Design
Exploratory, cross-sectional, online citizen-science feasibility pilot. No intervention, dosing or instruction to alter consciousness.
AkashicNET Citizen Science · AKN Pilot 001 · Public Draft v0.1
Test protocol,
open for scrutiny.
A proposed anonymous pilot for recording anomalous and noetic experiences without presuming what caused them.
STATUSPublic protocol prototype · no recruitment · no data collection
Purpose
What is being tested?
Primary feasibility question: can AkashicNET collect privacy-minimised, interpretable citizen reports of unusual experiences while preserving uncertainty, capturing both benefits and harms, and avoiding identifiable details?
Scientific boundary: this pilot may describe patterns in self-reports. It cannot establish that an experience has a paranormal, neurological, spiritual or other particular cause.
Proposed sample
Initially 50–100 adults. Convenience sampling will be declared and recruitment sources reported separately.
Eligibility
Age 18 or over; able to understand the consent information; choosing voluntarily to submit one of the available report types.
Comparison route
Ordinary or trivial experience reports provide a comparison route. They are not treated as proof or a perfectly matched control group.
Participation
One short online questionnaire, with optional narrative fields. Questions may be skipped and participants may stop before submission.
Recruitment
Any future invitation will identify the study status, intended audience, risks, privacy terms and contact route. No covert subreddit scraping.
Proposed variables
Record experience, impact and context separately.
- 01Experience route
An anomalous or noetic experience, or an ordinary comparison experience.
- 02Reported impact
Beneficial, difficult, mixed, no lasting effect, or prefer not to say.
- 03Experience categories
Participant-selected descriptors such as synchronicity, OBE, sensed presence, altered time, dream or unity.
- 04Context and cofactors
Broad setting, practices and circumstances from a reviewed list; no exact event, location or date.
- 05Interpretation
Optional personal meaning and plausible alternative explanations, kept distinct from the experience account.
- 06Background
Optional coarse age range, gender, nationality, country and education, used to describe sample bias.
Planned analysis
Descriptive first.
No inflated claims.
Report recruitment flow, completion, missingness and category frequencies. Compare reported impacts and broad contexts using counts and percentages, with uncertainty and missing answers visible.
Any narrative coding requires a written codebook, more than one reviewer where feasible, disagreement reporting and examples edited to prevent identification. Exploratory associations will be labelled exploratory, not confirmatory.
Small cells and risky combinations will be suppressed. Raw responses will not be published on GitHub or shown in public dashboards.
Privacy, welfare and provenance
No names, email addresses, usernames, IP addresses, exact locations, exact dates, device fingerprints or private records in the research dataset.
A future live system must provide a random receipt and withdrawal route without creating a public identity or account.
The study is not diagnosis, treatment, crisis support or proof of a claim. Distress and safety guidance must be visible before submission.
Protocol, schema, analysis code, synthetic examples and reviewed aggregate results may be public. Individual submissions remain private.
Required before launch
Publication is not approval.
This page makes the proposal inspectable. It does not replace ethics review, data-protection work or moderator permission where required.
- 1
Final protocol, questionnaire and analysis plan are versioned and frozen before recruitment.
- 2
Independent research-methods and ethics review is documented; any required formal approval is obtained.
- 3
Consent, privacy, withdrawal, safeguarding, retention and incident procedures are complete.
- 4
A secure EU-region database, restricted administration and multi-factor authentication are tested.
- 5
Rate limits, bot controls, duplicate handling, deletion tests and small-group suppression are verified.
- 6
A public change log names every material change between this draft and the live protocol.
Community review
Proposed discussion venue: r/NeuronsToNirvana
Comments from believers, sceptics, researchers and people with lived experience are welcome. Useful critique includes missing risks, biased wording, weak comparison design, inaccessible language and claims the data could not support.
Visit r/NeuronsToNirvana ↗Do not submit an experience through this protocol page. The linked form is a browser-only demonstration and intentionally stores nothing. A separate dated notice will be published if a reviewed study later opens.