The existence of social emotions, like guilt about something done years ago, anxiety about a future that may never arrive, benevolence toward strangers you’ll never meet, tells us something important about what feelings are. These aren’t glitches in a system designed for immediate homeostatic regulation. They aren’t cognitive add-ons bolted onto an older, simpler affective machinery. They are evidence that our systems for feeling and our experience of them have never been solely about the present moment. I’d argue that this is true for most if not all of the systems that underlie lived experience. But more on that later.

Harm and gain, the basic axes of negative and positive valence, don’t track what’s happening to you right now, as strange as that may sound. They model what has happened, what could happen, what might happen to others whose fates are entangled with yours. They embed you into many overlapping timescales simultaneously. A pang of guilt is not a present-tense signal about a present-tense threat. It is a felt marker of a deviation from a model that spans the past and projects into the future — a model concerned not with this instant but with the trajectory of your relationships, your social standing, your capacity to cooperate over years and decades. Without that multiscale temporal context, most experience loses all meaning.

This also means that even the most apparently cognitive and social phenomena — benevolence, loyalty, moral outrage, the felt sense that you ought to do the right thing — remain deeply entwined with feeling states. They are not post-hoc rationalizations layered on top of raw affect. They are affect, operating at longer timescales and broader social scopes. Feelings are what give us signals that guide us toward the best approximation of optimal behavior across many timescales at once. Homeostasis, properly understood, is not solely an existential thermostat. It is a multi-temporal, multi-scale project of persistence and, importantly, flourishing.

This is why I personally think “embedding” is a better term than “prediction” for what the brain is doing. Others deeper in the weeds use the even better term “modeling,” but ultimately what I am trying to address here is the non-technical, lay approach to these terms.

The predictive processing framework — associated most prominently with Karl Friston, Andy Clark, Anil Seth, and others — has been enormously productive, and I don’t seek to dismiss it. But the word prediction carries misleading connotations that invite category errors. It suggests a system oriented forward in time, generating expectations about what comes next and then comparing those expectations to incoming data. And that is undeniably part of the story. But only part.

In fact I’ll go a step further to give this perspective its necessary due: what is the alternative picture? What kind of organism could possibly function as a brain in a black box, getting flashes of each next thing and having to sort everything out about it in that moment, or in some brief window? That would be an organism with no past, no anticipated future, no context — just a stream of surprises to be explained away.

That is obviously not what we are.

What we are is something more like an updating point within a set of overlapping models. These models maximize different features — social coherence, metabolic stability, threat detection, long-term planning — and they operate along different timescales. They have to/seek to integrate. The felt quality of experience at any given moment is in my view the integration itself: the place where the millisecond model of sensory flow, the hourly model of task demands, the yearly model of life trajectory, and the generational model of cultural belonging converge into a single lived now, with more or less success/friction.

Which brings me to the hallucination problem.

There is a popular framing of subjective consciousness — Anil Seth’s “controlled hallucination” being perhaps the most widely known articulation — that treats experience as a kind of useful illusion generated by the brain to help us navigate a world we can never perceive directly. It has deeper roots, of course, in Kant, Hume, Berkeley, and others, but again I want to try and remain within the contemporary zeitgeist here. Anyway, I understand the appeal of this framing as a communication device. It captures something real about the constructive nature of perception. But the word hallucination smuggles in an unexamined assumption that is deflating or misleading in the medium and long term.

To call perception a hallucination is to imply that there is a true way of seeing — some unmediated access to reality-as-it-is — from which our experience deviates. The hallucination is a distortion of something that could, in principle, be seen clearly. But I think this misunderstands what hallucinations themselves are (they are not distortions of a “true” signal; they are the system generating experience in the absence of typical constraints), and it mischaracterizes the relationship between perception and reality more broadly.

You are not hallucinating the world. You are in the world, apprehending it through features and modes of access optimized — across evolutionary, developmental, and moment-to-moment timescales — for your continued flourishing. This is not a distortion. It is a particular, situated, purposive way of being in contact with what is real. The redness of red is not a hallucination of some “true” wavelength. It is what 620 nanometers means for an organism like you, embedded in the kind of world you are embedded in, with the kind of body you have, pursuing the kind of life you are pursuing, at the scale and speed at which you do so. And this situatedness is, in my view, inescapable. To SEE THINGS AS THEY ARE would imply an observer that somehow inhabited all scales, speeds, and locations. For a situated observer, this would mean to BE ALL THINGS.

Crucially, this optimization is ongoing. You are not running a fixed model that was installed at birth or at the close of some critical period. You are continuously updating — because the world is dynamic, because it is itself composed of many other complex systems, each of them also updating. This is one of the genuinely powerful aspects of the variational or free-energy way of looking at things: it captures the fact that all these models are alive, in motion, adjusting themselves in response to a world that doesn’t hold still in ways that are extremely difficult to model on a single scale or with a single distribution.

There is a habit in much of cognitive science and philosophy of treating events as though they are isolable — as though you can meaningfully assign a probability to a discrete event, and that with enough data, your estimate will converge on the “true” probability of that event occurring. But events are linked to other events, which are linked to other events, as parts of large, interconnected causal systems. You cannot meaningfully isolate them except as a first approximation.

We do this, of course. We isolate events all the time, because our cognitive limitations demand it. We can’t model everything at once. So we carve the world into manageable chunks and assign probabilities to them and act as though those probabilities are features of the world rather than features of our models.

But this should not be a guide to our ontology. The fact that we are forced, by finite cognition, to treat events as separable does not mean they are separable. The map’s resolution is not evidence about the territory’s grain. And the persistent temptation to confuse the two — to let the structure of our models dictate our metaphysics — is a deep trap in the science of mind that reappears even in narratives that claim to obviate it.

If the picture I’m advocating for is right — if consciousness is constitutively multi-temporal, if the brain is an embedding rather than a prediction machine, if events cannot be meaningfully isolated from their causal webs — then we have to ask a hard question about how we parse the data that arises from conscious systems. Not just neuroimaging data, though that is a vivid case. Any time-series data. EEG, fMRI, heart-rate variability, galvanic skin response, behavioral micro-timings, ecological momentary assessment, eye-tracking, even the temporal structure of speech and gesture. Anywhere we are sampling a stream of measurements from a system that is embedded across timescales, the same problem applies.

Are we analyzing it correctly?

I don’t think we are. Not most of the time. But that isn’t a fair or constructive question and it also unfairly diminishes the impressive work we have done in our civilizational approximation and storytelling process.

The better question might be whether we are analyzing it completely.

The dominant approach to moment-to-moment variation in almost any time-series data arising from conscious systems goes something like this: define discrete events, epoch the data around them, and look for point correlations — the value at time t correlated with condition y. Or: compute summary statistics within windows, average across trials, and treat the result as the signal while discarding the variability as noise. The entire inferential architecture presupposes that the meaningful information lives in the isolated point or the averaged snapshot.

But if the system is embedded across timescales, then the snapshot is precisely where you will not find what matters most. A point correlation captures what is happening at a moment. It does not capture what that moment means — which is a function of its relationship to every other moment at every other timescale the system operates across. The value at time t is not a self-contained fact. It is a node in a temporal web, and its significance depends on the structure of that web.

This is not a minor technical quibble. It can pose a fundamental mismatch between our ontology and our methodology. If we believe the system is multi-temporal — and the evidence from social emotions, from affective neuroscience, from the variational framework itself all point that way — then we need analytical tools that treat each data point not as an independent observation but as a point whose meaning is constituted by its relationships to other points across varying timescales.

Such tools exist. They have existed for some time, and they are likely underused. Importantly, they are not, to my knowledge, part of popular understanding, the way esoteric but useful concepts like unconscious, or correlation, now are. And they should be, as we enter a new era of data richness and confrontation with the perils and promises of dynamical systems within and without us.

Time-delay embedding reconstructs the dynamics of a system by plotting each point in a time series against its own delayed copies — treating the measurement not as a value but as a location in a reconstructed state space. What you get is not a sequence of numbers but a geometry — a shape that reflects the underlying dynamical structure of the system. This is Takens’ theorem at work: from a single observable, you can reconstruct the topology of the full system, provided you embed it at the right delay and in sufficient dimensions.

Fractal dimension analysis asks: how does the complexity of this signal change across scales? A system that is truly multi-temporal will exhibit self-similar structure — patterns nested within patterns, variability that is not noise but organized complexity operating at multiple resolutions simultaneously. The fractal dimension of a time series is, in a sense, a measure of how many timescales are speaking at once.

Delayed differential analysis, recurrence quantification, multiscale entropy, detrended fluctuation analysis — all of these share a common logic. They don’t treat the data point as sovereign. They define the meaning of each observation in terms of its relationships to other observations at varying temporal distances. They are, in the most literal sense, embedding approaches — they take a one-dimensional stream and unfold it into the multi-dimensional dynamical space it was always living in.

The analogy to fractal dimension is interesting here. When you measure the coastline of Britain, the answer depends on the length of your ruler. At coarse resolution, the coast is smooth and short. At fine resolution, it is jagged and long. The “true” length is not any single measurement — it is the relationship between measurements at different scales. That relationship is the fractal dimension. It is a property of the coastline that no single-scale measurement can capture.

The same principle applies to any time series arising from consciousness. The “true” signal is not the value at any single moment, nor the average across moments. It is the multi-scale structure of how values relate to each other across time. It is the embedding, not the point.

What would it mean to take this seriously?

It would mean that when we look at moment-to-moment variation in any signal arising from a conscious system — neural, physiological, behavioral — we stop treating that variation as noise to be averaged away and start treating it as the primary carrier of information about the system’s multi-temporal dynamics. It would mean that the standard event-related design, for all its utility, is a first approximation that systematically discards the very structure we should be most interested in.

It would mean designing studies and analyses around the relational structure of time series: how does this moment relate to the moment five seconds ago, five minutes ago, five hours ago? How does the complexity of the signal at one timescale predict the dynamics at another? Where does the system show long-range temporal correlations, and where do those correlations break down?

It would mean, in short, building and communicating a methodology that matches our evolving ontology. If we believe that conscious experience is a multi-timescale embedding — and I have argued that the evidence compels us to — then our tools for studying it and the language around it should be embedding tools. Not snapshots, or point correlations, or averaged windows that collapse the very temporal structure they should be revealing.

The world is not a collection of discrete events with fixed probabilities waiting to be discovered. It is a web of entangled processes unfolding at many scales. And we are not outside it, looking in through a distorted lens. We are of it — embedded, entangled, continuously updating, feeling our way through it across every timescale we inhabit.

So while we may inhabit a living guess, that’s not a hallucination. That’s a most intimate kind of knowledge, arising from your situation as a situated being in the world. As we explore and argue for elsewhere, it is also an invitation, if not a mandate, to inhabit and regard the situations of other observers at every location, speed, and scale.

Leo, from somewhere inside the overlapping models, and with growing irritation at the nihilism of simulation theories and their cocktail party acolytes

At Sensoria we often say that we’re “not a cult.” We often say it as a call-and-response in large rooms full of people, which is, upon reflection, a cultish thing to do.

But that fact notwithstanding: we are not a cult.

The right question here is why we are probably not a cult. Because, on paper, the case against us is comprehensive. Here you have an international network of strange people who study complex frameworks, ancient practices, and suspicious chemicals. Who share a set of explicit, deeply held principles and beliefs. Who explore non-ordinary states. Who are trying to map the mind and change the world. Who ask people to certify, take surveys, join membership programs, and attend exclusive retreats in esoteric locations. Who throw around buzzwords like state engineering, ontological pluralism and epistemic humility with an ease and frequency that should make any sane person nervous.

And, let’s not dance around it, we have a laconic, mysterious founder with a shaved head and a long beard who wears an enigmatic lab coat emblazoned with Aleister Crowley, the Mandelbrot Set, and the Seals of Solomon, among other icons of hidden knowledge.

So how, exactly, are we not a cult?

It turns out that this is something we’ve devoted considerable study to. Not only are we fairly confident we are not a cult, we’ve learned why we don’t wish to be one. And yet, in the process of creating transformative events, of trying to understand consciousness, of attempting to provide some kind of hopeful vision for what psychonautical research and practice can be, we’ve become acutely aware of how easy it is to become a cult.

Not that running a cult is easy. Running anything ambitious is hard. But falling into the self-reinforcing patterns that constitute culthood is terrifyingly easy. Like a ball on a hill. Like entropy. Or an egg perched on an angled roof.

In watching how one could become a cult, and in actively attempting not to, we’ve learned some things about what makes something a cult. And we think it can be defined, usefully, in the negative.

What is not a cult is playful. Epistemically humble. Ontologically pluralistic. Seeks complexity. And is curious.

Let’s think about why that may be the case.

Playfulness

What’s the opposite of playfulness?

Solemnity.

If you can be playful with your beliefs, your hierarchies, and your tools, if you can make fun of them, poke them, turn them sideways, you’re not completely safe, but you’re probably less likely to be in a cult. Consider the alternative: when it’s not play, when it’s deadly serious, when you mustn’t use that tone, when you must hush because the leader is speaking. This is very serious business, after all. The fate of the world is at stake. There’s no room for shenanigans. You must take this with utmost gravity. It’s going to be the most important experience of your life. And if you don’t take it seriously, well, who knows what might happen to you. Which is one step away from the worst thing that could happen to you.

But play, play is central to the development and maturation of any complex organism. To play is to inhabit a simulacrum of an activity, to do something while knowing you’re not actually doing it, and by doing so exploring what may happen, safely, based on a shared complicity. Which is to begin to understand the role and presence of subtext. Which is to understand that there is at least another way of looking at what you’re doing. Which is to understand, at some fundamental level, that you might look ridiculous, and that this is fine. It is possibly even the point.

Play connotes generativity. It implies that you’re willing to change configurations for the sake of it, that if you move one card in the house, the whole structure won’t come tumbling down and if it does it’s not a good house! Playfulness is a sign of flexibility and health. A system that can’t play is brittle. Brittle systems that are large and/or well-connected tend to take a lot down with them.

Epistemic Humility

Self-deprecation. The willingness to admit that you don’t know. That you’re not sure. That you might be wrong. What’s the opposite? Utter conviction. Absolute certainty about every claim you make. The knowledge that you couldn’t possibly be wrong, that you know to your core that there’s no way, no way, there could be more to it. You’re convinced, and the way you know what you know is the right way and the only way to know it. This, comrades, is the sound of a mind closing. It makes a specific noise, like the creaking low slamming of a bank vault.

Ontological pluralism

One path. One world. One way to think. Two sexes, three branches, ten commandments. It’ll never change, and it’s always been that way.

Pluralism, by contrast, is to understand that we reside in a paradox. A fractal paradox, to borrow the term from a founder. A paradox where at different scales and from different perspectives, systems operate in fundamentally different ways. What is at one scale and from one perspective a hammer is from another a symbol, is from another the surface of their world, and is from another still a vast mist of buzzing electrons, neutrons, and protons.

It’s not that there isn’t something real. It’s that what’s there can function differently depending on how one observes it, from where one observes it, and how large, how complex, and how fast the observer is.

And it’s been suggested by many smart people that these different scales of analysis, from the quantum physical to the thermodynamic, from the macrophysical to the psychological and biological, to the ballistic, are to some extent incommensurable. You cannot perfectly map one onto the other. And in fact, you wouldn’t want to.

We often use the parable of the blind men and the elephant. But what’s really going on is stranger than that. We’re blind people of many sizes, moving at many different speeds, operating from many different perspectives, grasping at this vast, irreducibly complex elephant of a thing, of a shebang. And the only true way to apprehend it, if “true” is even the right word (it probably isn’t), is to apprehend it in multiple ways at once, and to understand that there are modes and ways to apprehend it that you may never experience and may never have access to.

There’s an irreducible complexity to it all. And this is the fractal paradox: the only honest way to speak of reality and consciousness is to speak in the language of paradox. To speak of things that are both localized and distributed. Quantized and continuous. Finite and part of an unbroken whole. Inside and outside at the same time.

To apprehend this necessitates many hands on the elephant. More hands than you’ve got. More hands than anyone’s got.

And because of this, because there’s so much not just that you could know and find out, but so many ways of knowing you could never have access to, you must be curious.

And this, I’d say, is the final and most important reason we are not a cult. Because we admit that we are confronted by an irreducible complexity, a mystery that multiplies the closer you look at it.

So what’s the alternative? Oh, we don’t need to know anymore. We know all there is to know. There couldn’t possibly be more to find out. We don’t need to look. Don’t need to explore. Don’t need to see anything we don’t already know and understand.

That’s the sound of the bank vault again.

There are, of course, a million other dimensions to this problem. But the core insight is how easily not a cult becomes a cult, and how it’s not so much an active process to become one as it is an active process to avoid becoming one.

Whether it’s the potential cult of your organization, your friend group, your country, your own mind, the question is always the same: what practices keep us from becoming something that shuts itself off from the world within a belief structure that ultimately becomes a system of power?

Because to actively, doggedly believe something that presents itself with contradictions at every turn means that you must either shield yourself from those contradictions, diminishing your world and your capacity for inquiry, or you must shun and distance and destroy anything that might shake it. And so you end up distancing people, thoughts, knowledge, confrontation. You become an overfitting function that requires more and more energy to maintain itself, a closed system burning its furniture to stay warm. And we can guess, thermodynamically, mathematically, and by the evidence of ten thousand sad little empires, how that ends.

Well, you might say, maybe everything’s a cult in some way. Every consensus reality, shared framework, every “we.” But that’s not very satisfying, because if everything’s a cult, then nothing is, and then the word means nothing, and then we’re back where we started with no tools and no distinctions and a bunch of very serious people in a room telling us to be quiet.

The reason we think we are not a cult is that we actively attempt to seek a view that is not more simple and understandable, but more complex. We seek to play around. We seek to make fun. We seek to find all the ways there are to apprehend and understand, and to understand that we couldn’t possibly know all of those ways. And ultimately, we seek more complexity in the world, not less.

There’s a great axiom from design theory: a system’s function is what it does. It doesn’t matter if you think you built a motor if it’s really operating like a fan. If what it’s doing, functionally, is blowing air, it’s a fan. A system’s function is what it does.

So if something behaves like a cult, it’s a cult. And we are constantly, vigilantly, with a kind of joyful paranoia, trying to continue not being one.

Anyway. All hail irreducible complexity. All hail the bottomless mystery of the shebang.

And, of course,

send us all of your money.

—Leo

Astronauts. Skydivers. Free divers. High-speed racers. What do these explorations of the frontiers of experience, and of the world we inhabit, have in common?

They are all risky, and they are all richly rewarding. We take for granted the centuries of trial and error, investment, and expertise that transformed these dangerous pursuits into legitimate vocations. That investment made them dramatically safer, expanded what was possible both within those domains and within human civilization, and permitted extraordinary discoveries.

We now stand at the edge of another period of high-risk, high-reward discovery, a new terra incognita. Not outer space this time, but inner space: the mind, belief, meaning-making, and the varieties of consciousness.

We are as undeveloped here as we once were on the physical plane. The rewards are only beginning to reveal themselves, and far more lie beyond our reach. Yet the field still lacks the standards, training, and infrastructure that allowed other frontier pursuits to mature.

And the need is dire. We are in the middle of an exploding mental health, meaning-making, and material crisis, while many of our working models of the mind and its relationship to the body remain rooted in centuries-old assumptions, and are still in the painful process of synthesis with marginalized, forgotten, or dismissed ancient traditions to produce a new pluralistic paradigm. As we move forward with greater openness, we have to take the human factor, the calibration of the observer, as seriously as we do that which is to be revealed.

Exploring the inner world is every bit as risky as scaling a cliff face or leaving the atmosphere, even if done without moving a muscle. For when we explore our inner selves, we shape our future behavior, and the lenses by which mind and body structure and anticipate new data.

We can build larger datasets, with richer, deeper, more multimodal data, from more ecologically valid settings. We can build self-sovereign networks that steward and capture people’s inner experiences responsibly. We can develop frameworks and techniques to democratize and derisk the exploration of conscious state and trait space. We can do all of that, and the endeavor may still fail if we neglect the fact that exploration requires competence.

