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pineal? THE PSYCHEDELIC PINEAL «+ 83 signature, the accumulated experiences, memories, habits, tendencies, and feelings of the life that has ended. This conscious contending with our personal histories, where complete, results in a joining of those fields with ambient ones. It is as if a bell has been rung; the sound, loud at first, joins background noise, then gradually fades away. What is left over settles onto the next physical life-form that seems most appropriate for subsequent processing of unresolved issues. There is a resonance, a sympathetic vibration, of similar fields: C-minor gravi- tates to C-minor, animal traits to animals, plant qualities to plants, human issues to humans. In the case of human beings, these unmetabolized tendencies, this unfinished business, can enter the fetus only when it is "ready." This readiness may require forty-nine days, too, and may take the form of a pineal gland able to synthesize DMT. The pineal could act as an antenna or lightning rod for the soul. And sexual differentiation into male or fe- male, occurring at exactly the same moment, provides the biological framework through which the life-force now may assert itself. The movement of this energy, the residual life-force of the past into the present, through the pineal and into the fetus, might be the first and most primordial DMT flash. This is the dawning of consciousness, of mind, of awareness as a distinct biological and sexual entity. The blinding light of pineal DMT, secreted within the developing brain, marks the passage through this threshold. Until this forty-nine-day watershed, the fetus may be only a physical, rather than a physical-spiritual, being. Therefore, is forty-nine days when we truly can consider a fetus to be an individual sentient, and therefore spiritual, entity? This chapter suggests that naturally occurring altered states of con- sciousness result from high levels of pineal DMT production. However, what might happen if someone does not have a pineal gland, due to pineal cancer or a stroke destroying it? Would he or she have the same access to conscious experiences from endogenous DMT as someone with an intact