The CPS Lab · Amsterdam and online
Beyond disciplines.
A 21st-century lab for scientific spirituality. Researchers, practitioners and explorers working together to map the possibilities of consciousness, from contemplative experience to cognitive experiments and neuroscience.
Explore the territory. Share what you find. Build the map together.
Many maps, one territory
Build the map.
There is an enormous territory of human experience that we barely understand.
The CPS Lab brings together researchers, practitioners and other serious explorers of consciousness to develop better maps of what we call psychedelic space: the wider space of possible states and transformations of consciousness.
We compare experiences, practices, contemplative traditions, scientific models and empirical findings to ask a simple question:
What structures survive translation?
All maps are welcome. No map is sacred.
Membership
Don’t just hear about the research. Participate in it.
Lab membership means joining the research community: exploring ideas and experiences together, helping develop and pilot experiments, developing new questions, and helping improve the maps we use to understand consciousness.
Explore with serious people
Bring experiences, practices and questions that don’t fit one discipline, and examine them with people who combine openness with rigour.
Learn new ways to navigate
Encounter practices, distinctions and maps from contemplative traditions, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy.
Take part in real research
Members are invited to help develop and pilot experiments, contribute observations, test practices and shape the questions that could grow into larger scientific studies.
Develop your own work
Bring an unfinished idea, model, paper, practice, artwork, dataset or prototype and work on it with the Lab.
Contribute to the map
What the community learns doesn’t end with the meeting. It feeds an evolving, shared attempt to understand psychedelic space.
Use the map. Improve the map.
Inside the Lab
Can meditation change cognition in predictable ways?
One project we are developing asks whether different chakra meditation practices produce different measurable changes in cognition and social processing.
- 01Meditative practice
- 02Predicted cognitive change
- 03Browser-based experiment
- 04Pilot data
- 05Refined hypothesis
- 06Larger study
Many established behavioural experiments can be run entirely in a web browser. We can build tasks measuring associative thinking, divergent thinking, attention, empathy and decision-making, and ask participants to complete them before and after controlled meditation conditions.
- Researchers can develop the experimental paradigms and controls.
- Experienced practitioners can help refine the meditation protocols and phenomenological distinctions.
- Lab members can pilot these experiments from their own laptops once they are built, identify problems and contribute pilot data.
The aim is to use these distributed pilot studies to refine hypotheses, estimate effects and determine which questions deserve larger preregistered studies.
A meditation practice becomes a prediction.A laptop becomes an experimental apparatus.A distributed community becomes a laboratory.
How the Lab works
From experience to experiment.
The Lab works through the Center’s PEACE framework: a cycle for turning first-person exploration into increasingly rigorous research.
Practice
Enter or manipulate the territory systematically.
Experience
Attend carefully to what actually happens.
Analyse
Make distinctions and develop representations.
Compare
Look across people, traditions, models and measurements.
Experiment
Turn sufficiently precise patterns into predictions that can fail.
This is how observations become science.
A Lab meeting
Bring something unfinished.
- In Amsterdam
- In person, at Kokopelli.
- Online
- From wherever you are, as fully in the room.
A Lab meeting is not primarily a lecture. It is a session of collaborative cartography.
The best Lab meetings start with something half-formed and end with better questions than anyone arrived with: an experience turned into an observation, a distinction, a model, sometimes a prediction worth testing.
There’s no fixed timetable. We call a meeting when there’s something worth meeting about, in Amsterdam and online, and let members know.
Someone might bring
an experience · a meditation or contemplative practice · a research finding · a dataset · an anomaly · a theoretical distinction · a traditional map · an artwork · a prototype · a question you can’t yet formulate clearly.
Gather
Introductions, and what people have been working on since the last meeting.
One piece of work
Someone brings work in progress: a paper, a dataset, a practice, an artwork, a prototype.
Take it apart
The room works it through together: questions, objections, and maps drawn as we go.
Stay on
The conversation carries on afterwards, for whoever wants to stay.
What the room keeps asking
- What happened?
- How did you get there?
- What changed?
- Which distinctions matter?
- Who else recognizes this?
- Where else does this structure appear?
- How could we represent it?
- How could we be wrong?
What you contribute
What do you bring?
You might be a neuroscientist, meditator, philosopher, therapist, artist, engineer, mathematician, entrepreneur, or none of these. What matters is what you can contribute to the inquiry.
- Bring an experience.
- Bring a practice.
- Bring a question.
- Bring a model.
- Bring data.
- Bring a way of seeing.
Some of who’s in the room
Researchers
bring the newest findings, and the questions behind them.
Scientists
bring measurement, method and a healthy suspicion.
Philosophers
bring concepts sharp enough to tell experiences apart.
Artists
bring other ways of seeing, and of showing what was seen.
Engineers
bring ways to build things, test them and make them work.
Business people
bring ways to carry ideas out into the world.
Collective intelligence
Consciousness is explored individually. It doesn’t have to be understood individually.
Introspection is fallible, and consensus does not make something true.
The Lab combines first-person investigation with collective intelligence. Members can contribute observations, repeat practices, challenge interpretations and help work out whether a purported structure recurs across people and contexts.
The opportunity lies in combining many observations with structured comparison, controls and empirical testing. Serious inquiry doesn’t always need everyone in the same physical laboratory, which is why we are building toward distributed experiments that members could take part in from wherever they are.
Four kinds of intelligence, one inquiry
- First-person intelligence
- Careful investigation of your own experience.
- Collective intelligence
- Patterns, and disagreements, across many explorers.
- AI-assisted intelligence
- Relationships across a body of observations too large for anyone to hold in mind, which AI can help bring to light.
