One of the greatest spiritual mysteries focuses on the pineal gland “the seat of the soul” according to Descartes, the third eye of eastern traditions, the gland that secretes DMT and which seems to exhibit a strange connection in the processes of death and reincarnation.
The lamp of the body is the eye; so, if your eye is unique, your whole body will be full of light.- Matthew 6:22.
Fires are always playing around the pineal gland but when the kundalini lights them up, for a brief moment the whole universe becomes visible.–Madam Blavatsky.
Since ancient times the pineal gland has been the subject of the highest metaphysical speculation. Considered as a third eye or a mysterious spiritual eye, it is one of the main anatomical centers to which tantric yoga and other mystical disciplines are directed in the eagerness to open or activate a subtle perception and, by provoking a state of expansion of consciousness, unite the practitioner with divinity or universal principles. “In esoterism, the pineal gland is the link between objective and subjective states of consciousness or, in exoteric terms, between the visible and invisible worlds of nature”, says Manly P. Hall (Man: Grand Symbol of the Mysteries).
This speculation (which in hidden traditions is surely accompanied by a series of experiments in theurgical anatomy) has been revived today with the discovery that the secret pineal gland DMT (a powerful endogen) and a mysterious coincidence found by the doctor Rick Strassman: This gland is formed from the seventh week inside the fetus (the same moment when sex is identified); it is also exactly 7 weeks or 49 days that is said to take a human being in reincarnating according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol), the great authority in eschatology that Buddhism has. In this article, we will try to connect the ancient conception of the pineal gland as a spiritual door and an organ of metaphysical perception with findings and some of Strassman’s most radical hypotheses. To do this first we will set a scientific, historical and symbolic context of the pineal gland.
Embedded in the center of the brain, shaped like a pine cone, this small organ of the endocrine system is responsible for producing melatonin from serotonin and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an endogenous psychedelic substance that is present in small quantities in much of species of the planet (which has a precursor, such as serotonin, in tryptophan amino acid), among other hormones that emulate neurotransmitters. Its structure, consisting of cells very similar to those of the retina, is considered a vestige of a primitive third eye and in some reptiles; this “parietal eye” continues to function as a photoreceptor. Studies show that the pineal gland is especially sensitive to magnetic fields and its secretion of different hormones is mediated by the light or darkness to which it is exposed — serotonin increases with light and melatonin needs darkness (Strassman theorizes that DMT could naturally be generated if you spend a lot of time without exposure to light).
Around 1630, René Descartes wrote his famous hypothesis about the pineal gland as the “seat of the soul “. The father of rationalism explains: “This peculiar place of the residence of the soul is the Conarium, or Glandula Pineal, a certain core that resembles a pine cone, located between the ventricles of the brain “, and says the reason why this is the seat of the soul is “because this part of the brain is singular and only one “. Add the French philosopher that the smartest are not those with a larger pineal gland but a more mobile, in this coinciding with the occultist version that suggests that the pineal gland is activated by movement — a species buzzing — of energy that is represented by the kundalini snake. Although for some the idea of Descartes seems to have strange intuitive clarity, in his time and later this guess has earned him the scorn of his colleagues.
Manly P. Hall in Man: Grand Symbol of the Mysteries tells us that the pineal gland corresponds to the sefira of Kether, the crown, the divine unity that contains all things, and is The All-See Eye of the Masons, the Eye of Providence, the One Eye of the scriptures [Matthew 6:22] and also the Eye of Horus and the Eye of Cyclops (Greek Titans that evoke a primal state or previous humanity, which allegedly had access to a direct perception of the cosmos as internal reality).
I suggest that the individual’s life force enters the body through the pineal 49 days after conception and is released through the pineal gland in death. This 49-day prenatal period corresponds to the first signs of fetal pineal tissue, the differentiation of gonads in male and female and the interval of time between the death of an individual and the reincarnation of his soul according to Tibetan Buddhism. I suggest a metaphysical model in which biological, psychological and spiritual impulses exist in dynamic tension with this spiritual gland.
In the case of Tibetan Buddhism, it is 49 days also those who usually maintain mourning, which consists, among other things, praying to the dead prayers and mantras of the Tibetan Book of the dead, under the belief that the compound Psychic of the deceased person wanders the intermediate world (the bard) in search of the liberation found by his vehicle in the Clara Light (ösel), a light that is consciousness itself. Prayers are believed to serve you as a guide to unite with this light that is a reality beyond the illusion of samsara or the cycle of death and rebirth. It should be mentioned (and to Strassman) that for Buddhism what “reincarnates” is not a soul as we know it in Christian theology, for example, but a psychic component or an aggregate of the mind, which exists only until its actions or karma have fulfilled their chain of causes and effects. René Guénon even suggests that the idea of reincarnation is a modern invention and that what Eastern religions preach is the only transmigration, that is a continuity of the mind (or soul in the case of Hinduism) but in other worlds and planes of existence.
The journey through the bard consists of seven levels, which last every 7 days and in which the individual is faced with different strata of visions, some more terrifying than others (the iracund tantric deities usually appear in a similar region to what in other traditions is known as the astral or the world of desire). It is said that if the individual can distinguish these visions as mere projections of his mind or reflexes from his past acts and thoughts, then purification occurs and can achieve liberation. If this is not accomplished, then, Bardo Thödol narrates a disturbing sequence in which the attention of the individual, who wanders in a caliginous world of spectra and desires, is caught by an irresistible and abominable image: a couple who has sex. The individual identifies with this interdimensional copula and takes the process of rebirth in the ray of insemination (from both sides, in death and life, a light advances in a tunnel?).
