This item is not overly
helpful except to clarify just how much we are in early days in terms of
grasping what may be going on. Just what
are the inevitable receptor cells receiving?
Even better, is the process two way?
We already suspect that the
formal ‘soul’ enters the nascent human on the 49th day after
conception through this gland. Thus that
is when formal consciousness actually begins.
This is pretty powerful concept.
In the meantime we are
running into our general ignorance regarding the operation of the brain.
Conjecture:
1
Every
cell in the body and our brain has direct access to the Ubermind which is
outside of time. This is constantly
refreshed to ensure integrity in the physical world.
2
The
first conjecture can be constrained to a subset of cells but this appears
unnecessary.
3
Such
subset may actually operate as the central processor that manages access as
needed and runs the refresh cycle itself.
You can thus see where
this problem is going.
4 Things You Should Know
About Your 'Third Eye'
We still lack a complete understanding of the pineal gland -- but
that doesn't stop us from speculating.
March 22, 2013
Located in nearly the direct center of the
brain, the tiny pinecone-shaped pineal gland, which habitually secretes
the wondrous neurohormone melatonin while we sleep at night, was once
thought to be a vestigial leftover from a lower evolutionary state.
Indeed, according to recent research, we could
be increasing our chances of contracting chronic illnesses like cancer by
unnecessarily bathing its evenings in artificial light, working night shifts or staying up too
late. By disrupting the pineal gland and melatonin's chronobiological connection
to Earth's rotational 24-hour light
and dark cycle, known as its circadian rhythm, we're possibly opening the
doors not to perception, but to disease and disorder. A recently published
study from Vanderbilt University has found associations between circadian disruption and heart disease, diabetes and
obesity.
By hacking what pinealophiles call our
mind's third eye with an always-on technoculture
transmitting globally at light-speed, we may have disadvantaged our genetic
ability to ward off all manner of complicated nightmares. No wonder the pineal
gland is a pop-culture staple for sci-fi, fantasy and horror fandom, as well as
a mass attractor of mystics and mentalists. Its powers to divide and merge our
light and dark lives only seems to grow the more we take it seriously.
"We still lack a complete understanding of
the pineal gland," University of Michigan professor of physiology and
neurology Jimo Borjigin, a pioneer in medical visualization of the pineal
gland's melatonin secretion, told me. "Numerous molecules are found in the
pineal, many of which are uniquely found at night, and we do not have a good
idea of what their functions are. The only function that is established beyond
doubt is the melatonin synthesis and secretion at night, which is controlled by
the central clock in the suprachiasmatic
nucleus and modulated by light. All else is
speculative."
Discerning between the science and speculation
of the pineal gland hasn't been easy since long before Rene Descartes called it
the "principal seat of the soul" after studying it at length nearly
four centuries ago. (Although "no evidence exists to support this,"
clarified Borjigin.) So here's a handy shortlist of things you should know
about the pineal gland.
1. Third Eyes and Theosophistry
The current scientific understanding is that
the pineal gland probably started out as an eye,
and it receives signals from light and our retinas. Whether it was our
only eye which shrunk into the brain once its perceptive tasks were taken care
of by our two newer eyes, or whether it was a third eye with a spiritual and
physical connection to previous spiritual and evolutionary states, or both, has
galvanized science and speculation for centuries.
[ a far better
explanation is that it conforms to our eyes because its function is similar. It
samples part of the electromagnetic spectrum and transmits the data to our
mind, that we do not know what part is hilarious when we have discovered a mere
couple of weeks ago that the internal signaling inside a cell is mostly by
using light like radiation - arclein ]
Earth's ancient cultural histories are filled
with folklore featuring both one-eyed and three-eyed beings of great power,
from Shiva and Cyclops to that amiable fellow in The Twilight Zone's
classic episode, "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?"
and beyond. (From Beyond even:
See below.) Associations can be found in Hinduism, whose seventh primary
chakra Sahasara is a multilayered lotus that looks like the pineal
gland's pinecone, and whose primary function is to perceive universal oneness,
scientifically and spiritually speaking. Theosophists, who have been
studying what they perceive as hidden knowledge since the Greeks and Romans
ruled philosophical and scientific inquiry, have more recently claimed that the
pineal gland is the spiritual engine of our evolution into "embryo
gods, beings of consciousness and matter."
That description seems apt, given the
astronomical power we have achieved in a few million yeas of evolution.
While Homo sapiens' third
eyes likely transformed into pineal glands along the way, today we can still
find animals with photoreceptive third eyes, now called parietal eyes,
like New Zealand's endangered tuatara.
Fossils from other ancient creatures feature similar sockets in their skulls,
making our pineal gland a candidate for an ex-eye.
2. What Was Once Hidden Is Now Hi-Res
Michigan University professor Borjigin and his
team are hard at work on how the pineal gland and melatonin regulate our lives.
"The central circadian clock controls timing of
almost all aspects of our life, including physiology and behavior, and
melatonin is the best marker to decode the fingerprints of circadian timing in
both humans and animals," he told me. "In the past, it was very
difficult to study circadian properties of melatonin in animals due to
technical limitations. My lab invented long-term pineal
microdialysis, which permits automated, computer-controlled
and high-resolution analysis of melatonin secretion from rodent pineal gland
from four to 10 weeks in the same animal."
