Recovers the original meaning of psychedelic — from the Greek for mind-revealing — and develops it into a unified framework for psychedelic, meditative, and spontaneous experiences alike. At its core is psychedelic space: a four-dimensional map — scope, clarity, novelty, and duration — on which any mind-revealing experience can be located, from the spontaneous flash of insight to the deepest mystical absorption. Drawing on cognitive science, attention research, and the contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation, the book argues that engaging with such experiences is not merely a curiosity of consciousness but a live method for doing philosophy and cultivating wisdom.
Research
Philosophy, neuroscience, contemplative practice, and AI — integrated into a unified approach to understanding consciousness and psychedelic experience.
Experience First
The Center for Psychedelic Space is dedicated to researching psychedelic experiences — regardless of how they arise. The word psychedelic derives from the Greek psyche (mind) and delos (revealed): it means mind-revealing. A psychedelic experience is any experience in which hidden aspects of the mind become manifest in consciousness. This can happen through pharmacological means, but it can equally happen through meditation, prāṇāyāma, yoga, contemplative practice, aesthetic encounter, or spontaneous insight. By starting with experience rather than substance, we open a much larger — and more fundamental — field of inquiry.
Most psychedelic research today is organised around specific substances and their clinical applications. This has produced valuable results, but it has also narrowed the field’s conceptual horizons. When research is structured around a molecule, the experiences it occasions are treated as effects to be measured rather than phenomena to be understood. Our approach inverts this priority. We treat the experience itself — its structure, its dimensions, its relationship to consciousness — as the primary object of study, and we draw on multiple methods of occasioning it in order to understand what it reveals about the mind.
This reorientation has significant consequences. It brings contemplative traditions — particularly the yogic and meditative traditions that have been systematically investigating psychedelic experience for millennia — into genuine dialogue with contemporary science. It makes possible a comparative phenomenology of altered states that cuts across the pharmacological-contemplative divide. And it shifts the central question from what do these substances do to the brain? to the deeper and more consequential question: what does it mean for the mind to reveal itself, and how can we use that revelation wisely?
Publications
Recent and forthcoming books and papers from the Center — crossing philosophy, contemplative science, and empirical phenomenology to map the structure of psychedelic experience.
Witnessing Kundalini: Introducing the PEACE framework for psychedelic and meditation research
Forthcoming in Indian Spirituality in Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford University Press)
ReadIntroduces the PEACE framework — Practice, Experience, Analyze, Compare, Experiment — for bringing contemplative traditions into rigorous dialogue with psychedelic science. Current research maps the dissolution-oriented (Shiva) dimensions of transformation well, but is under-equipped for the energetic, formative (Shakti) processes that shape change over time. The chapter addresses this through the Psychedelic-Kundalinī Thesis, re-engineering cakras and kundalinī into empirically tractable constructs and applying LLM-based analysis to first-person reports — revealing MDMA in the warmth of Anāhata and LSD and DMT in the visionary modes of Ājñā and Sahasrāra.
Through the Psychedelic Looking-Glass: The Importance of Phenomenal Transparency in Psychedelic Transformation
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 3(10), 2022
ReadArgues that psychedelic transformation cannot be explained by increases in phenomenal opacity alone — the seeing of one's mental representations as representations. Psychedelics just as regularly induce increases in phenomenal transparency: radical absorption into nature, unity with music, immersion in mental imagery, encounters with an amplified sense of reality, and the revelation of a more authentic self. These transparent experiences are not bookends to opacity-driven insight but vehicles of transformation in their own right — opening a new line of empirical research into the role of attention and phenomenology in psychedelic psychotherapy.
Mystical Entropy: An introduction to the Psychedelic-Kundalini Thesis and the PEACE framework for contemplative research
Philosophical Psychology, 2026
ReadReframes psychedelic transformation through the contemplative polarity of Shiva (stillness, dissolution) and Shakti (energy, embodiment, transformation). Where current models of brain entropy and self-unbinding illuminate the Shiva side, this paper recovers the long-neglected Shakti side: how released energy is channeled into organized awareness. Bringing thermodynamic and information-theoretic notions of entropy into dialogue with Tantric cartographies of consciousness, it offers a new lens on the transdiagnostic reach of psychedelic therapy and the convergent failure modes of psychedelic and kundalinī-related crises — opening a research program in which contemplative traditions are not metaphor but method.
Psychedelic Philosophy
Philosophy began as the love of wisdom — not the production of journal articles. Its founders understood that the pursuit of wisdom requires more than logical argument. The Eleusinian Mysteries, the Oracle at Delphi, the Vedic soma rituals, the meditative traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism — all point to a practice of philosophy grounded in revelatory experience. Psychedelic philosophy recovers this experiential dimension and integrates it with the rigorous analytic methods that contemporary philosophy has developed.
The analytic methods of philosophy — deduction, conceptual analysis, thought experiments — are serial, rule-based, and conscious. They run on the mind’s CPU. Psychedelic methods are experiential rather than inferential: they tap into unconscious cognitive resources — the mind’s GPU. These methods include meditation, contemplation, engagement with myth and art, and psychedelic substances used with care and intention. The criterion is not the means but the effect: does the practice reveal hidden aspects of the mind in ways that make the practitioner wiser?
Three forms of wisdom are at stake. Sophia — theoretical insight, the knowledge of truths that are universal or fundamental. Aporia — the wisdom of knowing what you do not know, the Socratic recognition that false certainty is the deepest obstacle to understanding. And phronesis — practical wisdom, the ability to perceive what matters in a given situation and act well. There is growing empirical evidence that psychedelic experience and contemplative practice can cultivate all three: from creative and theoretical breakthroughs, to the dissolution of overconfidence, to measurable improvements in decision-making, ethical sensitivity, and mindful awareness.