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Graduated engagement: "you choose your depth"

Adepthood's governing product-design principle. Sources: adepthood NORTH-STAR.md (the thesis, written 2026-06-29) and AGENTS.md (the build-time restatement). Recorded as ADR 0006.

The floor

Everyone who opens Adepthood gets the same thing first: a place to write. Entries fold into a private, encrypted, ontology-classified corpus (tagged by Frequency and Wavelength phase), and over time that corpus speaks back — the Higher Self retrieves the user's own past reflections and reflects them back, calibrated to where they are now, in the language of APTITUDE. This floor is a complete product on its own: no course, no stages, no streaks required.

The rings

Around the floor sit optional depths — concentric rings, not a ladder:

  • Prompted journaling — stage-aligned prompts move a person through the ten Aspects implicitly, without "taking a course."
  • Habit scaffolding — opt-in, one new habit per stage, cumulative, with energy scaffolding, streaks, and tiered goals.
  • The practice ramp — opt-in timed mindfulness, breathwork, or movement escalating at the stage cadence.
  • The course material — substantial Aspect teachings, drip-fed at the stage pace.
  • The Digital Sangha — community as springboard and support.

Any ring, any combination, free movement between them. Nothing is gated behind anything else.

The rules that make it real

  • Sovereignty. Invitations to go deeper appear only when resonant with what the person has been writing or doing; they are subtle, one-tap declinable, never nagging, and never frame declining as failure. The test: would a wise friend actually say this right now, unprompted? If not, the app stays quiet.
  • Anti-guru. The wisdom reflected back is the user's own.
  • Anti-lock-in, pro-renunciation. The telos is to springboard people back to embodied community as Whole Adepts; success includes outgrowing the app. Anything that makes leaving harder is forbidden — no dark patterns, no streak-shame, no guilt mechanics.
  • Care boundaries. The app complements professional mental-health care and never replaces it; features touching Dark Nights or acute distress must surface pathways to human support.
  • Privacy as pitch. Intimate content is routed locally and encrypted at rest, surfaced as a feature (ADR 0012).

How it shows up in the code

The invitation engine and depth preferences are first-class backend subsystems (backend/src/domain/invitations.py, resonance.py, depth_preferences.py; backend/src/models/invitation_signal.py, user_depth_preferences.py; backend/src/routers/depth_preferences.py, invitations.py). The Map is being built as a wheel of balance, and navigation treats the journal as home. A user who stays at the journal floor for years has used Adepthood exactly correctly.