VR is as good as psychedelics to help people reach a better state.

As we got closer, I worried about violating the privacy of other participants. Then I remembered that oceans and thousands of kilometers separate me from me – and isn’t the point of simplifying the notion of personal space? So I tried to get into intimacy.

Agnieszka Sekula, a PhD candidate at the Australian Center for Human Psychopharmacology and co-founder of a company that uses VR to enhance psychedelic therapy, says: “What happens in VR is a sense of complete oblivion about the existence of the outside world.” “So there’s an analogy to this alternate reality in psychedelics that feels more real than what’s actually out there.”

But, she added, “there are definitely differences between what a psychedelic experience feels like and what virtual reality feels like.” Because of this, she appreciates that Isness-D has developed a new way of crossing over rather than simply copying what was already there.

More research is needed on the lasting effects of the Isness-D experience and whether virtual reality in general can produce similar benefits to psychedelics. A central theory (a debate far from settled) of how psychedelics improve clinical outcomes is that their effects are driven by both the experience of the trip and the drug’s neurochemical effects on the brain. As VR only reflects subjective experience, its clinical utility may not be strong as it has not yet been rigorously tested.

Jacob Addai, a psychiatry researcher in San Francisco, California, said he wished the study measured the participants’ mental health. VR posits that it might be able to control the default mode network—the brain network that gets activated when our thoughts aren’t focused on a particular task and that psychologists can suppress (scientists believe this is what causes ego death). People who have seen amazing videos have decreased activity in this network. VR is better at rendering than regular video, so Isness-D can call it the same.

Already, a startup out of Glowacki Labs called aNUma lets anyone with a VR headset sign up for weekly Isness sessions. The startup sells a shortened version of Isness-D to companies for virtual wellness retreats, and offers a similar experience called Ripple to help patients, their families and caregivers cope with the deadly disease. The author of the paper describing Isness-D is experimenting in couples and family therapy.

“What we’ve found is that representing people as pure brilliance frees them from a lot of judgments and preconceptions,” Glowacki says. This includes negative thoughts and prejudices about their bodies. He has personally facilitated aNUma sessions for cancer patients and their loved ones. One of the women with pancreatic cancer died days later. The last time she and her friends got together was when they were mixing balls of light.

For one of my Inness-D experiences, moving created a short electrical line that showed where I was now. After a while, the narrator breathed: “What does it feel like to see the past?” I started thinking about people from my past that I missed or hurt. In a messy curve, I used my finger to write their names in the air. As quickly as I typed them, I watched them disappear.