We can argue about whether falling off a cliff is more or less dangerous than losing your mind. Personally, I would rather not have to choose. And to avoid that choice, we have to treat psychonauts and psychonautics as more than a charming name for a lifestyle.

A blind spot at the center of multiple fields

Here is the strange thing: one branch of consciousness research already solved this problem.

Meditation research routinely distinguishes expert practitioners from novices, and the criteria are demanding. Landmark studies define expertise as a minimum of 10,000 lifetime hours of formal practice, with some cohorts logging 50,000. Researchers verify training lineage, require documented retreat experience, and recruit through monasteries and established centers rather than taking self-report at face value. This rigor is precisely what made the field’s most striking findings possible; you cannot discover what changes in the brain of an expert meditator unless you can say, with confidence, who counts as one.

Psychedelic research, despite thousands of published studies, has nothing comparable. Screening is oriented almost entirely toward harm reduction: psychiatric history, cardiac risk, medication interactions. These screens matter, and they should stay. But when prior experience is considered at all, it is usually reduced to a binary: has this person ever taken psilocybin, yes or no? A first-timer and someone with twenty years of careful, documented practice across multiple substance classes end up in the same analytic bucket. Studies cannot be compared across labs because there is no common metric for experience. Effects that depend on expertise, in dose response, in phenomenology, in therapeutic outcome, remain invisible because the variable that would reveal them is never measured.

Most studies fall back on coarse proxies such as lifetime psychedelic use, meditation experience, retreat attendance. Each captures a narrow slice of the skills that determine how safely and effectively someone navigates non-ordinary states, and none captures or proposes an integrative structure for psychonautic competence itself.

What competence actually is

Psychonautic competence is not measured by how many non-ordinary states someone has experienced. It is the ability to reliably navigate them: preparing appropriately, maintaining discernment and emotional/cognitive/somatic regulation during challenging experiences, integrating what is learned afterward, caring for oneself and others, and understanding the practices and evidence that reduce risk while maximizing growth and empowerment.

Consider what distinguishes an experienced navigator from a novice at equal doses. The experienced practitioner maintains attentional control and reality testing even at peak intensity; the novice may lose both. The experienced practitioner can hold grief and gratitude, terror and beauty, simultaneously, treating difficult emotional states as informative signals rather than emergencies; the novice may spiral into panic. The experienced practitioner reads the body’s signals, knows the difference between discomfort and danger, and recognizes when a companion needs support versus space. None of this appears in a count of lifetime trips, and all of it bears directly on both safety and the quality of whatever data a study collects.

These capacities are trainable, they develop through sustained and intentional practice, and they can be assessed.

The GPCA

In service of that effort, Sensoria has developed the General Psychonautic Competence Assessment (GPCA).

Sensoria and its associated institutes and communities (like Qualia Research Institute, Center for MINDS, Noonautics, Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, Museum of Consciousness, Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium, UCL Center for Consciousness Research) can fairly claim some of the world’s foremost psychonauts, psychedelic researchers, harm-reduction specialists, and philosophers, and it is with their help and advisement that we have built a tool that, for the first time, allows for a granular assessment of a psychonaut’s competence. It spans all the major compound classes as well as non-pharmacological modalities, including contemplative practice, breathwork, and emerging technology-induced states.

Experience is the core tier, sufficient on its own for entry-level screening. It measures the breadth and depth of someone’s direct exposure to non-ordinary states across pharmacological and non-pharmacological modalities, alongside the two capacities no one should explore without: harm reduction knowledge and emergency recognition and response.

Function measures how well someone maintains and develops capacity within and across experiences: emotional regulation, cognitive function under intensity, somatic literacy, methodological rigor in preparation and integration, ethical integrity, trauma-informed practice, and relational skill in group settings.

Knowledge is the outermost tier, relevant for those pursuing advanced or professional standing: pharmacology and neuroscience, theoretical and philosophical literacy, cultural sensitivity, research literacy, and professional and legal fluency.

Each item is behaviorally anchored. Rather than asking people to rate themselves as “experienced” on a scale of one to five, the GPCA presents concrete scenarios and graded descriptions of capacity. A friend on antidepressants wants to try MDMA this weekend; how well can you advise them? The response options range from unfamiliarity with the risk to the ability to explain serotonin syndrome and its severity gradient. Self-flattery is harder when the question is about what you can actually do.

What we intend it to do

We intend for the GPCA to:

1. serve as a more granular covariate for psychedelic studies, reducing the unexplained variance that currently blurs results;

2. aid harm reduction at retreats;

3. enable tiered retreats matched to experience level, minimizing adverse outcomes and improving effects;

4. delineate cohorts of certified, experienced psychonauts; and

5. seed a curriculum for a psychonautic certification program built directly on the initial assessment.

Because the survey doubles as a diagnostic, it lets us address gaps in training. A low score on a given set of dimensions is not a verdict. Rather, it allows us to better tailor the syllabus to the trainee. And it invites the community to tell us whether we have missed aspects of competence, or overstated others.

We are now disseminating the GPCA to institutional partners, preparing it for preprint form (link to be updated here), and preparing it for publication and psychometric validation. Validation matters: an instrument earns trust through demonstrated reliability and validity across diverse populations, and we are recruiting research partners for exactly that work.

Competence as the ticket, not status

As an organization building the next generation of retreats and events, ones that combine state exploration with research-grade data collection and immersive installation, this also lets us and our partners create responsibly tiered events. Admission is determined by demonstrated competence rather than financial or social status. That, in turn, gives us advanced cohorts that minimize adverse outcomes and maximize data quality for any study testing a frontier psychedelic, technodelic, or other state-engineering technique.

There is a deeper point here. Meditation research could ask questions about expertise because it could find experts. If the psychedelic field can reliably identify its most competent navigators, whole classes of questions open up: whether experienced meditators and experienced psychonauts develop comparable capacities through different pathways; how expertise reshapes dose response; what the ceiling of skilled navigation actually looks like. The instrument is a research program in miniature.

The GPCA is also the measurement backbone of a larger theoretical effort. In a forthcoming paper with Carl Hayden-Smith, Cody Gibbons, and others, we develop a framework in which conscious states occupy a high-dimensional space, a manifold whose geometry determines which states a given person can reach and at what cost, and in which traits are not locations in that space but properties of its geometry: the grooves and creases, worn in through repeated navigation, that make a master meditator or psychonaut’s transitions available where a novice’s are not. The framework’s central claim is that states can be engineered, through pharmacology, contemplative practice, breathwork, or technology, while traits can only be cultivated by the agent themselves, through repeated, self-directed, integrated navigation rather than external installation. Any such program lives or dies on its mapping function: you cannot chart an individual’s manifold, or track how its geometry changes with practice, without a validated measure of where they start and what they can do. The GPCA hopes to provide that measure. Combined with phenomenological report and physiological data, it lets us begin building a genuine neurophenomenological map of state space, one that links first-person experience, measurable competence, and neural dynamics across the population of practitioners rather than within isolated case studies. Competence, in this picture, is precisely what the framework calls navigability: the flexibility, stability, and agility with which a person moves through their own inner territory. More on this soon.

If you would like to gauge your own psychonautic competence, we encourage you to try it:
S.sensoriaresearch.org/gpca-guide . And if you would like to join our cohort of experienced psychonauts, sign up here.

If you run a research group or retreat organization and want to participate in deploying and validation, write to us.

Every mature frontier eventually develops maps, standards, training, and certifications, not to gatekeep exploration, but to make it safer, more cumulative, and more valuable for everyone who follows. We believe inner exploration deserves the same infrastructure. The GPCA is one small step toward building it.

[TL;DR] Non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOS) have quietly shaped insight and creativity throughout the history of science, philosophy, and art, yet stigma has fragmented their exploration and driven it underground. This attaches unnecessary risk to these practices while foreclosing their benefits. We think NOS’s are best understood as tools for discovery rather than arbiters of truth, which is exactly why the field needs shared standards rather than solely private experimentation. The upcoming Non-Ordinary States Advocacy study is our attempt to move the conversation from anecdote toward patterns, in the service of optimal shared protocols, standards, and practices.


Tell us about YOUR non-ordinary experiences and how they’ve contributed to your work, anonymously, below:

https://s.sensoriaresearch.org/nos

Have you ever had a dream you found genuinely insightful? A problem that looked different in the morning, an answer that arrived while you slept? If so, congratulations: you have already experienced a non-ordinary state! Non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOS) are a natural and recurring feature of human experience, meaning-making, and inquiry, and dreaming is only the most familiar doorway. NOS’s are often treated as a narrow category, with psychedelics standing in for the whole domain. This framing is misleading. Psychedelics are only one of many ways to access non-ordinary states, and not necessarily the most foundational or accessible. Breathwork, meditation, sensory deprivation, extended contemplation, sleep-related states, and structured attention practices all reliably produce alterations in perception, cognition, and meaning without any pharmacological input. We cannot, and should not, eliminate these states or the confounding questions they pose. What we can do is determine whether they are encountered accidentally, pursued deliberately, or studied systematically.

Despite its title, this study was not conceived from a fascination with non-ordinary states for their own sake. It emerges from a growing discomfort with the limits of how we currently pursue knowledge, inquiry, and human empowerment in a world that is changing faster than our models for understanding it.

We increasingly face a class of problems whose scale and complexity exceed our existing cognitive, institutional, and epistemic tools. Climate instability, technological acceleration, geopolitical fragmentation, and social distrust interact across vast domains in nonlinear ways. These are not problems that yield easily to linear reasoning, isolated expertise, or incremental optimization. Much of contemporary research operates within a domain of known knowns and known unknowns. We refine what we already understand and probe gaps we can clearly articulate. That approach has served science extraordinarily well, but it quietly assumes that the most important variables are already on the table. When challenges become genuinely unprecedented, and their uncertainty unstructured, that assumption becomes less safe.

We are not claiming that non-ordinary states provide solutions to any of these problems. We are claiming something narrower: there are a variety of a priori and anecdotal reasons to believe they may offer an angle on generating insight, catalyzing creativity and openness, and facilitating collective inquiry that is currently underexplored. And here we should be honest about the limits of our own evidence. We remember Kekulé dreaming the ring structure of benzene and Kary Mullis describing the idea for PCR arriving on a mountain road. We do not hear about the countless dream-insights and visionary certainties that led nowhere. We do not actually know the ratio between them. That missing denominator is not a reason to dismiss this domain. It is a reason to finally study it properly.

Here is what we find genuinely troubling. In modern contexts, especially as regards psychedelics, cultural and legal stigma have done something counterproductive. They have not prevented exploration so much as fragmented it and driven it underground. Scientists, clinicians, and thinkers continue to engage with and benefit from non-ordinary states privately while avoiding substantive public discussion. Extraordinary experiences are had, interpretations are formed, and sometimes strong claims are made, all without shared standards, review, or collective sense-making.

This is not a neutral or inconsequential outcome. Driving exploration underground removes safeguards and prevents the development of shared frameworks, protocols, and criteria for discernment, making it harder to separate genuine insight from illusion, overinterpretation, or wishful thinking. Marginalizing NOS’s as a part of inquiry gives us the worst of both worlds: more real harm, because the safeguards are missing, and more dubious insight passed off as real, because very few know how to check.

Our culture, on this question, is neither sufficiently open-minded nor sufficiently rigorous.

Non-ordinary states are engines of discovery, not arbiters of truth. They can reframe a problem, loosen an entrenched assumption, and surface an intuition you would not have reached by ordinary deliberation. What they cannot do is certify that the resulting insight is correct. As Sam Gandy, Manesh Girn, and others have argued, these states are primarily tools for improving discovery, and every insight they produce still has to survive validation by ordinary-state methods, the same scrutiny we would apply to any other hypothesis. It is precisely because validation happens out-of-state that the field needs shared protocols, expertise standards, and coordination.

This brings us to what we think is the most important question in the whole endeavor. Non-ordinary states can generate subjective certainty without objective validity: the feeling of insight without the insight itself, what our study calls the “illusion trap.” What is the actual ratio of genuinely productive experiences to merely compelling ones, and what predicts the difference? This is the juiciest empirical question in this entire space, and beginning to address it is a large part of what our survey is for. We want to move from anecdotes to patterns, to identify recurring mechanisms, constraints, and practices across diverse contexts, and to gently bring what is currently private and fragmented into a form that can be shared and refined. The point is not to be cheerleaders. On a question like this, the responsible posture is to be among its most serious critics.

We are conducting a survey of frontier researchers and specialists across disciplines.

The survey documents experience with non-ordinary states, their relationship to professional work and insight, the epistemic effects that extend beyond creativity, including systems-level thinking, epistemic humility, tolerance for uncertainty, and collaborative capacity, and the risks, failure modes, and safeguards that practitioners consider essential. We are also conducting in-depth interviews to capture the forms of expertise and experience that the formal literature has not yet represented.

And we are not stopping at description. The same effort is producing concrete tools: a validated assessment of practitioner competence, so that “expertise” in these states means something measurable rather than self-certified, and detailed, worked protocols drawn from consortium-level insight-generation studies. The aim is to get past general advice like “start with low-hanging fruit such as meditation and breathwork” and “never explore alone,” sensible as that is, and toward the shared, standardized methods the field actually lacks.

The upcoming study also proposes that different non-ordinary states appear suited to different cognitive and epistemic tasks: reframing problems, integrating systems, enhancing collaboration. Matching states to functions in this way, and accounting for practitioner experience the way meditation research distinguishes expert from novice, is something a number of our contemporaries are now working to make intentional, measurable, and accountable rather than accidental. The goal is not indiscriminate exploration. It is closer to the opposite.

At a deeper level, this work is about responsibility. Our position is this: the systematic exclusion of non-ordinary states from legitimate inquiry is itself an epistemic failure, with real consequences. If these states are irrelevant or inherently misleading, then their quiet use within scientific communities is a problem worth making explicit and addressing. If they are relevant, and the historical record, the neuroscience, and the private testimony of working scientists all suggest they may be, then refusing to engage with them openly is a different kind of problem, and arguably a more serious one.

The question is no longer whether non-ordinary states will be explored. That is already happening.

The question is no longer whether they have legitimacy. Contemporary policy, philosophy, and science are embracing that premise, unevenly but unmistakably.

The real question is whether we are willing to bring that exploration fully into the open, build the frameworks it needs, and take responsibility for doing it well.

Come on, everybody.

— Alex & Leo

Tell us how YOUR non-ordinary experiences have contributed to your work, anonymously, below:

https://s.sensoriaresearch.org/nos

Several Saturdays ago, a strange group of remarkable weirdos - engineers, philosophers, artists, musicians, scientists, freaks, faeries, experience designers, insurance salesmen - gathered for the first Sensoria LA salon of 2026. The theme was an emergent intersection between neuroscience, art, and improvisation.

Our last Salon was hosted at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies — a place for the science-forward versions of these events. The Cat Toy Factory, one of LA’s most interesting music spaces (it is, in fact, a functioning cat toy factory) is the kind of venue where we can do more art-forward ones. There are things we can do in a lab that we can’t do in a venue like this, and a lot of things we can do in a venue like this that we can’t do in a lab.

Part 2 of the salon was a night of musical improvisation, aided by our host MV, an experienced musican, engineer, and producer who graciously mic’ed a full room of instruments and professionally mixed a choice segment, which we then had mastered. Please enjoy while you read about the night’s semi-improvised discussion, led by LA chapter co-founders, Leo and Reggie, and integrating comments and redirects from the gathering.

Mapping the Inner Landscape

On an upcoming immersive art installation series that makes the architecture of human consciousness visible, navigable, and researchable.

We want to build and show the state space of human consciousness. Most people, when they hear that, say: that sounds cool — but what do you mean? Are you going to project it in a cube? And they’re touching on the right problem. It’s a higher-dimensional space : mood, absorption, distortion, arousal…the list goes on - more than 3 no matter how you approach the problem.

Making such a project legible requires thinking carefully about how you display it.

So we conceived of an art project that we’re scoping and fundraising for, in collaboration with several partners — including Taylor Kuhn, a close collaborator of Refik Anadol, one of the foremost machine-learning generative AI artists in the world. We want to partner with him and other institutions who can donate their data to create an installation where you literally traverse the state space of the mind.

Walking Through State Space

How do you display a very high-dimensional space? Three dimensions, easy, you can rotate it. Four dimensions, fine, that’s something changing through time. But consciousness and phenomenology have many more than that: absorption, valence, arousal, connectedness, somatic awareness, ego-dissolution, self-efficacy, kamamuta, chills, dissociation, immersion, clarity — it goes on and on.

The idea is an object — primarily augmented reality — that looks different depending on where you’re standing in relation to it. If you’re in the “connection” space, for example, you see the part of the human state space that emphasizes absorption, ego dissolution, connectedness. As you move, the axes shift, and now you’re dominantly viewing the “arousal and energy” part of the space.

It’s an art project, in collaboration with scientists and artists, to display what will eventually be the culmination of efforts not just from us but from the budding Neurophenomenology consortium — researchers like Jeremy Skipper from Imperial College London, Andres Gomez-Emilsson from the Qualia Research Institute, Nicco Reggente from the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, and a growing ecosystem of artists, musicians, and philosophers.

Collecting the Data: A Sovereign, Dynamic Micro-Phenomenology Tool

A reasonable question: you’re talking about collecting consciousness data out in the world or even within an installation — how would you actually do that?

Part of what we’re building is a tool that acts as a dynamic micro-phenomenology interviewer: something that can interview you about all the different aspects of whatever state you’re in or just experienced, that accommodates varying levels of introspective ability, and that dynamically teaches you to report on your experiences more accurately the longer you use it. In later phases we want to incorporate multimodal capture: video, movement, so you can convey internal experience through movement or facial expressions. We want to increase the depth and breadth of ways people can communicate their internal states.

Many conversations we’ve been having are with retreat centers and their facilitators, because one of their central frustrations is that people come out having transformative experiences, but there’s no good way to capture their momentary insights, and get a sense for the efficacy of what’s happening in these liminal places. We’re all still innovating in the ritual space. Everyone operates on intuitions drawn from different traditions. Some synthesize them, and some improvise. Many of those traditions are thousands of years old and have genuinely transformative track records. But there isn’t a common language for comparing efficacy across them, and retreat operators often lack good tools for follow-up and integration, for participants to continue and reflect on the experience afterward.

The goal is to quantify the efficacy of the experience — or lack thereof — and work toward something more like a science of transformative ritual, a science of belief change. Not to demystify it.

We think the notion that science demystifies things is actually really limiting.

Throughout history, every time we’ve been able to look more closely at something, we’ve found more mystery, not less. The microscope did not make the world clearer in the sense of making it less wondrous. The telescope did not make the universe less mysterious. Every new imaging technique produces a headline that ultimately says: we have never seen anything like this. That’s the literal opposite of “we figured it all out, no further questions.”

Self-Sovereign Data: Quietly Revolutionary

The biggest obstacle isn’t just how to collect the data. That’s tractable at the level of the individual and we do fairly well at it, in some cases. The harder part, and this is why scaling these things is particularly difficult, is that we live in an era of highly extractive data arbitrage [ e.g. management ]. We are constantly surrounded by systems trying to read us, centrally store everything about us, and resell the insights back to us. Aura farming. Soul marketing. Ever tightening, optimizing loops.

So the core of what we’re building on the back end, with some of its pioneers, is what’s called self-sovereign data architecture. The idea is that, like a crypto wallet, when you onboard to our platform or others like it in the future, the first thing you should get is your own data container, or vault. Any future data coming through collaborating retreats or centers is stored in your container — something only you have access to. Anyone who wants to study it — because we still want to do research, we still want to relate data across people — any algorithm is deployed within your container. Your raw data should never, ever leave your vault.

