Furthermore, keep in mind that a spirit molecule is not spiritual in and of itself. It is a tool, or a vehicle. Think of it as a tugboat, a chariot, a scout on horseback, something to which we can hitch our consciousness. It pulls us into worlds known only to itself. We need to hold on tight, and we must be prepared, for spiritual realms include both heaven and hell, both fantasy and nightmare. While the spirit molecule’s role may seem angelic, there is no guarantee it will not take us to the demonic.
Why is DMT so attractive a candidate for being the spirit molecule?
Its effects are extraordinarily and fully psychedelic. We have read some of the earliest reports of these properties from unprepared and unsuspecting research subjects who participated in the first clinical studies in the 1950s and 1960s. We will read much more about how truly mindboggling are DMT’s effects in our own very experienced and well-prepared volunteers.
Equally important is that DMT occurs in our bodies. We produce it naturally. Our brain seeks it out, pulls it in, and readily digests it. As an endogenous psychedelic, DMT may be involved in naturally occurring psychedelic states that have nothing to do with taking drugs, but whose similarities to drug-induced conditions are striking. While these states certainly can include psychosis, we must also include in our discussion conditions outside of mental illness. It may be upon endogenous DMT’s wings that we experience other life-changing states of mind associated with birth, death, and near-death, entity or alien contact experiences, and mystical/spiritual consciousness. These we will explore in much greater detail later.
In this chapter, we’ve learned the “what” about DMT. We now need to turn our attention to the “how” and “where.” We have prepared the groundwork into which we may now introduce the mysterious pineal gland. In its role as a potential “spirit gland,” or producer of endogenous DMT, the pineal is the topic of our next two chapters. We’ll also start investigating the circumstances under which our bodies might make psychedelic amounts of DMT.
3
The Pineal: Meet the Spirit Gland
One of my deepest motivations behind the DMT research was the search for a biological basis of spiritual experience. Much of what I had learned over the years made me wonder if the pineal gland produced DMT during mystical states and other naturally occurring, psychedelic-like experiences. These are ideas I developed before performing the New Mexico research. In chapter 21, I enlarge these hypotheses to incorporate what we discovered during the experiments themselves. In this chapter I will review what we know about the pineal gland.
In the next, I will elaborate upon these data to suggest conditions in which the pineal, in its role as a possible spirit gland, might make mind-altering amounts of endogenous DMT.
As a Stanford University undergraduate in the early 1970s I performed laboratory research on the development of the fetal chicken nervous system. I was curious about how a single fertilized cell could result in a fully grown and functioning organism. This was an exciting research field, and I wanted to see how I liked laboratory science. Less nobly, I also believed a research elective would help my chances of getting into medical school.
Despite the passion I had for this research, I felt guilty about killing fetal chicks. I had nightmares of chickens chasing me through vague and menacing landscapes. In these dreams, I escaped by lifting myself onto my mother’s washing machine!
It also did not seem as if laboratory science would provide me the opportunity to study the topics with which I was increasingly fascinated. While at Stanford, I took classes on sleep and dreams, hypnosis, the psychology of consciousness, physiological psychology, and Buddhism—all cutting-edge material in California universities in those days.
Wanting to sort things out, I went to the student health service and talked with one of their psychiatrists. He recommended I meet James Fadiman, Ph.D., a psychologist who worked at Stanford’s School of Engineering.
I called Jim’s secretary, set up an appointment to meet him, and got the confusing directions to the “engineering corner” of the university. After finding my way out of a few wrong turns and blind alleys, I found Jim’s office. He sat with his back to the window, the sun streaming in. I couldn’t see him very clearly due to the glare. The halo effect around his head added to my already moderate anxiety. I knew this would be an important meeting.
To deal with my own nervousness, I began the conversation and asked him what he, a psychologist, was doing in the engineering department. He chuckled and replied, “I teach engineers how to think. They’re smart, no doubt about that, but can they really solve problems imaginatively? How do they approach the creative process? I help them look at situations from different perspectives.”
