Behind The Mind’s Eye
On the deeply-engrained perceiver that not only curates our reality, but curates the ways in which we want reality to be.
“When the eye of the soul is turned toward that which is illuminated, it perceives and understands it.” — Plato
We think of our evolution as this linear road atop which we drive — our genetics are the map, our body and brain the vehicle, and our own conscious agency the driver — all moving through the twists and turns of space and time, one instinctive move to the next.
But we’re not exactly just a set of wheels on an open road that spills over a horizon — we’re not just a variable in some grand equation. We’re the whole equation, the road and the car.
We’re the entire story of it all.
We’re the ones and the only ones who both depend on and create any kind of meaning to everything; we’re infinitely capable of progression in perpetuity on this front, because we’re the cause and point of it all.
The intuitive drive that propels us from one even to the other, thus, becomes quite a big deal.
Right out of the gate — before we can even speak — we have a tremendous ability to influence our surrounding reality. From changing the quality and quantity of the breastmilk that we drink to dramatically altering an entire bubble of events in time and space, we have a significant impact on the world we enter into.
Before long, we’re talking, walking actors in a fate that we’re wholly responsible for carving out; all the while, we grow and decay, coalesce and disperse.
Along the way, our mind is managing every interaction — plucking signals from the noise and churning those signals into daily decisions that allow us to play with possibilities in whatever ways we do or don’t want to.
So what exactly causes the micro and macro managements that drive our conscious agency? What actually turns the key on the ignition and pens the saga of an individualized existence?
“The pineal gland is a link between the consciousness of man and the invisible worlds of Nature… An organ of conscious vision long before the physical eyes were formed.” — Manly P. Hall
The more we evolve and learn, the more we achieve, and the more failures we endure, the closer we come to seeing the ultimate point of it all.
Whether from an individual perspective (a drop of legacy flowing through a blood line), or from a collective standpoint (a religious enterprise reverberating through time), our ability to navigate our surrounding environment is something that mandates exponential progress.
There seems to be something beyond or beneath our understanding that drives this capacity to not only co-exist with reality, but to succeed in doing so — to dance with change, to defy entropy, and to open opportunity.
Inherent within us is something that connects our conscious agency to the matrices of existence in a way that grants us the potential to be proactive — to turn the naturally ordained suffering into grace, for instance, or the organic brutality of existence into highly nutritious food for thought.
An eye of the mind — a receiver either picking up on something from the outside or dishing out something from within; a transmitter with range and function unknown.
We not only have this knack for moving through our environment in ever-successful ways, but we seem to do so through the help of some pretty powerful methodology that we don’t quite understand.
There are numerous threads throughout countless structures of knowledge and belief that stitch together this idea of a transmitter-like capacity attributable to our consciousness.
And while the signal itself is something we seem to think we have a handle on, the source of it all remains an open conversation — it’s the typical point of divergence and debate.
It’s only along the tattered fringes of pure existential curiosity that we can find the more effortful investigations into this proverbial antenna of consciousness.
The signals themselves, we don’t tend to question so much as we bicker over; but the inner workings of the transmission network remain frustratingly elusive.
From deities to cosmic entities, higher-selves to machine elves, the source(s) of whatever signal(s) that lead us along eventually become lost in the dust clouds of the whole pursuit.
A cosmologist would contextualize it as an inherent purpose shared by all matter within the universe; a biologist would look at DNA-encoded instincts that afford us a greater capacity for the intake of information; a physicist would consider thermodynamic laws driving our maneuverability, and a quantum physicist would dress things up in notions of superposition or entanglement.
An artist would look at the muse, a composer at harmony and an engineer at archetypes.
Regardless of the avenue, we not only have this knack for moving through our environment in ever-successful ways, but we seem to do so through the help of some pretty powerful methodology that we don’t quite understand.
At least not yet.
“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”
― Buddha
While we’ve abandoned some of the more captivating mysteries surrounding the pineal gland, despite irrepressible murmurs of fluoride calcification and DMT hallucination, our fixation with the organ is prominent enough throughout history that it deserves some study in itself.
In Hinduism, we see that it’s associated with the Ajna chakra (the third eye chakra), which is said to enable our intuition, insight, and ultimately elevate our consciousness beyond levels comprehensible.
