Support the Research

What goes unmeasured

The field has a dominant marker for whether a psychedelic session helps: the intensity of the mystical experience it occasions. That marker is real, and it earned its place — but it accounts for only about a tenth of why some people get better and others do not. The other nine tenths is embodied, energetic, formative, and relational, and the field has had no map for it.

The absence is felt long before it is measured. A psychedelic experience can be plainly significant and yet so unlike anything ordinary that the person who has it is left without a framework to hold it — and the clinician sitting across from them without one either. What matters most about a session is often the part there are no words, and no instruments, for.

Consider what that means by comparison. In any other domain that induces powerful transitions of mind — aviation, surgery, deep-sea diving — basic cartography is not optional. You do not put someone through a transformation you cannot chart. Psychedelic therapy is the exception: it is already in the room, and we navigate most of it blind.

That gap is not a sign the existing science went wrong. It is a sign the map is partial — precise about the part it covers, silent about the rest. And it does not stay still: as the therapy reaches more people, the part of a session that most shapes whether it heals goes on being the part no one can yet read. Closing that gap is the work this page asks you to consider funding.

How we are mapping it

The Center began in that gap. It exists because the map it works on was one its founder needed and could not find — a way to make sense of experiences that were obviously significant and stubbornly hard to place. The work is an attempt to build, carefully, the thing that should already have existed.

The contemplative traditions — the yogic and tantric ones in particular — have been describing exactly this territory for a very long time. They name the embodied and energetic processes the current science leaves under-charted. Our method is to take those descriptions seriously as maps, work out what they predict, and then test those predictions against the brain.

Doing that without distorting either side is the hard part, and it needs a method. Ours is called PEACE.

PEACE — Practice, Experience, Analyze, Compare, Experiment. A way of taking a concept that a tradition knows through doing, and re-building it into something a scientist can measure — without throwing away what made it worth studying.

Practice. Start inside the discipline itself. A yogi works with prana — an energy they learn to gather, concentrate, and scatter through sustained practice.
Experience. Attend to what the practice discloses. As prana is gathered, attention narrows and steadies; as it scatters, attention frays. The concept is known from the inside.
Analyze. Name that regularity in terms science already has: prana, in this register, behaves like attentional resources — a capacity that can be concentrated or dispersed.
Compare. Now 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. That redefinition makes predictions: shifts in prana should show up in attention — in what people report, how they perform, and what the brain does. Predictions that can fail.

The cycle then runs again. The concept is held only as long as it keeps doing honest work. PEACE was developed with the late Prof. Anand Vaidya, and it is the backbone of the Psychedelic-Kundalini Thesis below.

What makes this possible is that the Center sits at one place where philosophy, contemplative practice, neuroscience, and AI meet — not as a list of disciplines but as a single way of working. Philosophy supplies the conceptual care; the traditions supply the map; neuroscience supplies the test; and the AI tools read first-person reports at a scale a person could not. The synthesis is the method.

Where the work stands

A method is only worth funding if it has already produced something. Four pieces of work mark the line so far — the framework, the project that tested it, the map it produced, and the calibration that names exactly the question to ask next.

Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind

Aidan Lyon

Oxford University Press, 2023

The book recovers the original sense of psychedelic — from the Greek for mind-revealing — and builds it into a framework that treats psychedelic, meditative, and spontaneous experiences as one field of study rather than three. At its centre is the idea of psychedelic space: a way of locating any mind-revealing experience along a few shared dimensions, so that states reached by very different routes can be compared rather than just catalogued. It is where the conceptual groundwork for everything below was laid — a way of asking what these experiences reveal about the mind, precise enough to be carried into a laboratory.

The Mystical Entropy Project

Templeton-funded

Completed 2025

The project that turned the framework into working instruments. It produced the PEACE method and the Psychedelic-Kundalini Thesis, and put them to a first test: a large-scale analysis of first-person trip reports, read by language models, asked whether the chakra structure would surface in accounts written by people who had never encountered the vocabulary. It did. That is suggestive, not conclusive — the analysis was told what lens to look through — but it is the signal that made the brain study worth running.

The Psychedelic-Kundalini Thesis

From Witnessing Kundalini

Lyon & Vaidya

The map the method draws. It treats the Tantric chakra system not as metaphysics but as a description of how attention organises itself — gathering into stable centres, each with its own felt quality — and proposes that psychedelics and contemplative practice move through the same space by different doors. In the trip-report analysis the substances sorted themselves along the traditional ascent: opioids low and bodily, stimulants into drive, MDMA at the heart, LSD and DMT in the upper, visionary centres. A correspondence in how experience is shaped — not a claim that a drug is a practice, or that chakras are organs.

Yogic Neurophenomenology

fMRI calibration

Working paper, 2026

The first test against the brain. The tradition describes inner experience as flowing through three channels — two that differentiate, one that integrates — so the thesis predicts the brain should organise the same way. Two expert practitioners entered four meditative states in the scanner. The integrating channel was the same brain-wide pattern across both of them, very nearly so; and each meditation reshaped the three channels in the order the tradition names — a pattern that does not appear by chance, and does not match breath, movement, or arousal. Two practitioners is a calibration, not a result. It does not confirm the map; it shows the method works, and names exactly the question to ask at scale.

The next step, and what support funds

The step that turns a signal into a map is a full, pre-registered study: twenty to thirty experienced practitioners, more comprehensive neuroimaging, and cognitive and behavioural tasks alongside the scans. Done at that scale, the correspondence is either confirmed or it fails honestly — and either way it is tied to how people actually think, feel, and change. That is the work that gives clinicians something to read a session by, while the therapy is already in the room.

The Center is an independent research institute — no university department behind it, no venture capital. That is a deliberate choice, and it has a cost: the questions are not set by a funder's priorities or a department's incentives, and the work runs on the people who think it matters. Support — of any kind — goes to a few concrete things, roughly in this order.

The full fMRI study. Scanner hours, practitioner recruitment, and the cognitive and behavioural testing that goes alongside the scans. A single session is expensive, and the sample has to be large enough — twenty to thirty practitioners — for the calibration finding to hold or fail honestly. This is the step that moves the work toward the clinic.
Researcher time. The unglamorous majority of the cost: the months of reading, analysis, and writing between a question and a published paper. Independent of an institution, this time is not salaried by anyone else.
Academic publishing. Open-access fees, which keep a paper readable by anyone rather than locked behind a journal paywall — a real, recurring cost of doing research in the open.
The AI tools. The compute and development behind Delphi and Sarasvatī, the citation-constrained companions built for this work, and the analysis pipelines that read first-person reports at a scale a person could not.