Dr. Terry Willard, Guest
Waking Times

One of the most won­drous parts of our phys­i­cal body is the Pineal Gland.  It is also called the epi­ph­ysis cere­bri, epi­ph­ysis, conar­ium or the “Third Eye.” It is a small endocrine gland in the ver­te­brate brain. It pro­duces sero­tonin and mela­tonin, hor­mones that affect mood and mod­u­late our wake/sleep pat­terns and sea­sonal func­tions. Its shape resem­bles a tiny pine-cone (hence its name in Latin, pinea, which means “pinecone”), and it is located near the cen­ter of the brain, between the two hemi­spheres, tucked in a groove where the two rounded thal­a­mic bod­ies join.

Even though this gland is hid­den deep inside the brain and is only the size of a pea, it has been an almost fanat­i­cal obses­sion of mas­ters, mys­tery schools and reli­gions through­out the ages. Rene Descartes, the famous philoso­pher ded­i­cated much of his life to study­ing the pineal gland, stat­ing it is the “prin­ci­pal seat of the soul”. He believed it is the con­nec­tion between the phys­i­cal body and the mind/soul. We also see it play­ing promi­nent in the writ­ings of Pythago­ras, Plato, and Iamblichus, as well as in Egypt­ian, Tibetan and Roman Catholic Church. It is even men­tioned by the Found­ing Fathers of the USA.

One of the cen­tral fig­ures in Egypt­ian mys­tery school myths is the Eye of Horus. Many feel the eye of Horus is really the third eye, or the pineal gland. There does seem to be a lot of sim­i­lar­i­ties, at least from an anatom­i­cal point of view.

The Egypt­ian con­nec­tion does not stop there, by any means — in fact some feel the great pyra­mid of Giza was not only built to stim­u­late Pineal activ­ity, it was built with the ini­ti­a­tion cham­ber in the shape/ loca­tion of the pineal gland.

In ear­lier blogs we have talked about the law of sim­i­lar­i­ties, frac­tal rela­tion­ships or mor­phic res­o­nance. When we have things with such a great degree of sim­i­lar­ity of shape, they can com­mu­ni­cate (vibrate) with each other with ease. This pyramid/ third eye con­nec­tion was not lost on the Found­ing Fathers of the U.S.A., who were mostly Free Masons; they used it as part of the country’s seal, which can be seen on the back of the Amer­i­can dol­lar bill to this day.

Many of the mys­tery schools often coded the infor­ma­tion in the form of a pine cone. We can see this promi­nently in the Vat­i­can as one of the largest stat­ues to nature. It also retains a dom­i­nant role on the staff of the Pope. The entwined snakes on Osiris’ staff are rem­i­nis­cent of the kun­dalini forces entwin­ing up the spinal cord to end in the pineal gland.

The Pineal Gland devel­ops in the human fetus around 21 days, respond­ing to light and dark­ness. Even though it is hid­den deep inside the brain, it has pho­tore­cep­tor cells that bear a strong resem­blance to the reti­nal cells of the eyes. In some species, like lam­prey (jaw­less, blood suck­ing eel-like fish) and tuatara (rep­tile), the pineal gland has access to the sur­face of the skin (a fora­men open­ing) and acts as a third eye with pho­tore­cep­tion, hav­ing cornea, lens and retina. In Humans, the pineal gland helps set up the cir­ca­dian rhythms. Mela­tonin is stim­u­lated by dark­ness and inhib­ited by light. Why would we have an organ buried deep inside our brain that responds to light?

Recent sci­en­tific research has shown there are sub­stan­tial, bio­log­i­cal sim­i­lar­i­ties between the retina and the pineal gland. Piezo­elec­tric micro­crys­tals may be trans­mit­ting pho­tons that can be picked up by the retina-like tis­sue in the pineal gland—where they are then sent to the brain and descram­bled into visual images. This may be respon­si­ble for what we call the “mind’s eye”—such as when we sud­denly see a men­tal image of our friend right before he or she calls us. DNA itself seems to accu­mu­late light and in the process trans­mit light to other cells as a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Can we watch this process in our mind’s eye? Clearly, more research is nec­es­sary to fully under­stand how the Pineal Gland actu­ally works, but we already have some intrigu­ing research available.

Even though the pineal gland is geo­graph­i­cally in the cen­ter of the brain, it does not sep­a­rate itself from the rest of the body with the Blood Brain Bar­rier (BBB), which the rest of the brain main­tains. The inter­nal por­tion of the pineal gland con­tains extremelycoher­ent water, with small crys­tals that respond to piezo­elec­tric fre­quen­cies. In fact, this water is so pure and coher­ent, it is hard to find this purity any­where else in nature accept the micro­tubules in the cell. Rudolf Steiner, a well-known scholar of the eso­teric mys­tery schools, argued that the leg­end of the Holy Grail—a chal­ice filled with the “waters of life” or “elixir of immortality”—is yet another sym­bolic ref­er­ence to the pineal gland. A recent Steiner com­pi­la­tion enti­tled The Mys­ter­ies of the Holy Grail estab­lishes detailed con­nec­tions between the Grail leg­ends and the pineal gland. The [Holy] Grail is also located within each of us, in the cas­tle of the skull, and can nour­ish our sub­tlest per­cep­tions in a way that dis­pels all but the most refined mate­r­ial influence.