The Upanishads routinely mention the dynamic “inner eye” that enables self-knowledge and cosmic understanding; such mentions will routinely align with modern day physiological understanding, both of the physical location and structuring of the eye behind the eyes, but also the hypothesized functions of the pineal gland.
Buddhism similarly views this inner eye as the gateway to higher awareness, with practices aimed at opening or widening the eye for expanded perception and enlightened inner vision; a muscle to be strengthened for improved intuitive function, and thus a greater ability to navigate our environments.
Mesoamerican carvings and statues often depict figures with pronounced pineal glands, associating them to spiritual insight, elevated consciousness, and/or greater awareness.
Ironically, the Vatican is home to the Court of the Pine Cone, which features a lofty pinecone statue, thought by many to represent the pineal gland and the over-arching concept of spiritual awakening.
Most popular is the ancient Egyptian iconography, which visually correlates the Eyes of Horus and Ra to a cross-section of the pineal gland within the brain.
Greek philosophers of days past also reference the third eye as a center of natural insight and accessibility to higher forms of wisdom. Descartes, for one, had claimed the pineal gland itself to be the “seat” of the soul and the spring of rational thought.
It was Galen (129 AD) in particular that had been the first to record an anatomical investigation of the pineal gland, detailing that the organ serves as a valve for the flow of psychic “pneuma” (a spiritual and ethereal essence) between brain ventricles, allowing us to function more harmoniously with its environment.
And so while our civilization-long fascination trickles into something comparatively anticlimactic of an answer today, it at least remains an ode to our persistent intrigue over the winding chapters of our existence.
Those ancient doodles from the lost wisdoms of yesterday seem to reveal more than we care to admit.
Modern investigation has so far deflated of lot of the esoteric presumptions made about the fulsome functions of the pineal gland.
But maybe we’ve just yet to connect the dots in the right ways.
Because it’s typical for modern scientific reasoning to throw out the unconnected (thus inconvenient) dots rather than letting them simmer on the back-burners of existence.
But where our curiosity survives, so too does the probability of an eventual solution. And where it takes so long to figure out (or to figure out that it’s impossible to figure out), it offers some existential and metaphysical insight.
It’s not that we’re back at the drawing board — we’ve never really left. And those ancient doodles from the lost wisdoms of yesterday seem to reveal more than we care to admit.
“When our individual life force enters our fetal body, the moment in which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT. Later, at birth, the pineal releases more DMT. As we die, the life-force leaves the body through the pineal gland, releasing another flood of this psychedelic spirit molecule.”
— Rick Strassman
Today’s study into the pineal gland proves to be more pragmatic, looking at the organ’s knack for synthesizing neurochemicals like melatonin and DMT; its correlative role and stature throughout our aging process (given links between its calcification and cognitive declination); its synthesesia of environmental signals; and its powerful function during death.
We now look at it all through our modern lenses of pharmacological and neurological relevance; practicality rather than purpose; a more passive curiosity in comparison to what once was.
But while we’ve trimmed the fat of esoteric wonder that floats around our curiosity of the pineal gland, our physiological investigation doesn’t seem to drown out the unrelenting mysticism.
The confounding presence of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) has stirred interest in understanding consciousness as the ultimate byproduct of the pineal gland — research of thinkers like Dr. Rick Strassman fortifies the idea that our perception of reality is wholly dependent upon this pea-sized organ.
Weighing only 0.1 grams, it’s located deep within a groove of the brain where the two halves of the thalamus join. It’s virtually in the center of our brains physical universe, smack-dab between both cerebral hemispheres, connected to regions that relay sensory and motor signals while processing emotional and motivational behaviours.
“We have two eyes to see two sides of things, but there must be a third eye which will see everything at the same time and yet not see anything. That is to understand Zen.”
- D.T. Suzuki
Despite the prominent physical real-estate, the pineal gland hides well from us the blueprints of its design.
There’s certainly more to it beyond its connections to the ventricular flows that ricochet around our brain mass and their ability to regulate our systems.
And almost regardless of those elements, the gland does seem to curate our experience of reality to some considerable degrees, whether cuing our circadian rhythms or prompting the release of certain neurotransmitters in the last breaths of our existence.
If the gland fundamentally permits our existence, it probably also shapes it to a degree we don’t yet (or can’t ever) fully appreciate.
