Artifact 02
The Lexicon.
The same concept in the three registers that never quite meet, plus what the evidence actually says, marked for strength. Including where the honest marker is untested, and including practices I teach. Built one entry at a time.
AcademicNeo-TantricSomaticScientific
Prāṇāyāmaprāṇāyāma · regulation of prāṇa"breathwork"paced respiratory regulationSlow paced breathing reliably raises vagal tone. The narrow claims hold; the broad ones do not. SupportedIn the corpus: the practice people most often arrived already doing, and most often described as having stopped working.
Āveśaāveśa · entering, possession"journeying"aspecting · parts workAbsorption is measurable. Parts-based models have limited controlled evidence. Whether either maps onto āveśa is interpretation. MixedIn the corpus: rarely named directly. Described, then apologised for.
Spandaspanda · the originating vibration"activation" · "the rising"autonomic charge · mobilisationThe fluid system as originator rather than recorder has real support in embryology and in fetal movement research. The Tantrik reading of it is mine, not the literature's. MixedIn the corpus: the sensation is described constantly. The word appears twice in eleven years.
Nāḍīnāḍī · channel, conduit. Nāḍī-Śuddhi: purification of the channels, required before serious energetic practicerarely used. Where it appears it usually means the practice, not the prerequisiteno direct equivalent. Nearest is capacity, and the vocabulary of what a system can carryThe anatomical claim has no modern correlate and should not be given one. The structural claim, that the conductor is prepared before the current is raised, is the sequencing every trauma-informed approach arrived at independently a thousand years later. MixedIn the corpus: nobody arrives asking for this. Almost everybody turns out to need it first.
Kuṇḍalinīkuṇḍalinī · kuṇḍalī, the coiled one"awakening" · "the rising"sympathetic activation with sensory phenomenaThe experience is well documented in case reports and self-report surveys, and the adjacent literature on adverse effects in intensive meditation is genuinely rigorous. The mechanism as described in the tradition has not been tested. Two different claims, routinely merged. MixedIn the corpus: the single most common word people arrive with, and the one they are least able to define when asked.
Full-body energetic orgasmno single source term. Closest are the ānanda and the vyāpti vocabularies, and neither maps cleanly"full-body orgasm" · "energy orgasm"non-genital orgasmic response · autonomic floodingOrgasmic response without genital stimulation is documented in the research literature, including in people with complete spinal cord injury, which is a real and surprising finding. That this is the same event as the one described in this field is an interpretation nobody has tested. I teach this and the marker still says what it says. UntestedIn the corpus: named directly by a substantial minority. Almost always alongside a worry that wanting it is the wrong reason to come.
Window of toleranceno direct equivalent"holding the container"window of tolerance · titrationA clinical heuristic rather than a validated construct. The framework underneath it has drawn substantial criticism in the physiology literature. Useful in practice; not established as described. ContestedIn the corpus: never used by participants. Entirely a practitioner word.
Seven of a growing set, twelve to fifteen at launch. Every entry carries an evidence marker, including entries covering practices I teach. Untested is a permitted answer and it gets used. Where the corpus has something to say about a term, it says it, without statistics until the analysis is done.