Creativity's Third Eye: DMT and the Neurochemistry of Inspiration

Anatomizing the Muse: The Bodily Underpinnings of Creativity, Part One

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today I pose a question in the hope that attempting to answer it will prove both fruitful and fascinating. Or rather, it has already proved to be both of these in my own experience. Now I’m hoping it will appeal to you as well. The project draws on and updates some of my previous writing and research from years past—though this material has not been publicly available anywhere for more than a decade—and it pushes my, or rather our, ongoing consideration of creativity and the daemon muse in a bit of a different direction. In terms of form, it takes a more heavily researched and footnoted approach than what I have typically published here. In terms of length, it will spill across more than one post—certainly two, and maybe three.

The question to be pursued is this: When we feel as if we are being guided and inspired in our creative work by an independent, external force or presence, what’s going on in our bodies, and more specifically, in our brains? What are the physical, neurological aspects of the experience of the daemon muse? And how does looking into this contribute to answering, or at least informing, the question of creativity’s ontological status and point of origin in our lives?

It was some fifteen years ago, around 2009 and 2010, while I was researching and writing the essays that I published at my now retired blog Demon Muse, that I first became interested in this subject. Most of those essays ended up in my book A Course in Demonic Creativity. One that did not was titled “In Search of Higher Intelligence.” It examined the interlinked experiences of Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson, whose collective lives spanned nearly 140 years, and who each in his own way experienced what felt like psychic contact with a separate, non-ordinary intelligence.¹

Though that essay didn’t focus on the neurological aspect of non-ordinary communication or creativity as such, it’s a fact that Crowley, Leary, and Wilson were all deeply interested in the workings of the human brain. In fact, the veritable explosion of new interest over the past couple of decades in what are now commonly called the “neural correlates of consciousness”—the brain states corresponding to subjective experiences—directly fulfills Wilson’s oft-expressed wish for a widespread cultural recognition of our real epistemological predicament vis-à-vis the neural basis of all our knowledge, which, he maintained, is an aggregation of impressionistic takes on a wildly rich and diverse primary reality by a multiplicity of nervous systems that experience fundamentally different worlds because they are “tuned” to different experiential wavelengths. For Wilson, as well as for Leary and Crowley, the matter of creative inspiration and the question of its neurological component were inseparable. So I think it was writing about these three men and their experiences of perceived supernatural or preternatural guidance and communication that originally ignited my interest in this topic.

What are the neurological aspects of the experience of the daemon muse? And how does this contribute to the interesting question of creativity’s ontological status and point of origin in our lives?

Consider the whole inquiry a sustained thought experiment, if you like, an attempt to pursue a line of thought in search of an answer to a question that—note well—may ultimately be unanswerable. It may even be inaptly posed. The real value may lie not in any hard and fast answer to be gained, but in the mere fact of the investigation itself, in the sparks of interesting ideas that fly up from this flame to singe our faces with provocative intimations of new angles on the mysterious other to whom we are subjectively joined in our inner lives and creative pursuits.

To restate, what I am basically asking here is 1) whether and where the muse experience might be located in the brain, and 2) how researching and thinking about this might contribute to our understanding of what this experience of muse-like inspiration “really is.” There is also 3) the question of how, if at all, such perspective might provide us with practical and/or philosophical enhancements to our creative lives.

Several possibilities for a biological seat of the muse in the brain commend themselves immediately to our attention. Some of them involve the new knowledge made available to us by the two technologies propelling today’s functional neuroimaging wave, positron emission tomography (PET) scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Others hail from different lines of inquiry. Collectively, they provide multiple “lenses” through which to focus our question and gain a multipoint perspective on it.

THIRD EYES AND ALIEN ENTITIES: The Mystery of DMT and the Pineal Gland

1. The mind’s eye

The first biological/neurological lens we will employ is the pineal gland, a pea-sized structure located deep within the brain that was determined in the mid-twentieth century to help regulate our circadian sleep/wake cycle by secreting melatonin. Prior to that, nobody knew what it really did, but speculation ran rampant for more than two millennia. In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek physician Herophilus examined the pineal while dissecting corpses and speculated that it was involved in the functioning of the soul. Two thousand years later, the 17th-century philosopher Descartes famously declared it “the seat of the soul,” the physical point where mind and matter are joined together, and from whence the former exercises control over the latter.²

