The Foundation Stone and the Spirit Molecule: Rabbi Joel Bakst in Conversation
In Hebrew it is called the Even haShetiya, the Foundation Stone. Picture a mound of rock at the summit of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. On that exact spot stood the Holy of Holies within the temple built by King Solomon, and resting there was the Ark of the Covenant, with two Cherubim perched above it. Around this stone a whole body of accounts gathered over the centuries, some of them reading like myth, legend, almost fantasy, all of them circling one idea: that the rock has something to do with human consciousness on a planetary scale.
The tradition piles story upon story at this one location. Adam and Eve were said to have been shaped from the earth here. Abraham is said to have come to pray at this place, and it was here, on the same mountain, that he bound Isaac. Jacob's dream belongs here too, the vision of a ladder reaching toward the heavens with angels going up and coming down, an image painters and illustrators have returned to thousands of times. And it was on this ground that Solomon raised the temple, following the design handed to him by his father, King David.
My own thread into all of this started about ten years ago in Taos, New Mexico. Someone there thought I should read a particular book, and when I did I was stunned. It was Dr. Rick Strassman's work on DMT, the so-called spirit molecule. One correspondence after another kept surfacing in my mind between the Foundation Stone in Jerusalem and the suggested function of the pineal gland inside the human body. As luck had it, Strassman happened to be a friend of the person who recommended the book, and he lived only a few blocks away. So I met Rick. A few years on he brought me into his documentary about DMT, and out of all of it came my own book, The Jerusalem Stone of Consciousness.
What came clear to me felt like a piece that had been missing: a way to read the purpose of Israel's inheritance in the world, the purpose of Jerusalem, and more precisely the Temple Mount and the stone itself. These days the Foundation Stone sits beneath a golden dome, the structure called the Dome of the Rock. People sometimes ask which rock that name points to. It points to this one. For all practical purposes the site is under Muslim control now, though the history remains plain enough: Solomon's first temple rose here, and roughly four centuries later the second temple stood on the same ground until the Romans destroyed it in the year 70. Whatever has happened above it, the stone is still the stone. The Hebrew prophets wrote about it, and in their writings it keeps turning up as central to where human consciousness is headed.