The pineal gland is a small gland centered towards the middle brain. For a long time it has been known as the third eye, and there is some truth in this!! The pineal gland produces melatonin, a tryptamine derivative. We have dealt with some other interesting tryptamine derivatives in the past, such as our good friend DMT that opens doors into vortices and eddies in the universe from which wisdom and healing can emmanate.
Can the Pineal Gland “See”?
Melatonin is produced at night as we sleep and it regulates much of the bodies repair and rest functions. Now interestingly enough, in many traditional beliefs the Pineal gland is seen as being the “Third Eye” a mysticall spot in the brain where the wise can see into different dimensions.
And this is where the interesting bit of truth comes in. In certain cases, blind people who cannot see still have a connection between the brain and the pineal gland that allows them to see if it is day or night.
This allows a blind person to follow a normal day night cycle without being able to “see” light or dark.
The Pineal gland and the Modern World
In terms of us understanding how we can use melatonin production in our bodies to ensure maximum health, we need to understand a few things that have changed in human life in the past 100 to 150 or so years. In the recent past, light came from candles or from whale oil lamps.
This meant that light was very expensive, and hence people tended to go to bed shortly after dark and sleep until it got light.
Red light, from fire, has no effect on melatonin production, but other frequencies, when detected by the brain will reduce or halt melatonin production.
In the past 150 years we have seen many technologies that have brought more and more light into our dwellings. The invention of kerosene really helped the world, as it meant that cheaper petroleum derived oil could replace whale oil and beeswax candles. This had the effect of saving the whales and proliferating cheaper light into the houses of the masses. When making kerosene there was this irritating, useless stuff that evaporated called gasoline. Somebody found a use for that eventually – hence your automobile. But that is another story.
As we have filled our homes with light, there are now many light sources that can interfere with melatonin production. Small LED’s such as those on power banks, mobile phones and various other electronic items produce green, blue and even white light that can interfere with melatonin production. Electric lights, light pollution through windows, flashes of vehicle light that come through windows at night, and many other sources of light pollution interfere with human sleep cycles.
Managing your Pineal Gland for greater mental health (and readiness for psychonautic experiences)
The human mind, like any other entity, requires maintenance. If you plan to use it a bit harder than normal, it requires more maintenance. If we look at normal mind maintenance, it is important to eat a diet which feeds your mind with what it needs. Neurotransmitters are typically made using a heavy reliance on the amino acids tryptophan, histidine, tyrosine and lysine. You also need to make sure that your brain is well supplied with good quality lipids (fats) which you get from mushrooms, eggs, and if you eat fish and meat, from these. Try to select free range meat, as this has a more balanced lipid profile. Oily fish are also a good source of brain lipids.
The most important part of building a balanced healthy brain is the rest cycle – this is where managing your melatonin production is so valuable. If you get asleep two hours before midnight, some researchers believe that you produce nearly twice as much melatonin before midnight as you do afterwards. This is why you often find you feel so good after an early nights sleep, whereas that half sleep you get after bingeing on Netflix until 1am is just not the same. Even if you sleep for 10 hours into your Saturday morning, you will not feel as rested as if you went to bed at 8pm and woke up at 5am!
Removing all light pollution from your room, installing black out curtains to stop light ingressing from the outside world into your life, and putting a bit of insulation tape over stray LED lights in your room can really help. If you do this, you can ensure that your natural sleep cycle will be the closest to what it should be and that your pineal gland can then regulate your brain health and regeneration cycle over the night. This means that you enter the morning with a brain that is well provisioned with all the neurotransmitters that it may need to get through a normal day happily, or an extraordinary psychonautic day as educationally and inspirationally as possible.
Cleaning your Pineal Gland
The Pineal gland can become calcified as we get older. This is not ideal for it at all. It can also accumulate heavy metals that can then damage the gland. Curcumin in turmeric appears to have some ability to help with preventing this and even removing heavy metals.
I have a trick that I do where I take about 200 grams of turmeric root (fresh) and 500 grams of ginger. I mix this with a liter of boiling water and then put that through my blender. I boil this for twenty minutes and strain the liquid from this. I add another liter and boil it again. Sweeten the filtrate with honey to taste and add lemon juice. Put this in the fridge and drink a half a cup in the morning and evening each day for a week. It will make you feel exceptional. It will also make you shake and gasp a bit the first few times you drink it as the ginger is quite character building. But it is good for you so just go for it – this is also good practice to build the psychological fortitude needed to chug a glass of san pedro if you ever find yourself having to do that for some reason (maybe to cure flu?).
Is there anything else the Pineal Gland can do?
Mystics and other wise people over the millenia have believed in the third eye. As a kid, I was fortunate to have a biology teacher who had spent years of his life living in monasteries in Tibet – he taught us various meditation techniques which have given me access to corners of my mind that I am sometimes scared to know about.
Many meditation techniques start with a relaxation stage and then a focusing method where you imagine a line of light shining through the middle of your eyebrow and out of the back of your head, and then a line shining through a bit back from the temples and where these two cross you focus and find a calm place in your mind. This is supposedly the third eye region, where we can learn to see in a different way.
I am a beekeeper (to see some of my beekeeping ideas) and I once learned from an old San man how they find bees. He said you sit, and you close your eyes and then look inside your head for the blue dots in the hills and go there. Remarkably, when I sat with him and meditated and used his method, I could sense blue energy bubbles where two swarms of bees were in the mountains and we were able to find these wild hives!
In summary
The brain is a tool that we use to understand reality – in all its forms. Any tool requires maintenance, and, the pineal gland is a crucial part of the brains maintenance system. It may also be a gland that acts in other ways and could be the the seat of the third eye – this is unlikely as it contains little neural matter. But somewhere in the middle of the brain is a place we can focus that allows us to see things in a way that science cannot yet describe. Give your pineal gland a good turmeric detox and it will serve you well, keeping your mind ready for whatever adventures you throw at it. Starve it of light at night so it can do its job – block out all the modern light that intervenes in our life and we can go back to the more mystical times when we lived in caves and understood things in a different way.
