About / background: This is a resource for the exploration, through a Bahá'í lens, of the "perennial philosophy", or "divine philosophy" as it is called in the writings of the Bahá'í Faith. It contains over 6,000 human-curated passages, mostly but not exclusively from the Bahá'í writings, and supplemented by over 123,000 AI-selected passages exclusively from the works of the Central Figures of the Baha'i Faith. If the outline organization is not helpful it can be switched to an alphabetical list of topics.
Many quotations are linked to the Bahá'í Reference Library — the sole authorized online repository of Bahá'í texts — or to a secondary source, so that the fuller context can be seen. Links to original Persian or Arabic texts at the Bahá'í Reference Library are also provided in many cases.
Quotations within each category are shown in no particular order. Quotations from authors beyond the Bahá'í writings have been included where they highlight a striking parallel or clarify an obscure concept. Bahá'í sources of lesser authority — provisional translations and pilgrim notes — have also been included as interesting material to be taken for what it is worth; the relative weighting of sources is left to the good judgement of the reader.
The Subject categorization is an attempt to harmonize three different logical schemas:
- the Kantian "questions of reason" (what can we know / what should we do / for what can we hope; see pages 4 and 1683 in the Partial Inventory vol. 1 pdf), which determines the overall outline structure,
- the Quranic ("We will show them Our signs in the world and within themselves, until it become plain to them that it is the Truth"; cf. Qur'an 41:53), page 1692 in the pdf, which determines the color scheme. The four substantives in the quotation correspond respectively to red-brown, green-yellow, blue, and purple. For good measure, purple is also the color often associated with the crown chakra, so that sets the orientation of the color wheel. The color scheme is explained in the PDF pages 1683-1692, excerpted here.
- Abdu'l-Baha's cosmology of arcs of descent and ascent from Some Answered Questions ch. 81, also page 1692 in the pdf, where the main topics areas are placed roughly along their position in the circle of existence. So the logical order being the unknowable essence ("the Truth"); things having to do with the Logos and its revelation ("our signs"); things having to do with the world of creation ("the world"), things having to do with the human world ("within themselves"), things having to do with the spiritualized human; and then back to the unknowable essence. alpha = omega.
The lengthier Topic outline (a version of which is below) is an evolution of a personal subject indexing project that started in 1993 and continuously maintained since then (in an old version of Evernote). This outline has 1700+ topics, some so specific that they only have one or two quotations under them. Its top-level organization took its inspiration from the "three worlds" cosmology of the ringstone symbol. Its focus is topics in divine philosophy. It contains around 6,000 quotations from the Central Figures, the Guardian and the House of Justice. It is not related to the Partial Inventory.
A separate subject categorization began around 2010 as an attempt to "flatten" and simplify the original outline and organize it according to broader logical categories. Its top-level organization roughly follows Kant's questions of reason (what can we know, split into metaphysics and epistemology; what should we do, split into personal and collective dimensions of ethics and spirituality; and for what can we hope, split into historically contingent subject matter pertaining to past present and future). This schema contains 660 subjects. These subjects were the inputs for the AI assisted categorization, based on the Partial Inventory, that was done late 2024/early 2025. That project produced tens of thousands more quotations, confined to the 660 Subjects and limited to the Central Figures.
In making the latter project available, I merged the two outlines, since I already had the older outline at loom.loomofreality.org and didn't want to create an entirely different site. It's a messy solution for two reasons: (1) I restructured the outline at loomofreality to fit the newer project, and mapped the two sets of subject categories onto each other the best I could (via the 32-character keys), leaving a long tail of categories from the older project with no link back to the newer project; (2) most of the quotations within the 660 categories contain both human-curated and AI-generated content, which can be partially redundant. I've inserted an explanatory note into each compilation marking the transition from former to latter.
See also another version of the list outline below at bahai-library.com/inventory/subjects#outline, and see details in the complete PDF, pages 1683-1692 (excerpted here), which are linked from the project overview.
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