- Scientific testing
- Controls and experiments that decide which patterns survive.
What we are building toward
A Lab that remembers.
The Lab is designed to keep what its members find, so that an observation made once, by one person, can meet the others it belongs with.
Humans explore. The Lab remembers. AI finds structure.Science tests it. The map evolves.
No individual researcher can hold all of it in mind.
A modern consciousness laboratory can accumulate experiences, practices, distinctions, discussions, traditional sources, scientific papers, models and empirical findings.
With appropriate consent and privacy safeguards, AI can help the Lab retrieve earlier observations, compare descriptions across traditions, identify recurring structures, expose contradictions, connect phenomenology with scientific findings and generate candidate hypotheses for human scrutiny.
This is the direction we are building toward, not a system in use today. Whatever it surfaces will be a candidate: for members to question, and for experiments to test.
Our first map
The Psychedelic–Kuṇḍalinī Thesis.
What happens if we take one of humanity’s oldest maps of transformative experience seriously enough to test it?
PKT asks whether structures described through the yogic chakra and Kuṇḍalinī traditions correspond to reproducible patterns in psychedelic and meditative experience, cognition and brain organization.
Rather than treating the chakra system as either literal anatomy or pre-scientific mythology, we translate its distinctions into hypotheses that can be compared with phenomenology, psychometrics, pharmacological data, behavioural experiments and neuroscience.
PKT is a first map, not the map.
Each of these can enter the same process of comparison and testing.
- Buddhist contemplative cartographies
- Taoist energetic systems
- Sufi practices
- indigenous and shamanic knowledge
- Western mystical traditions
- contemporary phenomenology
- psychology
- neuroscience
- mathematics
- and new maps developed in the Lab
Principles
What we hold to.
Start with experience.
The territory comes before the instrument. Before asking what caused an experience, which tradition owns it or whether it was spiritual or neurological, we ask what actually happened. Then we choose instruments that can follow it.
Energy, taken seriously.
Prāṇa, kuṇḍalinī, the subtle body. Traditions describe them with care; we investigate those descriptions rather than explain them away. Read closely, they make predictions that can fail: in what people report, how they perform, what the brain does.
Precision about experience.
Exact concepts, formal models, careful first-person description. We bring the tools of mathematics and philosophy to phenomenology, because a state described exactly can be compared with others, placed on a map and tested. Described loosely, it can’t.
Beyond disciplines.
The object determines the method. Consciousness doesn’t divide along faculty lines, so we follow a question wherever it leads, across contemplative practice, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and build a tool when none fits.
All maps are welcome. No map is sacred.
Traditions and theories are resources for inquiry, not objects of allegiance. A yogic map, a Buddhist one and a neuroscientific model can lie side by side and be compared. None is exempt from being tested, revised or set aside.
Stance
Scientific spirituality.
Human beings have spent thousands of years systematically exploring consciousness. Yoga and Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, indigenous and shamanic traditions, Western mysticism and many other traditions contain practices, phenomenological distinctions and maps of transformative experience.
We do not think these traditions should simply be accepted. But neither should they simply be dismissed. The Lab treats them as potential repositories of observations, methods and hypotheses.
- Practices become methods.
- Experiences become observations.
- Traditions become maps.
- Maps generate hypotheses.
- Science helps us test them.
Scientific spirituality is neither spirituality borrowing the authority of science nor science explaining spirituality away. It is a scientific practice of spiritual inquiry.
Alive in the Lab
What we’re working on.
The research runs through PEACE. Members bring their own questions alongside.
The Psychedelic–Kuṇḍalinī Thesis
The chakra system read as a description of how attention organises itself, and checked against first-person trip reports.
Mystical entropy
Psychedelics loosen the mind. How is the energy they release organised into new forms of awareness?
The next study
A pre-registered study of experienced practitioners: neuroimaging, heart and breath, and cognitive tasks alongside.
Chakra meditation, as a behavioural project
One project we are developing: whether different chakra meditation practices produce different, measurable changes in cognition and social processing. Members are invited into its development and piloting.
The institution
Why build a new kind of laboratory?
The CPS Lab sits outside traditional disciplinary and university structures while actively seeking collaboration with researchers, universities and other institutions.
This gives us unusual freedom in how questions are approached. We can investigate promising observations before they fit a grant category, bring practitioners directly into the research process, combine methods across disciplines, develop new tools when existing ones are insufficient, and take anomalies seriously before anyone knows whether they will become conventional research questions.
The Lab works upstream of conventional research: where strange observations become researchable questions.
When a question becomes sufficiently precise, collaboration with established laboratories provides the expertise, infrastructure and scale required for more demanding empirical tests.
The Lab is designed as a 21st-century, AI-native institution: one that can hold more than any one researcher could, and revise its maps as the work teaches it.
The object determines the method.
Membership
Join the Lab.
Membership means joining the research community, not simply attending its events.
- Explore unusual questions with serious people.
- Participate in developing and piloting research.
- Bring your own experiences, practices and unfinished ideas.
- Learn from perspectives outside your usual field.
- Help build better maps of consciousness.
- CPS research team
- Free.
- Members
- €10 a seat.
- Where
- In Amsterdam, at Kokopelli, and online.
- When
- Called when there’s something worth meeting about.
- How
- Membership is by application, in the form below.
Explore the territory. Share what you find. Build the map together.
Apply to join the Lab
Bring the question no single field can answer.
Tell us who you are and what you would bring. We read every application and reply by email. Once you’re a member, a seat at any meeting is €10, in Amsterdam or online.