Little did I know that Jim had worked with Willis Harman, who was administering psychedelic drugs in an attempt to enhance creativity, at a nearby research institute. The published results of this work, over thirty years old, remains the only such data in the literature and showed great potential for stimulating the creative process. I wonder how many of the Stanford engineering students he supervised were in those studies!1
Jim leaned forward, and the blinding glare from the sun worsened. He asked, “And what are you doing here?”
I told him. My ideas were poorly formed. I was fascinated by psychedelics. I had just started practicing Transcendental Meditation. My coursework was leading me into some very interesting fields. There seemed to be a thread running through it all, but what was it? Where could I look for a unifying factor?
Jim sat back and looked thoughtful, or so it seemed—his face was nearly invisible because of the sun’s rays behind him. “You ought to look into the pineal gland,” he said at last. “My wife Dorothy is making a film about the experience of inner light described by mystics. The pineal gland is drawing her in as the metaphysical source of this light, the crowning achievement of many traditions. Maybe it really does generate that light inside our heads.”
“How do you spell ‘pineal’?” I asked, taking notes.
We chatted a little more about my plans after graduation. Our brief meeting ended.
Building upon Jim’s advice, I began investigating what was known about the pineal gland, a tiny organ situated in the middle of the brain. I wrote several papers for classes that school year that began to lay out the broad framework for the theories I later developed.2
Western and Eastern mystical traditions are replete with descriptions of a blinding bright white light accompanying deep spiritual realization. This “enlightenment” usually is the result of a progression of consciousness through various levels of spiritual, psychological, and ethical development. All mystical traditions describe the process and its stages.
In Judaism, for example, consciousness moves through the sefirot, or Kabbalistic centers of spiritual development, the highest being Keter, or Crown. In the Eastern Ayurvedic tradition, these centers are called chakras, and particular experiences likewise accompany the movement of energy through them. The highest chakra is also called the Crown, or the Thousand-Petaled Lotus. In both traditions, the location of this Crown sefira or chakra is the center and top of the skull, anatomically corresponding to the human pineal gland.3
We first read about the physical pineal gland in the writings of Herophilus, a third-century B.C. Greek physician from the time of Alexander the Great. Its name comes from the Latin pineus, relating to the pine, pinus. This little organ is thus piniform, or shaped like a pinecone, no bigger than the nail of your pinkie finger.
The pineal gland is unique in its solitary status within the brain. All other brain sites are paired, meaning that they have left and right counterparts; for example, there are left and right frontal lobes and left and right temporal lobes. As the only unpaired organ deep within the brain, the pineal gland remained an anatomical curiosity for nearly two thousand years. No one in the West had any idea what its function was.
Interest in the pineal accelerated after it attracted Rene Descartes’s attention. This seventeenth-ce
ntury French philosopher and mathematician, who said, “I think, therefore I am,” needed a source for those thoughts. Introspection showed him that it was possible to think only one thought at a time. From where in the brain might these unpaired, solitary thoughts arise? Descartes proposed that the pineal, the only singleton organ of the brain, generated thoughts. In addition, Descartes believed the pineal’s location, directly above one of the crucial byways for the cerebrospinal fluid, made this function even more likely.
The ventricles, hollow cavities deep within the brain, produce cerebrospinal fluid. This clear, salty, protein-rich fluid provides cushioning for the brain, protecting it from sudden jolts and bumps. It also carries nutrients to, and waste products away from, deep brain tissue.
