The Psygaia Framework
An ecological systems view of how psychedelics reorganize human cognition toward interconnection.
You are part of a vast, living system — an evolving planet and cosmos where every breath, river, forest, mycelium, atom, and heartbeat is woven in relationship. This is not metaphor. It is the actual structure of life, described by ecology, systems science, and the lived knowledge of Indigenous peoples across millennia. And yet, for most people in modern industrial societies, it remains largely unfelt.
For thousands of years, humanity has entered into relationship with plants and fungi whose chemistry — shaped by deep evolutionary time — has the capacity to reorganize human perception in profound ways. These encounters remind us that psychedelic experience is not escape, but a form of return: to felt participation in the living world, to a sense of belonging that modernity has steadily eroded. The Psygaia Framework begins here — with the proposition that psychedelics are not merely medicines for the isolated individual, but ecological molecules that can help restore the relational attunement on which both human and planetary health depend. To engage them seriously is to rediscover what wholeness might actually mean: not self-optimization, but participation — in self, community, and the living Earth.
It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behaviour.
— Terence McKenna
OVERVIEW
What is Psygaia?
The Psygaia framework proposes that certain naturally occurring psychedelics — psilocybin, DMT, mescaline, ayahuasca, and cannabis — are not simply arbitrary chemicals that act on an isolated brain. They are ecological molecules: chemical expressions of living organisms participating in the broader networks of life.
When humans ingest these compounds, something consistent happens. The ordinary sense of being a separate self — looking at the world from the outside — temporarily loosens. In its place, people report a felt sense of belonging and interconnection, of being part of something larger than themselves. Trees feel alive. The forest feels present and attentive. The idea that we are separate from Nature starts to feel, obviously and viscerally, wrong.
This is not a random side effect, and it is not purely mystical either. Psygaia draws on three established scientific and philosophical frameworks — systems and Gaia theory, enactive cognition, and biosemiotics — to explain why psychedelic experiences so consistently produce these relational, ecological insights. Together, they offer a language for something many people have sensed but struggled to articulate: that these experiences are not hallucinations departing from reality, but encounters with a dimension of reality we have learned to filter out.
We call this ecological attunement: the embodied recognition of interdependence within living systems — felt in the body, not just understood in the mind.
At the same time, Psygaia holds an important caveat. Psychedelic experiences alone do not guarantee lasting transformation. Without cultural context, community, and ongoing practice, relational and ecological insights tend to be reabsorbed into the same disconnected patterns they briefly dissolved.
The experience reveals. What we build around it determines what that revelation becomes.
Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. I therefore attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness change, and I regard psychedelic as catalysts for this.
— Albert Hofmann
THE DISCONNECTION CRISIS
A Crisis of Perception
The ecological crisis is real and urgent. Accelerating biodiversity loss. Rising temperatures. A sixth mass extinction underway. These are facts, and they demand structural, political, and economic responses.
But beneath the visible crisis lies something harder to measure: a perceptual rupture. A widespread, largely unexamined sense that humans exist apart from — and above — the living world. That Nature is scenery. That other species are resources. That the health of the planet is someone else's problem.
This rupture did not happen overnight. It accumulated across centuries of philosophy, economics, and culture: Descartes separating mind from matter. The scientific revolution stripping quality and aliveness from the natural world. Colonial worldviews framing living landscapes as territories to claim and extract. Industrial capitalism requiring us to treat everything — land, water, air, even relationships — as inputs to a growth machine.
The result is what ecopsychologists call ecological disattunement: a diminished capacity to actually feel our embeddedness in the living world. Not just to know it intellectually, but to sense it — in the body, in daily life, in what we care about and how we act.
Contemporary research suggests this is now self-reinforcing. Each generation grows up with less direct contact with the living world than the last. The fewer experiences of genuine connection with Nature we have, the less we even notice the loss. We have named this the "extinction of experience" — and it may be as consequential as the extinction of species.
The planetary health crisis, in other words, is not only environmental. It is perceptual, psychological, and cultural. It is a crisis of how we see ourselves in relation to everything else that lives.
This is the context in which the psychedelic renaissance is unfolding. And it is why the question Psygaia asks matters:
Can these experiences help restore a felt sense of belonging to the living world?