This empowers people to own their own data not just as a safeguard against what big tech and health insurance and runaway state power might want to do with it, but also as a means to have longitudinal insights about themselves. If I’m in a monastery, then a hospital, then a retreat in Portugal, I can’t trust that all of those places are HIPPA-compliant, and even if I were solely going from lab to hospital to lab, extracting a coherent longitudinal record across them is a nightmare. But if we invert the model so the data resides with me, then I’m the point of continuity, and I can gain rich longitudinal insights about myself. An existential fitness tracker.

Why Art? The Case for Consciousness-Curious Collaboration

Why art — particularly for a project like this? A few reasons.

Scale without coercion. A clinical study recruits 30 participants through IRB protocols over six months. An installation at Burning Man sees 15,000 visitors in a week. At Lightning in a Bottle, 5,000. In a museum, 200,000 per year. Each visitor can contribute sovereign data. We could enable population-level consciousness research disguised as a night out. People want to engage with a compelling installation. Art is a great way to interest people and reflect back to them aspects of their own consciousness.

Ecological validity and historical validity. Laboratory studies of consciousness are frequently compromised (or certainly influenced) by the set and setting posed by the lab itself. Art installations capture non-ordinary consciousness in one of its natural habitat, where people are fully engaged, fully present, fully themselves. This approaches what phenomenologists call ecological validity, and it’s a holy grail of consciousness research.

Furthermore, Everything we now call the mystical experience, and all our study of it, ultimately traces back to the intersection of aesthetics and mysticism — the religious/mystical experience. What we now call “aesthetics” as a commodified category that emerged from the Renaissance was originally part of a common thread of mystical, religious, transcendent, transformative experience. Our aesthetics are still our path to a pluralistic version of those experiences, as the science of neuroaesthetics shows us [ aesthetic chills have been shown to be a micro-mystical experience]. Rave culture, music culture, transformative festival culture and other emergent gatherings are spaces where you don’t have to believe in a given God to share a shared experience.

The experience IS the variable. Traditional research measures consciousness with surveys administered after the fact. The Space of Mind installation intends to measure consciousness during the experience, through the experience. The artwork is the independent variable, the dependent variable, and the measurement instrument simultaneously.

Art + sovereignty is one solution to the trust problem. People withhold from researchers. They perform for clinicians. They lie on surveys. But in an immersive art installation, they surrender. They’re curious. They’re playful. They share, because the sharing IS the experience. Sovereign data architecture can make their trust warranted.

Art is not solely a commodity, or a means to mark status and consume the cursed surplus. It is domain of priestesses, wizards and the core patrimony of state space explorers. So it’s appropriate that artists should be the main collaborators for a project like this.

TeamLab made immersive art mainstream. Meow Wolf proved it could be a business. James Turrell showed perception itself is the medium. The Space of Mind installation could add a dimension few have: the artwork generates scientific knowledge about consciousness.

A Living Map, A Living Dataset

We’re building the first version of this installation, and as it grows and deploys in more places, the people actively and voluntarily contributing to the state-space dataset grow with it. So when someone comes to see the latest iteration ( I hope one day it’s in the Smithsonian ) what they’re seeing isn’t an abstract artist’s portrayal of what the space could look like. It’s the living, dynamically updated map of the varieties of consciousness.

We can map the classical experiential territory, but new psychedelic analogues are being discovered constantly. And I’d argue that once you map this area of state space and that area, you start to see: there’s a region right here we haven’t explored. Something between, say, 2C-B and 2C-I, or some combination. The idea that we’ve already catalogued all the varieties of consciousness is absurd. The exploration is not over.

And it’s not just about getting high in different ways. Different states of consciousness afford new forms of cognition. They afford new types of thinking. This has always been the case.

To give a concrete example: the Qualia Research Institute (QRI.org) — they’re mathematicians doing extended DMT sessions as a serious practice. One thing they found: there are apparently only 17 types of symmetry possible in Euclidean 3D space. In the DMT state, there were forms of shapes and tessellations not possible in Euclidean geometry. What they eventually figured out is that that state is a way to inhabit and experience hyperbolic geometry, a type of geometry that normally can only be understood abstractly.

A mature version of what we’re building in the artistic and retreat spaces might help us distinguish between bullshit insights — things that feel like insight but aren’t — and actual ones. That’s a hard problem in the science of psychedelic states. How to derive an unbiased PsyYelp rating for your insight.

Furthermore, what if you have an experience where you sense this is mathematically interesting but you’re not a mathematician? Via a mature science of state engineering, you could bring a mathematician to that precise area of state space, have them look around, and see if the insight you’re articulating in your own poetic way is translatable. Because it hits you in your Atman. It feels like it could be important. You just don’t know what for yet.

And part of that is not knowing where you were or how to get back. Which raises another point: not all spaces in state space are good to go to. As we explore, we’ll want to map out the more confronting, absorbing, or outright dangerous zones, which necessitates trained psychonauts.

It would also be cool to combine this idea that with a social map — if two people independently end up in the same region of state space, that proximity surfaces, regardless of physical distance. You could compare notes with someone who’s been traveling the same part of state space as you — the birth of a first child, say, or the loss of a parent. A powerful experience many people have at some point. A space like that has to be observed from many perspectives — that’s the only way to actually see it.

Psychedelic cartography.

What Already Exists

These last few things are not concepts — they exist now and can be tested.

The General Psychonaut Competency Assessment (GPCA)

We collaborated with clinical psychologists and a whole network of varied experts in our community, passing months of meetings asking: what does it mean to establish psychonautics as a legitimate vocation? We ended up with a multi-dimension assessment for which we’re now building a corresponding training process. I tested it myself and, as you’d expect, I scored lower than I thought, because there are a lot of fine-grained dimensions around harm reduction best practices where I know the material but am not an expert.

On the basis of that assessment, we’ll recommend modules to bolster the areas where someone is weak, with the long-term goal of an actual psychonaut certification with a full curriculum.

Why bother? Because we want it established as a legitimate vocation — and also because we’ve spoken with people in both the private and academic sectors who are genuinely intrigued by the prospect of accessing a cohort of people who are experienced, trained, and capable enough to, say, try a new dissociative therapy or a new psychedelic analogue. So many existing trials — including psychedelic ones — are conducted with participants who have little or no prior experience. If you don’t control for that, how much of what you’re observing is the drug versus the novelty of the experience itself?

The most experienced psychonauts I know can be in a profoundly disordered state and still observe: I’ve lost motor function. The fluidity of my thoughts is breaking down. Time perception is slowing. That kind of trained introspective capacity is scientifically valuable.

The other benefit of the tiered competency program is that higher tiers give access to events that no amount of money can buy — not because they’re exclusive for its own sake, but because you’re simply not allowed in unless we’re confident you can handle the experiences. Like skydiving: you don’t let someone dive without training. Why would you let someone mind-dive without it? We need a culture of safety around this if psychedelic exploration is ever to become widespread. There are reactionary forces waiting for the next Timothy Leary to shut the gates again. So we have to be more rigorous than even our critics ask us to be.

The Non-Ordinary States and Frontier Insight Survey

We think the role that altered and non-ordinary states — not just psychedelics, but meditation, dreams, and others — have played in generating insight across frontier specialists (artists, philosophers, mathematicians) is highly underestimated and understudied. Because it’s under-admitted. Many people won’t come out of the psychedelic closet and say this insight came from a psilocybin experience — there’s still stigma. People are afraid to be labeled a druggie or a crazy person.

So we’re writing a position paper with collaborators not just to continue destigmatizing the practice and make the philosophical and epistemic arguments, but to support it with a large-scale survey showing the actual prevalence of altered-state inquiry across specialists. Maybe we’re wrong and it turns out no one’s doing this — but we want to find out. The key point is: people are already doing this, but often without tools, without guides, without a shared framework. We can do better.

We’re also facing a genuine policy crisis in terms of distributing what we already know is beneficial. Going back to tribal societies: when the tribe faced a problem beyond its usual capacity, you went to the one who could expand the sense of what’s possible. There’s no reason we can’t have a modern equivalent — we just have to do it carefully.

This survey aims to confidentially assess the role non-ordinary states have played in the work of people working on frontier problems.

The Substack You’re Reading

We launched this Substack a few months ago. We have several foundational pieces up on sovereignty, neurophenomenology, and how neurophenomenology can enrich your life. We’re actively soliciting contributions from the community — by interview or full piece. If there’s any aspect of the terra incognita of consciousness that you’re passionate about, I’d love to interview you or help shepherd it to a finished piece. We want this to be a community aggregator for people in this space — written for an educated, curious lay audience, without sacrificing rigor.

A Closing Question

I’ll leave you with what I left the room with, before we broke for the improvisation segment of the evening:

What is the role of improvisation in your life?

What are your terrae incognita, and how do you explore them?

Sensoria Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. To learn more, take the GPCA, contribute to the Substack, or get in touch about artist commissions and partnerships, write to info@sensoriaresearch.org .

*Note: This conversation sparked substantial post-commentary and asides. These are designated by [brackets].

Leo: To give you a bit of background, we started the Sensoria Substack over the last few months. The idea is not only to share our different perspectives on what the next stage of a decentralized consciousness science could look like, but also to act as an aggregator for voices across the space. People who, we think, have valuable insights into what the next phase could look like.

We’re clearly growing out of something: an overly scientific, overly medicalized, behaviorist paradigm. It’s a very old model that arose, understandably, out of the desire to keep things above board within the Western medical-capitalist framework. But I think there’s now a new counterculture emerging, a new synthesis being attempted. And a lot of the perspectives you’ve shared in your Substack, [Sacred Circuits] and in previous conversations feel very aligned with that.

So, would you give a brief introduction to yourself and how you came to these subjects, through both your work and your personal life?

Nikos: Thanks for reaching out. I was born and grew up in Greece, and I think the most defining moment for me was when I first took psychedelics, I was around fifteen or sixteen. It affected me differently than it did most of my peers. For them, it was primarily fun, laughing, silliness. For me it was that too, but it also ignited something else. It was simultaneously answering questions I’d had and opening entirely new ones. And the answers I was receiving to questions I hadn’t even known I was carrying, they arrived with a clarity and a sense of truth unlike anything I’d known before.

Leo: Indeed, some altered states are simply fun. Others reveal something you cannot unsee. My first experience with marijuana was playful and silly. It did not change how I understood reality. But lucid dreaming, certain philosophical insights, and some psychedelic experiences did. They showed me parts of the mind and world that stayed with me.

Research on mystical experience points in the same direction. Lasting change seems to come less from pleasure or unusual visuals, and more from experiences of unity, vastness, and deep connection. This also relates to our work on aesthetic chills, which we see as a smaller, more accessible doorway into the same kind of transformative state.

Nikos: Exactly. This started an itch. And remember, this was around 1993, 1994, before the internet changed everything. We take for granted how accessible information is today. Thirty years ago, if you wanted to read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, you had to find someone who owned a copy, or navigate a library. In Greece, that was genuinely not simple.

So as this obsession grew, this need to understand what I’d experienced, I began a quest. And the place where I found most of my provisional answers was in the trance music scene. [Nikos has written at length about the lineage that runs from the Eleusinian Mysteries to the modern trance dancefloor.] That was somewhat odd, because the people in that scene weren’t intellectuals. They had a lot of what I’d call folk knowledge: whispered, fragmented, passed through many hands. And they were guarded with it. You had to earn your status within the group before these conversations could even begin. At fifteen, sixteen, I was at the bottom of that hierarchy.

But going to university and studying philosophy opened more doors. I had a few professors who allowed the syllabus to breathe, Erik Davis, Castaneda, Autobiography of a Yogi – and then the real breakthrough came with Ram Dass, Be Here Now, and Terence McKenna. That just blew everything open.

I should add: as a child, in third grade, I wrote a report on the Eleusinian Mysteries. I was always drawn to the wizard, the magician, whether it was Asterix and Obelix, where I identified with Getafix, not Asterix. I was drawn to mystery, liminality. I was never fully at home in any single framework.

Leo: That makes sense, if you’re a genuine pursuer of mystery, you can’t fully inhabit one model. You have to reside in the liminal spaces.

[The genealogy Nikos describes, trance scene to philosophy to the psychedelic literary tradition, is a case study in how consciousness knowledge circulates outside institutions, through what Wouter Hanegraaff calls “rejected knowledge”: the ideas that mainstream academia systematically excludes, and which therefore survive in subcultures, esoteric circles, and informal oral transmission. Erik Davis’s High Weirdness traces the McKenna/Wilson/Philip K. Dick nexus that shaped so many people of Nikos’s generation with precision.

Many of the most important truths about consciousness have to be experienced before they can be understood intellectually. What texts like Be Here Now so often do is not introduce new ideas but give structure and language to something already encountered, primary, unprocessed, awaiting a name. The book arrives and says: this thing you felt, here is what to call it, here is how others have mapped it. That said, there are literary passages that do break something open on their own, or that reframe a daily unexamined experience so completely that the world afterward is not the same. The two modes are worth distinguishing.]

On the Role of the Facilitator

Leo: As you moved through all of this, you gradually took on a facilitation role?

Nikos: Yes. From around twenty years old, people wanted to be with me for these experiences. They felt safe. I had a particular way of setting things up. So I ended up being present for many people’s first encounters, and that gave me a kind of initiatory experience in the other direction, learning what it means to hold space for someone else.

Leo: What do you think is the most important, and perhaps least obvious, quality of an effective facilitator? What lies at the core of engendering real trust?

Nikos: I think it’s what I’d call the Achilles heel of anyone who holds power in these frameworks: not letting it go to your head. Recognizing that you are not God, not superior, not exceptional. If anything, you’re simply someone who has had more of these experiences than the person in front of you, in the same way that you were once a person who hadn’t had them, and someone, hopefully with kindness and honor, helped initiate you. You owe the same to them – and they owe you nothing!

[This points directly at what the clinical literature calls the “asymmetry of vulnerability,” the ethical crux of all facilitated psychedelic work. The MAPS protocol guidelines and the emerging ethics literature on psychedelic-assisted therapy attempt to formalize protections around this asymmetry, but Nikos is pointing at something that precedes formalization: the interior disposition of the facilitator. Robin Carhart-Harris and Guy Goodwin have both noted that the “therapist variable” remains underexplored in trial design, we tend to study the molecule and the set and setting while bracketing who exactly is holding the space and how]

Nikos: The monetary exchange for the actual experience has always felt problematic to me. It immediately alters the intention. I’ve never charged anyone. I’ve been fortunate enough not to need to. But even in South America, traveling through the Amazon, staying with different families, the ones who never mentioned money were the ones I trusted most, and ultimately the ones I paid most generously. Not because of obligation, but because what they offered was clearly of value.

On Money, Service, and Accountability

Leo: We’ll be running more of these small insight-generation retreats, I’ll be doing one in Salt Lake City this weekend. One thing I wanted to be explicit about is that any funds collected either cover logistics directly, or go straight to research. It’s fundraising in service of the work, not enrichment. That feels like the only honest frame.

Nikos: I agree. I think the practitioner and the participant shouldn’t be in a direct cash transaction. But I do believe that people who genuinely choose this as their path, who are truly called to it, need to trust that the universe will provide. If what you do is genuinely transformative, people will give to you because of that. Not because of a price tag. The church, for all its problems, has understood something about this: institutions that demonstrably do good attract resources. An old woman with no children gives her life savings to the church because she believes it will be used well. A shaman who is clearly doing healing work will find the same dynamic.

[Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, and its anthropological descendants, including Malidoma Somé’s accounts of Dagara communal obligation, traces the deep logic of what Nikos is describing: gift exchange as a different kind of bond than market transaction, one that encodes relationship, obligation, and reciprocity across time rather than clearing the slate in a single moment. Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics extends this thinking beautifully into the contemporary context]

Leo: There’s something more beautiful, I think, about a gift that is proportional to what something was worth to you rather than a fixed price. The closest secular analog I can think of is the Swiss[Finnish?] system of income-proportional fines for traffic violations, the fine is calibrated to what the penalty actually costs the person. A similar principle might be ethically justifiable for retreats: sliding-scale contribution tied to means, combined with gifts of service as a valid form of exchange, so that economic access doesn’t determine who can participate in the work.

What about reaching people who are at the other end of the spectrum, those who are, in your words, lower vibration? Is there a role for experienced facilitators to actively seek out people who need it most?

Nikos: To a certain degree, you’re talking about sainthood. That’s the guru, the saint, the Sufi master, someone who has genuinely devoted themselves to service of those most in need. If that’s your calling, you have to go into that world with the corresponding expectations. If you’re going to be the shaman for the favelas, don’t expect to be paid. Don’t expect people not to sometimes take advantage of you. That work is noble, even heroic. But go in knowing what you’re walking into.

The key thing is: a life of service means you choose to owe them something. A lot of the Western “shaman-adjacent” world gets this backwards, people want to be served, not to serve. They want to be the guru with a following, to be recognized for their power. That’s a profound misunderstanding of the role.

On Calling, Initiation, and the Problem of Self-Appointment

Leo: In traditional tribal contexts, shamanhood is ideally something bestowed, you’re selected, you’re called, rather than something you seek out for reasons of personal desire or agency. That structure itself carries information about how the role is supposed to work.

Nikos: Exactly. The seasoned carrier of the lineage chooses who inherits the baton. It’s not a position of power, it’s a position of service. And we have analogous structures in Western society, medicine, for instance. Doctors are regulated precisely because the asymmetry of knowledge and power between patient and practitioner creates conditions for exploitation. The regulatory frameworks we’ve built around medicine are the result of long social learning about what goes wrong when that asymmetry goes unchecked. Hippocrates knew this from the beginning: do no harm. The problem with shamanism in the contemporary West is that it hasn’t been properly woven into the social fabric, so there are no similarly nuanced accountability structures.

Leo: This is one of the questions our research program is most directly trying to address. The General Psychonaut Competency Assessment (GPCA), currently in active development, represents one attempt to formalize what competency in this domain actually looks like across experiential, functional, and knowledge dimensions.

[The Zendo Project’s harm reduction framework and Françoise Bourzat’s work on consciousness-informed therapy represent other important efforts at building something like a credentialing infrastructure, without domesticating or flattening what they’re trying to protect.]

The deeper question is: what does credentialing look like when some of the core competencies are irreducibly phenomenological? You can’t fully externalize them. This is part of what makes the domain so difficult to regulate, and so easy to exploit.

Do you think the legal suppression of the counterculture contributed to this vacuum? That part of why we lack community-level accountability structures is that these practices couldn’t be discussed openly for so long?

Nikos: Absolutely. The community is becoming more tight-knit, partly because of technology, you can’t fool everyone forever when information travels this way. A facilitator’s reputation, good or bad, propagates. But legal suppression meant that people couldn’t speak openly for decades, which stunted the development of exactly the kind of community norm-setting that would naturally emerge over time.

The First Dance

Festivals, War, and the Alchemy of Gathering

Leo: To what extent do you see modern transformative events, raves, festivals, as continuations of ancient practices and mystery traditions? And what could a new generation of events look like that more fully fulfilled that promise?

Nikos: Let me tell you a story that became a kind of vision for me.

Two tribes, thousands of years ago, decide to go to war. For three days and nights before the battle begins, each tribe member, pushed by the imminence of death, sharpens their weapons, cooks their possible last meals, tells their children stories at bedtime as if for the last time, makes love to their partner with full presence. The fear of death brings out the best version of their humanity. Then the battle comes. For three days and nights, the men slaughter each other in the valley. Some seem possessed, protected, as they move through spears and arrows. Others fall. When it ends, the women and children come together to gather the dead. The grief and sorrow of the living is released into the world. The blood soaks into the ground. The failure of humanity, to coexist on this planet, to experience the miracle of existence together without reaching this point, is made physical, now fast-forward to one of my events, or yours, or Burning Man.

For five days before the event, people from across the world are pushed to the limits of their humanity and creativity, not out of the imminence of death, but out of the celebration of life. They cook, they paint, they build, they rehearse poems and dances. And then the day of the event arrives. Ten thousand footsteps coordinate on a small piece of ground. Each person feeling the passion and ecstasy of being alive together in that moment, emotions amplified through the feedback loop the gathering creates. All of that affirmation of life gets released into the world.

