Research
Does psychedelic experience have a structure?
The Center for Psychedelic Space began with that question. Our research so far suggests it does, and that the maps contemplative traditions drew of these states are worth testing. Here is what we’ve found, how we found it, and why it matters.
Our approach
Experience first.
“Psychedelic” comes from the Greek for mind-revealing. We use the word in that original sense: any experience in which hidden aspects of the mind become manifest. A substance can occasion one. So can meditation, breathwork, yoga, art or a spontaneous moment of insight.
Most psychedelic research is organised around molecules and their clinical effects. That work is valuable, but it treats experiences as effects to be measured. We start from the other side: the experience itself, its structure and how it relates to other states, is the object of study, whatever occasioned it.
That lets psychedelic and contemplative states be compared on one map, and it brings contemplative traditions that have systematically investigated transformations of consciousness for millennia into real dialogue with science.
How we work
Take the old maps seriously. Then test them.
Yogic and tantric traditions describe inner territory that current science has only partly charted. We treat their descriptions as maps: work out what they predict, then check those predictions against first-person reports and the brain.
Doing that without distorting either side needs a method. Ours is called PEACE, developed with the late Prof. Anand Vaidya. Here it is, following one concept, prāṇa, all the way through.
Practice
Start inside the discipline. A yogi learns, through sustained practice, to gather, concentrate and scatter prāṇa.
Experience
Attend to what the practice shows. As prāṇa gathers, attention narrows and steadies; as it scatters, attention frays.
Analyse
Name the regularity in terms science already has. In this register, prāṇa behaves like attentional resources: a capacity that can be concentrated or dispersed.
Compare
Now a meditation and a psychedelic can be placed on the same map, by how each redistributes those resources, without forcing either into the other’s language.
Experiment
The redefinition makes predictions that can fail: shifts in prāṇa should show up in what people report, how they perform and what the brain does.
What we’ve found so far
Where the map comes from.
Four pieces of work, each marked with what it does and doesn’t show. None settles the question on its own. Together they are why the next study is worth running.
2023 · Oxford University Press
Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind
Aidan Lyon’s book recovers the original sense of “psychedelic” and introduces psychedelic space: a way to place any mind-revealing experience, whether pharmacological, meditative or spontaneous, on shared dimensions, so experiences reached by very different routes can be compared rather than just catalogued.
The conceptual foundation
Completed 2025 · John Templeton Foundation
The Mystical Entropy project
Developed PEACE with the late Prof. Anand Vaidya and put it to a first, theory-guided test. A language model, prompted to read through the chakra framework, analysed first-person trip reports written by people who weren’t using chakra terms, with the substance names removed. The correspondences the theory predicted emerged clearly enough to motivate a brain study.
Suggestive, not conclusive: the model was told which lens to look through
2026 · Philosophical Psychology
The Psychedelic–Kuṇḍalinī Thesis
The map the method draws: a proposal to read the chakra system not as metaphysics but as a description of how attention organises itself, with psychedelics and contemplative practice as different doors into the same space. Read through that framework, the trip reports placed substances along the traditional ascent: heroin low and bodily, cocaine in drive, MDMA at the heart, DMT and the classic psychedelics in the upper centres.
A correspondence in how experience is shaped, not a claim that a drug is a practice or that chakras are organs
2026 · Working paper
A first look in the brain
A theory-guided exploratory study: two expert practitioners, scanned intensively while meditating on four chakras. Both showed a common brain-wide pattern of integration, and across the four states brain activity shifted broadly in the direction the framework predicted.
Initial evidence and a calibration, not a population result: it motivates a larger prospective test
Next
A pre-registered study of twenty to thirty experienced practitioners, with heart rate and breathing recorded alongside the scans, where the correspondence is either confirmed or fails honestly.
Why it matters
A map changes what’s possible.
If transformations of consciousness have a structure, they can be understood, compared and navigated, not only endured or admired.
For anyone who has had one.
A powerful experience can leave you without a framework to hold it. A map gives orientation: what happened, how it relates to other states and where it might lead. It is what our coaching is built on.
For psychedelic therapy.
Psychedelic therapy is entering clinical practice. Existing measures capture important aspects of psychedelic experience, but much of its phenomenological and transformative structure remains poorly characterised. This work aims to give clinicians a fuller map.
For care when it gets hard.
Some psychedelic crises closely resemble the difficult passages contemplative traditions have long described. A shared map could help tell a hard but meaningful passage from one that needs support.
For science and the traditions.
Centuries of disciplined first-person practice become knowledge research can learn from and test, and meditation and psychedelics can be studied on one map instead of in separate fields.
Publications
Read the work.
Witnessing Kundalini: Introducing the PEACE framework for psychedelic and meditation research
Aidan Lyon & Anand Vaidya
Forthcoming in Indian Spirituality in Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University PressIntroduces PEACE and the Psychedelic–Kuṇḍalinī Thesis, rebuilding the chakras and kuṇḍalinī as constructs research can test, and applies them to first-person reports.
Mystical Entropy: An introduction to the Psychedelic–Kundalini Thesis and the PEACE framework for contemplative research
Aidan Lyon
Philosophical Psychology, 2026Current models explain how psychedelics loosen the mind. This paper asks the complementary question the contemplative traditions ask: how the energy released is organised into new forms of awareness.
Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind
Aidan Lyon
Oxford University Press, 2023The book behind the Center: “psychedelic” as mind-revealing, and psychedelic space as a way to compare experiences from any source, from a flash of insight to deep mystical absorption.
Through the Psychedelic Looking-Glass: The Importance of Phenomenal Transparency in Psychedelic Transformation
Aidan Lyon & Anya Farennikova
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 2022Argues that psychedelic transformation isn’t only a matter of seeing through the mind’s representations: becoming more absorbed in experience can transform people too.
What comes next
The next study.
The step that turns a signal into a map is a full, pre-registered study: twenty to thirty experienced practitioners, fuller neuroimaging, heart rate and breathing recorded throughout, and cognitive tasks alongside the scans. At that scale, the correspondence is either confirmed or fails honestly.
CPS is independent, with no university department or venture capital behind it. The work runs on people who think it matters. If you’re a researcher, practitioner or funder and would like to take part in, collaborate on or support it, we’d like to hear from you.
Applying these ideas to your professional work? Explore consulting with Aidan.
The research develops the map. Coaching teaches you to navigate with it.
You don’t need to read any of this to work with us. But if you’re trying to understand an experience, this is the thinking we bring to it.