Rabbi Joel Bakst on the Pineal Gland, the Luz Bone, and the Hidden Dimensions of Torah
The pineal gland, in this view, is what links our dimension to a higher one. A quick clarification on the word higher: it doesn't mean somewhere above us, off in the sky. We reach for a three dimensional vocabulary because we have nothing better to describe something our ordinary senses can't reach. The other dimension is here, now. We're already inside it.
If that strikes you as fantasy or something lifted from a science fiction script, consider where physics has gone. Over recent decades, parallel dimensions have become part of the working structure of modern physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. String Theory and M Theory are familiar names to most people by now, and both rest on the premise that there are more dimensions than the ones we see or feel directly.
I locate this idea squarely within classical Torah, and specifically within what I've started calling Adamic Judaism. More on that term shortly. What I noticed is that the pineal gland, through its role in producing endogenous DMT, generates effects of a completely different and orderly kind. Almost everyone who encounters DMT reports the same thing, whether the source is Ayahuasca, some other external method, or the body's own internal production: they are not hallucinating. They have crossed into another domain.
From an Adamic Jewish standpoint, that domain has a place in the tradition. By Adamic Judaism I mean traditional, Orthodox Judaism, but laid over its own inner teachings, the esoteric soul housed inside the outer body of the Jewish legacy. That lineage runs back more than 3,200 years to Moses, further back to Abraham, back to Noah, and back to Enoch, the seventh generation from Adam, who has his own part to play in this picture.
The model itself is straightforward. If a single center in our physiology can take charge of channeling and regulating consciousness, and that center influences the whole body, then we have a way to approach the role of the Foundation Stone in Jerusalem. The Foundation Stone functions as a vortex. To the eye it now looks like nothing more than dead rock, but appearances settle nothing. We can clone animals from material that is, for every practical purpose, as good as dead, as long as the right constituents remain inside it. So what counts as dead at that point?
There is a tradition carried in many places across Judaism, in the Talmud, in the teachings handed down through the generations, and in the later Kabbalists, concerning a bone, a substance called Luz, spelled L-U-Z. The word is suggestive: in Latin and Spanish usage, Luz means light. In the sources it also names a very mysterious ancient city, the city of Luz, which was said to hold strange properties of its own.
To compress a long, winding, and endlessly interesting story: Luz, by my own research, is the word the prophets and sages reached for to point at the pineal gland and at what it is able to produce, Dimethyltryptamine.