Response · to Lyon (2026) and Lyon & Vaidya (forthcoming)
The PEACE framework asks for disciplined comparison across contemplative traditions. Here is what that comparison looks like when run over 3.9 million pages of primary sources — including one result that supports the Psychedelic–Kundalinī Thesis, and two that complicate it.
Aidan Lyon's Mystical entropy (Philosophical Psychology 39:5, 2026) argues that psychedelic science has developed one half of a polarity and neglected the other. The Shiva half — dissolution, unity, ego loss, ineffability — has been operationalised into instruments like the MEQ30 and linked to therapeutic outcome. The Shakti half — energy, embodiment, formation, the reorganisation of experience over time — remains, in his phrase, the dark matter of the field. Lyon and Vaidya's PEACE framework (Practice, Experience, Analyze, Compare, Experiment) proposes a disciplined way to bring contemplative cartographies into that gap without either romanticising or extracting from them, and the Psychedelic–Kundalinī Thesis is offered as a worked instance.
We have been building something that bears directly on the Compare step, and did so without knowledge of this framework — which makes the overlap worth reporting, and the disagreements worth taking seriously. The instrument is a corpus of roughly 3.9 million machine-translated pages of primary sources with semantic retrieval over them, so that a comparison across traditions can be run at a scale no reader could manage, with every claim resolving to a scan of the page it came from.
Below: one result that independently measures the asymmetry Lyon diagnoses, one that supports the PKT's central structural claim, one that supports its best-evidenced chakra while complicating the rest, and one philological finding about the source text the PKT cites. Then an honest accounting of where this instrument fails PEACE's own standard.
Lyon argues the field's instruments capture dissolution well and formation poorly. Running 36 phenomenological probes across the corpus and classifying 5,728 retrieved passages by register — whether a passage reports an experience or prescribes a method for producing one — produces the same asymmetry as a property of the historical record itself.
Material retrieved by contemplative-emptiness probes arrives 57% as instruction and 6% as testimony. Material retrieved by body-dissolution probes arrives 7% as instruction and 63% as testimony. Contemplative traditions overwhelmingly transmit method; visionary and medical traditions transmit report.
This gives Lyon's diagnosis a mechanism. A questionnaire is a testimony-collecting instrument: it can only ever ask what happened to you. The half of the record that transmits how to bring a state about — precisely the Shakti material — has no modern counterpart to be compared against, not because researchers neglected it but because the dominant instrument cannot represent it. The gap is built into the method, which is why noticing it required a framework like PEACE rather than more data.
Lyon argues that kundalini syndrome and psychedelic adverse effects converge because both arise under the same structural condition — energy released faster than the system can integrate it — and that their shared failure modes are evidence of a shared architecture. Different ignition sources, same engine.
We tested something adjacent without knowing this argument existed. We extracted the stage model of the Visuddhimagga — nine attainments of concentration, sixteen knowledges of insight — from our copy of the manual, in its own vocabulary, and ran it over the corpus, recording for each match whether the source lay inside or outside the Buddhist tradition that produced the model.
Inside the tradition, 48.8% of matches are concentration attainments and 32.9% are the knowledges of suffering. Outside it, concentration falls to 30.0% while the destabilising sequence rises to 62.9% (χ²(1) = 14.61, p < .001, OR = 3.1). Christian mystical sources supply most of the outside matches, most often to bhaya-ñāṇa, appearance as terror; Sufi sources most often to muñcitukamyatā, the desire for deliverance.
The technique-specific ladder does not travel. The crisis ladder does. That is independent historical evidence for the structural claim the PKT makes from clinical convergence, arrived at through a different route on different material.
The PKT's phenomenological hypothesis is tested in Lyon and Vaidya by prompting a language model to infer, from Erowid trip reports with substance references removed, how energy is distributed across the seven chakras — yielding the graded profiles of their Figure 1. We can supply something that analysis currently lacks: a historical prior. From ten independently reconstructed subtle-body systems (3,888 centres extracted from 432 books, aligned only on body location, never on names), we can ask what the sources themselves do with each locus.
Anāhata is exceptional, and it is exceptional in exactly the way that matters. At 33.1% experiential it is more than twice the rate of any other locus, and it is the single locus where all ten traditions — including the seven that never inherited the chakra system — report someone perceiving something. Hesychast sources place 76% of their centres at the heart and mark 70% of them experiential; Sufi sources, 55% and 31%.
This is independent attestation in the strict sense: traditions with no contact, no shared vocabulary, and no shared metaphysics converge on the heart as a place where something is felt. And the heart is precisely the chakra with the neuroimaging result Lyon reports — Bartels's pgACC convergence during Anāhata meditation. The chakra with the best neural evidence is the chakra with the best historical evidence, which is not what one would expect if the correspondence were arbitrary.
