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

greengages explore Cannabis, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca
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Our AI-generated |thegreengage| voiced and naturally researched by myself exploring arcane connections between nature; mind, and science. What if decoding matter could decode the mind? Each episode is an island. We blend neuroscience, chemistry, anthropology, history, & philosophy to explore how consciousness is shaped by molecules. Using cannabis, psilocybin, & DMT as case studies, this series dives into the neurochemical basis of thought, emotion, identity, & altered states. Curious about the brain, plant medicines, or the self? This podcast invites critical thinking & respectful engagement with ancient wisdom & modern science. thegreengage.substack.com

  1. 6D AGO

    🫀 Ep. 31/44 — Comparing Entheogens: Cannabis, Psilocybin, and DMT 🫀

    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, revelation From 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

    36 min

  2. FEB 9

    🫧 Ep. 30/44 — The Chemistry of Letting Go 🫧

    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 trust Next 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

    24 min

  3. FEB 2

    🔬 Ep. 29/44 — Modern Research on DMT: Challenges and Discoveries 🔬

    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

    34 min

  4. JAN 19

    🌤️ Ep. 28/44 — (Cultural) Stories and Shamanic Traditions 🌤️

    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

    23 min

  5. JAN 12

    🧬 Ep. 27/44 — Rapid Plasticity: DMT, Rewiring, and the Healing Window 🧬

    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 reflection Plasticity 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

    24 min

  6. JAN 5

    🌓 Ep. 26/44 — The Inner Lens: Pineal, Time, and the Third Eye 🌓

    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

    20 min

  7. 12/29/2025

    🔮 Ep. 25/44 — Endogenous DMT: Fact, Theory, or Myth 🔮

    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

    31 min

  8. 12/22/2025

    🧿 Ep. 24/44 — The Biochemistry of Ayahuasca: How Plants and Enzymes Collaborate 🧿

    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

    21 min
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Our AI-generated |thegreengage| voiced and naturally researched by myself exploring arcane connections between nature; mind, and science. What if decoding matter could decode the mind? Each episode is an island. We blend neuroscience, chemistry, anthropology, history, & philosophy to explore how consciousness is shaped by molecules. Using cannabis, psilocybin, & DMT as case studies, this series dives into the neurochemical basis of thought, emotion, identity, & altered states. Curious about the brain, plant medicines, or the self? This podcast invites critical thinking & respectful engagement with ancient wisdom & modern science. thegreengage.substack.com

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