Page Content (OCR)
The Pineal: Meet the Spirit Gland 56 Mane 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 experi- ences. 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 sys- tem. I was curious about how a single fertilized cell could result in a fully