thegreengage exploring the hidden connections between nature; mind, and science.

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.There comes a moment when the path divides into three and you realize they all lead to the same horizon.Cannabis. Psilocybin. DMT.Green, gold, violet.Three chemistries. Three tempos. Three mythologies.And yet beneath their differences runs a single current: consciousness itself.In this episode, we hold them side by side not to rank them, not to glorify them but to listen for their harmony. How they differ in onset and duration. How they reshape perception through distinct neural pathways. How culture, ritual, and intention transform chemistry into meaning.Because no molecule is sacred on its own.Context is the catalyst.Attention is the true instrument.In this episode, we cover:* 🌿 The neurobiology of cannabis: the endocannabinoid system, salience, and embodied perception* 🍄 Psilocybin and the default mode network: entropy, emotional reconnection, and narrative flexibility* 🧿 DMT’s rapid onset and thalamocortical intensity: transcendence, awe, and neural overload* ⏳ How onset, duration, and metabolism shape subjective experience* 🧠 The “reducing valve” hypothesis and modern predictive processing models* 🌎 Cultural containers: Shiva’s bhang, Mazatec mushroom veladas, Amazonian ayahuasca ceremony* ⚓ Set, setting, and intention as co-creators of psychedelic meaning* 🎼 Matching the tool to the intention: presence, healing, revelationFrom modulation to integration to transcendence, these substances trace a continuum:Awareness. Transformation. Surrender.Three rhythms, one pulse.Three mirrors, one light.Next episode, we move deeper into that light itself, asking what these experiences suggest about the architecture of consciousness, and whether mind is something the brain produces… or something it receives. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.There’s a moment—quiet, trembling—when something long-held finally releases. Not as an idea, but as a physiology: a sob surfacing from nowhere, a wave of warmth in the chest, grief transmuting into light.In this episode, we follow that threshold where the body begins to heal before the mind can explain. From amygdala alarms to memory reconsolidation, from vagus-nerve rhythm to psychedelic “afterglow,” we explore why catharsis isn’t weakness: it’s nervous-system intelligence: the organism completing what it once had to freeze.In this episode, we cover:* How the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex cooperate (or collide) to shape fear, meaning, and emotional regulation* Why psychedelics can reduce threat-reactivity and open safe access to difficult memory: without immediate shutdown* REBUS (Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics) and how softened prediction can turn panic into approachability* The neuroscience of memory reconsolidation: why recall is a window for change, not a replay of fixed footage* Neuroplasticity under safety: BDNF, network flexibility, and why “new wiring” needs a gentle container* Somatic processing and autonomic discharge: trembling, crying, yawning, nausea: when the body finishes an unfinished act* The vagus nerve and gut–brain pathways: how regulation can be felt as breath, warmth, and returning rhythm* Integration as the return of coherence, as turning catharsis into a lived shift: habits, meaning, and a new baseline of trustNext episode, we’ll widen the lens: moving from individual release to the social field: how connection, music, and shared ritual can reshape healing itself. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Before it was peer-reviewed, DMT was whispered through leaves and firelight.A message carried in smoke, received in trance, sung into being by those who listened to plants more carefully than we listen to ourselves.Now that same molecule glows under fluorescent lights.Electrodes trace its echo. IV lines hold seconds of eternity steady.The rainforest collapses into graphs and blood-oxygen curves and something quietly astonishing happens.This episode steps into the charged space where mysticism meets measurement. Where neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychonauts become unlikely collaborators, all circling the same impossible question: how do you study a revelation? What does it mean to quantify awe, to chart ego-death, to translate worlds of light into data?Because when we measure DMT, we aren’t just studying a drug — we’re testing the limits of what science thinks the mind is allowed to be.In this episode, we cover:* The birth of modern DMT neuroscience and why studying it in humans was once considered career-ending heresy.* Inside cutting-edge labs at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins, where seconds of infinity unfold under EEG and fMRI.* What happens in the brain when the Default Mode Network dissolves and global connectivity explodes into a neural symphony.* Why DMT experiences are often reported as more real than real and how scientists attempt to study meaning without dismissing it.* The rise of extended-state DMT infusions (DMTx) and what changes when the visionary space lasts minutes instead of seconds.* The ethical edge of psychedelic science: consent, integration, legality, and the problem of studying ego-dissolution responsibly.* Endogenous DMT and the unsettling question of whether the brain already knows this territory — dreaming, dying, or crossing thresholds.* Why mapping consciousness may be changing neuroscience itself, forcing it to reckon with awe, mystery, and humility.Next episode (The sacred, the scanner, and the silence between them):We’ll follow these measurements to their breaking point into the unresolved questions no scan can answer, where science begins to sense the shape of its own limits.If you’ve ever wondered whether the sacred can survive contact with the laboratory,this episode is your threshold. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Before DMT was ever a molecule in a laboratory, it was a message whispered through the leaves.In the humid green of the Amazon basin, there were teachers who listened—not to data, but to dreams. They learned to combine a woody vine and a fragile leaf, and from that union came a drink that reveals light inside darkness, geometry inside grief, and meaning inside chaos: ayahuasca. When modern chemistry isolated DMT, it treated the discovery like an origin story but for the Shipibo-Conibo, Tukano, Asháninka, Huni Kuin, and Quechua peoples, this “new” molecule was already ancient: one voice in a vast conversation between plants and people.This episode enters that conversation: where medicine, myth, ecology, and responsibility braid together. Not as competing truths, but as two ways of knowing the same living mystery.In this episode, we cover:* The forest as a library: how Indigenous knowledge systems treat plants as teachers, not resources—relatives with consciousness and memory.* Vine + leaf, gate + key: the ayahuasca union as both biochemical synergy (MAO inhibition + DMT) and cosmological marriage (Mother vine + radiant leaf).* Shipibo kené and the idea that health is pattern: illness as disruption, healing as re-alignment; often guided through sound, intention, and relationship.* The ceremonial “operating system”: dieta, maloca geometry, mapacho, silence, and the role of containment in meeting the infinite without being torn by it.* Ícaros as technology: songs as navigational tools—breath, rhythm, emotion regulation, and living codes that “weave” order into vision.* Myth as medicine: why jaguars, serpents, and celestial lattices are not just imagery but a cultural grammar—symbols that hold opposites until meaning can emerge.* The bridge between Jung, anthropology, and neuroscience: collective imagery, narrative repair, and the restoration of coherence after psychic fragmentation.* Reciprocity and responsibility: ayahuasca’s globalization, extraction risks, cultural sovereignty, benefit-sharing, and why context is part of the medicine.* Two ways of knowing: measurement and relationship—and how science and story can become complementary lenses rather than rivals.Next episode (a quiet tease):We’ll follow the brew beyond origin into the modern world where regulation, research, tourism, and ethics collide, and the question becomes not only what it does, but what it asks of us when it enters the marketplace. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.In 1956, Hungarian chemist Stephen Szára injected himself with a small dose of a then-obscure molecule: N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and watched the world dissolve into radiant architecture. When he returned, he didn’t describe it as merely visual. He described it as structural, as if perception itself had been rebuilt from the inside out.For decades, that sounded like poetry.Now it’s starting to sound like biology.Across cultured neurons and animal models, researchers have reported signs of rapid structural plasticity after brief exposure to psychedelic tryptamines: dendritic spines forming, synapses strengthening, growth pathways lighting up markers associated with learning, recovery, and emotional renewal. A molecule that is “gone” in minutes may leave behind echoes that last far longer.So the question becomes almost inevitable:Could a flash-state of consciousness open a healing window that outlives the flash?If the brain is a channel maybe some medicines don’t “fix” the song. Maybe they loosen the knots in the instrument, just long enough for the tune to change.In this episode, we cover:* What neuroscientists mean by rapid plasticity and why healing is often “reorganization,” not simple repair.* Dendritic spines and synaptogenesis as the microscopic handwriting of change, how the brain updates its circuitry through structure.* The “growth cascade” story: how 5-HT₂A, TrkB/BDNF, and mTOR pathways are tied to learning, resilience, and the stabilization of new connections.* Why DMT’s most provocative feature is tempo: subjective effects measured in minutes, with biological reverberations observed hours to days later (in preclinical work).* The sigma-1 receptor as an intracellular “stress-coordination” site, how DMT’s binding there hints at effects that may extend beyond neurons into cellular metabolism, inflammation, and resilience.* Human neuroimaging patterns consistent with high-entropy cortical states: alpha suppression, altered oscillatory dynamics, and unusual global connectivity followed by a return to order that may be subtly re-patterned.* A systems view of healing: potential links to stress-axis flexibility, immune signaling, autonomic recalibration, and memory reconsolidation (as a mechanism for changing the emotional meaning of old patterns).* A grounded comparison of DMT vs psilocybin vs ketamine as three different doors into rapid relief: different keys, converging on flexibility plus why context and care matter as much as chemistry.* The open frontier: how future trials may test single-dose, extended infusion, or micro-infusion paradigms and what biomarkers might finally let us measure “healing” as more than a feeling.Closing reflectionPlasticity is not a miracle. It’s a property of living systems, an ancient talent for returning to coherence after disruption.DMT may be one of the sharpest demonstrations of that talent: a brief storm that shakes the network loose, and then if the conditions are right, lets it settle into a new geometry.The molecule is not the healer.It may simply be the opening.The brain is a channel.And sometimes, healing is about changing the tune. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.There’s a small structure in the center of your brain, no larger than a grain of rice, that has been asked to carry an impossible weight: the seat of the soul, the third eye, the hinge between worlds. And yet, in the language of biology, it is also something astonishingly concrete: a translator of sunlight into time.In this episode, we follow the pineal gland through its double life: myth and mechanism, symbol and hormone, until the two begin to mirror each other. We move from Descartes’ geometric longing to locate the soul, into the circuitry of circadian rhythm, melatonin, and the nightly descent into dreaming. And then we step carefully into the shimmering uncertainty: the DMT hypothesis, the seduction of revelation, and the discipline of skepticism. Because perhaps the pineal is not the source of consciousness, but one of its interpreters, where the body listens to the sky and turns cosmic rhythm into inner light.In this episode, we cover:* Why the pineal gland became the most myth-loaded “tiny lantern” in the brain: singular, central, and symbolically irresistible.* The cross-cultural “inner eye” thread: ajna chakra, the Eye of Horus, and the ancient intuition of inward seeing.* Descartes’ claim that the pineal is the meeting point of mind and body and what survives of that idea symbolically, even if it fails anatomically.* The pineal as a biological clock: how light signals route through the suprachiasmatic nucleus to trigger melatonin release and shape sleep and dreaming.* The evolutionary echo of a “parietal eye” in earlier species and why the third-eye myth may be a memory of biology turned inward.* The DMT speculation: why tryptophan-lineage chemistry tempts the idea of pineal DMT, and what the evidence actually supports (and doesn’t).* How to hold symbolism without surrendering rigor: separating metaphorical truth from unfounded claims about “activating” the pineal.* The deeper message of the pineal: consciousness doesn’t only expand in brightness: sometimes it deepens in darkness through rhythm, surrender, and renewal. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.DMT has always been framed as something out there: a jungle secret, a cosmic key, a portal held in the hands of plants. But what if the more astonishing story is the one happening inside us? What if the molecule that reshapes perception isn’t just encountered in smoke or ceremony… but is quietly crafted in the tissues of our own bodies?This episode walks straight into that trembling boundary between biology and myth. Between what we can measure, what we can infer, and what we only dare to whisper. Endogenous DMT is one of the strangest scientific riddles of the last century: a molecule that exists in our blood, our lungs, and perhaps even our brain, yet refuses to tell us what it is doing there. Is it a dream-architect? A death-vision catalyst? A silent tuner of consciousness? Or simply chemical static we’ve mistaken for signal because the story felt too beautiful to resist?In this episode, we cover:* The unlikely origin of DMT as a forgotten laboratory compound before becoming a cornerstone of psychedelic culture.* Julius Axelrod’s pivotal discovery that DMT exists in the human body and why this shocked the scientific world.* The biochemical machinery (INMT and related pathways) that gives our cells the ability to synthesize DMT naturally.* Competing theories about DMT’s function: dream generator, near-death surge, or subtle contributor to waking consciousness.* Why measuring endogenous DMT is technically difficult and how this fuels both doubt and fascination.* The sharp divide between scientific caution and cultural myth-making around the molecule’s meaning.* How endogenous DMT sits at the fault line between neuroscience, spirituality, and the enduring mystery of consciousness.* Why this question matters for the future of brain science, regardless of which theories prove true.Next episode:We step further into the architecture of altered states: tracing how the brain reshapes itself when molecules and meaning collide. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Some brews tell a story; this one solves an equation. Ayahuasca is what happens when the forest discovers combination therapy: a vine that disarms the body’s enzymes, a leaf that carries a fragile vision-molecule, and a human nervous system caught in the middle of their collaboration. Two plants out of tens of thousands, coming together to slip DMT past our biochemical gatekeepers and into the brain. It feels less like an accident and more like a conversation between chemistry and consciousness.In this episode, I follow that conversation into the smallest scales: into MAO enzymes patrolling the gut, into harmala alkaloids that gently turn those enzymes off, and into the timing that lets DMT survive long enough to bloom into hours of visions. We look at how Indigenous knowledge anticipated the logic of modern drug design, pairing an active compound with an inhibitor long before pharmacology had a name for it. Beneath the serpents and songs, there is a quiet lesson: that plants, enzymes, and stories can work together to change what the mind is capable of seeing.In this episode, we cover:* Why ayahuasca is a biochemical improbability: two specific plants, among more than 40,000 in the Amazon, forming a synergy that makes orally ingested DMT active at all.* What happens to DMT on its own: why swallowed DMT is normally dismantled by monoamine oxidase (MAO) in the gut and liver, and what “poor oral bioavailability” really means in human terms.* How harmine and harmaline from Banisteriopsis caapi act as reversible MAO-A inhibitors, temporarily disarming the enzymes that would otherwise destroy DMT before it reaches the brain.* The subtler role of tetrahydroharmine as a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and how the vine itself shapes the mood, pacing, and afterglow of the ayahuasca experience.