These visualizations could go a long way toward
understanding how to hack melatonin, which the pineal gland secretes when we
sleep and helps the brain repair and sync our bodies to Earth's rotation. Melatonin
is a stunning compound, found naturally in plants, animals and microbes. A
powerful antioxidant, its list of its medicinal uses only seems to grow each
year, as we learn more about its ability to help with immune disorders, chronic
illnesses, and neurodegeneration.
"Pineal microdialysis allows us to monitor
melatonin secretion closely under various conditions to simulate jet lag,
shiftwork, light pollution, diet manipulation and more to define the
fingerprints of circadian response to environment, he added. "It also
allows us to discover animals with extreme chronotypes, like early-birds or
night-owls, to understand how individuals with different chronotype respond to
circadian challenges differently. These are still ongoing studies, but hopefully
some of the works will be published this year."
3. Artificial Light = Dark Future
What has been
recently published about melatonin is already pretty significant, especially
for those looking to combat breast and prostate cancer. Harvard University
School of Public Health researcher Itai Kloog and his group published a series
of studies in the last few years explaining how our "modern urbanized
sleeping habitat" (PDF) is a massive hormone-based cancer risk. "We have blotted out the night sky"
with artificial light, wrote Earth
Island Journal's Holly Hayworth," citing Kloog's research and
noting that half that light is wasted anyway.
"We've proven beyond a doubt that it's a
risk factor," Kloog told me. "Light at night has been proven on many
levels, by our group and many others, to definitely contribute to higher risk
of developing hormonal cancer."
Kloog's team published five studies altogether,
including analyses at local and global levels, and all of them found firm
correlations between circadian and melatonin disruption and higher risks of
cancer. Analyzing NASA's
Defense Meteorological Satellite Program archive (to
illuminate Earth's light-at-night coverage) and data from the World Health
Organization, Kloog's group "found clearly that as women were more exposed
to light at nighttime, their rates of breast cancer went up. Our Israel study
found that going from minimum exposure to average exposure to light at night
resulted in a 36 percent higher standard rate of breast cancer, and going from
average to maximum was another 26 percent increase."
Using kernel smoothing to create density maps
showing light exposure and cancer rates, Kloog's team found that another of its
studies, which sourced more than 20,000 light sources by height and intensity,
showed a clear association. For their two worldwide studies, they developed an
algorithm to assign population weight average light exposure for every person
in every city across the world, using WHO data, and again they found a clear
association between cancer and light at night.
"For average light exposure per person, if
you take an underdeveloped country like Nepal, we're talking about 0.02
nanowatts per centimeter squared," Kloog explained. "Compare that to
the United States, where the average light exposure of a person is 57.5. Up
until around 120 years ago, humans were basically exposed to 12 hours of
sunlight and 12 hours of darkness on average, seasons and latitudes permitting
of course. But since the invention of the lightbulb, we've artificially
stretched the day. We go to sleep late at night, we have lights on while we
sleep, we have a shorter sleep duration. We have a lot of factors stretching
out our days, relative to the light period we experienced during millions of
years of previous evolution."
"It's something that's easy to take out of
the equation," Kloog told me. "Go to sleep in a dark room. Use less
light. Close the shutters. Circadian disruption is carcinogenic to
humans."
4. Occult Classic
This is not to say that late-night viewing
itself isn't good for the mind, especially when it comes to pineal glands and
third eyes. Because pineal glands and third eyes remain singular components of
an otherwise binary brain with an extraordinary past, they have stimulated some
stranger explorations of their spiritual and supernatural possibility. The
pineal gland's circadian dualism has achieved particular resonance with
influential occultists like horror influential H.P. Lovecraft. Who, in
turn, have spawned new generations of speculative talents that have used it as
a quite flexible receptacle for expansive meaning.
"My first exposure to the pineal gland came
from Stuart Gordon's movie adaptation of Lovecraft's From Beyond," Javier Grillo-Marxuach, creator of the
cult sci-fi television classic The Middleman,
told AlterNet. "In truth, everything I know about that particular
endocrine body probably derives from that seminal experience, which explains
why I am a television writer and not a brain surgeon."
In From
Beyond, a supernaturally activated pineal gland turns mad scientists
into brain-eating zombies. The recently reissued 1957 exploitation film She Devil features
a "female monster" whose hyperstimulated pineal gland turns her
into "a demon, a devil, a creature with a warped soul!" In both
films, and many other third-eye
head-trips, functions as a sexualized organ, rather than a
circadian regulator. Today, some use melatonin supplements, available since the
'90s, to aid with sexual dysfunction. But the pineal gland's expansive mythic
and scientific history has much broader applications when it comes to folklore
and entertainment.
"In The Middleman, we quickly discovered that because this most
mysterious of glands is so misunderstood, even though its very name connotes a
certain frisson of scientific accuracy and technical understanding, it was a
fantastic shorthand for whatever otherworldly qualities we needed to
justify," Grillo-Marxuach added. "Over the course of 12 episodes, the
pineal gland became the source of psychic ability, communication between
parallel dimensions, the magical influence of succubi and incubi over the
libidos of ordinary mortals and, finally, the power source for our main
supervillain's armageddon device. Since Stuart Gordon and H.P. Lovecraft gave
me such a gift in my teenage years by providing me with so fanciful an
understanding of cerebral anatomy, I figured I'd pay the favor forward as many
times as possible."
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