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place. fade. THE PSYCHEDELIC PINEAL «+ 81 There is something that "enlivens" us when joined with our body. When present in matter, it shows itself by way of movement and heat. In the brain, it provides the power to receive, and transform into awareness, our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. When it is gone, the light is ex- tinguished and the engine stops. Whatever it is, the presence of this enlivening force provides us the opportunity to interact with this time and While not "personal," this spirit or life-force has a "history" associ- ated with our particular collection of animated matter. It has experienced things with us, while being essentially unchanged by those events. Its movements have created unique fields of influence by the notes or sounds it has generated by our body's mental and physical activities. When the body is too weak to contain it, it leaves. Some goes to other matter, and some joins the ambient background of fields. The unique fields produced by its cleaving to our body, however, remain for a while before dissipat- ing. The stronger the field, or the louder the note, the more time it takes to One of the most powerful reasons for my fascination with the pineal gland relates to its function in the life of the spirit. The importance and potential of this was brought home to me when, as a medical student in the mid-1970s, I learned of a startling coincidence involving the pineal gland and Buddhist beliefs about reincarnation. I cannot overemphasize how strong an impression this discovery made on me, and how it strength- ened my search for a spiritual role for the pineal gland and, within it, the spirit molecule. I already knew that the Tibetan Buddhist Book ofthe Dead teaches that it takes forty-nine days for the soul of the recently dead to "reincar- nate." That is, seven weeks from the time of death of one person elapses until the life-force's "rebirth" into its next body. I remember very clearly, several years later, feeling the chill along my spine when, reading my textbook of human fetal development, I discovered this same forty-nine- day interval marking two landmark events in human embryo formation. It takes forty-nine days from conception for the first signs of the human pineal to appear. Forty-nine days is also when the fetus differentiates into