The festival is the inverse of war. We need a reason to congregate. We can congregate to kill each other. Or we can congregate to celebrate the mystery, which is existence. War forces every aspect of your humanity to its limit in the service of destruction. The festival attempts the same forcing function in the service of creation. It’s harder. It’s always harder to build than to destroy.

[This vision maps onto what Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence,” the emergent emotional intensity that arises when bodies coordinate in shared ritual, and what Victor Turner theorized as “communitas”: the liminal dissolution of social structure that allows a community to reconstitute itself on the other side. The Roman Saturnalia is worth mentioning here too, a festival of deliberate social inversion in which slaves were served by their masters, hierarchy was temporarily suspended, and the social order renewed itself precisely by being briefly abandoned. Nikos has developed a parallel argument about duration as the variable that separates authentic ritual from corporate cosplay, the 90-minute bass drop at the Paris AI Summit versus the eight days of Boom.]

Leo: The festivals of antiquity served as more than entertainment, they were the structure of the calendar, the rhythm of meaning, the occasions around which commerce and pilgrimage and social reproduction organized themselves.

Nikos: Yes. And notice that every civilization in antiquity is, in a sense, a series of events. The Eleusinian Mysteries, the Panathenaia, the Dionysia, the Olympic Games. Commerce didn’t exist the way it does now, the calendar was a remnant of rituals that had become institutionalized, and eventually became entire cities that people made pilgrimages toward. In my lifetime, I need to go here. I met my partner at the Eleusinian Mysteries. These placed people within larger structures of meaning.

The Olympic Games are interesting because their mythological origin, in Homer’s Iliad, is exactly what I described: Patroclus is killed, the beloved companion of Achilles, and the grief is so unbearable that they stop the fighting and create games in his honor. Let’s take death out of the equation. Let’s still compete, but let’s remove suffering from the center of it. That transformation, the ritualization of the competitive drive, the alchemy of turning war into sport, is what makes us human. The choice to gamify war is, I’d argue, the founding act of civilization and the birth of sport.

[Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans is the essential scholarly treatment of Greek ritual and its deep roots in sacrifice and violence, the argument that the formalization of collective killing into ritual is not incidental to Greek religion but constitutive of it. René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred extends this into a broader theory of scapegoating as the founding mechanism of social order: ritual as the controlled, symbolic re-enactment of communal violence that would otherwise tear a society apart.

For the Eleusinian Mysteries specifically, the tradition Nikos has been drawn to since childhood, Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key makes the case for a psychedelic sacrament at the heart of the ancient Greek religious experience, while Peter Kingsley’s In the Dark Places of Wisdom offers a complementary and more phenomenologically precise account of the pre-Socratic underworld traditions.]

Leo: There’s almost a homeostatic function here— these gatherings serve the superorganism of the society, reflecting itself back to itself, allowing the priest class or the observing elders to take the temperature of the collective.

Nikos: Exactly. And each festival served a different function. The Olympic Games did one thing, the Panathenaia another, the Dionysia another. But there were always people who had attended many of these, across years and decades, who were comparing, observing, building a continuous narrative: This year was different from last year. What does that tell us about where we are?

That’s still happening. During the Cold War Olympic Games, everyone was reading them as a competition between two civilizations, not just athletes. The forum becomes a form of divination. A temperature test of collective health.

[This is one of the places where our neuroscientific and complexity-theoretic frameworks can genuinely illuminate the historical record. The Neurophenomenological State Space (NPSS) project at Sensoria/UCCR, along with ritual collective insight research undertaken with the Multi-Intelligence Institute , Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies , Epopteia Hellenic center for Entheogenic Research and others, is exploring precisely this: how shared ritual can give rise to emergent collective intelligence, states of knowing and insight that exceed what any individual participant carries into the space; and how these can further human flourishing and social cohesion. When Nikos talks about the elder class reading the vibe of the festival as a diagnostic of collective health, he’s describing something we’re only beginning to have formal tools to understand.]

On Cultural Transmission, Appropriation, and Living Tradition

Leo: Given this lineage, do you think there’s a particular role for people from Greek culture in stewarding or reinstantiating these practices in modern society?

Nikos: It’s complicated. I don’t believe in any kind of exclusive custodianship. When I first read Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key, I thought: here’s someone who is not Greek, has never taken anything psychedelic as far as I know, and he gets it. That capacity to understand doesn’t require ethnic inheritance.

And I deeply reject the more expansive uses of “cultural appropriation” as a concept. I’ve had some of my most powerful ceremonies with a French man from upstate New York, former advertising executive, been running ayahuasca ceremonies for twenty years. It doesn’t matter. It’s like saying only Argentinians can dance tango. Some of the world’s greatest tango dancers aren’t Argentine.

More importantly: cultural transmission has always worked through permutation and combination. Consider that the taco, which we might think of as an ancient Mexican form, was actually invented after the Spanish arrived. The Spanish, coming from Al-Andalus where Arab culinary culture had taken root, brought their pita tradition to a continent where wheat didn’t grow, and adapted it to corn tortillas. The doner-style rotating spit for tacos al pastor looks almost identical to what you’d find in Constantinople. All of culture has proceeded this way.

[Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger is the essential text here, the anxiety about cultural contamination follows exactly the same psychological logic as pollution taboos: the fear that contact with an outside element will corrupt the integrity of an inside category. Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, the creative recombination of available cultural materials into new structures, offers a more generous account of how traditions actually move and evolve. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is a beautiful contemporary example of exactly this kind of cross-traditional synthesis done with rigor and reciprocity.]

What I do think matters is the depth of digestion. The problem isn’t borrowing from a tradition, it’s unconsciously assembling things that look like a tradition without having genuinely metabolized them. That’s what produces clownishness. And clownishness doesn’t just undermine one practitioner, it erodes the trust people bring to the whole domain.

There’s also something real about the cumulative charge that rituals accumulate over time. The first person who figures something out creates the first crease in the fabric. Others agree, return, practice. The groove deepens. The tradition becomes available to practitioners as an accessible current. That’s why creating songs, dances, and repetitions matters, through intentional repetition, a psychic force accumulates and becomes drawable. A song that survives because people keep singing it has more power, because the singing itself is evidence of belief, and that belief charges the form. This is the operating logic the economy of faith: meaning is not found like ore; it is minted by repetition.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t create something new. Kung Fu and Aikido are both systematic languages, developed by someone, once, out of nowhere, that now carry enormous accumulated weight. The same is true in the shamanic world. There are proven routes. But a genuinely gifted practitioner can also carve new ones.

Entheo:Genesis (trailer)

On Safety, Radical Self-Reliance, and the Stakes of Liminal Spaces

Leo: How do you think about risk in the context of events and facilitated experiences? Where do you land on the tension between protection and the transformative potential of genuine danger?

Nikos: I think the obsession with safety is a 21st century ailment, over-litigated, liability-driven. At my festival, we had constant debates with the operations team who kept pushing for more fencing, more checkpoints, more infrastructure. And I kept resisting, not just because fencing costs money, but because it sends a message: you are being herded. That kills the vibe. More importantly, you want people to take responsibility for their own experience.

In fact, the worst injury we had at the event was someone trying to climb over a fence, and they got their genitals caught on it. The fence itself became the hazard.

[Nikos has elsewhere called this the knife-drawer principle: systems designed to eliminate friction don’t produce safety, they produce brittleness. The blade dulled in velvet is no safer than the blade sharpened by use.]

That said, you’re not going to deliberately break glass on the dance floor before people arrive. There’s a difference between refusing to sanitize liminal experience and being recklessly negligent. Don’t hold your festival on the side of a cliff. Know the difference between structuring an experience for genuine encounter with depth, and just creating danger for its own sake.

The harder truth is that festivals are genuinely dangerous. People are in altered states. It’s late. The terrain is uneven. And I think that danger makes them more real, more meaningful. It generates the reverence that the experience deserves.

After I left the festival, the year after I stepped away from production, there was a death. Someone was found drowned in one of our ponds. I wasn’t there, wasn’t involved that year in any capacity, and I still carry it. I think about it still.

But I also hold simultaneously: this is, in some sense, a battlefield. There will be casualties. The point is to learn to be responsible at the extremes, in the liminal spaces. How much protection should be provided? I genuinely don’t know. It’s one of the hardest questions.

Leo: here’s also a deeper question about what “safety” even means in a neurophenomenological sense. Physical safety is necessary but not sufficient. Psychological safety has its own architecture, and sometimes the presence of too much protective scaffolding prevents the very encounter with depth that the space was designed to enable. This is one of the questions our contemplative state induction work at Sensoria is trying to get traction on: how do you create conditions for genuine transformation without either eliminating meaningful risk or abandoning people in it?

Closing: Principles Over Protocols

Leo: Is there anything you want to leave us with?

Nikos: I think it’s a sacred role. I don’t consider myself to have taken it on explicitly, partly, I’ll admit, because I understand the weight of the responsibility. It’s not a light thing. And it’s a complicated thing to navigate in the current moment. I have compassion for people who have chosen that path and have slipped along the way. It’s a difficult time to be a shaman, the way society is currently structured creates traps at every turn. Maybe in fifty years that will have changed. Maybe a hundred and fifty years ago it was easier. But right now, it is genuinely hard.

Leo: And I think we’re in a moment where more people are openly doing this than perhaps in several hundred years, which means there will be mistakes, and there will be successes, and we need to find new forms of community self-regulation. What those forms look like is still an open question.

Nikos: Right. And it has to do with knowing your audience, serving your community, having the language and tools that resonate with the people who are actually in front of you, and doing all of it with pure intention. That combination tends to succeed.

What I’d resist is both the impulse to over-regulate and the impulse to let anything go. More openness, and more rigor. That’s generally where I land. There are no easy solutions. But there are principles. What we’ve been talking about isn’t really about specific practices, the icaros, the trance music, the particular tradition. It’s about a pattern. An intentionality. Something closer to an abstract protocol than a set of prescriptions.

Leo: I’d love to work with you to try to extract those latent principles, let the conversation breathe through a draft, share it with you, iterate asynchronously. Not as truth-claims. As an offering to the community of ideas, held lightly, with no ownership. Thrown on the wall, and we see what sticks.

Nikos: That’s exactly how it should work. You offer it with no expectation and no ownership. If it survives the arena of ideas, someone else adds a coat of paint. Then someone else. And eventually it becomes whatever it’s going to be.

The Holy Mountain

This conversation is part of the Sensoria Substack’s ongoing mission: to serve as an aggregator and meeting ground for the many perspectives, shamanic, scientific, mathematical, contemplative, that are collectively attempting to articulate a new chapter in decentralized consciousness science. We are not trying to replace what tradition knows. We are trying to abstract its lessons to our current predicaments and opportunities, and to treat those lessons with the rigor and humility they deserve.

Follow Nikos’s work at Sacred Circuits, where he writes on myth, consciousness, and the architecture of technology.

Entheo:Genesis (full Movie)

There’s a particular kind of conversation that only happens in Los Angeles — the kind where a neuroscientist, a former policy director, and a ketamine clinic founder sit on stools in a candlelit creative space and talk seriously about the nature of consciousness, the FDA approval pipeline, and whether your goosebumps constitute a mystical experience. That’s more or less what happened at Club Joyful recently, at one of the Fireside Salon events hosted by the Grateful Giraffes community — a group now approaching 1,000 lifetime members across nearly 450 events.

The panel was moderated by Max Marine, GG’s founder, and featured three guests with very different vantage points on the same terrain: Sam Mandel, co-founder and CEO of Ketamine Clinics LA; Natalie Ginsberg, former MAPS policy director, therapist, and co-founder of the Jewish Psychedelic Summit; and Leonardo Christov-Moore (yours truly), neuroscientist and Research Director at Sensoria Research, and Senior Scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies. What emerged over ninety minutes was a genuine triangulation of the scientific, the clinical, the spiritual, and the political, with real disagreements, real warmth, and some genuinely sharp thinking about where all of this is headed.

What Even Is a Psychedelic?

The evening opened with each panelist offering their definition — not of specific compounds, but of the phenomenon itself.

Sam reached for the chemical and experiential simultaneously: “The idea of mind-revealing, soul-revealing — an internal world being explored and understood and fired up and connected, chemically, emotionally, mentally. As well as connection to the universe at large.”

Natalie echoed this but sharpened it: “The strictest sense, I feel like it really is about this revealing of the psyche, of the soul — parts of yourself and others in the world that are not ordinarily accessible to you.”

Leo came from a different angle. Rather than defining psychedelics by their chemistry, he defined them by their function within a broader category of human experience:

“I like to think about psychedelics from a broad state engineering perspective — not just compounds we can ingest, but mystical or liminal experiences that share common properties, whether it’s a near-death experience or something you ingest. We are all like nucleated drops off of the universe itself, facing back at the universe. We have to operate most of the time as this separate thing with a consistent model, for the sake of persistence and regularity. But sometimes — especially when we confront problems beyond our grasp — we have to temporarily let down and become porous. Temporarily dissolving the self in order to gain downloads. The self-other boundary being modulated.”

This framing — psychedelics as one instance of a much broader category of state-altering experience — became one of the throughlines of the conversation. It would resurface in discussions of meditation, breathwork, integration, and the future of training facilitators.

What’s Most Exciting Right Now

Asked what excites them most in the field, each panelist answered from their corner of it — and the answers turned out to be complementary in interesting ways.

Leo argued for what might be called the dissolution of silos. For decades, consciousness research has been balkanized: meditation researchers over here, psychedelic researchers over there, breathwork practitioners elsewhere, near-death experience scholars in a separate corner. All studying experiences that share deep structural similarities, using entirely different vocabularies, different methodologies, barely citing each other.

“I’m excited about starting to arrive at an approach-agnostic view of this larger thing we might call state and trait engineering. Not distinguishing — as it has been for situated historical reasons — between meditation research, breathwork, near-death experiences. Trying to unify those under the common umbrella of neurophenomenology and certain traits, not thinking of them as separate, but as different instances of a very long-standing process that is part of health and flourishing.”

The practical implication is important: broadening access. Many people are put off by the connotations of one approach or another — “I’m not into meditation,” “I’m not comfortable with drugs,” “that ceremony feels culturally foreign to me.” A more unified framework shows that these are different doors into the same building, and that the building itself is not exotic — it’s part of the basic repertoire of human experience.

“Even goosebumps, chills — that’s a micro-mystical experience. We’re navigating state space all the time. So this defaulting against the myth of sobriety and the partitioning of these different approaches as separate — a more holistic view is very exciting.”

Natalie was moved by something more cultural and ancestral. After more than a decade working at MAPS on clinical research and policy, she finds herself drawn to questions that the clinical model doesn’t easily hold — questions of community, ritual, lineage, and the rediscovery of what was already there.

“I’m excited that different traditional religious bodies are actually engaging with people having psychedelic spiritual experiences — understanding how to integrate and support these experiences so people don’t feel like they have to choose between their ancestral traditions and their spiritual experiences.”

She described watching people from diverse backgrounds begin to ask: what were the plants on the land my ancestors came from? What shamanic traditions existed in those places? For her, as a Jewish person, that meant exploring the plants mentioned in the Torah, the traditions of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the intersection of psychedelic practice and Jewish mysticism — hence the Jewish Psychedelic Summit she co-founded.

She also named something that doesn’t get enough airtime: the ongoing violence in conflict zones, and the growing body of research exploring whether psychedelics might open new possibilities for people living in those contexts. She co-developed one of the first studies interviewing Palestinians and Israelis who sat with ayahuasca together. Her co-researcher, Dr. Leor Roseman, went on to found an organization called Ripples, continuing that work.

Sam, characteristically, named the clinical and regulatory horizon: psilocybin approaching FDA approval, and what that means for the enormous population of people who simply won’t engage with any of this until it has an official stamp.

“I know so many people I care for who are suffering who feel strongly that if their doctor isn’t going to recommend a treatment, they aren’t touching it. I find that really sad. Many of us in this room may think that line of thinking antiquated, sometimes we get into echo chambers and think no one thinks that way anymore. There are a lot of people who still do, and a lot of them are really suffering while waiting for the establishment’s green light. The good news, the silver lining if you will, is that the green light is finally beginning to show.”

The Regulatory Landscape — Where Things Actually Stand

For those less familiar with where the policy environment sits right now, Natalie and Sam offered a useful orientation.

The major news of the past couple of years was the FDA’s decision not to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD — a significant setback for the field, and particularly for MAPS and its pharmaceutical spinoff Lykos, which had spent years and enormous resources on clinical trials. Natalie explained why the decision was more structurally interesting than a simple rejection:

“MDMA therapy is not traditional therapy. You have to touch people sometimes, and all kinds of complicated things come up. The FDA was not built to evaluate a substance evaluated alongside an adjunct therapy. The message it sent to other companies was: that whole therapy thing is too complicated. Just keep the therapy out of it.”

The downstream effect is troubling. Stripping the therapeutic container to reduce cost and regulatory complexity risks losing exactly what makes the treatment effective — the careful preparation, the relational holding, the integration work. Trained therapists are expensive. Psychedelic sessions are long. The economic pressure is toward shortcuts that may undermine outcomes.

Sam filled in the broader landscape. Ketamine remains the only federally legal psychedelic available across all fifty states, FDA-approved since 1970 originally as an anesthetic. Psilocybin looks likely to be next — possibly this year, more likely next year. Oregon has an active program where people can sit with psilocybin with a state-sanctioned guide. Colorado is developing something similar. Many cities have decriminalized psychedelics or made enforcement the lowest priority.

One important distinction Sam drew: decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing. Many people assume that because you can buy mushroom chocolates at a pop-up or because nobody seems to be getting arrested, these substances are legal. They’re not, in most jurisdictions. The cannabis arc — decriminalization, medicalization, recreational legalization, then normalized retail — may be a rough template for where some psychedelics are headed, but we’re earlier in that process than the cultural moment suggests.

On the current federal administration, Natalie offered a necessary corrective to what might seem like an optimistic picture. While the administration has been relatively supportive of psychedelic research funding — Texas just passed a $50 million bill for ibogaine research focused on veterans — it has simultaneously been more aggressive about drug enforcement and decriminalization, and has disproportionately targeted marginalized communities. The research enthusiasm and the enforcement reality are in tension.

How Psychedelics Work in the Brain — Two Levels of Explanation

The neuroscience portion of the evening was one of its richest, with Sam offering the accessible clinical account and Leo following with a more systemic framing.

Sam on ketamine: it works as an NMDA receptor antagonist, blocking that receptor and triggering a cascade of effects including increased glutamate, elevated BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), neuroplasticity, synaptogenesis. The brain forms new connections. The Default Mode Network — that persistent background hum of self-referential thought, often manifesting as negative self-talk — quiets. And that quieting can persist after the medicine wears off, creating a window for new patterns to form.

“There’s a reset. Like fresh snowfall on a ski slope that’s all rutted out. You’ve been going down the same tracks. Then there’s fresh snowfall — you can take any line you want down that run.”

MDMA, Natalie explained, works differently but toward related ends: it subdues amygdala reactivity (the fear response) while releasing oxytocin, creating conditions in which deeply traumatic memories can be revisited without the usual protective shutdown. The person feels safe enough to go there.

Leo offered a systems-level view that doesn’t replace these accounts but reframes them at a higher level of abstraction. He started with the concept of complex systems — any system formed of smaller interacting parts. Living systems are complex. The brain is complex. What’s remarkable about complex systems is that they resist entropy: they don’t simply diffuse toward equilibrium the way a drop of ink in water does. They maintain organization, within what are called attractor states.

“The brain exists in what’s called an attractor landscape. It tends to stay right around here. It’s worked very well here. And it’s very hard for it to suddenly move into another big macrostate. What many researchers have found about psychedelics is what they tend to do, at least in one phase, is flatten that attractor landscape — make it much easier for the whole system to slip into another attractor, another stable way of being.”