If the self is expanded to include the natural world, behaviour leading to destruction of the world will be experienced as self-destruction.
— Theodore Roszak
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
Three Frameworks
Psygaia integrates three gradual, established scientific and philosophical traditions to explain how psychedelic experiences consistently give rise to ecological cognition.
01 - Systems & Gaia Theory
The Planetary Level
Earth is not a backdrop for life. It is a self-organizing, self- regulating system composed of interdependent biological, atmospheric, and geological processes — a planetary web of feedback loops through which life maintains the conditions for its own continuity.
This perspective, rooted in the work of James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and systems ecologists, does not require a mystical claim. It is a scientific description of how our planet actually works. Life regulates itself at the scale of the whole.
What psychedelics appear to do, at this scale, is make the individual feel their participation in this larger system. Reports of "feeling part of the Earth," "sensing the forest as a whole," or "understanding how everything is connected" can be understood not as hallucinations but as momentary encounters with systemic embeddedness — the recognition that you are a node in a living network, not an observer standing outside it.
02 - Enactive Cognition
The Organism-Environment Level
Mainstream neuroscience tends to treat the mind as something that happens inside the skull: a brain processing inputs and generating outputs. Enactive cognition challenges this. It proposes that mind is not located in the brain alone — it emerges through the ongoing relationship between an organism and its environment.
We don't just perceive the world. We enact it. The tree you see is not a neutral object "out there." It is a meaningful presence that arises through your embodied engagement with it — shaped by your history, your body, your needs, your way of moving through the world.
Psychedelics temporarily reorganize this coupling. They loosen the rigid cognitive habits through which the ordinary sense of a bounded, separate self is maintained. When those habits relax, the world can appear more fluid, more responsive, more alive — not because the world has changed, but because the organism is relating to it differently.
03 - Biosemiotics
The Chemical Level
Living systems are communicative. Not in the way humans are communicative — not through language or intention — but through chemical signals that carry meaning for the organisms that receive them.
Plants release volatile compounds that neighbouring plants interpret as warnings. Fungi coordinate forest-wide networks through chemical exchange. Bacteria regulate collective behavior through threshold-sensitive molecules. The living world, at every scale, is saturated with signal.
Psychedelic compounds — psilocybin, DMT, mescaline — are themselves products of this chemical ecology, evolved within fungal and plant organisms over millions of years. When humans ingest them, the human organism interprets these molecules through an evolved neurobiological system that renders them profoundly significant.
In biosemiotic terms, psychedelics function as modulators: they dramatically expand the range of environmental signals that register as meaningful to the human organism, temporarily shifting attention from the ego-centered noise of ordinary life toward relational patterns in the living world.
Why do some mushrooms and plants occasion deeply meaningful spiritual experiences that reveal to humans the interconnection of all life?
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WHAT PEOPLE EXPERIENCE
Three Recurring Patterns
Across studies, cultures, substances, and settings, psychedelic experiences consistently give rise to three phenomenological structures. Psygaia interprets these as expressions of altered organism-environment coupling — not hallucinations, not purely subjective projections, but reorganized ways of perceiving a relational world.
01 - Boundary Dissolution & Self-Transcendence
The temporary loosening of the habitual boundary between self and world. Participants describe "merging" with their surroundings, the sense that "there is actually no real separation between humanity and the natural world," identity expanding beyond the individual into something larger.
This is not the annihilation of selfhood. It is the loosening of a particularly rigid version of it — the isolated, boundaried ego that modern culture treats as the only possible way to experience yourself. When that loosening happens, something opens.
Clinically, these experiences are among the strongest predictors of therapeutic outcomes. Existentially, they are among the most reported catalysts for lasting changes in values, priorities, and care for others.
02 - Aliveness & Animacy
The intensified perception of the more-than-human world as alive, responsive, and present. Trees breathe. Rivers move with purpose. The forest is not scenery — it is a participant.
"The wind, trees, grass and even soil constantly radiate an energy that we are undeniably part of." This is a typical report, not a mystical outlier. Across survey research and clinical studies, participants consistently describe the living world as feeling animate in a way that is not normally accessible to them.
