Rabbi Joel Bakst on the Pineal Gland and the Tree of Life
Call it coincidence if you want, but for those of us inclined to see otherwise, nothing sits outside the divine. If everything exists within God, then there is no room for pure randomness. And even the things that look random turn out not to be. Modern deterministic chaos theory makes the same point from the other direction: what appears chaotic is still obeying a hidden pattern underneath.
Consider the term itself. The pineal gland carries, in Hebrew, an echo of Peniel or Penuel, which means the face or presence of God. El refers to God, or to anything of a higher dimensional order. Pene, or peni, is face. I picked up another detail from Rick's book worth sitting with: the pineal gland is the smallest organ in the body.
There is something stranger still about where it sits and how it is built. Located in the center of the brain, the pineal is the only organ there that is, morphologically, a single structure. Every other part of the brain comes paired. You see it plainly in the two hemispheres. Go looking at the pituitary, the thalamus, and the rest, and each has a right and a left. The cerebellum practically has a dotted line drawn down its middle, splitting it in two. Yet dead center, there is this tiny thing that is wholly singular. The only singular organ in the brain.
My own research, which I lay out at length in my book, treats this gland the way Rick develops it: as a vortex or portal between the physical and the spiritual. He gave us the phrase spirit molecule, the molecule itself being physical. Seen from a different angle entirely, the pineal looks like the last remaining trace of what tradition calls the tree of life. The rest of the body is dual, through and through. This one small organ is the only true singularity. Everything else falls under the tree of the knowledge of duality.
People usually render that phrase as the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I would push back. At this point in the cosmic order there is no evil yet. What we are really dealing with is duality. And even the duality behaves like the two prongs of a wishbone. Follow where they lead and they bring you back to one point, the singularity, which is the tree of life. Here is something most people never hear: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge are a single tree. That is traditional Judaism. It is not widely taught, but do the research and it becomes obvious on its own. The singularity has a remnant left in us, and that remnant is the pineal.
So the little gland is an essence. It is a fractal, a fractured fraction, a microcosm. Not the whole, clearly. But a single drop pulled from the ocean holds every constituent the ocean holds, all of it, even at that scale. That is the way we can borrow the language and the consciousness of fractal geometry to talk about it.