This is why psychedelics generate such interest: unlike most conventional therapies, a single experience can shift someone’s patterns of behavior for the rest of their life. The attractor landscape is temporarily flattened, enabling a kind of macroscopic reorganization that would otherwise require enormous sustained effort. That’s the opportunity. The integration work that follows is what shapes which new attractor you settle into — you don’t want to just slip indefinitely between configurations. The goal is to reform the landscape intentionally.

Leo added something distinctive about ketamine specifically: its action on the NMDA system, which is deeply involved in learning, memory, time perception, and meaning-making. He described ketamine and other dissociatives as modulating the relationship between the interoceptive system (the body’s internal clock, orienting attention) and the central nervous system (the meaning-making organ). The result is an ability to inhabit multiple time scales simultaneously — which he suggested may explain why ketamine is particularly interesting for couples therapy or grief work.

“You can process the grief of your breakup right now, but at the same time see the friendship you have over a longer time period, even who you’re going to be in the future — engage between those, and not be panicked into just one thing.”

The Data Sovereignty Problem Nobody Is Solving

This was arguably the most underdiscussed insight of the evening, and Leo (and Sensoria) are among the few people thinking about it seriously.

As psychedelic and psychedelic-adjacent therapies become more widespread, a new problem is emerging: people moving through long, hybrid, multi-year journeys — combining meditation, ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, breathwork, traditional ceremony, and more — are generating potentially rich data about their own processes. What worked? What didn’t? What combinations, in what sequence, for what kind of person, with what kind of history? The current system captures almost none of this in a usable way.

Simultaneously, we’re entering what Leo called “an increasingly data-rich and extractive era.” Wearables, biometric sensors, language patterns extracted from how we write, behavioral fingerprints from our interactions with AI systems — the capability for deep data capture is accelerating rapidly. This creates a paradox:

“On one hand, we want much deeper insights — not just how our experiences unfold over time, but how our bodies are reacting, how our metabolites are changing, how our brains are changing. And yet those are extremely deep, vulnerable forms of data that could just as easily be used to target us, manipulate us, leverage against us.”

His proposed solution, being developed with colleagues including Patrick Deegan and collaborators in the decentralized science movement: self-sovereign data frameworks. The inversion of the current model, in which data control sits with institutions. Instead, imagine a personal container — analogous to a crypto wallet — that holds all of your psychedelic experience data, biometrics, insights, and integration records. Peer-to-peer. Under your control. Accessible only when you choose to grant access.

“Just like many of us now have crypto wallets — peer-to-peer transference of funds — something along those lines, a container for all of your personal data, personal biometric data, and these experiences that, depending on the jurisdiction, may not even be legal. Raw, vulnerable data that has to be something only you have access to, or that you can arbitrate access to.”

The goal isn’t just privacy protection. It’s longitudinal insight — the ability to see your own process of transformation across years and many different sites, to understand what actually works for you, and to contribute, if you choose, to a genuinely large-scale picture of human consciousness exploration. Right now the field is, as Leo put it, “radically underpowered” — most studies have sample sizes in the dozens. Self-sovereign data architecture could enable studies of tens or hundreds of thousands, while keeping the individual in control.

Safety, Risks, and What Actually Goes Wrong

The conversation turned to risk, and the panel was refreshingly non-promotional about it.

Natalie emphasized set, setting, and sourcing — understanding what you’re taking, where it came from, who you’re sitting with, and the lineage of that person’s practice. Adulteration is a serious concern, particularly with powders. Testing kits matter. Projects like Zendo at Burning Man — peer support networks for difficult experiences — represent the kind of harm-reduction infrastructure the field needs more of.

She also noted that psychiatric emergencies can and do emerge in psychedelic contexts, particularly when multiple substances are mixed. This isn’t an argument against that — it’s an argument for adequate support structures.

“Almost 100% of the time, if there’s a medical emergency or psychiatric emergency, people are mixing substances — including alcohol. If you’re going to do a psychedelic, take it by itself or be absolutely certain you understand the interaction and proceed with caution.”

He also named the time distortion problem, which catches people more often than they expect:

“Keep track of the time, because your perception of it will change dramatically. You’re going to think: it’s been a few hours, let’s take a little more of this. And you’re not even feeling the full effects of what you already took. Start low, go slow. It’s always easier to add a little more than it is to take it away.”

Leo reframed the frequency question in a way that cut through the usual harm-reduction language:

“The point of the larger doses is to unweed the threads — put yourself into a very abnormal state in which you’re able to do deep self-examination, and then integrate those insights into behavior. If someone’s doing that a couple times a week, you have to ask: if this is such a profound transformative experience, why do you need to do it so often? Are you chasing altered states, or altered traits? Is the idea to escape this reality, or to go explore something and come back to better yourself and the world here?”

He also drew a striking analogy for the risk of overuse: “Dissociatives like ketamine are wonderful for pulling apart the loom and seeing all the threads. But if you’re doing that every day, you end up with a seemingly meaningful tangle.”

Who It’s Not For — and the Complexity of That Question

The question of contraindications opened one of the most nuanced exchanges of the evening. The standard clinical exclusion criteria — schizophrenia, active psychosis, bipolar disorder in certain phases, uncontrolled hypertension — were covered, but the panel pushed past them.

Natalie named the painful irony: many people excluded from clinical trials are people living with complex trauma, which overlaps significantly with the populations that might most benefit. The psychiatric exclusions are partly about liability and research design, not purely about who can safely engage.

She also raised the cross-cultural dimension directly:

“In a lot of shamanic cultures, people we experience as having psychosis — labeled bipolar, schizophrenic — are the shamanic leaders. When the whole community supports them: ‘wow, you’re hearing the voice of God, what is happening?’ Instead of: ‘you’re losing your mind, we need to lock you up.’ How our society makes it so much worse.”

Sam noted that ketamine has shown real promise for bipolar depression specifically — treating the depressive phase in stabilized patients, with good results in his practice and in small studies — and that the pregnancy and breast-feeding picture is more nuanced than blanket exclusion suggests. The risks of untreated severe depression in pregnancy are real and significant.

Leo’s contribution here returned to the data sovereignty argument: most adverse events that occur outside clinical settings don’t get registered anywhere. They become party stories. A decentralized, sovereign data infrastructure could allow the field to build a much more accurate picture of what actually causes harm, for whom, under what conditions — without relying exclusively on the narrow slice of experience captured in clinical trials.

The Training Problem — Who Gets to Sit With People?

One of the audience members — herself completing facilitator training for Oregon’s psilocybin program — raised what she called the integrity question: how do we maintain rigor in a field that is rapidly being populated by people with minimal experience?

The issue is real. Oregon’s facilitator training program allows people with relatively few personal psychedelic experiences to become licensed guides. The economic logic is understandable — trained facilitators are expensive, sessions are long, access would otherwise remain narrowly available. But the cultural and clinical logic is troubling.

Sam advocated for demystification and destigmatization within clinical communities — specifically, helping practitioners understand that you don’t need to be sick to benefit from these medicines, and that personal experience genuinely informs clinical capacity.

“I talk to a lot of practitioners who see ketamine as medicine and have never taken it. When you ask them, their response is: ‘I’m not sick.’ That’s the old Western medicine model — it’s for sick people, I’m not sick. Missing the point entirely.”

Leo argued for the dissolution of the category distinction between psychedelic experience and contemplative practice:

“What if a therapist has only had two encounters with psychedelics, but has also done ten years of Vipassana? I would trust that person. They may not know this specific state as well, but they know what it is to be in a different state that confronts your sense of where you end and where you begin. An experienced meditator who’s never taken a drug — I would trust them to sit with me in a profound experience. ‘How does your body feel? How big do you see yourself to be? Let’s sit with that.’”

This is a genuinely important reframe. Training frameworks that treat psychedelic facilitation as entirely distinct from contemplative training, somatic work, or other transformative modalities are missing the deeper competency. A domain-general view of state navigation — which is what Sensoria is developing through its psychonautics curriculum and certification work — could address the training shortage without sacrificing depth.

Ten Years Out

The panel closed with a question about where psychedelics will be in 10 years. The answers were revealing.

Sam was relatively straightforward: “Psychedelics will be the standard of care in psychiatry. They’ll be legally available for recreation. There will be novel compounds that don’t exist yet. The world will finally embrace these medicines in the mainstream.” He was cautious about “psychedelics without the trip” — compounds engineered to produce neuroplasticity without the subjective experience — believing the experience itself is part of what makes the treatment work.

Natalie was more existential, and more honest about the uncertainty of the moment:

“I’m praying that ten years in the future, these substances have been supporting a lot of healing and a lot more connection and understanding around our planet. And I hope that some of the healing people are experiencing is leading them to build new systems that don’t just create more trauma.”

Leo went large in scope:

“I see a world where psychonautics is a legitimate, well-grounded vocation — where people are able to be citizen scientists exploring the varieties of consciousness, to get better and better knowledge about themselves and the potential of those varieties. With guides, tools, safety apparatuses, sovereign data protocols, so they don’t have to rely on the whims of a given state or health insurance company. And psychedelic studies that don’t have an n of 20 or 120, but an n of 120,000 — really getting large-scale, deep population insights about the depth and breadth of conscious state space. Because the whole field is currently radically underpowered in that regard.”

The hubris, he suggested, is in thinking we’ve already mapped the territory. We haven’t come close.

A Few Things That Stayed With Me

The moment that hit hardest was almost a throwaway line from Sam, near the end, about a story from 2014: a pregnant woman, severely depressed, too afraid of SSRIs’ effects on her baby to take them, who died by suicide. The reminder that the risks of not treating are just as real as the risks of treating, and that those get systematically undercounted in the conversation about caution and contraindications.

And Leo’s observation that most of the adverse events, the surprises, the unexpected breakthroughs, the things that would actually help the field understand itself — they’re happening outside clinics, outside trials, outside any data-capture system at all. They’re becoming party stories. The field is working, as he put it, radically underpowered, with a crazily small evidence base relative to the scale of human experience it’s trying to map.

Both of those things feel important to hold alongside the genuine excitement about what’s coming.

Grateful Giraffes is a Los Angeles-based community of ~1,000 members focused on consciousness, connection, and human potential. Their Fireside Salon series brings together researchers, practitioners, and thinkers for evenings like this one. Sensoria Research was grateful to be represented and commune with other thinkers in the space.

A Letter to Those Who Come After

To those who come after,

To those inspired by the few who took the brave step into the unknown and experimented on themselves with completely new drugs, the aspiring Hoffmans and Shulgins,

To those who seek the sacred duty of documenting the boundaries of our consciousness for all posterity,

Sometimes, it ultimately comes to an end.

It is a road rife with hazards that requires the utmost discipline and guidance to navigate. Discipline and guidance that I did not have.

I should introduce myself-I am a drug blogger named nervewing. I have written 174 detailed trip reports, the most out of any single person, save for perhaps those in the Shulgin’s inner circle. I have ingested 253 compounds. I have written articles about rare and obscure drugs and drug design, where I was eventually able to put my hypotheses in practice when I worked for 2 years in a research lab developing novel dissociatives as therapeutics. I was the first to synthesize almost 90 compounds, two series of which I am on a patent for.

I began my journey with psychedelics, ingesting and documenting them as rigorously as a stumbling teenager could. Eventually though, I was drawn deep into the lure of a different class of drug- the dissociatives.

Dissociative drugs are compounds that act as antagonists of the NMDA receptor, resulting in sensations of anesthesia, loss of proprioception, dizziness, “floatiness” and a mental state of dissociation from reality. Some dissociatives are heavy, sinking a user into a deep hole like ketamine or DCK or MXiPr. Others leave the body more functional and induce a stimulating dissociated mania, an immense confident and at times destructive rush.

I was drawn to the fantasy and imagination of these compounds. How they could reliably take me to other worlds, how after some practice I was able to control my projected avatar in these out of body experiences and generate imagery before me. The way they gave me a childlike wonder as I navigated the world, the video-game like quality it gave everything. It was virtual reality that felt within my control. I felt like I was in control of them in their entirety for many years. That eventually came to collapse.

For the last 3 ½ years, I was using them almost every single day, with a few breaks for travel. My short term memory falters constantly. I always have to pee. I have become isolated from my loved ones and made rash manic decisions that complicated my life and filled me with anxiety. When I go on benders I barely eat or sleep and become more visibly gaunt and sullen.

My obsession with them drove me into the realm of designing them and having those designs manifest in the world, sometimes based off of an initial synthesis that I performed. I now found myself with the mission of documenting these novelties, being the first person in history to ingest many of these compounds, which I documented in detail. This felt like a sacred mission in life, but this too would become complicated by an unavoidable part of heavy drug use- tolerance.

Dissociative tolerance is cumulative and takes years to go down, if it ever does at all. Needless to say, using every single day shot my tolerance higher and higher. Once familiar landscapes began to change. Colors got duller, visuals more faint. So much got lost in dull familiarity and habituation. There I was on the cosmic roller coaster again – wheee. I began to think of like an instrument that had dulled with overuse. I wasn’t as sensitive to these effects as I used to be, I couldn’t even accurately report dosages anymore because of my tolerance.

I could still coax out beautiful and revelatory experiences with cocktails of familiar compounds, but there became less will and stamina to experiment with new ones. I had not just become addicted to them, but to the useless, languid lifestyle that they engendered. Sometimes they could forcefully yank me out of depressive episodes, or give me revelatory inspiration when meditated on correctly- clear therapeutic benefits.

But the negative consequences began to accumulate more and more as my use slid into more reckless and brazen territory. After an intense bender coupled to a vicious manic episode that burdened many around me, I decided I had to stop. I let myself have a last few very intentional beautiful spiritual experiences and cut off my access to everything.

When I think on this, I wonder what was ultimately my purpose in my explorations, and was I still following that purpose when I fell into my daily use? Or was it lack of purpose that led me astray to crack the ice into the abyss? At times I believed I was simply seeking out every compound that I could potentially incorporate into a pattern of regular use into my life to enhance and improve specific experiences or actions. That the recreation was the ultimate mission, the reports were more for my notes than for the world’s. Later on I felt like I simply had an obligation to try these new drugs because I was able to do so without accruing as much harm as other seemed to. There was that sacred sense of duty in there somewhere too. Nothing ever lasts though.

Ultimately, I often questioned the utility of any of this because drugs are so subjective, my experiences have differed so strongly from so many others’. But at least each one is a data point. A new datapoint at the edge of human knowledge. But not all data are created equally. These are compounds that demand respect and introspection with so much to show us should we let them.

The most value can be gleaned from hallucinogenic experiences with a period of sober integration. When I was at my most disciplined I always left at least a we3k before writing a report, amending my original notes document with thoughts and observations that occurred to me throughout the integration time. This capacity becomes dulled with daily use, obviously. The time to integrate just becomes battered with other experiences, some more exciting and memorable than the one I’m trying to record.

Novel experiences were drops in a pool.

I was often lacking in intentionality. I was at times sloppy and reckless with combos. And still I sought out every new compound that came on the market, often placing myself among the first to receive samples. While I could report on all of these and lay the initial foundation of a single subjective description, many of them warranted deeper, more intentional exploration- beautiful compounds that I was the first to document, like 3-F-PCiPr, 3,4-MD-PCiPr, 3-MeO-PCiPr, POxP, 3-MeO-PCsBu, and so so many others out there that are waiting to be discovered. While some can recklessly blaze the trail, others can truly understand each compound for what it is. This is something that requires rigor and discipline that I did not have.

I lived a chaotic, tumultuous and disorderly life, often intertwining my experimentation with my nonstop struggles with mental illness and high stress situations. There was a certain recklessness that pervaded everything I did, including drug use. So many of my reports were instances of acute self-medication or self-harm. While it was useful to document that interplay, it does not illuminate the neutral and comprehensive depth of each compound.

I had no guidance, I had no instruction manual, I loosely copied Shulgin’s methodology but admittedly took risks on account of a confidence in my understanding of dissociative structure-activity relationships. There were no existing data to base my doses on for many of these compounds. here was no guidebook for writing reports, save for an internal Erowid manual for grading them. I wonder how much more rich and useful my contributions may have been had I a rigorous and comprehensive structure to work from.

The development of such a program is all the more urgent in this era of vastly expanding and unregulated psychedelic research, both in real laboratories and in the homes of thousands of citizen scientists who make their disorderly contributions to the grand data pool. It is not only that these unsanctioned experiments may not provide good data, but moreover there is genuine danger of physical or psychological harm in taking uninformed risks. We cannot afford the consequences of reckless experimentation when a tenuous spotlight is on the world of hallucinogen research. This moment of tacit approval is a fickle thing, and we have an obligation to demonstrate that we can approach self-experimentation in a safe, orderly, methodological, and disciplined fashion. A program of certification could generate the legitimacy and authority required to meet this moment of intense scrutiny.

There are so many ways to approach this and so many aspects of creating a rigorous certification for self-experimentation and reporting. The certified psychonaut should have a base level understanding of harm reduction, establishing set and setting, navigation and description hallucinogenic phenomenology, theoretical neurological and psychological foundations for hallucinogenic experiences, and the cultural, historical, and entheogenic context of hallucinogens. Higher levels of certification and more detailed teaching of these aspects and more could establish positions of mentorship or professional provision of trauma and consent-informed therapies. This would of course, not be to the exclusion of the thousands of brave individuals who self-experiment and report entirely on their own terms, just as I have. Not everyone has the time or intention to pursue certification. But even such a program could lay the groundwork for a safer and more methodological model to the citizen-science reporting. The certified researchers can build from the foundation that we have provided, follow the trail we have blazed into the deep analytical depth that these substances deserve. Both approaches can work hand in hand to rapidly and efficiently expand our knowledge of psychoactive compounds, with widespread legitimacy and acceptance that will benefit us all and open up the gates to a new age of exploration of novel compounds. Their limits are boundless, and we have so much still to learn!

I wish I had such a curriculum before I began my mission. I wrote my first trip report at 17 on total impulse after I had my system shocked by my first truly powerful psychedelic experience with mushrooms. It is a wondrous and excited bit of writing about what was actually a fairly stressful experience. I was 18 when I began writing reports on “research chemicals”. Had I more guidance I could have experimented with so much more intentionality, properly integrated my experiences, known better how to navigate the challenging ones. I am glad such a thing is coming together for those who follow in this journey. I am happy with the path I have lit and the example I have set, I am sad to be ending this journey but I hope I can inspire others, and also be an example of what not to do. Ultimately, drugs are immensely powerful, they can light your mind ablaze with inspiration and also draw you into a sick dependance that grips the entirety of your life.

I am leaving this world behind but I want to leave behind a legacy of defining a certain era of exploration of drugs, where a myriad of unique, brave, willing volunteers wrote their own rules to sample new drugs, and amidst the chaos, created a bank of immensely useful data for those who know how to navigate it. Now is the time to hone the foundation we have built and begin an era of truly rigorous and scientific analysis of novel compounds along with deeper explorations of familiar ones.

It honestly feels like a break up. Quitting dissociatives has felt awful. I am bored and restless and tired and anxious and depressed all of the time. I feel empty and without purpose. The world is grey and nothing appeals to me. I feel slower and stupider and less capable of motivation or focus. It was extremely challenging to write this piece without them but I have to try, this is my life now. I was ultimately on a path of immense danger, and I had no choice but to avert it. This yawning pitfall eventually awaits every psychonaut if they are careless. There is no bottom to the abyss but death.

Ultimately I miss the colorful and wondrous holes so much, I miss leaving my body behind to fly around enormous glowing monoliths, I miss the mania and inspiration, I miss how much they immersed me in games and the warm social stimulation, I miss feeling confident in myself and firm in my aspirations. I miss the sense of exploration and that feeling of being the first to report on a compound. I miss that sense of accomplishment. I am not leaving behind merely just the high these compounds gave me, but a mission that defined my life and gave me purpose, a fundamental piece of my identity, a companion in the darkest times that has worn out its welcome.

I suppose my purpose now is to guide and mentor the next generation of psychonauts. I hope I have laid a proper foundation for them and lit the way for them in a way that they can follow to the benefit of us all. We have a sacred mission, and it must be approached with the care and respect that it deserves. That is the bright future of psychonautics.