Within the Indic sources alone, the prior is flat. Restricting to the traditions the PKT actually draws on — Hindu tantra, kundalini yoga, Tibetan tantra — experiential rates across the seven loci run 9.2%, 10.9%, 11.2%, 11.6%, 12.7%, 14.9%, 23.5%. There is no gradient. In their home literature the chakras are near-uniformly objects of visualisation and ritual construction, not sites of reported sensation. Anāhata's distinctiveness appears only when non-Indic traditions are added.
This does not refute the PKT, but it sharpens a confound its proof of concept should rule out. A model asked to distribute experience across seven chakras will produce a distribution. The question is whether the resulting gradient reflects structure in the trip reports or the model's inherited chakra semantics — and the historical record, which is where those semantics come from, is flat on the dimension the gradient is supposed to track.
The test is clean and cheap. Correlate the Figure 1 profiles against two priors: the historical experiential distribution (flat within Indic sources) and the historical attributional distribution — how much doctrinal and ritual weight each chakra carries, which is emphatically not flat. If the profiles track the second and not the first, they are measuring semantics. A further control would run the same pipeline over reports of non-psychoactive intense experience; if chakra gradients appear there too, they are a property of the instrument.
The PKT identifies its phenomenological model as “the standard seven-chakra model inherited from the ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa.” We hold that text — the Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa, sixth chapter of Pūrṇānanda's Śrītattvacintāmaṇi (1577), with Sanskrit commentary — and its running header on every page is षट्चक्रनिरूपणम्, ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇam: the investigation of the six chakras. Our extraction agrees: across all Hindu tantric sources retrieved, the modal stated count is six.
The structure above ājñā is not a seventh chakra but a graded hierarchy, which the commentary sets out directly:
Above the Command Center [Ajna Chakra] sits the second Drop [Bindu], which is of the nature of Shiva. Above that is the Awakening Power [Bodhini Shakti] in the form of a half-measure. Above that is Sound [Nada], shaped like a half-moon and representing the union of Shiva and Shakti. Above that is the Great Sound [Mahanada], shaped like a plow. Above that is the Pervasive Power [Vyapika Shakti]… Above that is Shamani, and above that is Unmani. These exist in sequence as the seven causal forms. Pūrṇānanda, Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa with Sanskrit commentary, p. 57 — read the page. Bracketed terms are the translator's inline glosses.
Only then is sahasrāra introduced, located “above everything previously shown.” So the classical architecture is six chakras, then a seven-stage series of increasingly subtle sound-forms, then the thousand-petalled lotus above all of it. Flattening that into seven equal slots is not a small simplification: it discards precisely the graded, energetic, formative structure above ājñā that the Shakti-oriented project most needs. The tradition already had a finer-grained map of the upper reaches than the modern model preserves.
The transmission is worth stating precisely, because it is where the count changes. Woodroffe 1919 — the source the PKT cites — is The Serpent Power, Woodroffe's own translation of this text, which he rendered “Description of the Six Centres.” So the chain runs: a text titled six, a translation titled six, and a modern model of seven. The seventh slot enters after the translation, not from the source.
This is offered as a resource rather than a correction. If the PKT is looking for differentiated architecture on the Shakti side, the nāda hierarchy is differentiated architecture that its own cited source supplies and the seven-chakra rendering throws away.
PEACE admits only “repeatable, method-governed practices and only experiences showing convergent phenomenological structure.” By that standard this work has no P and no E. There is no practice here and no practitioner. Nobody involved in producing these results has done ṣaṭcakra meditation, and the categories were recovered by reading rather than by training. On Lyon and Vaidya's own account, that is not a minor gap: it is the specific deficiency their framework was built to remedy, and it means nothing here can settle what a chakra is.
What the instrument does supply is a much stronger C. Comparison in this literature has been conducted by scholars reading across a handful of traditions in translation. We can run ten reconstructions over 432 books in thirty languages, align them on a shared axis, and hold every claim to a facsimile. Against the five criteria Lyon sets for a map of psychedelic space, this scores on Empirical (it connects claims to checkable evidence) and contributes to Orienting (it supplies priors and coordinates). It scores poorly on Practical — nobody can use a UMAP projection from inside an altered state — and not at all on Experiential in the first-person sense PEACE requires.
The honest description is that this is an Analyze-and-Compare engine that could sit underneath a PEACE-shaped programme, not an alternative to one. Its outputs are priors, baselines, and philological constraints — the things that tell you whether a correspondence you have found is surprising.