In Descartes’s time, the ebb and flow of the cerebrospinal fluid through the ventricles seemed perfectly suited for the corresponding movement of thoughts. If the pineal gland “secreted” thoughts into the cerebrospinal fluid, what better means for the “stream of consciousness” to make its way to the rest of the brain?4
Descartes also had a deeply spiritual side. He believed that thinking, or the human imagination, was basically a spiritual phenomenon made possible by our divine nature, what we share with God. That is, our thoughts are expressions of, and proof for the existence of, our soul. Descartes believed that the pineal gland played an essential role in the expression of the soul:
Although the soul is joined with the entire body, there is one part of the body [the pineal] in which it exercises its function more than elsewhere. . . . [The pineal] is so suspended between the passages containing the animal spirits [guiding reason and carrying sensation and movement] that it can be moved by them . . . ; and it carries this motion on to the soul. . . . Then conversely, the bodily machine is so constituted that whenever the gland is moved in one way or another by the soul, or for that matter by any other cause, it pushes the animal spirits which surround it to the pores of the brain.5
Descartes thus proposed that the pineal gland somehow was the “seat of the soul,” the intermediary between the spiritual and physical. The body and the spirit met there, each affecting the other, and the repercussions extended in both directions.
How close to the truth was Descartes? What do we know now about the biology of the pineal gland? Can we relate this biology to the nature of spirit?
The pineal gland of evolutionarily older animals, such as lizards and amphibians, is also called the “third” eye. Just like the two seeing eyes, the third eye possesses a lens, cornea, and retina. It is light-sensitive and helps regulate body temperature and skin coloration—two basic survival functions intimately related to environmental light. Melatonin, the primary pineal hormone, is present in primitive pineal glands.
As animals climbed the evolutionary ladder, the pineal moved inward, deeper into the brain, more hidden and removed from outside influences. While the bird pineal no longer sits on top of the skull, it remains sensitive to outside light because of the paper-thin surrounding bones. The mammalian, including human, pineal is buried even deeper in the brain’s recesses and is not directly sensitive to light, at least in adults.6 It is interesting to speculate that as the pineal assumes a more “spiritual” role, it needs the greater protection from the environment afforded by such deep placement in the skull.
The human pineal gland becomes visible in the developing fetus at seven weeks, or forty-nine days, after conception. Of great interest to me was finding out that this is nearly exactly the moment in which one can clearly see the first indication of male or female gender. Before this time, the sex of the fetus is indeterminate, or unknown. Thus, the pineal gland and the most important differentiation of humanity, male and female gender, appear at the same time.
The human pineal gland is not actually part of the brain. Rather, it develops from specialized tissues in the roof of the fetal mouth. From there it migrates to the center of the brain, where it seems to have the best seat in the house.
We have already noted the pineal’s proximity to cerebrospinal fluid channels, which allows its secretions easy access to the brain’s deepest recesses. Additionally, it sits in strategic closeness to the crucial emotional and sensory brain centers.
These sensory or perceptual hubs are called the visual and auditory colliculi, little mounds of specialized brain tissue. They are relay stations for the transmission of sense data to brain sites involved in their registration and interpretation. That is, electrical and chemical impulses that begin in the eyes and ears must pass through the colliculi before we experience them in our minds as sights and sounds. The pineal gland hangs directly over these colliculi, separated by only a narrow channel of cerebrospinal fluid. Anything secreted by the pineal into that fluid would settle onto the colliculi in a moment.
In addition, the limbic, or “emotional,” brain surrounds the tiny pineal. The limbic “system” is a collection of brain structures intimately involved in the experience of feelings, such as joy, rage, fear, anxiety, and pleasure. Therefore, the pineal also has direct access to the brain’s emotional centers.
For many years physiologists considered the mammalian pineal gland the equivalent of the “brain’s appendix.” It was a residual, vestigial organ, a throwback to our early reptilian days, with no known role. That changed when American dermatologist Aaron Lerner discovered melatonin in 1958. This and related findings began what might be called the era of the “melatonin hypothesis of pineal function.”