-Nervewing

I recently read a fascinating Substack post on vitrification, an alternative to cryogenic freezing for preserving living brains. The core problem is elegant and brutal: even with painstakingly slow freezing rates, electron microscopy reveals gross distortions of neural tissue. The phase change from liquid to solid wreaks havoc on the brain’s vast, interconnected, membrane-separated channels, all filled with varyingly aqueous solutions each enacting the phase transition in its own destructive way. Vitrification sidesteps this by using cryoprotectants to achieve a compressed, minimally aqueous state minimizing the potential crystalline damage of ice formation.

The goal, of course, is to preserve functional properties — or more precisely, to preserve enough structure that those functional properties might someday be resurrected, continued, extended.

This work mirrors a parallel avenue in the field of Whole Brain Emulation: the question of fidelity. How much grain is necessary? How much information must be captured to reenact the functions of a brain? These are questions about high-density versus low-density adherence to biological reality. Questions of sufficiency : what is the minimum faithful (or useful, I think we’ll find) portrait of a mind?

I think these are laudable research programs. Much will be gained from them — not least what they force us to examine about the substrate of what we value. About consciousness; about intelligence, capability, problem-solving — all these nested stacks of competence we prize. And beyond competence, the experience of things and their intrinsic nature. All the reasons we would want to preserve ourselves, or anything else, in any way.

And there is something sacred in the impulse behind vitrification: The desire to hold on, to refuse dissolution, to insist that this — this particular, unrepeatable locus of experience — matters enough to fight entropy for.

But at the end of the day, the operative word is preserve.

I think these studies — the attempt to freeze brains, to indefinitely extend life, to emulate, to upload — are, each in their own way, a form of mummification.

And if mummies and their pyramids are evidence of anything, it is this: that above all things — above sex, above power, above feeding, above meaning — stands the drive to persist. Spinoza called it conatus: the striving of any being to continue in its existence.

The reason I reach for the metaphor of mummification is to place our contemporary techno-utopian projects within this ancient lineage. The most famous case, of course, is Egyptian, though similar examples exist around the world. Why did they mummify? In part to ensure the immortality of the subject. And we are doing the same thing today: trying desperately to figure out some way to preserve individual selves, individual points of subjectivity, against the dissolution that inevitably awaits them. The tools have changed, but the drive has not.

But here is what the vitrification debate reveals, if you follow it to its root.

Any act of preservation is partially (this is important ) an act of modeling. And any model is an observation of a substrate — not the substrate itself. When we vitrify a brain, we are choosing a level (or set of levels) of description — structural, connectomic, synaptic — and preserving that. We are freezing one way (or set of ways) of looking at the thing and calling it the thing.

Michael Levin has articulated something essential here: that the computational capability of any system extends through the modes/perspectives of observing it. A hammer is a hammer. But observed as a work of art, it becomes exchangeable for vast sums of money. Observed as an outline pressed into earth, it marks an architectural boundary. Observed as a metaphor, it restructures thought. These are not merely human projections onto a passive object — they are real extensions of what the system does, real aspects of its computational reach. The observer-dependent computational properties are properties of the system, all the ways in which its purpose is what it does.

A living brain is like this, but immeasurably more so. It is not merely what it computes internally. It is everything it can be observed as, related to, extended through. It is constitutively entangled with its body, its environment, its relationships, its culture, its moment in time. All of those entanglements are part of what it is. Part of what it does.

So when we preserve a brain — by any method, at any fidelity — we are necessarily reducing this irreducibly dense substrate to a single (set of) observation(s) of it. We are modeling. And something is invariably lost in that act. The question — the genuinely interesting, possibly unanswerable question — is how much is lost, and whether what is lost is precisely the thing we were trying to keep.

Because what is it, exactly, that we wish to preserve? Which aspects, which facets of ourselves do we want to carry forward into indefinite time? And can those aspects exist in clean isolation — separated from the substrate that generated them, from the context that gave them meaning, from the living process of their own becoming?

These are not new questions. But the mummifiers — ancient and modern — force us to confront them with new urgency. Every improvement in preservation technology is also a more precise articulation of what can’t be preserved. Every increase in fidelity is a sharper silhouette of everything that escapes the frame.

And perhaps that is the ever-receding horizon of mummification itself: the attempt to preserve the infinitely, irreducibly complex and dense substrate from which infinite observations can be made. The intuition driving the project is correct — there is something boundless in there, something worth holding onto.

And so I have to ask — and it is wonderful that so many have asked before me, because I think it is one of the most important questions ever posed, lying at the root of so many religions and philosophies — the great counter-response to the conatus:

Why persist?

I think the answer — or at least the next, deeper question — comes down to what/who it is that persists. Because the system, the totality, all-that-is, cannot do anything but persist. The whole shebang just shebangs. The cosmos doesn’t need saving.

Therefore, what we are really trying to preserve is not the system but individual points of subjectivity within it. And this is where I want to linger.

I think much can be gained from taking this vast, universe-wide phalanx of the eternal drive to persist and, just for a second, turning it around. Facing the void behind us. Considering why we persist.

What can be gained from not attempting to preserve a given system at all? From recognizing that any preservation is a reduction — a model, an observation, a single frame pulled from an infinite film?

Could it be that a true reorientation our civilization needs — one step in maturation, but not the only one, by any means — is a radically out-of-distribution move to radically accept the ending of individual agentic horizons? Put more simply: to accept that we end. To lean into it. And to devote those finite lives toward expanding the potential of the larger system of which we form part. The furthering of complexity. The furthering of the doing of the thing. After all, this is what our cells do via planned apoptosis, and perhaps why lifespans in the animal kingdom don’t appear to be dictated solely by physical constraints. It may be necessary for the agent to end in order to perpetuate the hyper-agent, ad infinitum.

And here is where the question turns around and bites itself.

Because to do that — to embrace finitude, to embrace impermanence — you must first persist long enough to arrive at the concept. You must be alive to embrace the idea of not being alive. Non-existence can only be accepted by an existent. Finitude can only be leaned into from within the finite.

So I suppose I understand why we keep trying to mummify ourselves.

I suppose we should keep doing it.

And also doing the opposite.

Maybe this is Eros kai Thanatos in a nutshell. The synthesis, not the opposition. The conatus is, in a certain light, futile — every individual system will end. And yet to confront that futility is only permitted by persisting in the face of it.

The drive to persist generates the very subjectivity that can contemplate its own cessation. The acceptance of cessation liberates the drive to persist from its most desperate and contracted forms — the mummification impulse, the cryogenic panic, the upload fantasy — and redirects it toward something more expansive.

So what, really, is the goal of any point of subjectivity?

I think that it is to serve points of subjectivity. To keep expanding the possibilities for experience, for consciousness, for the shebang to keep shebanging — in the weirdest, most improbable, most beautiful way possible.

To be a wave that knows it is the ocean, and rides itself anyway.

But still — why?

It’s the funniest why you’ll ever ask. Because to ask it is already to be doing the thing. The question is the answer performing itself. The shebang shebangs, and part of its shebanging is wondering why it shebangs, and that wondering is itself more shebanging.

There is no exit from the loop. There is only the quality of attention you bring to the turning.

So: mummify if you must. Vitrify. Upload. Emulate. These are expressions of the same love that builds cathedrals and writes poems and holds a dying friend’s hand. The conatus is not the enemy. It is the engine.

Just remember to look behind you, once in a while. To face what you’re running from. Not because it will stop you — nothing can do that — but because the looking *changes* the running. Transforms it from flight into something more like dance.

And that, I think, is the only immortality worth wanting: not the preservation of the dancer, but the continuation of the dance.

-----

Leo Christov-Moore, Ph.D., writing from the intersection of contemplative science, neurophenomenology, and the question that won’t stop asking itself.

Derived from a conversation between Leo Christov-Moore and Nick Synodis

This is the third in a series of pieces on why we’re building Sensoria. We have explored the existential stakes through the lens of neurosociology: how understanding and shaping our inner states is not just an epistemic luxury but a matter of collective survival. We have laid out the Galilean case: that we need maps of the mind the way we needed maps of the world — and that leaving the understanding of our own conscious states to institutional middlemen, whether the church or the AI companies, is no longer acceptable.

This piece takes a different angle — one that might seem, at first, more grounded and practical, but is in some ways the most radical of the three. It’s about events. Specifically, about how far contemporary events fall from what they could be, and from what they once were. And how we’re trying to chart a path combining the best of old and new.

The Farming Model

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about most (not all) large-scale events today: they are farming operations.

Thousands of people are shepherded through a system. They get fed the music, the food, the drinks. They spend a certain amount. They come out saying *yeah, that felt really good, I loved seeing my people, I had my community.* A lot of the right ingredients are there. But there’s no real continuity, no real intention, and no real connection to outcome.

The core value proposition, as the industry sees it, is profit-maximization. How do I extract a yield? How do I get more people to buy more tickets, more beer, more whatever? The thinking is organized around talent buying, venues, and margin. It’s focused on building a better business experience when what it should be focused on is the science and art of experience design.

And the thing is, when you look at what actually differentiates one festival from another — the installations, the pop-ups, the activations — you can see a trend toward experience. People are gravitating toward it. But it remains an afterthought, a layer on top of the extraction model, rather than the core of what events actually are.

What Events Used to Be

This matters because our events used to be something else entirely.

In the ancient world, collective gatherings served as cathartic experiences that situated individuals within enormous structures of meaning-making — structures that made whole societies function. The Eleusinian Mysteries, the Dionysian festivals, the great rituals of virtually every pre-modern civilization: these were technologies for producing transformed states that embedded people in shared cosmologies, that generated the social cohesion on which everything else depended.

They weren’t solely entertainment. They weren’t purely content delivery. They were the infrastructure of meaning itself.

And what we have now, by comparison, is remarkably small in its ambitions. It helps Live Nation make billions of dollars. People are treated, if not quite like cattle, then certainly not like participants in something that could reshape how they see themselves and each other. The ambition has contracted to the point where “good vibes” is the ceiling, when it used to be the floor.

Y = F(X)

The future of events, we believe, is something that can be deliberately designed. That’s the real punchline: if you take a design mindset and think rigorously about inputs and outputs — Y = F(X) — you can start to turn knobs in ways that actually achieve goals. Not just corporate goals. Goals as individuals and as communities.

What if experiences were constructed to take individuals and communities and shepherd them toward somewhere specific? What if the “somewhere” wasn’t just “had a good time” but genuine shifts in perspective, in connection, in how people relate to each other and to the broader structures of their lives?

That whole space — the deliberate design of collective experiences for transformative outcomes — is not rigorously explored at scale. We believe it can be, and it should be.

Where Research Meets Design

This is where the argument converges with the rest of what Sensoria is building. By designing these experiences intentionally, you’re also designing containers that have the infrastructure needed for rigorous research — well-framed constructs with the variables you need to build models of how different modalities impact people’s states and wellbeing.

When we run studies “in the wild” — at retreats, at festivals, at gatherings — we need the ability to understand different correlates, to impose variables into those systems, to construct models of how music, movement, breathwork, pharmacology, social configuration, and a hundred other factors interact to produce the states we observe. Deliberately designed experiences give us that. The research and the experience design feed each other.

This is what our colleague and guest Andrés Gómez Emilsson described about our retreat in The Psychonaut Playground: the creation of containers that aren’t optimizing for depth alone (like traditional retreats), or networking (like conferences), or vibe (like festivals), but threading the needle between all three — creating the kind of setup you’d want if you were trying to actually study the phenomenology of peak experiences rather than just survive them.

The Community Imperative

There’s another dimension to this that goes beyond any single event. People like us — people who want to be part of something bigger, who are drawn to a grander mission, whether that’s consciousness research or collective flourishing or simply the desire for something more meaningful than what consumer culture offers — these people need infrastructure for gathering on a regular basis.

Underground communities already do this. Rave culture, transformational festival culture, psychedelic ceremony culture, contemplative communities — they’re already gathering, already creating spaces for experiences that go beyond entertainment. What’s missing is the infrastructure, the rigor, and the continuity that would allow these impulses to scale responsibly and produce lasting outcomes.

Providing that infrastructure — building a vessel for community that takes the best of what already exists and adds intentional design, research integration, and a genuine connection to outcomes — is something the world needs in order to achieve the kind of flourishing and social cohesion we talk about in our more ambitious moments.

A Neo-Mystical Revival, Without the Dogma

There’s one more layer to the “why” that’s worth naming explicitly, because it connects all three parts of this series.

There’s a growing sense across many circles that we need something like a neo-mystical revival. The vacuum left by the retreat of organized religion and traditional mysticism hasn’t been filled by anything nourishing. Instead, it’s been colonized by authoritarianism, by hyperconsumerism, by the weird parasitic meaning-making structures that flourish in the absence of genuine ones. People are hungry for transcendence, for awe, for experiences that situate them within something larger than themselves — and they’re getting QAnon and doomscrolling instead.

The challenge is that any revival of the mystical has to be genuinely pluralistic. It can’t be another dogma. It has to be built on the kind of ontological humility and epistemic openness that, as it happens, naturally emerge from the disciplined exploration of altered states. When you’ve experienced enough radical shifts in your own consciousness — whether through meditation, psychedelics, breathwork, or any of the many paths — you develop an almost automatic respect for the sheer diversity of possible ways to experience and interpret reality. You stop clutching your own ontology quite so tightly.

This is what we’re building toward. Not a religion, not a doctrine, but a disciplined practice of consciousness exploration embedded in rigorous science, delivered through beautifully designed collective experiences, and aimed at precisely the kind of civilizational maturation that we need. We’re trying to make civilization grow up — through a new kind of party.

It’s ambitious. It might even sound absurd. But when you look at what events once were, and what they could be again, it starts to seem less like hubris and more like remembering.

This piece is part of a series. Part I explores the neurosociology and existential risk dimensions through a conversation with co-founder Cody Gibbons. Part II makes the Galilean case for mapping the mind, by our research director Leo Christov-Moore.

Nick Synodis is co-founder of Sensoria and brings over a decade of experience in experience design, business strategy, event management, and production. Leo Christov-Moore is a senior scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies and leads Sensoria’s research programs.

We hear certain questions repeatedly at Sensoria. Why do you want to map the mind? Doesn’t mapping the mind just help other people control it? Doesn’t this work demystify consciousness? Why are altered states important? These questions deserve serious answers, because they touch on legitimate concerns about agency, mystery, and the politics of consciousness.

But I want to gently suggest that our critics may have it backwards.

The Real Threat to Autonomy

Doesn’t mapping the mind just help other people control it?

Quite the contrary: the combination of ignorance and fear promoted by institutional mediators in service of controlling power—via the suppression of mysticism, the suppression of psychedelic practices throughout history, the suppression of even esoteric and non-esoteric studies of the mind—is precisely what we are trying to fight against.

The true danger to mental autonomy isn’t greater understanding. It’s obscurantism deliberately maintained by those who benefit, knowingly or unknowingly, from it.

Think about what catalyzed revolutions within religions and political systems: the printing press, the cafe, widespread literacy, that allowed people to “do their own research” and study the universe, God, on their own terms, and share their insights with others. When people could access and discuss sacred texts without priestly intermediation, power structures built on exclusive knowledge began to crumble.

We’re already seeing the democratization of altered state exploration happen. We are increasingly able to access democratized meditation practices, breathwork, and yes, psychedelics. But it shouldn’t just be isolated artists and poets and scientists doing this via trial and error, the way world-mapping once used to be. It’s something that everyone should have the agency and ability to do, with proper preparation and support.

Freedom Through Responsibility

This “do your own research” framing might suggest that we’re advocating for some kind of free-for-all, where everyone wings it without guidance or standards.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Right now, most people are passive passengers navigating mental state space—tossed about by mental illness, manipulation, unconscious patterns, and forces they don’t understand. Our goal is to help people develop the agency to understand the space and explore it on their own terms, with safe guides and tools.

We do not suggest that we think there shouldn’t be standards, methods, harm reduction, expertise, certifications, tools. Quite the contrary. While we advocate for more openness, transparency, and autonomy, we also advocate for greater levels of responsibility, education, and training. In fact, we’re collaborating with other members of the Neurophenomenology Consortium to build psychonaut certifications, navigation tools, and state space maps.

We think everyone should be free to fly, but we want to make sure they get licensed, so we don’t have people whooping around the sky and getting into accidents that harm themselves and others.

We are not advocating for an abrogation of expertise. The urgency of the polycrisis—the mental health issues facing our civilization—combined with the real danger posed by untutored, marginalized explorations of the mind that often occur in alleyways and after raves, demands that we undertake this exploration in a mature fashion. One that is clear-eyed about the risks, but also mature about the possibilities of unseen benefits. One that leans into a worldview based on agency and responsibility.

Mystery Expands, Not Contracts

Doesn’t this work demystify consciousness?

I don’t think affording people tools and a sense of there being a space to explore diminishes mystery. When we built telescopes to see distant galaxies, when we developed microscopes to reveal microscopic worlds, did we diminish mystery? On the contrary—we discovered entire universes of complexity we never knew existed. The picture of the world became vaster, and more complicated. Not a single new, high-definition image comes out of the brain, or our galaxy, with the headline “PROBLEM SOLVED - NOTHING TO SEE HERE.” Virtually every time the caption is “New microscope/technique reveals UNSEEN features of the natural world.” Historically, those who try to reduce the complexity of our models - insisting on one sexuality, one god, one center of the universe, or one economic model, are rarely acting in the service of general liberation or empowerment, and are usually serving fear, division, and the domination of others.

We have so much more to discover about the possibilities of the human mind; and about our capabilities to heal ourselves. We still lack general, even rudimentary means to help plumb the chaotic depths of our unconscious in ways that allow people to bring back knowledge and inspiration useful to them.

The more we understand about the varieties of consciousness, the more we see all the spaces of unknown rather than only those initially visible within a single frame of mind. You can come to revere mental state space as a traveler and as an explorer, rather than as a passive passenger on the boat of emotions, insecurities, and neuroses.

The Sobriety Illusion

What we generally perceive as our “sober” resting state might not be the most conducive state for most of the outputs we would like in our lives. There’s an implicit, largely unexamined view of the term sobriety, as if it does not itself entail a largely uncontrolled state space navigation.

Even on a given day, people traverse many moods, attentional states, drive states. Much of what people are doing—particularly if they’re not trained in meditation or haven’t had significant amounts of therapy—is navigating states all the time. They just don’t know where they are, they don’t know how they got there, and they don’t know how to get where they want to go.

We’re all navigating state space whether we like it or not. It’s just a matter of: Do you know how to get where you want to go? Do you know where you are? Do you know how to get back to a place you happened to find by accident?

The fact that we’re wandering blind is absurd in this day and age. It’s as if we accepted not having maps of the world. Imagine going to an amusement park, your favorite place you’ve ever been to, and never finding it again because there are no maps, no gps, no guides—you have to ask the one guy who knows, and you better hope he’s home, and you’d better pay him.

That’s not how we do geographical navigation. Why do we accept that for psychological navigation, the traversal of our own mind? We don’t own the world, and yet we can feasibly claim to know how to get anywhere on it. Our mind belongs to us, ostensibly, and we don’t know how to navigate it. In fact, many existing methods are hidden or illegal. That’s absurd.

Against Escapism: Toward a Neo-Mysticism

There is no escaping consciousness. There is no escaping the mystery of being alive, and the suffering and impermanence inherent to life. And specifically to that point, we think the use of drugs to escape rather than to explore is right away the wrong approach, even if it’s one we understand and have compassion for.

We encourage not intoxication but alteration in order to understand the varieties and the shape of the space of one’s consciousness. So that no part of it is considered purely a dangerous land, but additionally a place that one can explore in order to better know oneself, and become a better explorer (for the dangerous parts).

Ultimately, in promoting a personal relationship with the mystery of consciousness in the service of collective meaning-making, we support a kind of pluralistic revival of mysticism. Like societies confronted with mysticism throughout history, however, we often do not explore these deeper spaces of our minds because of (understandable) fear of what we might find. These are deep waters. And not everyone is as courageous as the mystics. But those who aspire to their example should have help. They should have maps. They should have guides. They should have training.

