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

Anatomizing the Daemon - 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

For Strassman, this all ignited an enduring interest in the pineal gland, and he approached his later DMT research under the guiding hypothesis, based on highly suggestive but inconclusive biochemical evidence, that DMT, which is produced endogenously—that is, naturally, internally—by the human body, and which can also be found throughout nature in plants and animals of all kinds, occurs with a particularly psychoactive relevance in the pineal gland, from whence it is responsible for spiritual and mystical experiences like those seen in religious visions, enlightenment experiences, and near-death experiences. In other words, he hypothesized that the pineal gland is the “spirit gland,” the biological locus of spiritual experience. The resonance of this idea with the long-enduring “third eye” notion is obvious.

Strassman’s research consisted of injecting sixty volunteers with DMT and carefully documenting the results. One of the most common reports to emerge from these sessions was the experience of being subjectively propelled into what felt like other-dimensional encounters with independent, objectively existing “others,” entities that appeared variously as clowns, elves, aliens, angels, demons, robots, and insectoid creatures. These beings wanted to interact, communicate, and sometimes even assault the experiencer.

Both Strassman’s descriptions of these phenomena and those of his research subjects, who not only conversed with him during and after their DMT sessions but composed written accounts of their experiences, are replete with tantalizing hints of muse-like elements. “[M]ost curiously,” Strassman writes,

there was a feeling of “the other” somewhere within the hallucinatory world to which this remarkable psychedelic allowed them entrance....Beyond their own loss of control, some volunteers felt another “intelligence” or “force” directing their minds in an interactive manner. This was especially common in cases of contact with “beings”....Also surprising were the common themes of what these beings were doing with so many of our volunteers: manipulating, communicating, showing, helping, questioning. It was definitely a two-way street.⁹

In a follow-up conversation with Strassman about the long-term effect of the sessions, a volunteer named Aaron said, “I’ve found that the DMT experience intensified verbal, visual, and musical abilities.” A volunteer named Rex said, “I’ve had more creative urges, and I’ve been writing more....I have written some poems of the Other. Many were written before, but some after getting started in the study.” Perhaps most pointedly, a volunteer named Nils said his first experience with DMT, which occurred a year before he got involved with Strassman’s research, produced a remarkably muse-like effect: “I became very excited as an inner voice spoke to me. This was my intuition directly relating to me. It was the most intense experience of my life.”¹⁰

It is obviously only a short step, if indeed it’s a step at all, from the experiences described here to the related experience of communication with an inspiring and motivating daimon, muse, or genius, which similarly arrives from an invisible “hyperspace” and feels like an autonomous, ego-alien force or presence that pushes, pulls, or otherwise influences a person’s actions and affect.

3. The divine channel

Back when I was first learning about all of these things in the aughts and 2010’s, I read Strassman’s book and came away hungry for more information about his thoughts on the relationship between the DMT experience and creative inspiration. So I wrote to him. This was in June of 2011, and I was pleased to find him quite accessible and willing to answer my questions.

When I asked him about any experiences with a specifically muse-like presence that emerged from his research, he told me that none of his test subjects encountered “a specific entity that said ‘do this’ or ‘do that,’ although people felt inspired, either over the short or long term, to effect changes in their creative lives.” He said that when he performed some informal follow-up interviews with a few test subjects for the 2010 documentary film that was made from his book, some of them did describe “changes of interest” that indicated a kind of creative leading:

For example, someone began writing fiction based upon her experiences, which had led her to Peru and an investigation of some of the ayahuasca culture there. Someone else, a physician, changed specialties from family practice to a more obstetrics based practice because of some of his visions on DMT.  Another volunteer was inspired to begin training as a body-therapist, but I don’t know if she followed-up in that regard.

He also described a creative impact on his own life and work: “Indirectly, my path changed course, as I’m less interested in the biology now than I used to be, and more interested in the spiritual meaning/message of the DMT effects.”

