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82 * THE BUILDING BLOCKS male or female gender. Thus the soul's rebirth, the pineal, and the sexual organs all require forty-nine days before they manifest. I unearthed this synchronicity when I was in my early twenties. I didn't know exactly how to make sense of it at the time. I still do not. In fact, conjectures relating far-flung phenomena based upon similarities in time may be as much wishful thinking as the old herbal "doctrine of sig- natures," which suggested that an herb's properties depended upon how it looked. If a plant looked like a heart, it must be good for heart disease. What I'm proposing is almost a "doctrine of elapsed time." If Bud- dhist texts and human embryology reveal that different developments require forty-nine days, the events must be related. This association is perhaps logically shaky, but also intuitively appealing. How might the anatomical emergence of the pineal and the reproduc- tive organs forty-nine days after conception involve the spiritual or life force? As we die, if near-death experiences are any indication, there is a profound shift in consciousness away from identification with the body. Pineal DMT makes available those particular non-embodied contents of consciousness. All the factors previously described combine for one final burst of DMT production: catecholamine release; decreased breakdown and increased formation of DMT; reduced anti-DMT; and decomposing pineal tissue. Therefore, it may be that the pineal is the most active organ in the body at the time of death. Might we say that the life-force therefore exits the body through the pineal? The consequence of this flood of DMT upon our dying brain-based mind is a pulling back of the veils normally hiding what Tibetan Bud- dhists call the bardo, or intermediary states between this life and the next. DMT opens our inner senses to these betwixt states with their myriad visions, thoughts, sounds, and feelings. As the body becomes totally in- ert, consciousness has completely left the body and now exists as a field among many fields of manifest things. The spirit molecule has outlived its usefulness as a scout for these realms. It has led us to the other shore, and we are on our own. During the next forty-nine days, we use our will, or intent, to process our unique life's