How Correlate reads the traditions.

Correlate is an interpretive archive, not a citation database. Our tradition primers are hand-composed summaries that draw on canonical teachings and widely-taught surveys. Our Oracle is an AI synthesis engine. Both are meant to spark curiosity across traditions — not to replace primary sources, teachers, or peer-reviewed scholarship.

If you plan to quote, teach, or publish from anything you read here, verify against the primary text of the tradition first.

Every entry on our Traditions index (Christianity, Vedanta, Sufism, Stoicism, Determinism, Quantum Physics, and the rest) is a short primer — era, region, a summary, four to five core beliefs, a handful of practices, key figures, and a short list of correlations with other traditions.

These primers are composed by hand, in a consistent voice, drawing on the kind of introductory material a first-year religion, philosophy, or history-of-science student would encounter. Our reference points include:

• Reference works — the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Encyclopædia Britannica, the Oxford and Cambridge Companion series, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Primary texts — the Bible, the Qur'an, the Upanishads, the Pali Canon, the Tao Te Ching, the Zohar, the Corpus Hermeticum, Plato's dialogues, Marcus Aurelius, the Ra material, and the like.
• Institutional and community sources — official teaching bodies where they exist (e.g. the Vatican, Chabad, the Office of the Dalai Lama), and long-standing community references such as sacred-texts.com.
• Peer-reviewed surveys — the standard university introductions to religious studies, comparative philosophy, and the history and philosophy of science.

Individual sentences in a primer are not footnoted. If you spot a claim you believe is wrong or reductive, please write to us — we take corrections seriously and revise entries when they're warranted.

The Oracle is a large language model — Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 — instructed to answer as a scholar-mystic who maps a term across three to five traditions. Every Oracle response is generated live from your question. It is not retrieved from a fixed corpus, and it does not attach source URLs.

Because Claude was trained on a broad body of public text, its answers reflect the general shape of how these traditions are described in academic and popular literature. It can be wrong. It can hallucinate a reference. It can smooth over important disagreements. Treat every Oracle response as a starting point for your own reading, never as the final word.

We surface a small disclosure on the Oracle page itself. If you plan to share an Oracle answer publicly, we recommend also naming the source traditions it cites and checking their primary texts.

A correlation on Correlate is a claim of family resemblance — that two traditions, in different vocabularies, are gesturing at something structurally similar. It is not a claim that the two traditions are identical, that one is derived from the other, or that all thoughtful practitioners of both would agree with the comparison.

Correlations are proposed by the archive, by the Oracle, and by our community. They are meant to open a conversation, not close one. Disagreement — from within any tradition — is expected and welcome.

Weekly posts, comments, and reactions come from real people in the Correlate community. They pass through basic moderation but are not fact-checked. Opinions expressed there belong to their authors and do not represent the archive.

Because our primers are living summaries, they will change over time as we get better feedback from teachers, practitioners, and readers. If you're a scholar or long-time practitioner of a tradition we cover and you see something worth correcting, please write to us at corrections@correlate.online. We'll credit you if you'd like.

Correlate's voice is warm, plain, and intentionally light on jargon. That is a choice — we're building a doorway, not a defended thesis. Depth lives in the sources we point to.