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The Psychoactive Pineal Gland
Various (Meditation, Cannabis, MDA)
by 4-HO
Citation:   4-HO. "The Psychoactive Pineal Gland: An Experience with Various (Meditation, Cannabis, MDA) (exp48444)". Erowid.org. Mar 9, 2006. erowid.org/exp/48444

 
DOSE:
  repeated smoked Cannabis
BODY WEIGHT: 135 lb
There are plenty of individuals out there practicing mind-altering meditation, and plenty more who have for reasons unbeknownst to themselves entered 'strange' and 'psychadellic' states without having taken any chemical. Of the two experiences I would like to make note of, one is a Near Death Experience, and the next being a result of an interesting meditation I have discovered (maybe even invented?).

As a little backstory, about 3 months prior to the NDE, I had been hospitalized for Asphyxiation Pneumonia caused in part by poor living conditions, and in another part from an exhausted body from hard drugs (oxycontin + cocaine). Since exiting that hospital a week later, I have never been more grateful to be alive. I swore off the use of anything that was not either psychadellic or marijuana (and of course I couldn't get away from occasional social alcohol consumption although I have now). When the paramedics arrived, I felt as if I was waking up from a deep sleep, and heard 'only responds to painful stimulus.' I do not remember any painful stimulus. I was much too exhausted from oxygen deprivation to have any useful experience during this, besides the realization of what damage I could do to my body if I was not extremely wise in my choices in the future.

In the coming months before my next NDE, I had the amazing benefit of consuming mushrooms an extraodinary amount of times. Each and every time I felt greatly enlightened and it has truly changed my life and altered my perception of the universe, however a mushroom trip is always difficult to integrate fully and I have yet to come back from it with some of the amazing knowledge and awareness I'd had until waking up the day after.

The day of the NDE was about 2 days after having eaten mushrooms about every other day for a week. My friend and I had been sitting in our room smoking out of a gravity bong. After enjoying that for a while I sat in a chair and stared at the impressions in the plaster ceiling. I was always amazed by the old appearance of houses in the town (and they were old), they always seemed to promote a 'trippy' visual distortion. I attempted to bring back the visual magic of my experiences that week. I stared at the ceiling for what felt like eternity and was probably more like 5 minutes without blinking once. I became hyperaware of my eyes, they felt funny, I somehow had the delusion that they had dilated fully and when I blinked I thought they were stuck like that. More likely they were completely bloodshot and agitated. To this day thinking about the feeling still brings back and extremely scary feeling, the same one I felt that day in my eyes.

Suddenly I snapped my eyes closed tightly and told my friend they hurt a lot, and that I thought they were stuck dilated. Well he was almost blind with the strongest of prescription glasses so I had to see for myself. This is when the magic began. I opened my eyes, stood up, and looked at a mirror on his desk... everything seemed to be normal, my eyes were beet red, but that always happened when I had smoked pot during the course of the day. I stared at that image in the mirror and somehow was drawn into the mirror and suddenly...

I forgot I existed... At this point according to my friend, I collapsed to the ground and in transit smacked my face on the table, and as I was able to observe for 3 months afterwards, also got a humongous rug burn on my face. What happened in my perspective I find much more interesting. Suddenly everything was black... Empty, void... There was no feeling, there was no Me, and there was no realizing I was not existing... For what felt like an eternity there was just darkness. Until suddenly, I remembered... I remembered I existed, and so terrified that I had died, I panicked... but I didn't know where I was or what had happened, let alone where I had been when this all started.

At this point in reality was probably when my friend started shaking me extremely violently.

Suddenly, as I had seen in some extreme ether induced experiences, I watched reality rebuild itself. From this has come some of my deepest feelings and spiritual beliefs of the universe. The moments before I regained consciousness were so extremely fast that I could barely make out anything, but the vision was impossible to forget. I watched everything build upon itself exponentially, from a few sine waves undulating in different colors, to many more in more spectral variations. Eventually these sinewaves took the form of clusters of light, fractals of sorts. At this point I noticed that I was hearing a very high pitched sound and it was extremely loud. As the fractals gained in density I noticed everything had begun rushing towards and had gained the quality of a timelapse photograph. The sound in my ears transformed into a siren and this is when my first rational thoughts came to mind, 'Oh my god I'm in an ambulance again,' and 'What have I done now.' As I opened my eyes the neon lights slowed to the imagery of my friend's room, the sirens slowed the noises of traffic outside, and my friend's panicked voice as he tried to shake the life back into, tears in his eyes.