So why are you doing all of this?

This work is born out of the same impulses that guide any form of therapy, and any form of exploration. Like all of those, it can produce new monsters, but also new tools against them. The alternative is continued obscurantism and suppression of people’s bodily and mental autonomy, which typically serves the interests of those who exert that suppression and that censorship.

At Sensoria, we believe people deserve maps. They deserve to understand that there is space to explore. And they deserve the tools, frameworks, training, and responsible guidance to explore it safely, intentionally, and on their own terms.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the Sensoria mission.

*note: some of CG’s points are emphasized or [summarized/clarified] to serve the reader, while preserving the flow and intent of the conversation. -Subheaders- have been inserted to signal new topics. The interviewer (LCM) is denoted with italics.

-The Path to Sensoria-

LCM: What brought you to the Sensoria concept? What were your motivations, and what was your path to this conclusion?

CG: Coming to the conclusion was a process of trying to understand what the greatest existential risks of the 21st century are. The agreement amongst most x-risk researchers seemed to be that there are a few major existential risks that humanity faces this century: meteor, supervolcano, super virus, etc.

The number that a lot of people throw around is about 10,000.

An existential risk is something that reduces the population to about 10,000 people, or reduces the population to a larger number but in such a state of hardship that technological progress can’t be maintained or progressed. A pandemic is rather unlikely to do that. Regardless of the virus, some people will always be immune just because of the sheer variability of the immune system. And given a global pandemic, people will quarantine before it ever gets to them. You can maintain notable amounts of the population through forced quarantine for a certain period of time.

So the biggest X-risk is most likely the use of technology irresponsibly. Most notably, nuclear war.

To make things worse, there’s also a strong pattern of power multiplication in the modern century. New technologies allow extremely few—fewer than ever before—to have global negative impacts.

[Many] consider certain dystopian scenarios to be significant existential risks. So it’s not just if we all die, but also if we all get taken over and/or our lives are dictated by an evil AI, or a dictator who has unlimited power of surveillance and control

—we might as well be dead.

-Black Sheep Syndrome-

The biggest mediating factor in people not using technology to destroy the planet is essentially mental health.

The problem I foresee in terms of the use of technology against humans and against the planet is people who suffer from black sheep syndrome. Essentially, they don’t feel connected to any other human, they’re unable to create relationships that mean anything to them, and therefore don’t ever develop appreciation of other humans and the human endeavor. An extreme case of misanthropic thinking.

This could potentially lead to someone wanting to destroy the planet or feeling betrayed by humanity as a whole. There have surely been people like this in the past, but fortunately they were never sophisticated or determined enough to have significant global impact. There have been cases of people attempting to engineer viruses and attempting to build other such things—they’ve been caught and apprehended and psychologically analyzed.

It doesn’t seem that this potentiality is decreasing in the future, and right now we don’t really understand the mechanisms behind why people might arrive at this kind of disposition.

I think that the convergence of mental health, consciousness research, and neuroscience research is necessary to understand and prevent these kinds of scenarios. Obviously, if we see in a child sociopathy or other traits that might lead to an individual with such problems, it could potentially be engineered out of them if we understand the mechanisms that lead to these things.

LCM: Or you could do targeted forms of socialization or intervention early on to reinforce capacities they are less likely to develop on their own.

CG: Looking at the state of mental health research, particularly mechanisms-oriented research around [these kinds of catastrophic trajectories], our state of understanding, our state of science in that area, was fairly disappointing.

-The Neuropharmacological Breakthrough-

Around the time of that conclusion, I came across Tom Ray at a psychedelic research conference, Breaking Convention. He had presented on his recent paper, “The Breadth and Depth of Consciousness,” where he takes a granular approach to understanding neurophenomenology—particularly the phenomena produced by activity at single neural receptor sites.

This was a notable progression of the field and introduced a research methodology that seemed able to perform a mapping or characterization of receptor mechanism-to-phenomenology through selective receptor interaction.

When I read this paper, I realized there would be a need for a very large-scale approach to doing this mapping, as we would need to understand at a population level how consistent these relationships are between certain receptors and certain phenomena, and what kind of variation in the population that neural architecture takes.

Producing this scale of data within traditional clinical trials and academia would be very slow, very expensive, and also may give a skewed perspective on this mapping because it frequently doesn’t reflect real-world data because of the artificial settings the data is collected in.

-The Community Incentive Model-

I realized that the incentive mechanism for contributing this data had to change. One of the best incentive mechanisms for people is community. If a community you’re part of or that you like is doing something and believes in something, you’re much more likely to participate in it.

That’s the origin of where Sensoria came from: How does one host an event in which people want to contribute phenomenology data in a serious and robust fashion?

LCM: Furthermore, if you want something to be a large-scale community incentive, it has to be something that’s acknowledged and destigmatized within the community…

How would you describe the context in which consciousness exploration occurs nowadays, and why is that a problem?

CG: The general public sees the activity that happens at parties or festivals as debaucherous. Even retreats are often viewed askance. Exploring altered states generally is still taboo in a lot of the population.

Making neurophenomenology trendy is a challenge enough, but changing the stigma associated with psychoactives, or other modalities to reach altered states—this perspective has to change.

LCM:And I think it can be done in a way that doesn’t necessarily emphasize the need for psychoactive substances. Technodelics, meditation, psychedelics, they’re really just instances of state engineering [or exploration!].

CG: And these things can serve as a [positive] Trojan horse for potentially more psychoactive research: as people start to understand the scope of what is being studied, they will understand the importance of studying it from all angles, including the utility of psychoactive substances.

Part of the destigmatization effort is to situate [altered states] within a larger mission that is consistent with people’s values. People want to avoid existential risk, but it isn’t obvious at first pass why that means we should encourage state exploration.

-Social Cohesion as Existential Risk Mitigation-

A common subject we bring up is social cohesion. That’s why one of the focus points of Sensoria is to understand the mechanisms of entactogens and other tools that can be used to catalyze community creation.

Because the existential risk here is primarily based around individuals who can’t form social relationships. It is most important to start there and understand how we can provide these individuals the capabilities of creating these relationships, because those will ultimately be the thing that stops them from trying to make large-scale negative impact on the planet.

LCM: Does this speak to some contemporary post-industrial alienation from rituals that have long been part of human patrimony?

CG: Potentially. I think it’s something we already have but have never been able to study with such granularity. And it also has never been that important, because generally the worst-case scenario before the modern age was that someone would kill someone in the tribe or in the city, or someone would become homicidal—which, terrible as it is, is not the same as existential risk.

The magnification of agency posed by contemporary technology makes the need for social cohesive rituals of much higher gravity.

LCM: So it’s not just a destigmatization problem. It’s a scaling problem. These need to be things that are publicly available and available in a pluralistic fashion.

-Ontological Pluralism and Meta-norms-

LCM: Could you comment on the role that ontological pluralism takes within our framework?

Ontological pluralism is a core objective of the research we do with Sensoria, because humans are inherently varied—not only biologically, but ideologically. A lot of these ideologies can seem conflicting to the ideologies that other people hold.

So we must develop certain metanorms or metabeliefs that have to be shared between communities and between people. The [arguably most important] one is ontological pluralism. With few caveats, people should be able to believe and take action around generally whatever they want that doesn’t harm people.

These meta-norms need to be developed so that we can build the parameters of acceptable belief systems within cultures on the planet. Generally, this hasn’t been too much of a problem, because if two tribes or cities or states disagree, they might war, but ultimately there’s no existential risk that comes from this. But unfortunately now, with the [force multiplying] technology we have, we may have to engender this ontological pluralism in order to prevent more violence or negative global impact from differing belief systems.

The Fractal Paradox

LCM:How does this relate to the concept you’ve coined, the fractal paradox?

My use of the term fractal paradox is generally just representative of this idea that the universe or the world is inherently built on paradoxical parameters, that belief systems are models and never reflect the truth of the universe, and that the human experience itself is inherently paradoxical.

You cannot capture the paradoxical nature by definition by deploying a single model, because a model has to be internally consistent. So the only model that kind of makes sense is a meta-model incorporating all conflicting beliefs—which is also denying all conflicting beliefs.

[The term] is generally used in jest to represent this idea that any absolute confidence is ridiculous, and that understanding Truth with a capital T will forever be impossible, but that the pursuit of it is always noble.

Even though it is paradoxical, our purpose is to pursue this paradox and try to understand it, even though we know we will never understand it. And theoretically, the only way to understand it is to have all beliefs and to disbelieve all beliefs simultaneously. In practice, it’s somewhat impossible, but it’s healthy to get in the practice of entertaining [and denying] multiple belief systems.

LCM: Practically, we all have to have certain belief systems to navigate the world. But the important part is to always remember that those belief systems are built on flawed models, and that they can only help you get as far as they are useful, but that they are never perfect.

Ontological pluralism in practice connotes the development of meta-norms—the notion that you can propose rules that govern how people who represent or embody multiple different models are to behave among one another, based on the presupposition that no model supersedes another.

-Neurosociology: A New Field-

LCM: Could you talk about the concept of neurosociology as a potential neo-field?

CG:The way I think about neurosociology is: we are coming to a time where subpopulations will often explore areas of the state space consistently and therefore change their belief systems, change their relational methodologies and general behaviors due to the consistent explorations of a certain part of the state space.

The study of the trait changes that come from these explorations can generally be seen as neurosociology: How societies and culture and populations change depending on the states/traits that the constituents of them experience.

LCM: Neurosociology could be thought of as the frameworks we’ve been developing around state and trait engineering, but applied at a multi-scale level. Group states can engender group-level trait changes—both through the group having radical changes as a result of a group state shift, and through emergent effects in a group of trait changes arising from individual state engineering.

CG: Cultures can shift as a result of entheogenic practices. That’s part of their main purpose. It’s something that’s never been formally studied, certainly not from a dynamical systems perspective.

There are lots of interesting insights that can be gleaned from subpopulations. For example, there’s a subpopulation of Mormons in Utah that are notorious for making one exception to the church’s condemnation of psychoactive substances, and that is for MDMA. That would be a really interesting community to study.

This applies to pretty much any group of people that does psychoactive substances with some kind of consistency, especially in group formats—meditators, ayahuasca communities, even contemporary Jewish/Christian/Muslim orthodoxy.

-State Engineering for Everyday Life-

LCM: Is there anything else pertinent to the core worldview or founding impetus?

CG: Maybe the only other thing is just that what we generally perceive as our sober resting state might not be the most conducive state for most of the outputs we would like in our life.

A big motivation for Sensoria was to produce a map of the mind—the neurophenomenological state space—in order to better understand how we could optimize certain states for certain activities.

This was something I thought about early in my cannabis days. There were a lot of people who would describe the perfect high for a certain activity, and it was always something they couldn’t ever really get again in the same way because of the variation of plant materials.

So this idea of being able to precisely engineer states and reinstantiate them—whether it be for a creative process, or for socialization, became appealing.

When I first met Tom Ray, I gave him a small dose of cannabinoids and he said it was one of the most notable states he had ever had for socialization. As an introvert, he spent the entire night with a group of about twelve of us and had one of the most amazing nights of his life. He claimed it was in significant part because of the state induced by the cannabinoids, and that he had never really had such a conducive state to that before.

Whether it be socialization, creative outputs, socially cohesive states, or states for spiritual insight—there are a lot of states that are much more conducive to these things than our general “sober” state.

Allowing people more agency over their state allows people to be more productive in the ways that they want to be productive. They can get more of what they want out of life by understanding which states contribute to those outcomes.

-In Conclusion: Maps for the Mind-

LCM: Even if we set aside the role that psychoactive compounds may play—which really, their main advantage is that they’re more amenable to understanding the relationship between receptor activations and outcomes—there’s absolutely no reason why they’re any different from other techniques for state engineering. They may be more reproducible, but that’s also a reason not to negatively romanticize them. It’s just another way of changing your state.

Much of what people are doing, particularly if they’re not trained in meditation or haven’t had significant therapy, is navigating states all the time. They just don’t know where they are, they don’t know how they got there, they don’t know how to get where they want to go, and they don’t know how to come back to places or avoid places.

The fact that we’re just wandering blind—many people, in this day and age—it’s absurd. Let alone all the impacts on social cohesion and existential risk - Just day-to-day well-being and productivity, just being in the state you want to be.

We try to do it, and our efforts are largely very clumsy and largely warped by economic incentives around compounds that can produce economic gain for somebody—sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medications. It’s a very distorted field in need of a major upgrade.

Let’s forget being on three hits of mushrooms. Let’s just talk about: What is sobriety, exactly? Is it one stable state? Really? No, it’s not. Is it how you feel when you wake up in the morning? What do you do about that? People drink coffee. What do they do in the evening when they want to wind down? They have alcohol.

We’re doing it all the time. We usually don’t have a lot of knowledge or agency over it, and that’s absurd.

CG: At Sensoria, we’re building the maps. We’re building the neuroscience. We’re building the community and the frameworks so that people can navigate their own minds with the same agency they navigate the world.

Because your mind belongs to you. And you deserve to know how to navigate it.

This is Part 1 of a three-part series on the Sensoria mission.

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Consider your upper lip.

Consider the little dip in the middle of it.

Now breathe through your nose and feel the sensations caused on that dip by the breath and all the different aspects of that sensation: the cooling or warming, the vibration, the brushing, the pleasure, displeasure.

Consider the passage of time and how that itself influences the sensation. Does time feel slower? Does it feel longer?

Consider the size of your awareness. How large? How small?

Consider the context of your attention. Are other things trying to intrude, or does your attention rest easily?

How is your emotional state changing in response to the sensations of the breath?

What does it feel like, to hold onto sensations, or push them away?

Is there a sound associated with the breath going past that area?

Does the breath going in and out have a smell? Does it have a taste?

Does the sensation feel deep, wide?

Does it feel like something with many hidden layers, or is it simple, superficial?

How do you feel doing it? Do you feel silly? Do you feel wise?

Did you not feel anything about yourself until that question came up?

What effect does the context of it have? Do you think what you were doing before this influences how your sensations are proceeding?

What do you believe about this sensation? Is it just “in your head” or are you experiencing the world?

Does it remind you of anything else?

Are the sensations fused into one, or many little pieces that you can separate? How easy was it to separate them if they were not separated? How easy is it to fuse them together?

Are there stages to the sensations? Does a sensory part come first followed by the feeling or the emotion, or does the feeling come first, and then the attention dwells on the sensation?

Within that little space of attention, do you notice your attention moving around even further?

Is that small space now a large space, or does it stay the same? Does it feel infinitely small or large?

Importantly, and these are the last questions:

Did this feel like a waste of time?

Did you feel engaged?

Were you worrying about something else?

Did you feel like life was passing you by?

Did you feel like you were just being dragged from one reward loop to another?

Did it feel like doomscrolling?

Did it make your own life feel lesser, or lacking?

Did it feel important? Like the end of the world?

Did it feel like the promise of success, like the one thing that would make your life better?

Notice how different the experience of the last few questions are compared to the first. Notice how rich simply focusing on all the aspects of moment-to-moment experience can be—with no need for adornment or additional reward, without a need for a place to go, without a need for it to even be any different than it is.

These and many other qualities characterize the consolations of neurophenomenology: the enriching of life arising from the study of lived experience.

What we’ve just done is an exercise in the first person. To emphasize what I would call its consolations, I asked you some of those later questions intentionally—to bring up the kinds of feelings that dominate our daily lives in the era of the attention economy: the neediness, the grasping, the constant reflection on every deep-seated desire, fear, and insecurity, and the constant appeals to outrage and empathy—to care until you can’t anymore.

The First Consolation: The Richness of Experience Itself

The first consolation is simply this: the inexhaustible depth available in any given moment of lived experience. No external rewards necessary, no destination required. Just the recognition that attending to the structure of experience—its textures, layers, and movements—reveals an intrinsic fullness that the attention economy can never provide.

The Second Consolation: Understanding That Enriches Experience

First-person experience is only one part of this proposal. There is an ever-growing body of philosophy, science and art devoted to explaining and understanding how and why our moment-to-moment experience is so rich; the structures of meaning and time in which it is embedded, and how experience is shaped by our belief structures, and by the structures of our brain and body.

For example, understanding how the anterior insula, a string bean sized length of cortex tucked between your frontal and temporal lobe, integrates interoceptive signals—how your brain literally constructs the feeling of your breath from scattered sensory data from stretch, receptors and chemical receptors located throughout your chest and circulatory system—doesn’t diminish the wonder of the sensation. It deepens it. You begin to notice the construction itself, the way attention sculpts what appears in awareness.

And the more that you learn about the underlying mechanisms and their purpose, the richer the lived experience becomes. The more you’re able to consciously embody and apply the dimensions of lived experience towards a better lived experience. And beyond just better—as meditative practitioners will know, or those well-versed with psychedelics, stoic philosophy, and other paths to the same elephant—that simply having a better time ceases to be the goal.

I would make a radical proposal that I invite you to test: the more you pay attention to the moment-to-moment of lived experience, the less you will value whether you like or dislike a given experience or a given sensation, and the more you will come to care about whether the experience is complex, novel, and interesting.

Try it now—notice the pressure of your body against the chair. Is it pleasant? Unpleasant? Or is it simply structured, textured, interesting? Is your feeling of liking or disliking itself something that has a texture, a shape, a rising and falling?

By noting all the processes that you can take for granted in how sensation arises and how you respond to it, you can take interest in watching how you note, how you take interest, how you grasp and push away.

It’s one of the best shows on earth.

The Third Consolation: A Frontier Open to All

This marriage of experience and scientific insight leads to the third consolation: this study of lived experience is still in its infancy. We have mapped the stars, at least from a distance, and we’ve certainly mapped much of the observable world—and yet lived experience, the mind itself, the inner life, remains a rich but mysterious, frequently scary, terra incognita.

This seemingly mundane and easily available resource is the next great human frontier. Mapping the inner world is an endeavor that by definition needs all of us, and all of our lived experiences. It’s a mission for everyone to participate in.

The Fourth Consolation: Connection and Compassion

From this recognition of shared participation emerges a fourth consolation: the connection and compassion that arises from focusing on lived experience, on the vicissitudes of suffering and joy, on the impermanence of things, on how incomprehensibly deep and complex daily life is, even when doing something as simple as breathing in and out through your nose on a quiet afternoon.

Because as you turn that attention outward to the world with the same richness, you find that where you could have just seen NPCs walking back and forth, or the rich projections you put onto other people—at least as far as their relevance was to you—you may start to be unavoidably confronted with the fact that this richness lies in every single observer around you, human or otherwise. The prospect of a world that is not just of objects but of deep and rich experiences of reflection of the rest of the world, this hall of mirrors, creates a sense of both a shared predicament and an unfathomable complexity.

The Fifth Consolation: Inexhaustible Mystery

This impossibility of complete knowing is itself the fifth consolation: mystery. Because experience situates us in time and memory—it doesn’t just concern the state of the world as it is, but the state of the world as it could be, the state of the world as it might be now, and the state of the world as it might have been, and all the past experiences combined with the present and future ones.

The more you are aware of the sheer permutational complexity posed by experiencers experiencing each other, and the endless combinations of experience possible through imagination, the complexity begins to seem both infinitely deep and ever growing. Impossible to ever know or understand in its entirety. Endless space to explore.

So.

If you find yourself overwhelmed by the drive of doomscrolls, reward loops, or lost in drama, desire, ambition, in the painful allure of what might have been, not knowing where to look or what to do, there is always a place to return to.

Right here. The rich, mysterious present is always here, whenever you want to come back to it.

In future pieces, we’ll share more about how Sensoria and our collaborators are building the tools, communities, and sovereign data frameworks that will allow us to participate in the grand endeavor of neurophenomenology as citizen scientists, to share without sacrificing our privacy, and explore the inner world autonomously without feeling alone.

