God Helmet?
I Put On the "God Helmet" and Broke Through the Simulation. Here's What I Saw.
A geometric lion rose out of the earth, the veil tore, and what looked like Arabic script collapsed into equations: My trip report from inside the machine.
Aug 02, 2026
It is. It is! It’s fucking answering me. I’m going bonkers. I’m officially batshit crazy. Oh my god. What the fuck? Oh my god.
I asked it whether I was on the right path, what does any of this mean, and it answered in Arabic mathematics.
That is the short version. The long version is a twenty-five-minute recording made on a folding chair in a rented event space, wearing a piece of experimental equipment called The God Helmet.
Perhaps better known as a Koren Helmet, after Stanley Koren built the original at Laurentian University for the neuroscientist Michael Persinger, who ran experiments with it for three decades. The device has four coils, positioned over the temporal lobes. They emit a rotating magnetic field somewhere between ten nanotesla and seven microtesla. You sit in a quiet room and wait. Persinger reported that better than 80 percent of his subjects felt an unseen presence in the room with them.
I felt I might be a good candidate for this. I do not have “visions.” I have never had much luck with meditation, and I have spent thirteen years writing about people who claim experiences like this while keeping a careful professional distance from having any of my own.
I heard firsthand accounts from people in tears after the God Helmet allowed them to see their dead grandparents and in one case, even their dead dog. What I got was a geometric lion, an ice wall, a pierced veil to the “simulation,” a spiral of what looked like Arabic script resolving into numerals, and a possible connection to the visions of Catholic mystic, Padre Pio.
The transcript below is mostly unedited except for a redaction which covered the guide’s own medical history and personal testimony. He did not consent to have that published, so I omitted that part. Otherwise, everything else is exactly as it came off the recording, including the point roughly nine minutes in where I lose my composure entirely and sound like a sailor.
I have no working theory yet on what I experienced. I imagine it was an epiphenomenon of the brain, but I have a transcript and a set of images burned into my memory that I could not draw, so I worked with AI to generate the closest things I could to what I saw.
The real mystery is the script. What was the message I was meant to receive? If you recognize anything in the reconstructed images, please tell me what you see. I want to know what the symbols are and what they mean.
Session Transcript
00:18
GUIDE: Still seeing the flashing?
HEATHER: Yeah, but it changed. It moved onto my left side instead of the middle. It’s very bright. Extraordinarily bright.
GUIDE: In your mind I want you to look around. All of what you see. Are you floating, are you standing?
HEATHER: Whoa. Through the whole experience it’s like I’m going through someone’s iris, or fiber optic. But now it just switched back to that middle light and it’s just floating.
01:03
GUIDE: In your mind, I want you to picture an eye. Just an eye.
01:20
GUIDE: Do you see it?
HEATHER: Yeah.
GUIDE: I want you to ask that eye first if it can show you what you want to see. You can tell it to blink once for yes and twice for no.
01:58
GUIDE: How far away is it?
HEATHER: It’s moving now. It’s back on my left side, over here.
GUIDE: If you can reach out, I want you to reach out and grab that eye and put it in the...
02:13
GUIDE: It’s your third eye.
HEATHER: Yeah, it strangely works [when I move it].
GUIDE: Now put the intent to see what you want to see. Focus hard, and say that sentence of what you want to see over and over in your head.
03:07
HEATHER: It’s like...
03:22
HEATHER: Very strange.
03:40
HEATHER: It’s very weird.
GUIDE: Mirrors?
HEATHER: Weird. It sounds like snow on a television, but very fine grain, and it sounds really weird.
GUIDE: Is there a dial on the television, a channel switcher or anything?
HEATHER: No, there’s no actual image. It’s just, it looks like I’m in the...
04:03
HEATHER: Wait.
04:07
HEATHER: I don’t know. To me...
04:16
HEATHER: Can’t tell if it’s...
04:27
HEATHER: There’s symbols.
GUIDE: Ask them to write it in English.
HEATHER: There’s writing everywhere.
GUIDE: This is the first time we’ve actually seen anything at all that was...
05:22
GUIDE: We’re a little bit over. Do you want to keep going, or do you feel like...
HEATHER: If I could, just for a moment.
GUIDE: Sure, sure. We can do two.
05:43
GUIDE: Through your mind’s eye, ask it the question that your heart wants to ask.
06:28
GUIDE: Put that intent that it can come and answer you in your dreams anytime.
06:55
HEATHER: There’s an equation.
07:00
GUIDE: Can you describe the equation?
07:11
HEATHER: If I had something I could write with, but I don’t. Hold on. Wait.
07:24
HEATHER: I don’t know why, but it’s just math.
07:42
GUIDE: Is it moving or static?
HEATHER: It’s moving, and now it’s...
07:49
GUIDE: If it stops, I want you to take a picture in your mind.
07:57
HEATHER: Okay, so. Okay. My gosh, hold on, wait!!! Like what? I don’t even know what to... Am I having a stroke?
GUIDE: Well, you’re talking, so...
HEATHER: Right, right, exactly. So I’m probably not. Okay, okay, okay.
08:26
HEATHER: Is this known to create emotional...?
GUIDE: Absolutely. But again, it’s both sides. We’re at twenty minutes.
HEATHER: There was something that broke through. It was like a veil.
08:55
HEATHER: But it was math. It’s math!
GUIDE: What is the universal language?
HEATHER: Yes, but it...
09:09
HEATHER: It is. It is! It’s fucking answering me. I’m going bonkers. I’m officially batshit crazy. Oh my god. What the fuck? Oh my god…
123 Likes∙

Comments