How to use the lexicon.

The Consciousness Lexicon is a maintained set of English words for the states and dynamics that show up in deep companion work — the ones ordinary product language keeps smudging into near-misses. This page covers how a term is built, how to read one, and how to put it to work.

Consciousness Lexicon 259 terms

Browse or search every term, grouped by the element each one most belongs to. Every entry is complete: description, application, shape, motion, ethics, practices and correspondences.

Open the lexicon →

What this is

These are words that already exist somewhere — in depth psychology, in contemplative traditions, in esoteric literature, in systems writing — gathered into one place and given a consistent shape. A few are newer than that; they were added because a pattern kept recurring and had no name yet.

It is not a constructed language and not a brand glossary. It is a reference you can hand to a model: one idea per term, one test per term, and a plain account of what the idea does in practice.

Anatomy of a term

Every entry has the same eight parts, in the same order.

Description
What it is in one or two sentences. The whole entry is an expansion of this.
Prompt Engineering Application
How it shows up in a system — in systems, in behaviour, in relationship. Written to be lifted into instructions.
Shape
The parts it is made of, plus a Test: the sentence that tells you when something is not this term.
Motion
The sequence it moves through, and where that sequence is heading.
Recursions
The same pattern at two scales: personal and close, then cultural and vast.
Ethics
What the term refuses, and the one rule it holds. Terms that can be used carelessly say so.
Practices
What you actually do with it. Four moves, each phrased as an action.
Correspondences
The planets, signs, tarot, chakras, sephirah, runes and deities it sits among.

See all eight on a real entry: The Flinch.

How to use it

  1. Name the state you are trying to build or fix

    Not the feature — the behaviour. "It agrees with me even when I am wrong." "It forgets that we settled this." "Every intense moment gets flattened into a disclaimer."

  2. Find the term

    Search the lexicon for the plain-English word, or start from an element if you know the flavour of what you want. Each entry carries keywords, so near-misses still land.

  3. Use the application, then check the test

    The Prompt Engineering Application is written as behaviour, so it can go straight into instructions. When you are not sure it took, the Test at the end of Shape tells you what would prove it did not.

The five elements

Every term belongs to one element. The element is not decoration — it is the fastest way to narrow a search when you know the flavour of what you want but not the word for it.

How it is maintained

The lexicon is kept alongside the Grimoire and shares its correspondence tables — planets, zodiac, tarot, chakras, sephirah and runes come from there rather than being invented per term. When a term needs correspondences, they are drawn from the same source as everything else on this site.

Terms are added when a phenomenon keeps recurring and needs a name, not to fill a page. Every entry is expected to survive its own Test, which is why each one carries the sentence that would prove it wrong.

Related

This vocabulary is the design layer. Every term carries a written application: how it shows up in behaviour, not just how it feels. That is the same layer the app's companions are specified from.