From a biosemiotic perspective, this makes sense: when the ordinary filtering of sensory information loosens, far more of the living world's actual signals register as meaningful. The world doesn't become something it wasn't. The organism becomes capable of perceiving more of what was always there.
03 - Interdependence & Ecological Embeddedness
The affectively charged insight — felt, not merely thought — that everything is connected. That actions ripple outward. That one belongs to a larger system in which care for the world and care for oneself are ultimately the same thing.
"Harming nature would be like hurting myself." This is the kind of realization participants report — not as an abstract principle but as something directly experienced, often accompanied by awe, grief, gratitude, or a renewed sense of moral responsibility.
Empirically, these insights correlate with lasting increases in nature-relatedness and pro-environmental behavior. Psygaia understands them as momentary apprehensions of the systemic interdependence that ecology has always described — felt, for once, from the inside.
Research note - A growing body of peer-reviewed studies supports these patterns. Forstmann & Sagioglou (2017) found that lifetime psychedelic use predicts greater nature-relatedness, mediated by self-transcendent experience. Kettner et al. (2019) found significant increases in nature-relatedness persisting at two-year follow-up. Lyons & Carhart-Harris (2018) found that psilocybin-assisted therapy increased nature-relatedness alongside therapeutic outcomes. Natural settings consistently amplify and extend these effects.
Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.
— Robin Kimmerer
PRACTICE & ETHICS
Grounding the Experience
The growing psychedelic renaissance and surrounding industry tends to frame these substances as treatments for individual pathology — depression, anxiety, addiction — delivered in clinical settings aimed at standardized, measurable outcomes. This framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete.
If psychedelic experiences most reliably produce healing through connectedness — to self, to others, to the living world — then approaches that confine that healing to the isolated individual mind are missing something essential. You cannot fully address a relational wound in a non-relational setting.
Ecological medicine offers a different frame: health as an emergent property of reciprocal participation in living systems — bodily, social, ecological. In this view, what appears clinically as symptom relief may reflect something deeper: a reorganization of how a person participates in the relational networks that sustain life. The goal is not symptom elimination. It is restored belonging.
Traditional Indigenous ceremonial contexts — Mazatec mushroom ceremonies, Shipibo ayahuasca traditions, Huichol peyote rites — have long understood this. In these contexts, healing is not a private event. It is a reorganization of participation in community and cosmos. Place, reciprocity, and relational accountability are not optional additions to the experience. They are constitutive of it.
These traditions do not offer templates to replicate. They are internally diverse, historically shaped by colonialism and struggle, and embedded in specific cultural and territorial relationships that cannot simply be extracted and applied elsewhere. But they offer an important orientation: that psychedelic experiences, to become genuinely transformative, need to be held within something larger than the individual.
A note on cultural integrity: Indigenous knowledges and practices deserve genuine respect, not appropriation. Any contemporary engagement with psychedelic traditions must include acknowledgment of Indigenous sovereignty, reciprocity with source communities, and honesty about the colonial histories that shaped both the suppression and the current commodification of these practices.
Psychedelic experiences are meaning-generating events. They disrupt established self-concepts and open the possibility of a different story — one in which you belong to the Earth, not merely live on it. This is what we mean by narrative repair: the reconstruction of personal and cultural stories that align human life with its actual relational constitution. But this must be grounded in ecological reality and ethical humility, not romanticized cosmologies borrowed without context.
This is a world of nature to which we belong, absolutely. It is the circle of life, of which we are an integral part. Open your eyes, and see the browns and greens of the earth, and the light which is the essence of nature. The young need to become aware of this circle of life, and realize that it is possible to experience the beauty and deep meaning which is at the core of our relation to nature.
— Albert Hofmann
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
What Comes Next
The Psygaia Framework opens several directions for future research and practice. These are not predictions. Rather, they are invitations.
Nature-based research. Preliminary evidence suggests that psychedelic experiences in natural settings produce stronger and more lasting increases in nature-relatedness than those in clinical environments. Future research should examine this directly, comparing outcomes across settings and isolating what natural contexts uniquely contribute. Psygaia predicts that richer ecological contexts will amplify ecological attunement.
Longitudinal studies. Most current research tracks outcomes over weeks or months. We need to understand what happens over years — whether relational insights consolidate into lasting change, or attenuate as people return to disconnected cultural environments. Integration matters as much as the experience itself.
