Rabbi Joel Bakst on the Pineal Gland, DMT, and the Prophetic Interface
Read the prophets closely and they describe something specific: a liquid. The Hebrew phrase is Mayim Chayim. Mayim means water, but it also carries the sense of a living fluid, something that pours out and spreads from a single source, a kind of vortex. The prophets speak of this living liquid flowing out from that center and reaching into global consciousness. In their vision it completes what Moses began and what every stage after him pointed toward: one shared awareness across all of humanity.
So what did studying the pineal gland actually give me? Start with the caution. This remains a scientific hypothesis, and I want to be honest about that. The circumstantial evidence is strong, though, and my own expectation is that hard, undeniable proof is only a matter of time. The claim is that the pineal gland, along with cells throughout the body, produces the neurotransmitter and hormone dimethyltryptamine, and that under particular conditions it can release a large quantity of DMT. That surge is what opens the doorway, the portal if you like, between this dimension and ones above it.
The overlaps between the tradition and the biology are hard to shrug off. In many systems the body is mapped by centers, and which centers you name depends on the geometry you choose. The navel is a center. So is the solar plexus. So is the heart. The pineal gland is a center too. Look at a person from the front and the pineal seems oddly placed, too high up; surely the center belongs in the heart or the gut. But the question is less about what you are looking at and more about where you are looking from. Shift to an overhead view, straight down, and the pineal gland sits not only in the middle of the brain but in the middle of the entire body.
Rick's research, and the work of plenty of others, suggests the pineal may carry the deepest responsibility for consciousness itself. The idea is that the soul passes in and out through this gateway, and that the pineal drives our dreaming. His newest book takes up that thread directly. It treats the role of endogenous DMT inside the mechanism of what gets called Biblical Prophecy, the way a bridge might form between our ordinary three-dimensional world and something beyond it.
For the sake of simplicity, call that beyond a fourth spatial dimension rather than time. All of traditional Judaism rests on this premise, and it comes before any discussion of God: we assume there are more dimensions present than the ones we perceive. Not merely length and width, nor only the three we move through, but a fourth as well. When I say 4D, four-dimensional, four-directional, that higher dimension is exactly what I mean.