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With a growing body of research highlighting the therapeutic potential ofexperiential phenomenology which diminishes egoic identity and increases one'ssense of connectedness, there is significant interest in how to elicit such'self-transcendent experiences' (STEs) in laboratory contexts. Psychedelicdrugs (YDs) have proven particularly effective in this respect, producingsubjective phenomenology which reliably elicits intense STEs. With virtualreality (VR) emerging as a powerful tool for constructing new perceptualenvironments, we describe a VR framework called 'Isness-distributed' (Isness-D)which harnesses the unique affordances of distributed multi-person VR to blurconventional self-other boundaries. Within Isness-D, groups of participantsco-habit a shared virtual space, collectively experiencing their bodies asluminous energetic essences with diffuse spatial boundaries. It enables momentsof 'energetic coalescence', a new class of embodied phenomenologicalintersubjective experience where bodies can fluidly merge, enablingparticipants to have an experience of including multiple others within theirself-representation. To evaluate Isness-D, we adopted a citizen scienceapproach, coordinating an international network of Isness-D 'nodes'. Weanalyzed the results (N = 58) using 4 different self-report scales previouslyapplied to analyze subjective YD phenomenology (the inclusion of community inself scale, ego-dissolution inventory, communitas scale, and the MEQ30 mysticalexperience questionnaire). Despite the complexities associated with adistributed experiment like this, the Isness-D scores on all 4 scales werestatistically indistinguishable from recently published YD studies,demonstrating that distributed VR can be used to design intersubjective STEswhere people dissolve their sense of self in the connection to others.

Dissolving yourself in connection to others: shared experiences of ego  attenuation and connectedness during group VR experiences can be comparable  to psychedelics