Of particular significance for our present consideration of the pineal gland in relation to the muse is a new focus that entered Strassman’s thought subsequent to his seminal DMT research project: the relationship between the DMT experience and the state of consciousness that produced the Hebrew Bible. Like the Christian New Testament, the Hebrew scriptural texts are commonly described as “inspired,” referring not only to their content but to their mode of origin. And whereas in DMT: The Spirit Molecule Strassman drew on ideas from theoretical physics, Buddhism, and shamanism to speculate about the nature and meaning of DMT realms and entities, when I spoke to him in 2011 he said he was inclined to think that “the Old Testament model of prophetic states seems like a good one to explicate the DMT effect,” since these states “resemble, to a certain degree, DMT effects, suggesting a common underlying biology.” He was at that time writing a book on this subject. As he described it to me, his focus was mainly on the possible value of this insight for gaining a better interpretive and even experiential grasp on the Hebrew scriptures: “Since the prophetic state inspired the Old Testament text, this overlapping biology may suggest that psychedelic states, to the extent they resemble prophetic ones, could facilitate a deeper resonance with the text.”

Strassman’s book was published in 2014 as DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible. Receiving praise from the likes of Jeffrey Kripal and James Fadiman, it presented, as Strassman announced in the introduction, “a new scientific model for spiritual experience that bridges the Hebrew Bible and contemporary psychiatry.”¹¹ Cleverly inverting the trendy modern term “neurotheology,” Strassman called his model “theoneurology,” explaining that whereas “neurotheology proposes that the brain generates spiritual experience…the theoneurological approach asserts instead that the brain is the agent through which God communicates with humans.”¹² Clearly, this notion has significant resonances with our purpose at hand—which, again, is to investigate the speculative idea that perhaps the pineal gland, by means of endogenous DMT, is a biological locus of the muse, the experience of inspired creativity.

4. The unresolved enigma

In the interest of factual accuracy, it’s important to remember that the pineal gland’s production of DMT is still awaiting experimental proof or disproof, although Strassman told me that recent evidence—recent as of my conversation with him in 2011, that is—continues to suggest the distinct possibility that it really does happen.¹³ Today, thirteen years after he said that, the situation remains essentially unchanged, with research continuing to produce provocatively suggestive but maddeningly inconclusive results.¹⁴ However, if Strassman’s pineal-DMT idea should prove to be true, this would strongly implicate the pineal gland in the muse experience.

This is especially so in the context of things like psychologist Benny Shanon’s description of the creativity-enhancing effects of DMT, which he witnessed and personally experienced in conjunction with ayahuasca. The visionary state brought about by ayahuasca is, he says, “a time of grace during which ordinary human beings can…be like dancers or musicians when the Muses descend upon them.”¹⁵ In his book Antipodes of the Mind, Shanon describes a state of muse-like empowerment that came upon him once when he drank ayahuasca and played the piano:

In an amateur fashion, I have been playing the piano since childhood. I have played only classical music, always from the score, never improvising. . . . Once during a private Ayahuasca session, I saw the piano in front of me. A score of a Bach prelude was there. I played the piece repeatedly and felt I was entering into a trance. Then, I left the score aside and began to improvise. I played for more than an hour, and the manner of my playing was different from anything I have ever experienced. It was executed in one unfaltering flow, constituting an ongoing narration that was composed as it was being executed. It appeared that my fingers just knew where to go. Throughout this act, my technical performance astounded me. At times, I felt that a force was upon me and that I was performing at its command.¹⁶

Shanon says a friend who witnessed this performance later said it truly seemed as if he had been infused with the power of the muses.

One may of course argue that this serves not as evidence of the pineal gland’s muse-like function, or of anything else, for that matter, other than the psychological and psychedelic effects of ingesting a DMT-laden substance. But again, if Strassman’s hypothesis is true, and the pineal gland does produce DMT that becomes psychoactive at certain life junctures, then the connection is drawn.

To summarize: The deep source of creativity truly feels to the ego like an independent and autonomous intelligence, force, or presence. Since the pineal gland may be centrally involved in the production of entity encounters, dreams, visions, and other experiences that display the same quality of intra-psychic autonomy as, and that stand as first cousins to, the muse experience, and since psychedelics in general, including DMT, are so deeply associated with the stimulation of creativity, the pineal gland is worth considering as a possible biological locus of the muse.¹⁷

NEXT TIME: In the next entry in this series, I will delve into the life and thought of the late British psychologist, author, and paranormal theorist Stan Gooch, who famously developed a theory that located the human visionary unconscious, which Gooch held to be responsible for such things as dreams, paranormal phenomena, and creativity, in the cerebellum, the “second brain” that we all carry in the back of our head.