This experience must have lasted all of 1 minute. For the remainder of the night I was extremely bothered by my eyes, and terrified it would happen again. For months afterwards when my eyes became bloodshot from smoking pot, I would start feeling as though I had been staring at something too long and start blinking rapidly and panicking from that same feeling. Luckily, I have not had the pleasure of reexperiencing that NDE.

I most postulate that this extreme sense of time dilation, yet rushing sensation (in such a short time so much happened for what felt like forever, at such a high speed) must be attributable to that amazing chemical DMT, which has been said (Probably not with good evidence), to be released at the time of birth and the time of death. I have not yet smoked DMT, although I am eager for the spring so I may harvest some Phalaris of my own.

My second experience I will describe more briefly. I had some wonderful experiences with MDA which seemed to open me up to altered-meditative states with much more ease. One night I had taken a 100mg dose, and after having some amazing experiences with meditation, I retired. The next day, inspired by the experience, I took to meditative discovery in my bed. As I lay there, I decided to experiment with reaching a point in inhalation where the pressure in my lungs was equal to the ambient pressure, and air could circulate freely. Ironically a few weeks later my father, a respitory therapist, mentioned an article he was reading about new ventilators that did exactly that - apparently they are very efficient.

With much concentration I managed to reach this point and hold it first for a period of 20 seconds. I could feel alternating warm/cold currents in my lungs, and eventually I could not distinguish between them, as the flow was so smooth. I did not feel panicked as if the carbon dioxide was building up in my lungs, and I started to feel increasingly energized as I have in prior experience with chakra meditation. I decided to incorporate a meditation I like where I focus on a shaft of light entering my third eye and penetrating to where I would estimate my pineal gland might be (between my ears at the center of my brain). When this meditation is very successful, I see very bright flickering white light behind my eyelids (similar to the backdrop for many of my CEVs on mushrooms). Well, the bright light was brilliant this time around, and the more I focused on this pressurized/energized feeling in my frontal lobes, the more brilliant it became, until suddenly my entire head felt like it was as heavy as lead and it was then when I had my first glimpse of the opening of my third eye.

Very quickly I felt a shaft of something, maybe it was light, being thrown into my third eye and nailing that spot in the center of my brain. Outward from the site of impact surged such an incredible rush of energy that triggered my panic response. All the while the CEVs I was experiencing were a visualization of these feelings. The panic response hit hard and quick, I was reminded of my first NDE, and the quick thought entered my mind, 'Do you really want to risk it tonight?' and the answer was 'No.' I usually accept my own psyche's premonitions as valid. My psyche wants me to learn more about it, about the universe it is a part of, etc. But it would rather I breathe when I do so. At this point I started breathing normally again, and I have a good feeling that breathing was my body's main concern.

Overall, this and many other psychadellic or meditative experiences have changed my life. As a few side notes, my life's aspiration, is to in 8 years time become a neuropharmacologist. I hope to do much exploration in the fields that Dr. Shulgin has through his published works opened me up to. I dream of a day where Psychadellic Therapy can help some of the extremely troubled personas in this world, and even help a marriage here and there. But most importantly, I dream of the day where psychadellic use is accepted. Maybe our abusive and compulsive use of drugs is not so wrong, but maybe it has contributed to our society's views on drugs in general.

I hope someday that we can get past this, that we will all have had the pleasure to consume mushrooms, to love ourselves with MDMA, to experience our place in the universe with DMT, and through guided practice and meditation, we will all understand what we were meant to. 'The end of the human experiment.'

Immerse Your Soul in Love.

Exp Year: 2004ExpID: 48444
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 9, 2006Views: 18,657
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Meditation (128), Cannabis (1) : Various (28), Retrospective / Summary (11), Combinations (3)

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