* The contribution of Psychotria viridis (chacruna) and related DMT plants: how the same molecule that launches a 10-minute rocket trip when smoked becomes a four-to-six-hour unfolding when protected by the vine.* The “dance of molecules” inside the body: timing of MAO inhibition, DMT absorption, receptor binding at 5-HT2A, and the way these moving parts cooperate to reconfigure brain networks and subjective reality.* Ayahuasca as a natural prototype of combination therapy, mirroring strategies now used in HIV treatment, oncology, and psychiatry and what that suggests about learning from forest pharmacology.* How Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing meet in this brew: one framed in enzymes and receptors, the other in teachers and spirits, both pointing to the same underlying principle of collaboration. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Some molecules change how you feel. DMT changes what you believe is possible. One moment you’re in your living room; the next, you’re in a cathedral of impossible geometry, standing before beings that feel more real than your own thoughts — and then you’re back, staring at the clock, realizing only a few minutes have passed.In this episode, I follow that impossibility into the brain itself. We look at what DMT actually is — a tiny tweak on the same backbone as serotonin and melatonin — and then watch what happens when that modest molecule slams into the cortex at full speed. From collapsing alpha waves to dream-like theta rhythms while awake, from hyperactive visual cortex to a Default Mode Network that comes undone, we trace how a few milligrams can turn the brain into a generator of entire universes. And then we ask the question that refuses to go away: are these worlds fabricated, or revealed?In this episode, we cover:* How DMT’s structure (a simple tryptamine with two methyl groups) lets it slot into serotonin receptors, especially 5-HT2A, and why such a small change can unleash such enormous experiences.* The extreme speed of smoked or vaporized DMT: rapid entry through the lungs, instant blood–brain barrier crossing, MAO breakdown, and why an experience that lasts minutes can feel like eternity.* What EEG and fMRI show during a DMT trip: collapsing alpha rhythms, rising dream-like theta and delta, visual cortex overdrive, and a sudden surge of global connectivity across brain networks.* The disruption of the Default Mode Network — the brain’s “self-loop” — and how its temporary breakdown correlates with ego dissolution and the sense of becoming something larger than your everyday identity.* The recurring visionary motifs of the DMT space: fractal geometries, tunnels and thresholds, entity encounters, alien architectures, and the uncanny feeling that these places have their own internal logic.* Competing theories of origin: DMT as a brain-generated hallucination, as a “tuning” of consciousness to hidden channels, as a release of Jungian archetypes, or as a magnification of an endogenous system the brain already uses.* The unresolved mystery of endogenous DMT in mammals: why the body makes it at all, and whether it plays subtle roles in dreaming, near-death experiences, or other altered states.* What all of this suggests about consciousness itself — not as a thin line of waking awareness, but as a vast landscape our brains usually fence off for survival.Next time, we follow this molecule to the edges of the map — into dreams, near-death experiences, and the strange overlaps between the DMT realm and the stories humans have always told about what waits on the other side. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Some discoveries feel like the outcome of careful, incremental method. Others feel like messages. Ayahuasca sits in that second category: a brew that shouldn’t exist, if we trust probability alone. Two plants, chosen from tens of thousands in the Amazon, brought together in such a precise way that they open a hidden doorway in the mind. To Western science, it looks like a biochemical miracle. To the forest, it looks like a conversation that has been happening for a very long time.In this episode, I follow that conversation from both sides. We move from the pharmacology of MAO inhibitors and DMT to the songs, rituals, and dietas that hold the medicine. We spend time with the lived experience of the brew: its purging, its visions, its emotional tides and then zoom out to the neuroscience and clinical research now trying to catch up. Threaded through it all is a deeper question: what does it mean to say that plants teach us, and how might that be more than a metaphor?In this episode, we cover:* Why ayahuasca is such an improbable discovery: how Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis work together, pharmacologically, to bypass the body’s MAO “gatekeeper” and make oral DMT active.* The cultural intelligence behind the brew: Indigenous names, lineages, and the ceremonial preparation of ayahuasca as a sacred technology rather than a chemical accident.* The role of ritual: icaros, dietas, offerings, and communal work in shaping the experience, and why preparation is understood as both plant-relationship and nervous system training.* What it actually feels like to drink ayahuasca: the purge, the serpent and jaguar visions, ancestral encounters, emotional catharsis, and the way ceremony holds people through difficult journeys.* How modern neuroscience interprets the brew: 5-HT2A receptor action, disruption of the default mode network, new patterns of brain connectivity, and emerging evidence for antidepressant and addiction-treatment effects.* Ayahuasca as co-evolutionary dialogue: plants as “teachers,” metaphor as a cognitive technology, and how the forest’s language of images and patterns might be translated into changes in behavior and worldview.* The inseparability of medicine and ecology: how the future of ayahuasca is bound to the fate of the Amazon, and what it means to protect not just a substance, but a living relationship. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Some molecules feel like gentle currents in the background of life and then there are the ones that arrive like storms. This episode steps into that sudden brightness, that impossible flash where the mind meets a form of vision that feels older than language. DMT is the lightning that reveals the landscape for a moment, leaving us changed long after the sky goes dark again.When I speak about DMT here, I’m really speaking about a deeper paradox: how something so chemically simple can unleash experiences so immense. How a handful of atoms can bloom into geometries, beings, colours, and meaning. And why this molecule, more than almost any other, sits at the crossroads of biology and myth. In this episode, I follow DMT through its natural roots, its presence in the brain, and its overwhelming imprint on human imagination, not to solve the mystery, but to understand why it stays.In this episode, we cover:* What DMT actually is: a simple tryptamine built from the same backbone as serotonin, yet capable of inducing intensely immersive visionary states.* How DMT appears across nature: in Amazonian plants, acacias, grasses, animals and why its ubiquity raises evolutionary and symbolic questions.* Natural vs. synthetic DMT: ayahuasca’s long, slow unfolding vs. the concentrated “lightning strike” of pure, laboratory-produced DMT.* The debate around endogenous DMT: the evidence, the controversies, the possibility that this molecule of vision may be produced within the human brain.* The chemistry of vision: how DMT activates the visual cortex, alters travelling waves, and recruits the machinery of perception to generate worlds behind closed eyes.* Why DMT visions feel real, not imagined, and how that “convincing quality” opens philosophical questions about the origins of perception.* The cultural magnetism of DMT: shamanic traditions, scientific research, artistic inspiration, and the shared driver running beneath; awe.* How DMT acts as a mirror for our deepest question: what consciousness is, and what it might be capable of perceiving. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

Some stories move like rivers: slow, persistent, carving their way through time. The story of psychedelics is one of them. A rise, a fall, a long forgetting, and a return. A door that opened too quickly, slammed shut, and decades later creaked open again.In Episode 20, we step back from molecules and myths to ask the larger question:Why did science walk away? And why is it walking back now?This is not a simple tale of good science or bad politics. It is a story woven from fear, curiosity, cultural upheaval, and the invisible currents that move civilizations.🜁 The Golden Age: When Psychiatry Looked to the PsychedelicThe 1950s and early 60s were a strange, hopeful time. LSD wasn’t a countercultural icon yet: it was a scientific instrument. A lens for studying consciousness. A potential cure for alcoholism. A shortcut to psychological breakthroughs that normally took years.Clinics from Saskatchewan to Los Angeles reported results that seemed impossible:people letting go of trauma, addiction, and existential fear after just one or two guided sessions.It wasn’t magic. It was method: careful preparation, therapy, and the willingness to look inward.By the early 1960s, over a thousand scientific papers had been published. The door of perception was open, and the scientific world walked through it with excitement.And then… the winds shifted.🜂 The Cultural Explosion and the Closing of the DoorsWhen psychedelics slipped out of the lab and into the streets, the story changed shape.What scientists saw as tools for healing, governments saw as catalysts for protest.What researchers viewed as breakthroughs, politicians saw as threats.The counterculture adopted LSD as a banner of rebellion. The media turned curiosity into panic. And in 1970, nearly overnight, psychedelics were declared substances with “no accepted medical use.”It wasn’t lack of evidence that shut the door, it was fear of change.Research ended not because it failed, but because the culture could not contain it.🜃 The Quiet Years: What Survives When the Lights Go OutProhibition buried the science, but not the knowledge.Traditional Mazatec healers kept their mushroom ceremonies alive, as they had for generations.Underground therapists continued practicing in whispers.Artists, mystics, and philosophers carried the flame in metaphor, vision, and song.Even in silence, the story moved.Science forgot, but consciousness did not.🜄 The Return: When Data, Need, and Humility AlignThe renaissance of the 1990s–2020s didn’t come from sudden excitement. It came from:* Scientific humility: the realization that the original research had been abandoned, not disproven.* New tools: fMRI, PET, and neuroscience capable of mapping what mystics described.* Public health crisis: depression, addiction, and trauma rising beyond the reach of traditional treatments.* Cultural openness: a shift toward mindfulness, plant medicine, and holistic healing.* The keepers of the flame: Indigenous knowledge and underground practice providing a lineage to return to.When Johns Hopkins and Imperial College published their modern studies, showing lasting relief from depression, PTSD, and addiction, the old narrative cracked.The door opened again, cautiously.🜍 Where the Renaissance Stands NowThe psychedelic renaissance is not a rebirth of the 1960s.It is slower, quieter, more clinical, yet still full of mystery.We now live in a world where:* Psilocybin and MDMA have FDA “breakthrough therapy” status.* Oregon has legalized supervised psilocybin sessions.* Clinical trials for depression, end-of-life anxiety, addiction, and eating disorders continue to expand.