This response to light has not gone unno­ticed by researchers of psy­che­delic hal­lu­ci­na­tions.  Dr. Rick Strass­man, while con­duct­ing research on the psy­che­delic dimethyl­trypt­a­mine (DMT) at the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico, advanced the con­tro­ver­sial hypoth­e­sis that a mas­sive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near death was the cause of the near death expe­ri­ence (NDE) phe­nom­e­non. Sev­eral of his test sub­jects reported NDE-like audio or visual hal­lu­ci­na­tions. His expla­na­tion for this was the pos­si­ble lack of panic involved in the clin­i­cal set­ting and pos­si­ble dosage dif­fer­ences between those admin­is­tered and those encoun­tered in actual NDE cases.

Sev­eral sub­jects also reported con­tact with ‘other beings’, alien-like, insec­toid or rep­til­ian in nature, in highly advanced tech­no­log­i­cal envi­ron­ments where the sub­jects were ‘car­ried,’ ‘probed,’ ‘tested,’ ‘manip­u­lated,’ ‘dis­mem­bered,’ ‘taught,’ ‘loved,’ and even ‘raped’ by these ‘beings’. Bas­ing his rea­son­ing on his belief that all the enzy­matic mate­r­ial needed to pro­duce DMT is found in the pineal gland, and more­over in sub­stan­tially greater con­cen­tra­tions than in any other part of the body, Strass­man has spec­u­lated that DMT is made in the pineal gland. Cur­rently there is no pub­lished reli­able sci­en­tific evi­dence sup­port­ing this hypoth­e­sis and as such, it is merely a hypoth­e­sis. DMT and chem­i­cally sim­i­lar sub­stances have been found in many of the botan­i­cals that are used by Shamans around the world to induce euphoric states for them to com­mu­ni­cate with the spirit world.

The mood alter­ing sub­stance sero­tonin, which is in the same chem­i­cal fam­ily of indols as mela­tonin and DMT, is man­u­fac­tured in many parts of the body, espe­cially the brain. Nicholas Gia­rmin, a pro­fes­sor of phar­ma­col­ogy, and Daniel Freed­man, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chi­a­try, con­firmed that the human brain man­u­fac­tures sero­tonin at var­i­ous sites in the brain. For exam­ple, in the Thal­a­mus, they dis­cov­ered 61 nanograms of sero­tonin per gram of tis­sue; in the Hip­pocam­pus, 56 ng.; in the Cen­tral Gray Sec­tion of the Mid­brain, they found 482 ng. But in the Pineal Gland, they found 3140 ng. of sero­tonin per gram of tis­sue. The Pineal Gland was unmis­tak­ably the rich­est site of sero­tonin in the brain. This dis­cov­ery impli­cates the Pineal Gland as an impor­tant site of sero­ton­er­gic [serotonin-forming] activ­ity. This strongly sug­gests pineal gland func­tion can affect mood. On the other hand, there may be some cor­re­la­tion between pineal gland health and autoim­mune issues such as MS.

Clearly, MS is asso­ci­ated with pineal cal­ci­fi­ca­tion. For exam­ple, one study showed 100 per­cent of indi­vid­u­als with MS who were con­sec­u­tively admit­ted to a hos­pi­tal had pineal cal­ci­fi­ca­tion com­pared to only 43 per­cent for similar-aged con­trols with other neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­ders. In addi­tion, groups who have a low MS inci­dence (e.g., African Amer­i­cans, Japan­ese) also have less pineal cal­ci­fi­ca­tion. Flu­o­ride may affect the enzy­matic con­ver­sion of tryp­to­phan to mela­tonin. Flu­o­ride may also affect the syn­the­sis of mela­tonin pre­cur­sors (e.g., sero­tonin), or other pineal prod­ucts (e.g., 5-methoxytryptamine).  The human pineal gland con­tains the high­est con­cen­tra­tion of flu­o­ride in the body. Whether or not flu­o­ride inter­feres with pineal func­tion in humans requires fur­ther investigation.

When you start adding all of this up, where mys­tery schools, philoso­phers, major reli­gions, and shamans all point toward the pineal gland being impor­tant for spir­i­tual awak­ing, we can eas­ily see a pat­tern. When you real­ize that mod­ern health issues like mood dis­or­ders, depres­sion and anx­i­ety, as well as autoim­mune issues like MS also point toward the small pineal gland, it trig­gers ones curiosity.

There are many futur­ists who say 2012 is a time for reawak­ing of the Third Eye or the Pineal Gland. In fact, there have been many tech­niques found to acti­vate the Pineal gland. In future blogs I will inves­ti­gate some of these.

To be continued …

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