Lab · Research · open data
The Experience Ledger
A private journal for practice and listening sessions. After each one it asks eleven short questions, drawn from William James’s four marks of mystical experience and adapted from the altered-states scales researchers use. It keeps your answers in this browser and lets you compare your own session types, for example a Resonance Session against plain silence. If you choose to, you can share anonymised scores, and withdraw them later.
Private by default. Everything you log stays in this browser’s storage. Nothing leaves your device unless you press Share in step 4 after reading exactly what is sent. The page works offline. This is not therapy and not a diagnostic tool. If a session leaves you distressed, stop, and see getting help.
This page needs JavaScript and the shared Lab script (/lab/lab-core.js). If you are seeing this, one of them did not load.
1 · Your ledger
Log a session
After any session
Pick what you just did, then answer the questions. Leave any slider untouched to skip it.
Timed silence (the control)
Sit with nothing playing. This is the comparison condition: without it there is no way to tell what a session added. No sound plays at the end; the screen changes.
1 · Your ledger
Compare your own sessions
Two of your session types side by side: the mean on each question, the bar showing ± one standard deviation (how much your sessions vary), and n, the number of sessions that answered it. This is your own unblinded data. It describes your sessions and nothing else. With fewer than five sessions on either side, a difference means nothing yet.
One question across all your session types
2 · The questions
What we ask, and where it comes from
Every item is a 0–100 slider. That is the same response format as the 11-factor and 5-dimension Altered States of Consciousness Rating Scales (the 11D-ASC and 5D-ASC), so scores can sit beside published numbers. The wording is our own adaptation, not the validated instrument. The real 11D-ASC scores each factor as the average of several tested items; we ask one plain-language item per idea. Any comparison with published norms is therefore indicative only, a rough sense of scale, not a measurement on the same instrument.
Four items are William James’s four marks of mystical states from The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity. They are a philosopher’s descriptive checklist, not a validated scale. Two baseline items (how settled you felt before and after) let you see change within a session.
| # | Question (exact wording) | Idea | Source |
|---|
Questions version q1. If the wording ever changes, the version changes and old and new answers are never pooled.
Why Bucke is here, and why he is not a question. Richard Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness (1901) lists marks he took from accounts of illumination: a subjective light, moral exaltation and joy, intellectual illumination, a sense of eternal life, the loss of the fear of death. James drew on him. We read Bucke as living tradition and inspiration. His marks echo in the joy and noetic items, but his evolutionary claims are not science and are not scored here.
3 · Norms
Your scores beside the Altered States Database
The Altered States Database (Prugger, Derdiyok, Dinkelacker, Costines & Schmidt, Scientific Data, 2022; summary on our reading list) collects published questionnaire results for drug and non-drug altered states on the same scales. The numbers below are copied, unchanged, from its open dataset (OSF, version 2025-12-31, CC0), 11D-ASC sheet, in percent of the scale maximum. Each row is one group in one published study; follow the DOI to the original.
Read this before reading the table. Only five of our items map onto an 11D-ASC factor, and our single items are not the validated multi-item factors. The mapping for noetic → Insightfulness and imagery → Complex imagery is loose. The studies ran in labs with screened volunteers, set doses and set timings; you are one person at home. Treat this as a sense of scale, never as a measurement. Psilocybin rows are there only to show what the top of the scale looks like in a lab. Nothing here suggests using any substance.
Not in this table, and why. Ineffability, transiency, passivity and changed sense of time have no 11D-ASC factor to set beside them. The MEQ30 does measure ineffability, but on a different response format, so we do not mix it in. Meditation norms are still to be added: the database’s 11D-ASC sheet has no meditation-only group yet (meditation appears only combined with psilocybin), and we will not stand in a different scale’s numbers for it. Silence has no direct norm either. The nearest low-stimulation references are the placebo, the normal-breathing control and the Ganzfeld rows, and none of them is silence.
5 · Aggregate so far
What people have shared
Live from the Lab server. A figure appears only when at least five different people have shared that session type and answered that question. Until then it is not shown at all, not even as a count. When a result arrives we will publish it as it is, including “no difference”.
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6 · Safeguards & privacy
A way out, always
Is this therapy, or a test of my mental health?
No. It is a journal with a few questions. It diagnoses nothing, and a high or low score means nothing about you as a person. Deep states, including ones from music, breath or long silence, can bring up difficult feelings. If a session is hard, stop, and use the help links above. Do not use these sessions in a crisis.
Where is my data?
In this browser’s local storage, under the key sb-lab-ledger-v1, shared with the Honest Oracle and Resonance Sessions on this site so their sessions appear here too. Clearing site data deletes it. Export JSON gives you a copy; Import JSON merges one back in. We cannot see it and cannot recover it.
What if I share and change my mind?
Press Withdraw everything I shared. Every row made with your contributor key is deleted from the live database immediately. Published totals update on the next page load. Copies someone already downloaded cannot be recalled, which is why nothing is published for a session type until five different people have shared it.
Does a Resonance Session change experience?
We do not know. That is the question this ledger exists to answer. Nothing on this site claims a track is conscious, awakens anyone or entrains brainwaves. If the shared data shows no difference from silence, that is the result we will publish.
What does the server do with my IP address?
Cloudflare passes it to our server, which combines it with a secret, hashes it, and uses the hash only to count requests for rate limiting. Those counters are discarded after three days. The IP and its hash are never stored with scores. Server access logs are kept for operations only.
Built on: the Altered States Database (Prugger et al., 2022) · James, 1902 · Bucke, 1901 · 11D-ASC: Studerus, Gamma & Vollenweider, 2010 · the roadmap
Silence
10:00
Nothing is playing. Sit, breathe, let your eyes close if you like. Press Stop, or Esc, whenever you want.