Two centuries after that, the first real scientific findings about the pineal gland’s nature and function had the ironic effect of providing fuel for further mystical and metaphysical speculation. Based on the observation that we share this organ with other animals, including not just mammals but creatures of an older evolutionary age, such as amphibians and lizards, whose pineal gland is linked to a functional third eye called the dorsal or parietal eye (located on top of the head between the two main eyes), several scientists in the late nineteenth century began to conjecture that the human pineal gland is a vestigial dorsal eye or third eye of its own, a relic of our phylogenetic history. This was immediately pounced upon by esoteric philosophers, including, most notably, Madame Blavatsky, the formidable head of the Theosophical movement, who declared that it provided scientific evidence of the reality of the mystical third eye or “Eye of Shiva.”

Today the idea of the pineal gland as a vestigial eye is an accepted part of evolutionary biology, even as it has also become almost universally embraced among occult and esoteric thinkers for its spiritual third-eye resonance. Witness this typical passage from a 2003 publication by the Theosophical Society:

The mind and senses are paths for occult energies that work through various psychophysical centers or chakras, among the highest of which is the pineal gland. These centers continue to develop as we evolve towards spirit. So while the third eye or pineal gland has certain physiological activities in conjunction with the pituitary gland—together they regulate the rhythms of metabolism and growth—it is also the physical organ of intuition, inspiration, spiritual vision, and divine thought.³

On a less mystical but no less philosophically and emotionally evocative note, the renowned twentieth-century French writer George Batailles famously thought that, in the words of the American philosopher David Farrell Krell,

the cardinal phylogenetic fact in the development of the human species…is its vestigial unpaired eye....Both sense organ and gland, both harbinger of light and remnant of inner darkness, the pineal eye is for Bataille the birthmark of human futility and fatality. It is the fleshy symbol of a hapless, hopeless struggle against animality and the earth, of a vain attempt to reach the heights of the open sky.⁴

So what is it about this ostensibly unassuming component of the human endocrine system that has inspired such interest and speculation? The clinical research psychiatrist Rick Strassman explains the matter concisely in his groundbreaking book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. As it turns out, one thing that draws attention to the pineal gland is the simple fact of its anatomical singularity in the human brain, the unpaired quality that Bataille referred to:

The pineal gland is unique in its solitary status within the brain. All other brain sites are paired, meaning they have left and right counterparts; for example, there are left and right frontal lobes and left and right temporal lobes. As the only unpaired organ deep within the brain, the pineal gland remained an anatomical curiosity for nearly two thousand years. No one in the West had any idea what its function was.⁵

Endocrinologist and chronobiologist Josephine Arendt gets at the same thing when she begins her Melatonin and the Mammalian Pineal Gland by referring rather lyrically to “the pineal gland, the mysterious unpaired organ of the brain, the ‘third eye’, the seat of the soul, a ‘calcified vestigial organ with no function’, subject of medical jokes.”⁶ The New World Encyclopedia likewise conveys much the same point: “The pineal gland was the last endocrine gland to have its function discovered. This combination led to its being a ‘mystery’ gland with myth, superstition, and even metaphysical theories surrounding its perceived function.”⁷

2. The spirit molecule

Most pointedly for our own specific interests, in the 1990s the pineal gland was implicated in fascinating research involving the psychedelic substance DMT and its tendency to produce experiences of being visited by angels, demons, aliens, and other paranormal presences with a distinct first-cousin relationship to the muse, daimon, and genius. This research was conducted by the aforementioned Rick Strassman. Beginning in 1990, Strassman conducted the first DEA-approved research into the effects of psychedelics on test subjects in over two decades. He then wrote DMT: The Spirit Molecule, published in 2001, from his findings and reflections.

In the book he describes how the deep origins of the project involved both the pineal gland and the question of creativity. He was an undergraduate at Stanford when he was alerted to the possible spiritual significance of the pineal by the pioneering transpersonal psychologist James Fadiman, who explained to Strassman that one of his jobs was to help engineers learn to think creatively. “Little did I know,” writes Strassman,

that Jim had worked with Willis Harman, who was administering psychedelic drugs in an attempt to enhance creativity, at a nearby research institute. The published results of this work, over thirty years old, remains [sic] the only such data in the literature and showed great potential for stimulating the creative process.⁸