Lerner was interested in vitiligo, a skin disorder in which there are depigmented, or lightened, patches of skin throughout the body. A 1917 study observed that cow pineal gland extract lightened frog skin. Lerner thought that a pineal factor therefore was involved in vitiligo. He ground up over twelve thousand cow pineals and finally found the skin-lightening compound. He named it melatonin because it lightened skin by contracting the black pigment in special cells: melas, black; and tonin, contract or squeeze. (Despite all of Lerner’s work, there is little evidence today that melatonin plays a role in vitiligo.)7
At the same time, scientists were manipulating light and dark cycles in order to better understand the effect of light on reproduction, no small issue when one considers the economic value of well-timed animal breeding for the livestock industry. They found that constant darkness blocked reproductive function and shrank the sexual organs; it also stimulated pineal growth and the production of melatonin. On the other hand, constant light shrank the pineal, reduced melatonin levels, and turned on sexual function. Using these experimental results, scientists concluded that melatonin was the crucial pineal factor in whose presence reproductive function flagged, and in whose absence reproductive function flourished. Put simply, melatonin possessed powerful anti-reproductive effects.8
Now that the pineal gland had lost some of its mystery, how did melatonin relate to the alleged spiritual properties of the gland? I firmly believed that there was a spirit molecule somewhere in the brain, initiating or supporting mystical and other naturally occurring altered states of consciousness. My first best guess was that pineal melatonin was this “spirit molecule,” the chemical interpreter through which the body and spirit met and communicated. If melatonin had profound psychedelic properties, my search for the vehicle by which the pineal affected our spiritual lives was over.
Melatonin’s full name is N-acetyl-5-methoxy-tryptamine. We can tell by its name and structure that, like DMT and 5-methoxy-DMT, melatonin is a tryptamine.
We have a good understanding of how the body regulates melatonin production. It is the “hormone of darkness.” Light turns off melatonin production, both during daylight hours and in the presence of artificial light during nighttime hours. The longer the nighttime dark hours, the more melatonin. The greater the daylight hours, the less melatonin. Besides indicating whether it is day or night, the patterns of melatonin production also inform the animal about the time of year. These longerterm melatonin effects help prepare for the appropriate seasonal responses—pregnancy in spring
or fall, hibernation during the winter, or fat loss in summer.
Noradrenaline and adrenaline (or norepinephrine and epinephrine) are the two neurotransmitters that turn on melatonin synthesis in the pineal. They are released directly onto the pineal gland by nerve cells that almost touch it. The neurotransmitters attach to specialized receptors, which then begin the chemical process of melatonin formation.
The adrenal glands also make adrenaline and noradrenaline, releasing them into the bloodstream in response to stress. They are crucial factors in the body’s reaction to danger: the “fight-or-flight” response. However, only adrenaline and noradrenaline released by nearby pineal nerve endings, not by the adrenal glands, have any effect on pineal function.
This is not what we would expect. Since the pineal gland does not originate from brain tissue, it exists outside the blood-brain barrier and ought to be responsive to blood-borne chemicals and drugs. Nevertheless, the body protects the pineal gland with a fierce tenacity. The stress-related surges of adrenal-gland adrenaline and noradrenaline secreted into the blood never get to the pineal. The pineal security system, made up of “vacuuming” nerve cells, simply cleans up the blood-borne adrenaline and noradrenaline in an incredibly efficient manner. Not surprisingly, this barrier makes it nearly impossible to stimulate the pineal gland to produce melatonin during the day.
Tiny blood vessels surround the pineal, so once it makes melatonin, the hormone quickly enters the bloodstream and spreads throughout the body. The pineal also secretes melatonin directly into the cerebrospinal fluid, where it can affect the brain even more quickly.
The function of melatonin in humans is uncertain, despite major advances in our understanding of its effects in other animals. There is great interest in determining whether melatonin has the same effects on reproductive function in humans as it does in other mammals. Melatonin levels fall dramatically at human puberty. Some investigators think this may allow the sexual apparatus to free itself from pineal restraint and thus begin functioning in an adult manner. Conclusive evidence remains elusive. Neither is it scientifically established that melatonin plays a role in jet lag, winter depression, sleep, cancer, or aging.9
DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences Page 7