So while they say that we seem to know less about our own oceans than we do about our cosmos, it can also be said that we know less about our own brains than we do about about the physical world that we inhabit.
Oddly enough, it also drags another seemingly unassociated variable into the equation.
Such an evolution would need help from more than the five primary senses we have, and maybe even the two dozen auxiliary ones that we have chosen to classify.
For reasons beyond my effort to unravel, there are some persistent cosmological considerations that tend to pop up rather profusely throughout research on this subject.
There’s a rather thick network of chain-links that bring together the more intuitive connections between the mind and the universe above.
From recurring descriptions of celestial immortality to persistent analogies that liken our pineal gland to some kind of antennae or receiver, the cosmic perspective seems just as important an element in the discussion as anything else.
Daoism, for instance, denotes the idea of our inner vision providing a clarity of movement so elevated that it can only be imagined as the constellations of stars in the night sky, unrestricted from the conventional bounds and cycles of life and death on earth.
And very few pages have to be turned through Vedic texts to see the bewildering connections between consciousness and certain behaviours, actions and habits of the cosmic world.
It could be because the black waters of space and all their captivating macro-happenstance offer to us the most authentic glimpse into the nature of sentience; it seems the reason that we so reverently abide by orbits and processions — why we use the stars and planets and massive clusters of distant matter as a guide for our own interaction with all aspects of reality — space, time, objectivity, subjectivity.
In my discussion with cosmologist Brian Swimme, he detailed his concept of cosmogenesis — that everything in the universe is demonstrative of a primordial and creative form of ambitious self-evolution — and that all things move through reality in this archetypal and transformative way.
And in an interview with astrobiologist Michael Wong, whose diverse team of scientists and philosophers wrote a comprehensive study detailing the “law[s] of increasing functional information”, I discussed with Wong certain concepts that echoed Swimme’s commentary — that all organisms (biotic and abiotic) seek to grow increasingly complex and thus evolve, and that we can see this metaphysical pattern to be habitual amongst all matter in the universe.
Well, such an evolution would need help from more than the five primary senses we have, and maybe even the two dozen auxiliary ones that we have chosen to classify.
So it seems that, from whatever soils our curiosity is rooted into, the same kind of organism sprouts with respect to understanding our consciousness as something more; that it works much more actively in the backgrounds of our daily operating system and that we can’t escape the more ethereal qualities no matter how many scalpels or microscopes we throw at the mystery.
We transcribe data from our surrounding environment and we adjust our interaction with reality according to those signals; the pineal gland seems to process the less tactile or sensory side of things, doing so in ways we can’t know.
Whereby our eyes give us the gift of visual navigation, and numerous regions of our brain affords us the ability to maneuver with reason and morality, the pineal gland — long worshiped throughout history for its apparent ability to elevate conscious to cosmic proportions of celestial perfection — seems to be doing much more than we realize it can do.
“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man”
— Henry Adams
So what does any of it really matter?
On its face, an organ that calibrates our experience of reality may not be the most noteworthy cog in the meshwork of the mind.
But if we consider the potential that it can hold in helping us maneuver through existence with greater effect, we begin to see a bigger point; we also begin to tap into the ancient fascination surrounding this organ.
When we’re dialed in to certain states of ideal consciousness, our movements seem effortless, and our responsiveness to the world around us seems more prescient; our thoughts are synchronized with reality in a way noticeably different than the typical, default modalities of our cognitive capacity.
It’s evident on sports fields and surfboards, in logistical operations or in symphonies; something we don’t really have the modern vernacular or context to wholly appreciate, and something we can’t always arrive at without a considerable amount of mental gymnastics.
In such a state, thoughts form and flow organically and our movements become more malleable as we navigate possibilities with an artful kind of discernment, one that not only curates the reality around us, but curates the ways in which we want reality to be.
While we can get to this state through innumerable avenues or disciplines of knowledge — religious and esoteric, physical and emotional, sportive or pharmacological — the blueprints still remain rather unattainable.
Whether we’re dialing into something external or internal, whether it’s reason or ego or instinct, we know it to be a more active and elevated mode of conscious perception; much like described in ancient texts, and much like analogized with celestial contexts.
To get here is to somehow blend proactivity and reactivity into a working equanimity that can play with possibility in ways that often leaves us bewildered by our own ability to do what we do.