A distinctive set of terms circulates in this current, usually offered without provenance and often with an implication of antiquity. Most of them can be dated, and several to a single book.
Indigo children is the most precisely traceable. Nancy Ann Tappe, who described herself as seeing people's auras as colours, introduced the idea in Understanding Your Life Through Color in 1982, reporting what she took to be a new aura colour among children born from the late 1970s. Lee Carroll and Jan Tober turned it into a movement with The Indigo Children in 1999, attaching a character profile, difficulty with authority, unusual sensitivity, a sense of purpose, poor tolerance of routine, that overlaps substantially with descriptions of attention and autism-spectrum conditions. That overlap is the source of the practice's most serious criticism, since the framework offers parents a flattering spiritual reading of behaviour that might otherwise prompt an assessment.
Starseed comes out of the American UFO-contactee literature of the 1970s, where it named a person believed to have originated with, or to carry the consciousness of, another world. It has since detached from the flying-saucer context that produced it and now circulates as an identity, with an elaborate taxonomy of home systems that would have been unrecognisable to the writers who coined it.
Lightworker came into wide use in the 1980s for a person understood to have incarnated in order to raise the general level of consciousness. It functions as a vocation and, increasingly, as a professional category, since a great deal of paid spiritual service is now offered under the name.
Twin flame is recent, spreading principally online from the 2000s, and it is the term on this list with a documented pattern of harm attached to it. Its content is that a single soul divides into two bodies, so that exactly one other person is one's counterpart, and that the relationship will be turbulent because its purpose is to force growth. Every one of those features works to keep a person inside a painful relationship: conflict is reinterpreted as evidence of the bond, absence is reframed as a stage in a chaser-and-runner pattern, and the uniqueness claim removes the option of leaving, because there is no second one. A coaching industry has grown around it selling readings and programmes to people in acute distress about a specific named individual, and journalists and former clients have documented what that produces. There is no pre-modern source for the concept. Earlier esoteric writing speaks of soulmates and of twin souls, which is related and is not the same thing, and which carries none of this apparatus.
Christ consciousness is a Theosophical and New Thought usage in which Christ names a universal state of awareness available in principle to anyone, distinguished from the historical Jesus, who is held to have attained it first or most fully. It is not a Christian doctrine and no mainstream church recognises it as one.
Cord cutting is a visualisation exercise in which a person imagines an energetic attachment to another person, a place or a period, and severs it. It draws on the etheric-body model that Theosophy supplied, and it was popularised in the healing literature of the later twentieth century.
Past lives as a therapeutic subject, reached under hypnosis or guided regression and read for the origin of a present difficulty, is a twentieth-century Western development. Rebirth itself is of course ancient and central in Indian religion, but the traditional doctrines do not offer recall of particular former identities as a service, and where regression material has been investigated it has repeatedly been traced back to ordinary sources the subject had encountered and forgotten.
Synchronicity is the one term here with a named author from outside the movement. C. G. Jung coined it for meaningful coincidence understood as an acausal connecting principle, worked on it from the 1920s, and set it out fully in a 1952 essay published alongside work by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Jung intended a carefully bounded proposal about the relation between psyche and world. In general use it has become a word for any coincidence that felt significant at the time, which is a very considerable loosening of what he argued for.