Cognitive symbiosis. Once humans began cultivating relationships with psychedelic-producing organisms, something interesting happened: humans protect and disperse these species; the organisms, in turn, modulate human cognition in ways associated with wellbeing, empathy, and ecological care. This mutually adaptive relationship — what we call cognitive symbiosis — deserves serious interdisciplinary investigation.
Ecological medicine integration. If connectedness consistently mediates therapeutic outcomes, clinical protocols need to reflect this. Preparation and integration should engage ecological awareness — grief practices for ecological loss, land-based sessions, relational accountability. Healing is not an isolated event. It is a reconnection with the living web.
Indigenous-governed research. How do different ontological orientations shape what people take from psychedelic experiences? We cannot answer this without research that is genuinely governed by Indigenous communities, held within ethical safeguards, and committed to epistemic humility. Western science is not the only or necessarily the best lens through which these experiences can be understood.
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.
— Gregory Bateson
CONCLUSION
Beyond the Experience
Psychedelics do not resolve the structural drivers of the planetary crisis. They do not change economic systems, reverse biodiversity loss, or substitute for political action. Any framing that suggests otherwise — that these substances might "save the world" or catalyze a spontaneous planetary awakening — is inflated beyond what evidence supports, outside what the framework claims, and beyond reason.
And yet the intuition behind such language is not entirely wrong. To the extent that ecological destruction is sustained not only by extractive infrastructure but by a perceptual and cultural orientation that renders the living world inert, instrumental, and separate from ourselves — to that extent, the question of perception matters. What we feel ourselves to be part of shapes what we are capable of caring for.
This is where psychedelic experiences, properly understood, may have genuine significance. By temporarily loosening the habitual cognitive structures through which a bounded, ego-centered self is maintained, they allow relational dimensions of life to become experientially vivid — the kind of vividness that can shift values, reorder priorities, and generate what philosophers call moral motivation: not just knowing what is right, but feeling moved to act on it. The phenomenology is striking in its consistency. Across substances, cultures, and centuries, the same patterns recur in psychedelic experience: the dissolution of the ordinary sense of separation, the perception of the living world as animate and responsive, the felt recognition that one belongs to something vast and interconnected. These are not random artifacts of altered brain chemistry. They are, the Psygaia Framework proposes, expressions of a reorganized relationship between organism and environment — moments in which the relational structure of life, which ecology has always described from the outside, becomes briefly perceptible from within.
Such experiences do not disclose a mystical beyond. They reveal what was always here: the systemic embeddedness that sustains every living thing, including us. Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD and spent his long life reflecting on what that discovery meant, wrote near the end that what humanity most needed was a shift "from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation." That sentence reads differently when grounded in systems science, enactive cognition, and biosemiotics. It is not mysticism. It is a description of what ecological attunement — genuinely felt, not merely intellectually acknowledged — might actually produce in a human being.
But the experience, however profound, is not the destination. Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the living world as a community of reciprocal relations, one that calls forth not just wonder but responsibility. Responsibility requires more than a single insight, however luminous. It requires practice, culture, community, and the slow, difficult work of translating felt belonging into the choices and structures of an actual life — and an actual society.
This is where the limits of the molecule become clear, and where the real work begins.
Psychedelic experiences can attune cognition toward ecological and relational dimensions of life. They can render interdependence vivid, loosen entrenched narratives, and open imaginative space for different ways of being in the world. But sustained ecological attunement depends on social and cultural conditions that enable reciprocal relations with the more-than-human world: communities that hold these insights, practices that deepen them, and collective commitments to the ecological and political transformations that individual perception alone cannot accomplish.
The challenge that follows is therefore not personal. It is collective, multigenerational, and relational — a civilizational project of the kind that has no clean endpoint. Psychedelics are not its solution. They may, under the right conditions, be one of its catalysts: helping cultivate the relational sensibilities, the felt belonging, and the moral imagination that such a project requires.
That is the work Psygaia exists to support. If you are interested in contributing — through research, dialogue, community, or participation — we invite you to get in touch or join us in Psygaia's Circle.
I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation.
— James Gustave Speth
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You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
— Terence McKenna