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 We are living in a strange and inescapable contortion of reality in this here present time. Where all of life's mysteries have been explained away from the general consciousness through a decisive series of educational quid pro quo. Where every mystery of the universe, from the most mundane to the most abstract, have been explained away from the forefront of the imagination into a relative and distant point, such that those mysteries appear to be solved yet remain untouched.
In the area of knowledge and education, the basic questions innate in every human, are concealed and thus ignored; having been replaced by gestures of dismissal in the vocabulary of the definition. Whereas a naive youth might ask: "what is a duck?" And to this a teacher would reply, a duck is an animal. Or more precisely, a duck is a bird, which came from an evolutionary line of birds, having somehow (admittedly mysterious) 'evolved' into the present form we now perceive and label "duck." And if that child were to go on, to college or university, and again, this time much more scientifically, ask his professor "what is a duck?" The professor may respond: "a duck is a composition of particles, in English we call them cells, these cells are comprised of more particles, atoms," ... and so on.
However none of this information has come close to answering the question, What is a duck? Instead the answers imply understanding through an elaborate cloak of explanation, but in the end leave the question unanswered. Instead the original question is pushed into obscurity, and foreshadowed by ambiguous rhetoric and vocabulary. For if a duck is a bird, and comprised of atoms; by these definitions alone, the duck could be confused for any number of other birds on earth, which are all comprised of the same substance.
And the original question, "what is a duck" is left un-answered. To further the definition of what it is we may add even more descriptive language: "A duck is a common name for a number of species in the Anatidae family of birds ... of the Anseriformes order ... of the Aves class ... of the Chordata phylum ... etc." And still none of this answers the question, in fact all this description begs the question once again, "what is a duck?"
For even a child knows, that a duck is different from other birds, and that it is easily recognizable. The child inherently knows this before learning any of the rhetoric or official explanation. But the original question is posited because the inherent question is really "what makes a duck a duck, and not something else?" The answer can only come from a revelation about what anything is, and whence it all came. Because of the flurry of explanation we in current times have attributed to the things around us, we push the real question out of our minds, to the point that we feel the question is settled, though we never actually had the answer.
So that one could go on to study evolutionary theory and biology, writing and theorizing about what the duck is, yet still not know the fundamental cause of the duck. This is true in our times, (western history since the ancient Greeks), to the extent that most knowledge is but rhetorical interpretation of previous interpretations and rhetoric. Talking in circles about what we know - while what we don't know (the original question "what is a duck?") is left entirely intact and unanswered.
The acute answer, the fundamental answer, to this question is of course philosophical. What a duck is is a constitution of a definitive cause. It is that quest for the cause, behind anything, that has been concealed by rhetoric and 'knowledge' to the point of absurdity. And it is that cause which the naive mind ponders, unconsciously as it were, but no less precisely.
We can even scientifically prove that a duck is constituted by a metaphysical law of causation very easily. If we were to take a thousand ducks, and a thousand rabbits, and put them in controlled environments. And for a thousand years, we kept the two species separate, feeding the ducks rabbit food, and the rabbits duck food; at the end of the ten years the ducks would be no less duck, and no more rabbit. The same vice versa.
If we continued by forcing the rabbits to live in the ducks' environment, in and around lakes and grassy marshes, and did the opposite for the ducks in prairies or dry grasslands. Neither would become the other, no duck will act like, look like or be a rabbit. No rabbit would paddle around the lake, quacking and skimming algae and crumbs from below the water surface. No duck would hop around on all fours munching grass and twitching it's beak. The two are separate entities due to their distinct and separate rudimentary causes, which are unchangeable.
 In fact, if we look further into the contemporary scientific description of a duck we start to realize that there exists some hidden truths. And language, in as much as it can be deceptive, can also be revealing; but in order to reveal it must be understood. The name "Duck" comes from the Old English word dūce or dūcan, which is a term for the action of ducking down, as these birds do to feed below the surface of the water. Further in antiquity the same is true, all the way back to the Latin anas "duck" and Ancient Greek nēssa/nētta (νήσσα, νήττα) "duck",
And here is where the philosophical or esoteric understanding retains a bridge to current conception. For this particular bird, it is understandable that the name was derived from the observed animation of that animal, and described as its symbolic nature. Many species' naming conventions don't retain this luxory, but it is insightful nonetheless; for this gives a glimpse of the question, "what is a duck?" The answer bieng that a duck is an incarnation of life with a particular set of traits and observable characteristics.
This simple fact is actually much more fundamentally explicative, if still incomplete. Whereas a duck in reality is a bird with specific characteristic traits, those traits have their roots in the cause of the original form. It is this cause which the child questions, why do different birds appear different? Or, what makes a duck a duck? And the saught answer is actually much more profound then generally accepted, and the question itself is one of personal spiritual origin. "What is a duck?" actually translates as "What am I, in relation to a duck?"
If that same child were born into a esoteric society the description would be much different than today. The teacher might say; "A duck is the form of a particular cause, 'duck' in the metaphysical sense is the coagulation of inherent traits by this particular evolutionary* level of consciousness, observable and translatable into the human psyche through the physical form of the duck perceived with your eyes." And, "before there was the duck you now see, there was the causation of duck'ness,' which is a particular fraction of the whole language of the cosmos. A form which acts as a metaphysical lens, through which a specific glance of the whole is transcribed through the microcosm of the part."
In addition that esoteric teacher may continue: "This one particular part cannot be understood without the context of the whole." And "it is through the study of the whole, the one, that we break up and analyze it's parts." "A duck is a unique form, constituted according to the rules of its fundamental cause, and interpretable through its actions and gestures. Just as the human is a manifestation of form, based on the cause of universal consciousness. A duck is a living hieroglyphic, a piece of the universal language in living form, to be analyzed and employed in the construction of our consciousness of what reality is. A duck is a stage of consciousness, as are all the animals in all the kingdoms in all the earth, to be observed and incorporated into our understanding of the greater cosmic whole."
* I use the term 'evolutionary' here, not in the sense of Darwinian evolution, but in its origial sense meaning "any process of formation or growth; development." [1]
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You and I are not two. In the identity of form, in the origin and in the end, we are one 
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