* Venture capital, biotech companies, and pharmaceutical patents shape the new landscape.It is a fragile opening: luminous and contentious at the same time.Because psychedelics live at the intersection of many worlds:medicine and mysticism, healing and profit, tradition and innovation.The question now is not only whether they work but who gets to define what “working” means.🌒 Why This Story MattersEpisode 20 reminds us that the return of psychedelic science is not inevitable. It is chosen.Chosen through decades of persistence.Chosen through humility and need.Chosen through communities that kept their traditions alive even when the world tried to silence them.Psychedelics teach us that consciousness is a vast landscape.Science teaches us how to map it.Culture determines whether we are allowed to explore it.And history teaches us that any door opened by curiosity can be closed by fear.The renaissance is an invitation and a responsibility.🌱 Next EpisodeIn our next episode, we finally meet the long awaited dimethyltryptamine: the molecule of the messenger, the emissary, the dream made chemical. (DMT);) Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.What if molecules could wear masks?Not as myth or metaphor alone, but as reflections of how they move through consciousness. This episode invites us into the symbolic theatre of neurochemistry, where cannabis and psilocybin take the stage not just as substances, but as archetypes: recurring roles in the story of the human mind.Through the lens of both neuroscience and mythology, we explore how molecular action becomes symbolic personality and how these archetypes, in turn, shape identity, culture, and even law.🌿 In this episode, we explore:* Cannabis as the StabilizerActing through the endocannabinoid system, cannabis tunes the nervous system toward balance. It eases pain, slows perception, and thickens time: a molecule of grounding and gravity. Yet its gift of calm can also turn to inertia, fog, or forgetfulness. The stabilizer comforts, but also cautions: balance must stay alive, not stagnant.* Psilocybin as the RevealerBinding to serotonin 2A receptors, psilocin loosens the Default Mode Network: unbinding thought loops, fusing sensory and emotional circuits. The result? Revelation. Psilocybin is the archetype of insight, the teacher who unveils hidden patterns and forgotten truths. But revelation can overwhelm; its light is dazzling, not gentle.* Neuroscience Meets NarrativeReceptor activity and archetypal symbolism are not opposites but mirrors.The ECS feels stabilizing because it is.The serotonergic flood feels revealing because it literally opens communication between brain networks.Science describes the mechanism; story translates the meaning.* The Theatre of MindIn the drama of consciousness, molecules are actors. Cannabis dims the lights and deepens stillness; psilocybin floods the stage with imagery and voice. Each plays a role, not by intent but by the way we experience their presence: as dialogue partners in the inner world. This is why ritual and set-and-setting matter: they give the archetype a script to speak through.* Culture as ReflectionArchetypes extend beyond neurons into society.Cannabis cultures mirror its stabilizing tone: rhythmic, communal, meditative; while psilocybin cultures embody revelation and transformation. Even laws and stigmas echo these personalities: the “lazy stoner,” the “mad mystic,” projections of collective archetypes onto policy.🧠 Why it mattersTo understand a substance, it isn’t enough to map its receptors, we must map its myth.Each molecule carries both biological truth and symbolic meaning, co-created through human encounter.In recognizing chemical personalities, we glimpse a deeper truth: molecules are not just arrangements of atoms. They are arrangements of meaning.👿 Coming nextIf cannabis stabilizes and psilocybin reveals, what happens when a molecule doesn’t just ground or unveil, but transports?When it feels less like a companion or teacher and more like a messenger from beyond?In our next episode, we meet DMT: the molecule of the messenger, the emissary, the dream made chemical. 😏 Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.If biology has a prime directive, it’s balance. Not stillness—dynamic equilibrium. From breath and heartbeat to mood and memory, the nervous system constantly negotiates a moving target called homeostasis. When trauma and chronic stress hijack those set points, anxiety, pain, and insomnia can become the “new normal.”This episode traces how two major neuromodulatory systems help restore that balance:* the endocannabinoid system (ECS), tuned by cannabis,* the serotonin system, engaged by psilocybin.In this episode, we cover1) Homeostasis & identityHomeostasis isn’t just survival math; it underwrites a continuity of self. Feedback loops (HPA axis, autonomic tone, thalamic filtering) keep physiology—and our lived sense of “me”—coherent. Dysregulation fractures that continuity.2) The Endocannabinoid System — the body’s internal balancerCB1 (brain/spinal) and CB2 (immune) receptors, with on-demand messengers anandamide and 2-AG, form retrograde “brakes” that prevent runaway signaling.* THC can strongly modulate CB1 (perception, memory, time).* CBD acts more subtly (supports anandamide tone, anti-inflammatory effects).Under chronic stress and PTSD, ECS tone can drop; targeted cannabis may ease pain, improve sleep, reduce hyperarousal—a nudge back toward center (with the caveat that overuse can push balance the other way).3) The Serotonin System — the psychedelic resetPsilocybin → psilocin binds 5-HT2A, loosening rigid cortical patterns (DMN downshift; cross-network “global integration”). Short term: more entropy/flexibility; longer term: a chance to recalibrate maladaptive set points. Patients often describe this as a “reset”—not erasure, but reopened possibility.4) Two tools, two tempos* Cannabis/ECS: regulates the now (sleep, pain, affective edges).