The Dictionary They Gave Me

In a small spiritual organization I spent seven years inside, the leader had invented a classification system for people. Three tiers: square, triangle, circle.

The square had four angles. Too many. Dense, heavy, vibrationally low. The triangle was better, only three. Semi-evolved. The circle had no angles at all, which made it almost divine. You moved between tiers depending on what you did, what ideas you had, and whether those ideas produced what he considered results. You could be a circle on Tuesday and a square by Thursday afternoon.

Years later I noticed this wasn't a system at all. It was a way to keep everyone watching everyone and nobody stable long enough to ally with anybody. At the time the three shapes felt like a new branch of physics.

The shapes were only the start. Ordinary people, the ones who hadn't found what we had found, were citizens. City people. Not free. Said with a tired, knowing smile. Leaving the compound was going into the lion's mouth. A bad day was low vibrations. Bad luck at work: karma. If you were sad you weren't sad, you were dense. Within maybe six months I had traded most of the ordinary words for these, and nobody had to force me. I adopted them the way you pick up slang in a new city, because everybody around you uses it and because using it makes you feel like you belong somewhere.

This is the quiet part most cult-recovery books skip. The dictionary wasn't imposed. It was offered. I took it with both hands.

The details weren't the point. Every office I've walked into since has its own squares and circles, just called high performers and culture fits. Most therapy vocabularies do the same work more quietly. Attachment styles and trauma responses have started doing for a new generation what karma and low vibrations did for mine: organizing the inner life into categories that feel like discoveries but arrive pre-installed.

What I didn't see at the time is that a dictionary does more work than a belief. You can privately doubt a cosmology and still describe your own tiredness as dense energy. You can roll your eyes at the leader's latest speech and still reach for karma when a waiter is rude. The beliefs can wobble. The words keep the house standing. Lera Boroditsky's research group at Stanford has spent years showing this in less dramatic contexts: the available vocabulary of a language quietly biases which inner states its speakers notice, remember, and treat as worth naming.¹ A complete spiritual vocabulary does not just label experience. It decides which experiences are allowed to exist.

What eventually broke the dictionary wasn't analysis or therapy or an exit interview. It was jokes.

A few years after I left, I started spending time with other people who had also left. We'd cook long meals in rented cabins, drink too much wine, make fun of the weather. One evening somebody said somebody else was in the square today. I laughed so hard I had to put my glass down. After that it was everywhere. Somebody got drunk at dinner: he entered the square. Somebody split firewood with unusual focus: stop, you're already in the circle, nowhere higher to go. Traffic jam: karma. Lost keys: energetic blockage. Friend cancels: obviously low vibrations. What's up, citizen, how's life at the institution?

We laughed for years. Still do.

And somewhere in all that laughing, without my noticing the day it happened, the words stopped working. I couldn't use them seriously anymore even if I had wanted to. Irony did the work that argument could never have done. A word cannot be sacred and a punchline at the same time. One of those readings wins, and in my experience it is always the punchline.

I got lucky on this. The people I ended up with were funny, and my own disposition leans toward mocking the things I have survived. The people I know who left these systems without much humor have had a harder time. They dropped the beliefs but kept the dictionary, and the old words kept rearranging their inner life where they couldn't see it. You can be ten years out and still automatically translate your loneliness into an attachment problem.

The dictionary is quieter now, after twenty years. Not gone. I still catch myself reaching for one of the old words sometimes. Not ironically anymore, not even seriously. Just out of habit, the way your hand still reaches for a light switch in a house you moved out of years ago.

I don't think it ever goes all the way. But I notice it now, which is most of the work.

Keep Exploring

If this resonated, you might also find value in:

• Seven Years – the longer version of the organization and how I got in and out.
• When the Messenger Ruins the Message – how we judge spiritual teachers before they open their mouth.

Three Shapes in the Kitchen

For the next three days, carry a small notebook or keep a note open on your phone.

Every time you catch yourself using a word or phrase you learned from somewhere specific (a workplace, a self-help book, a wellness app, a tradition, a therapist you once saw, a podcast you listened to for too long), write it down. Don't stop using it. Don't judge it. Just note it, and where you got it from if you remember.

If you want to push it, steal the old idiot classification and use it on yourself. Mark each phrase S, T, or C (rigid, striving, or smooth). Not because the shapes mean anything (they never did), but because catching the tone of borrowed language is funnier than analyzing it, and usually more accurate. Recycling it as a joke is one of the cleaner ways to show it no longer owns you.

At the end of the three days, read the list out loud.

You aren't hunting for insights. You're just seeing the outline of the dictionary somebody else put in your head. Whether you keep using those words is your business. But the choice is only honest after you've seen which ones aren't yours.

Notes & References

¹Boroditsky, L. (2011) – "How Language Shapes Thought." Scientific American, 304(2), 62-65.