In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley recounted his experience taking mescaline under the guidance of the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. He wrote how it enabled him to glimpse the intrinsic energetic luminosity of matter: “the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence… flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged… [even] the folds of my grey flannel trousers were charged with Isness.”

“Isness” is our latest VR research project, designed to explore how the Narupa VR tools can be adapted to enable participants to experience the energetic essence of matter, and elicit perceptual responses comparable to psychedelic experiences. You can read more in an open-access paper we’ve just posted to the arXiv!