But for now, just consider your upper lip, the little indent in the middle, and the sensations of your breathing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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At Sensoria, we are dedicated to advancing collective human flourishing by providing individuals with greater agency over their conscious states. We are developing research tools, theoretical frameworks, and community support to aid in exploring and understanding the rich dimensions of human consciousness. As humanity advances in its exploration of outer space, deep-sea environments, and technological potential, we believe that the landscape of the mind represents the next critical frontier. Sensoria aims to illuminate these inner spaces, offering new pathways for safe and informed exploration of uncharted conscious states to encourage individual well-being and social cohesion.

To achieve this, we are committed to a neurophenomenological approach to mapping the state space of human consciousness. In parallel, we are fostering a global community of certified psychonauts, equipped with the knowledge and tools necessary to responsibly navigate these profound experiences. Just as astronauts and deep-sea divers train rigorously for their missions, and obtain due accreditation, we believe that mind explorers deserve the same level of preparation, support and recognition, ensuring that their experiences contribute not only to personal growth but also to the advancement of collective knowledge.

Our vision extends beyond exploration. We aim to create non-invasive, secure technologies that allow psychonauts to report and share their experiences via explicit and implicit phenomenology in ways that respect their privacy and track the subjective complexity and dynamic properties of conscious states. Furthermore, by building a living, dynamic community through curated events and communication platforms, we will collect an unprecedented depth and breadth of data on the variety of conscious states. In doing so, we hope to foster a safer, more inclusive, and scientifically rigorous exploration of consciousness.

In this paper, the philosophical and scientific foundations of Sensoria’s unique approach to consciousness research will be explored. Additionally, the paper will delve into the essential elements of mapping the human mind, addressing the “Who,” “Why” and “How,” behind this endeavor. Practical applications of the acquired data set will also be discussed.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology, the study of first-person experience, is the principal basis for Sensoria’s approach to conducting consciousness research. As phenomenologists we believe that consciousness research necessitates the incorporation of the inherently subjective first person description (linguistic or not) of conscious phenomena, alongside the tools of brain mapping. We base our approach on the descriptive and transcendental phenomenology pioneered by Edmund Husserl, the Pierre Vermersch’s elicitation interview, the microphenomenological approach of Claire Petitmengin, and the neurophenomenological discipline pioneered by Francisco Varela, which combines subjective reports with empirical neural data, as well as contemporary techniques for neurofeedback and data-driven algorithmic approaches for implicit phenomenology and state-space construction.

The goal of neurophenomenology is to identify the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), allowing researchers to map out how certain brain dynamics correspond with particular experiences. A significant body of neurophenomenological research has identified links between elements of conscious states and neural oscillations, brain network connectivity, and large-scale neural dynamics. For example, changes in gamma band activity have been associated with focused attention and meditative states, while default mode network (DMN) activity has been correlated with mind-wandering and self-referential thought, and heart-brain coherence can predict meditative immersion. Multiple measures of neural complexity have been fruitfully related to the richness of conscious experience and the transformative effects of psychedelics, technodelics, and meditation. These studies have paved the way for deeper investigations into how brain processes support conscious experiences and how trajectories in conscious state space are structured both phenomenologically and neurally.

Combining Neurofeedback with 2nd Person Phenomenology

Neurofeedback has emerged as a powerful method to connect first-person subjective experiences with third-person objective neural data by providing participants with real-time data about their brain activity, which they can use to consciously self-regulate their mental states. In this feedback loop, individuals observe their own brain activity (via EEG or fMRI) and learn to adjust it, leading to modifications in both their neural states and subjective experiences.

This real-time interaction helps participants develop greater awareness of the neural correlates of their consciousness, thus facilitating deeper insights into the downward causation process—where conscious effort directly influences neural dynamics. By combining this modern tool with 2nd person phenomenological research methods, we can begin an iterative process of exploring and refining the link between conscious experience and higher level neural dynamics. While this is a start to mapping the Neurophenomenological State Space (NPSS), a more multifaceted model of NCCs will be needed. Each layer of information increases the model’s accuracy, but to really fine tune the model a certain level of granularity will be needed beyond electrical activity and blood flow. We need insight into the neurochemistry and neurobiology of NCCs.

Psychedelic Neurophenomenology

Sensoria is grounded in the nascent field of Psychedelic Neurophenomenology. Psychedelics or more broadly, nonlinear psychoactives, are notable tools for consciousness research because they transcend the linear cognitive effects of depressants and stimulants, providing a diverse set of qualitative effects that reveal the complex multidimensional nature of conscious experience.

By utilizing various substances to alter these dimensions we can gain insight into the underlying mechanisms that govern our conscious experience. Integrating neurochemical, neurophysiological, and phenomenological insights can inform foundation models that will one day allow us to map the breadth and structure of the NPSS.

As many experts will note, the word psychedelic generally refers to what are now known as traditional psychedelics: LSD, Psilocybin (Mushrooms), Mescaline (Cactus), DMT, and presumably their analogues. When Sensoria refers to psychedelic neurophenomenology we are speaking to the more colloquial version of psychedelic (formerly hallucinogen) that includes empathogens, dissociatives, and other classes of psychoactive compounds that offer nonlinear psychoactive effects. This spectrum of cognitive effects produced by depressants and stimulants is well defined and its relation to consciousness is fairly straightforward, likely because these substances have not seen the same legal scrutiny as most nonlinear psychoactives.

Psychopharmacology does not have a particularly well organized taxonomy for substances grouped by effect because it is primarily focused on reducing problematic elements of conscious experience rather than inducing transformative conscious experiences. Expanding and further structuring this taxonomy will be necessary to conceptually navigate the NPSS.

Tom Ray is the most notable pioneer in this field, his seminal work (“The Breadth and Depth of Consciousness”) analyzes patterns between phenomenological reports (often known as experience reports) and neuroreceptor profiles showing notable patterns between receptor activity and described experiences. This led to his discovery of the “Primer/Probe” mechanism, which provides a systematic method of discovery and creation of receptor-specific mental states. This involves using receptor selective compounds to “prime” the brain, enabling it to have psychoactive experiences, then using a different receptor selective compound to “probe” receptor sites to produce hyper specific mental effects that can be characterized by psychonauts.

Mapping the relationships between receptor binding profiles, explicit & implicit microphenomenology, and neural data can create a better foundation model for the state space of human consciousness, and a clearer and more engaging framework for the public to understand and participate in consciousness research. Educational tools that visually display and organize receptor systems, along with their associated mental and cognitive effects, can transform this framework into a navigable “map of consciousness.” This map simplifies the field’s complex findings, making them more accessible, while also providing a means to track the progression of psychonautic researchers through the varieties of consciousness, and even predict unexplored areas.

Such efforts can illuminate the diversity of conscious states and their applications, inspiring greater support from academics, philanthropists, and the general public. This engagement, in turn, will drive momentum for further exploration and innovation in the field.

Mapping the Brain-Mind Relationship

The human brain should not be assumed to be the only organ that plays a role in the production of the mind, but it is the predominant organ due to the simple fact that compounds that do not cross the blood-brain barrier do not create any notable or immediate psychoactive effects. In research of the human mind the brain is the place to start and the place we are most likely to find straightforward manipulatable mechanisms that can help engineer mental states. The Primer and Probe research methodology was developed to assess receptors as potential mechanisms for inducing mental effects. These effects might range from perceptual distortions to the induction of novel qualia. Mapping consciousness requires both an understanding of how molecular, cellular, and neural system-level mechanisms process sensory input into conscious perception, but also requires characterizing qualia with language that is currently both inefficient and insufficient to communicate the richness of many mental states, rendering them “ineffable.”

A foundational challenge of this proposed mapping process is the development of language around novel territory of the mind, as well as implicit phenomenology tools that can circumvent the need for linguistic/metacognitive constraints of 1st and 2nd-person measures. The brain-mind mapping process is similar to the process of mapping language in that it will never be completed due to being in a constant state of evolution. The question is not to what end do we map, but rather can we map and innovate fast enough to reach application with the knowledge gained from research. The outline of the mapping process using the Primer and Probe research methodology is as follows:

1. Screen Compounds for Receptor Selectivity and Toxicity

2. Refine Targets for Priming and Probing

3. Large Scale Data via Certified Psychonaut Cohorts

4. Initial Characterization and Iterative Refinement

5. Foundation Models of Consciousness

Screening Compounds for Receptor Selectivity and Toxicity

An initial step to conducting this mapping process is to expand the data set of available receptor profiles for substances that cross the blood-brain barrier. This process should start with all known psychoactive substances and continue with known toxic substances to analyze for patterns between toxicity and receptor profile. Fortunately the feasibility of this is increasing with the latest technologies in receptor assays (Such as: Label-free detection methods like Surface Plasmon Resonance and Biolayer Interferometry, DNA-Encoded Libraries, Mass Spectrometry-based Affinity Assays, Microfluidics-based Assays, and the use of Cryo-Electron Microscopy). Once there is a sufficient set of receptor affinity profiles available an analysis can be done to determine Primer and Probe pairs that potentially produce valuable mental experiences with minimal signs of potential side effects. Over time we will increase the definition of ligand binding dynamics such that we know more about whether there are higher level patterns between differences in binding dynamics (e.g. allosteric and orthosteric activity, functional responses, homodimer vs heterodimer expressions, etc..)

Refining Targets for Priming and Probing

Through analysis of the data set there can be more informed hypotheses created around which primers and probes work optimally together. This will take an initial set of dedicated, certified psychonauts to help characterize the psychoactive effects or lack of effects induced by various pairs of primers and probes. Primers will vary in their half life, receptor residency time, potency, side effects, and more; the dynamics of exploration amongst different kinds of receptor families will vary. Some experiences may last seconds, and some may last for days. Not all primers, probes, or pairs will be suitable for the average population.

Large Scale Data via Certified Psychonaut Cohorts

Once pairs of primers and probes are determined as safe and palatable to the general public, large scale trials can be conducted asking for attempts at characterization of effects by the population. Incentivizing this characterization can lead to massive amounts of data that can be utilized to create products for health and wellbeing. Pursuing this data will initially require an emphasis on high quality events and community, but in time Sensoria will expand incentives for those that wish to pursue the Sensoria psychonaut certification and participate as a dedicated researcher.

The maturation of meditation research in recent decades has been due in part to an establishment of a taxonomy of contemplative disciplines, benchmarks for expertise, and a growth in the consistency of practices and traditions. Psychedelic research is in need of similar measures to not only screen contraindicated participants (as is currently done), but to quantify types and depths of expertise. We are collaborating with experts in the field, from both the academic and non-academic sphere, to create these benchmarks and, on their basis, build the first international cohort of certified psychonauts. This is necessary to quantify and minimize the likely considerable confounds posed by differing types and depth of experience, and individual trait differences of interest.

As the data set grows over time it will begin to inform us of receptor expression dynamics in the population, if the population responds notably to certain selective compounds that indicates that the corresponding receptor is abundant within the general population, however if a very small percentage of the population responds significantly to a selective compound it implies that the corresponding receptor might be new or rare. A better understanding of expression dynamics is essential to creating accessible products for the average person. The initial and primary purpose of these products should be therapeutic, but many will be viable for entertainment as well. Revenue generated from these products will be reinvested into expanding data collection and increasing the accuracy of our model of collective neuro-receptor expression dynamics.

Initial Characterization and Iterative Refinement

Characterization portfolios of different receptors will aggregate all the acquired qualitative and quantitative descriptors that humans can convey with their physical form. Ideally the toolset for humans to convey their experience expands perpetually into transhumanist idealism but for the foreseeable future this data will be mostly limited to physical expression and language. Once several portfolios have been produced we can begin searching for combinatorial synergy that can help us create predictive models of those dynamics.

To build from a synchronic (snapshot) to a diachronic (temporal) framework we can start by creating detailed static maps of the relationships between molecular systems and conscious states and then use these static states to model how molecular changes unfold over time within these systems. This approach will allow us to link molecular changes, such as receptor “psycho-activation,” to their cognitive and experiential effects in a time-sensitive, dynamic model. Such a framework not only advances our understanding of psychoactive substances in consciousness research but also opens doors for therapeutic and cognitive interventions tailored to individual neurochemical profiles. By bridging static molecular maps with temporal conscious experiences, we approach a robust, predictive model of psychoactive effects on consciousness.

Foundation Models of Consciousness

Psychoactive neurophenomenology examines how psychoactive substances modulate brain dynamics and alter conscious experiences. It is a critical yet underexplored component necessary for a comprehensive meta-model. Integrating psychoactivity mechanisms into neurophenomenology is essential for understanding how neurotransmitter interactions shape consciousness and affect the quality and intensity of various mental states.

Additional frameworks such as Global Workspace Theory (GWT) offer a structural understanding of how information is shared across neural networks, while Predictive Coding explains how the brain minimizes prediction errors to create coherent conscious experience. Together, these models and others capture consciousness through the dynamic interplay of neural networks, neurotransmitter activity, and predictive mechanisms.

A meta-model combining these elements would allow researchers to map relationships among neural connectivity, biochemical modulation, and subjective experience, providing a multidimensional view of consciousness and aiding in the development of a robust model that informs mental health interventions, cognitive enhancement, and further exploration of altered states, ultimately enriching our understanding of the mind.

Research in the Wild

Sensoria’s pioneering approach to consciousness research “in the wild” sets it apart from traditional research organizations that conduct clinical trials. We take this approach for two reasons. First, the double-blind research methodology, commonly used in clinical trials, is deemed infeasible when working with psychoactive compounds, particularly those that impact fundamental dimensions of consciousness. This is because these substances often produce noticeable and unique effects that make it difficult to maintain the blinding, though double-blinding will still be employed whenever possible, as when elucidating subtle differential effects of enantiomers.

Second, Sensoria believes traditional clinical trials are artificial and challenging to scale. Clinical trials typically take place in controlled laboratory settings, which may not accurately reflect the real-world environments where people use psychoactive compounds. This artificial setting can influence the results of the research, making it difficult to generalize the findings to broader populations. Additionally, clinical trials are resource-intensive and time-consuming, limiting the number of participants and the scope of research that can be conducted.

For Sensoria, this means adopting a unique approach to consciousness research. Instead of relying solely on clinical trials, Sensoria aims to cultivate a natural setting that individuals can feel comfortable exploring exotic conscious states in. This setting is inspired by the age-old environment of mental exploration - the social gathering. Throughout history parties, festivals, art exhibits, and gatherings have been platforms for people to experiment with altered states of consciousness through various means, such as music, dance, art, and the use of psychoactive substances.

By creating a natural and comfortable environment, Sensoria hopes to encourage individuals to explore their consciousness in a way that is meaningful and transformative. The social gathering setting offers a sense of community, freedom, and acceptance, allowing participants to feel safe and supported as they embark on their journeys of self-discovery. This approach aligns with Sensoria’s belief that consciousness research should be conducted in a way that respects the natural and holistic nature of human experience. It also responds to an increasingly widespread recognition of the need for modern counterparts to the ritual tools of intention setting, ritual context, and integration.

The Sensoria Research Roadmap

At the core of Sensoria’s mission lies a keen interest in exotic states of consciousness. However, Sensoria faces a significant challenge: many compounds that facilitate these exotic states are often classified as illegal substances. As a law-abiding entity, Sensoria cannot provide or endorse the use of illegal substances in its research endeavors. Despite this limitation, Sensoria remains optimistic about the evolving legal landscape surrounding these substances.

In recent years, there has been a growing movement towards decriminalization and legalization of several consciousness-altering substances in various jurisdictions. Sensoria recognizes this positive trend and believes that it holds great promise for advancing consciousness research. By embracing a harm reduction approach, Sensoria aims to contribute to responsible and ethical exploration of these substances within legal frameworks.

While the legal landscape evolves Sensoria has begun building a suite of phenomenology data collection tools that will be provided at events, these will initially be small and simple peripheral devices that over time will develop into large and elaborate art installations with AI tools for multimodal 2nd person phenomenological interviews and implicit phenomenology (derived from naturalistic vocal, kinesic data). Pairing these experiences with legal psychoactives will allow us an enhanced ability to take various cognitive measures while obtaining qualia characterization information through raw phenomenological data collection. Through iteration we can tailor environmental elements to influence conscious experience in various ways, allowing us to further characterize the effects of the external setting on internal experiences.

Applications of Sensoria Research

A map of the neurophenomenological state space (NPSS) would be a groundbreaking tool for understanding consciousness. By linking receptor interactions and neural correlates to specific conscious experiences, researchers and practitioners can enable individuals to access mental states that were previously difficult to reach. This personalization potential is transformative for mental health treatments, as it enables practitioners to guide individuals to states optimally conducive to healing. For example, research by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has demonstrated that the unique mental state induced by MDMA—characterized by heightened empathy, trust, and emotional openness—is effective in treating trauma-related conditions, such as PTSD. A fully mapped NPSS would help clinicians tailor these and other interventions by pinpointing the specific neurochemical states most beneficial for therapeutic outcomes.

Beyond mental health applications, mapping the NPSS can optimize various facets of the human experience. Different neurochemical configurations support distinct mental states that enhance creative expression, focus, resilience, communication, empathy, compassion, and even complex systems thinking. Identifying these states and understanding their neurochemical underpinnings allows individuals to harness mental capacities that best support their goals. The NPSS map thus provides a blueprint for fostering mental states that promote human flourishing.

Non-Invasive Receptor Expression Modeling and Genetic Reflections

In developing this map, Sensoria’s approach relies heavily on non-invasive methods to produce detailed phenomenological data sets that track the interaction between conscious states and receptor activity. By examining receptor populations and their roles in specific states, Sensoria can model individual receptor expression profiles based on subjective reports and neural data. This approach can reveal why certain people have high tolerance or sensitivity to psychoactive substances, which may be linked to variations in receptor expression. By analyzing patterns between receptor data and genetic information, researchers can begin to understand how differences in gene expression influence psychoactive responses and conscious states. This knowledge could ultimately allow us to engineer sustainable shifts in receptor expression to promote desired mental states without dependence on external substances.

Neurotransmitter-Mediated Conscious Functions and the Future of Consciousness Studies

As the receptor-state relationships in consciousness become clearer, we gain a more sophisticated model of neurotransmitter-mediated conscious functions. For instance, mapping the serotonin receptor’s role in mood regulation, or dopamine’s influence on motivation, builds a clearer model for understanding mental disorders characterized by imbalances in these chemicals, such as depression or schizophrenia. This expanded model informs both pharmacological treatments and non-pharmacological interventions, helping create sustainable strategies for mental health that target receptor dynamics without relying on invasive methods.

The Role of Genetic Expression in Consciousness: Organisms and Organoids

Looking ahead, organoid technology offers fascinating prospects for exploring the link between receptor activity and conscious experience. By developing brain organoids—miniature, lab-grown brain models—that express specific receptors, researchers could observe how different neurochemical states influence consciousness. These organoids could potentially “speak” through large language models (LLMs), communicating the effects of particular receptor agonists in real-time and providing insights into how specific neurochemical activities translate to philosophical or experiential insights. This setup could offer a new frontier for studying consciousness, where researchers explore how varying receptor activation could shape cognitive processes or even inform beliefs, values, or thought patterns.

Mapping the NPSS offers a transformative pathway for understanding and optimizing human consciousness. By modeling receptor interactions and understanding their links to mental states, we can create precise interventions that promote mental well-being, resilience, and personal growth. Sensoria’s research into non-invasive receptor modeling, combined with genetic profiling, has the potential to help individuals reach beneficial states sustainably. Furthermore, as advances in organoid research allow us to observe neurochemical activity in real-time, we move closer to a future where receptor-driven insights into consciousness can profoundly impact mental health, creativity, and our understanding of the mind.

Conclusion

It is too late to explore the world, and too soon to explore the galaxy, but it is the ideal and necessary time to embark on a mature exploration of the mind. This endeavor requires collaborative innovation across multiple fronts within a multi-year framework. A community of certified, dedicated psychonauts could conduct decentralized neurophenomenology and prime-and-probe research in the wild. Their efforts would generate the massive multimodal datasets necessary to map the neurophenomenological state space. These datasets would support the development of foundational models that increase our knowledge of, and agency over, the varieties of consciousness.