* Psilocybin/serotonin: re-patterns the how (habit loops, belief rigidities), especially when paired with preparation and integration.5) Healing as balance, not perfectionHealth isn’t a flat line; it’s the capacity to wobble and return. From yin-yang to modern neurobiology, illness reads as imbalance; recovery is resilience—the nervous system’s ability to flex without breaking.Practical takeaways* Name your baseline: What does “balanced” feel like for you (sleep, appetite, focus, social connection)? Track it.* Match tool to task: Acute insomnia/pain/anxiety → consider ECS-supportive strategies; entrenched depressive loops → consider evidence-based, supervised psychedelic therapy where legal.* Context is medicine: Set, setting, and integration determine what sticks. Plan your aftercare (sleep hygiene, journaling, therapy, movement, nature).* Dose the lifestyle, too: Breathwork, sunlight, protein timing, and circadian cues are powerful homeostatic levers.Listen: (YouTube) • (Podcast) • (Apple) Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Back in Episode 11 we asked, what makes a trip? Today we return to the answer’s beating heart: set and setting. Psychedelics aren’t light switches; they’re amplifiers. Chemistry opens the door, but mindset and environment decide which room you walk into.Why this mattersSet & setting isn’t “harm reduction.” It’s a framework for understanding how psychology, space, culture, and relationship co-create entheogenic outcomes: from terror to awe, from confusion to clarity.In this episode, we cover* Origins of the phrase: From Leary/Metzner/Alpert’s 1960s insight—psychedelics as “nonspecific amplifiers”, to its deeper roots in Indigenous ritual containers (Mazatec veladas, Shipibo icaros).* Set (inner): Mood, expectations, intention, personal history; predictive processing and the DMN; why preparation (fasting, prayer, therapy, journaling) “tends the soil.”* Setting (outer): Space, music, people, culture; why a supportive room with skilled guides is an active ingredient, not décor.* Cultural containers vs. clinical frames: Temple and clinic as different, yet valid, hearths for the same spark; reciprocity and humility when borrowing lineages.* Integration: How set & setting extend through time; practices that weave insights into daily life (reflection, therapy, art, movement, time in nature, community).* Practical takeaways: Prepare the mind, curate the space, choose trustworthy company, and plan for integration; because the session isn’t the finish line, it’s the threshold.Key ideaThe chemical is the spark; set and setting are the hearth. With a hearth, fire becomes warmth, light, and sustenance.Three practical prompts* Intention: One sentence you’re willing to remember mid-storm.* Care team: Who holds space before, during, and after? Name them.* Integration plan: One practice you’ll do within 48 hours (journal, walk, call, art piece).Listen: (YouTube) • (Podcast) • (Apple) Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Among the Mazatec, mushrooms are not objects; they are beings.Teonanácatl — the Nahuatl name meaning “the flesh of the gods” — entered ceremony as sacrament, medicine, and dialogue. In candle-lit veladas, curanderas and curanderos sang in Mazatec, pairing mushrooms to honor balance, seeking diagnosis, guidance, and healing rather than spectacle.From Sahagún’s accounts of Aztec festivals to carved “mushroom stones” and debated rock art, the human story keeps circling the same intuition: fungi as thresholds — not for escape, but for encounter. Centuries later, colonial suppression tried to silence these rites; yet the songs survived in whispers. The twentieth century’s “rediscovery” — Wasson’s Life article, María Sabina’s veladas, Hofmann’s synthesis — brought psilocybin to science while fracturing the worlds that had carried it.This episode asks how we remember rightly: with context, consent, and reciprocity.🔎 In this episode, we explore:* Mazatec practice & meaning: veladas, paired mushrooms, healing aims, prayer in Mazatec.* Mesoamerican lineages: Aztec codices, “mushroom stones,” ritual pairings with pulque; continuity in Mixtec/Zapotec/Mazatec oral histories.* Traces & debates: Tassili n’Ajjer and Selva Pascuala rock art (what we can and cannot conclude); Siberian Amanita parallels; entheogens across cultures.* Eleusis as echo, not equivalence: the kykeon and fungal/fermented sacraments shaping cosmology and ethics.* Suppression & survival: Inquisition-era bans, clandestine ceremonies, knowledge transmitted in secrecy.* Rediscovery & rupture: Wasson in Huautla, María Sabina’s life and losses, Hofmann’s isolation of psilocybin, labs and counterculture.* Appropriation vs. reciprocity: why lineage, language, consent, and benefit-sharing matter in the “psychedelic renaissance.”* Walking forward with care: cultural humility, restorative storytelling, and supporting the communities that kept the fire.Core idea: Psilocybin’s history is not a straight line from “myth” to “science.” It is a spiral of revelation, suppression, and renewal — reminding us that molecules travel fastest when stories are honored.Listen: (YouTube) • (Podcast) • (Apple) Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.In our last episode, we looked at how psilocybin seems to lift depression, ease anxiety, and even bring peace to those facing death. Today we go deeper—into the living architecture that makes such change possible: neuroplasticity.For a century the brain was imagined as a machine: fixed wiring, gradual decay, little hope of renewal. But that metaphor failed the living truth. The brain is not a black box; it is a garden—growing, pruning, grafting new paths across time. Plasticity is how we learn, heal, and become.Psychedelics like psilocybin appear to open windows of heightened plasticity—brief periods when the brain is unusually flexible, unusually receptive. Old loops loosen. New associations take root. What seemed locked can move again.