthetics — Embodied practices of art, attention, impermanence, simplicity, and situated perception extend philosophical inquiry into lived and material experience.

This genealogy a living body of sources. It will continue to evolve and expand through the contributions, suggestions, and feedback of those who join this conversation. 

Please feel free to contact us with sources, perspectives, or voices You believe should be added, briefly explaining why they are relevant. We will share suggestions with our committee for consideration. 

Thank You 🙏🏽