🔎 In this episode, we explore:* What is neuroplasticity?Structural change (new synapses, dendritic growth) and functional re-mapping (regions sharing or shifting roles). From London taxi drivers’ hippocampi to cross-modal plasticity in blindness, the brain redraws its own maps.* Critical learning windows—reopened.Childhood is not the only portal. Evidence suggests psychedelics can rekindle sensitive periods: psilocybin promotes synaptogenesis; connectivity expands; habit-loops soften. Huxley’s “reducing valve” meets modern network science.* Trauma and reprocessing.Trauma is plasticity caught in a loop—fear pathways wired hard. In a supportive setting, psychedelics can thaw the frozen narrative: memories re-encoded with safety, compassion, and context. Not erasure—re-narration.* Therapy timelines, compressed.Weekly erosion vs. catalytic quake: preparation → session → integration. Psychedelics don’t replace the slow work; they can accelerate it—if the container is strong.* The double edge.Plasticity enables growth and entrenchment alike. Set, setting, screening, and integration determine whether the soil grows weeds or medicine.Core idea: Psychedelics don’t just change consciousness; they change the conditions of consciousness—making flexibility possible again so new meanings, behaviors, and selves can form.Listen: (YouTube) • (Podcast) • (Apple) Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Depression often narrows life into loops: rumination, numbness, the feeling of being locked in. Psilocybin doesn’t “numb” those loops but it seems to open them. In this episode, we trace how a fleeting mushroom alkaloid can catalyze durable changes in mood, perspective, and behavior when given with care.🔎 In this episode, we explore:* Clinical evidence at the edge of suffering: trials in treatment-resistant depression and end-of-life anxiety showing rapid, sometimes months-long improvements after 1–2 guided sessions.* Neuroplasticity & networks: psilocybin becomes psilocin, engages 5-HT2A receptors, quiets the Default Mode Network, and increases cross-talk between distant brain regions: loosening rigid patterns.* The emotional “reset”: less amygdala reactivity to fear, more capacity to feel and process like catharsis instead of suppression; clarity instead of looping.* Psilocybin vs. SSRIs: daily, incremental management vs. rare, catalytic sessions; dampening symptoms vs. reorganizing patterns; approaches that can be seen as complementary rather than competitive.* Set, setting, and integration: why preparation, supportive guides, music, eyeshades, and post-session integration matter as much as receptors.* Limits & cautions: not a cure-all; not for everyone; risks and contraindications exist: context, screening, and professional oversight are essential.Core idea: psilocybin doesn’t just change consciousness; it changes the conditions of consciousness—opening cognitive, emotional, and narrative flexibility so new meanings can take root. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Psilocybin doesn’t just change consciousness: it changes the conditions of consciousness.In this episode, we follow the molecule from ingestion to insight: how psilocybin becomes psilocin, how it loosens the brain’s default narratives, and why the inner world can feel newly vivid, emotional, and spacious.🔎 In this episode, we explore:* The Default Mode Network (DMN): why the brain’s “storyteller” can become a tyrant, and how psilocybin quiets its grip.* Hyperconnectivity: novel conversations across distant brain regions (memory ↔ vision, emotion ↔ cognition) and what that feels like from the inside.* Emotion and fear processing: reduced amygdala reactivity, catharsis, and the sense of finally setting down a long-carried weight.* Mystical-type experiences: what clinical research measures, and why participants describe meaning beyond measurement.* The container: preparation, guided session, and integration — how set and setting shape outcomes as much as receptors do.* Paradox and practice: why brain scans show disintegration while the person reports union, insight, and renewal.Psilocybin is not a myth or a metaphor here, it’s a molecule shifting circuits, redirecting currents, and retuning the mind’s architecture. What science maps as connectivity, many experience as freedom. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is designed for educational and artistic purposes only, to inform mature audiences. It explores ideas related to various substances and must not be interpreted as promoting illegal use or activities. Viewers are responsible for knowing and complying with local laws. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, substance use, or addiction, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional or contact a local support service.Somewhere in the quiet shade of the forest, a mushroom pushes through soil.Inside it, a molecule waits.Psilocybin.Across continents and centuries, humans have found this compound and given it names: food of the gods, flesh of the gods, teonanácatl. Today, science calls it psilocybin: a tryptamine, close cousin to serotonin, and one of the most studied psychedelic molecules on Earth.But what is psilocybin, really? A chemical formula on a lab sheet? A key that opens neural doors? A sacred presence woven into ritual?🔎 In this episode, we explore:* The basic chemistry of psilocybin and its conversion into psilocin* Why its structure mirrors serotonin, and what that means for the brain* How Indigenous cultures understood and revered it long before pharmacology* What modern science has discovered about its effects on mood, perception, and neuroplasticity* Why a single molecule can ripple into myth, medicine, and meaningPsilocybin is more than a drug.It is a bridge — between chemistry and culture, brain and spirit, science and story. Get full access to thegreengage at thegreengage.substack.com/subscribe