Warm regards,

1. “In Search of Higher Intelligence” is included in my essay collection What the Daemon Said. You can also find it in the 2013 book Daimonic Imagination, Uncanny Intelligence, edited by Angela Voss and William Rowlandson for Cambridge Scholars Publishing. It was also published in a 2012 issue of the academic journal Paranthropology.

2. For an easily accessible source of information about Descartes’s thoughts on the pineal gland, and also about the general history of scientific and esoteric speculation on the subject in general, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Descartes and the Pineal Gland” (accessed June 18, 2024).

3. John Van Mater, Jr., “The Third Eye and the Pineal Gland: Ancient Clue to Spiritual Man,” Sunrise, February/March 2003.

4. David Farrell Krell, Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body (Albany: NY State University of New York Press, 1997), 146 (Krell’s emphasis).

5. Rick Strassman, M.D., DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001), 59.

6. Josephine Arendt, Melatonin and the Mammalian Pineal Gland (London: Chapman and Hall, 1995), 1.

7. New World Encylcopedia, s.v. “Pineal gland” (accessed June 4, 2011).

8. Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 57. Regarding James Fadiman, you might find something of interest in an interview/conversation that I had with him some years ago, as it touches directly on themes of relevance to these matters of creativity, the daemon muse, and the ontology and metaphysics of human experience. See “Interview with James Fadiman: The Daemon and the Doors of Perception,” The Teeming Brain, November 14, 2014.

9. Ibid., 2, 149, 187.

10. Ibid., 270, 271, 8. In a rather remarkable reversal on these types of experiences, a thirty-six-year-old waiter and writer named Don found that “his transpersonal high-dose DMT sessions destabilized his world view so much that he stopped writing for the first time in years,” since his psychedelic confrontation with “the vast and impenetrable nature of the source of all existence” conflicted with his staunch Roman Catholicism and threw him into despair (273).

11. Rick Strassman M.D., DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2014), 3.

12. Ibid., 4.

13. Strassman told me, “Nicholas Cozzi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison submitted an abstract to this year’s Society of Neuroscience meeting in which he shows high activity of the DMT synthesizing enzyme in pineal, spinal cord, and retina. That abstract will be in their proceedings.” That abstract, by Nicholas V. Cozzi, Timur A. Mavlyutov, Michael A. Thompson, and Arnold E. Ruoho, is “Indolethylamine N-methyltransferase expression in primate nervous tissue,” Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, vol. 37, no. 840.19 (2011). Though it is a heavily technical piece that speaks mainly to fellow researchers in its field, the introduction contains the following statement that I feel like quoting because I like its incorporation of a fascinating humanistic element into an otherwise purely medical-scientific document: “DMT has been proposed to act as a neurotransmitter in humans and to be involved in psychosis, dreaming, near-death experiences, and spiritual exaltation.”

14. As recently as 2022, for example, Dr. Steven Barker, Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State University in the Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences at the School of Veterinary Medicine, published a paper in the scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience titled “N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an Endogenous Hallucinogen: Past, Present, and Future Research to Determine Its Role and Function.” It provides a historical overview of research into endogenous DMT, including its biosynthesis and role in the pineal gland, and presents suggestive but inconclusive evidence that adds up to a bottom line of “more research needed.” Still, Barker—who appeared in the documentary film counterpart to Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule—takes pains to emphasize the evocative nature of the subject, as in the following passage: “Over time, the observations of the hallucinogenic phenomena experienced following the administration of DMT have led to speculation that endogenous DMT is possibly involved in psychosis, normal attributes and experiences such as creativity, imagination and dream states, maintenance of waking reality, altered states of consciousness including religious and/or spiritual phenomena, and NDEs. Even more far reaching and ‘other worldly’ hypotheses have also been offered, suggesting that DMT, as well as other hallucinogens, may provide actual proof of and/or philosophical insights into many of our unanswered questions regarding extraordinary states of consciousness. Regardless of the level and cause of such speculation and hypotheses, it is only scientific research that can inform or refute such thinking.”

15. Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 366.

16. Ibid., 210–211.

17. A parting thought from Strassman’s and my conversation underscores the irreducible element of arbitrariness in all of these speculations: When I described my pineal-muse idea and asked for his gut reaction, he replied, “People seem to live normal lives without the pineal. And anyway, most endogenous DMT seems to derive from the lungs. Perhaps the lungs are the source of creativity more so than the pineal if you’re looking for a source of an endogenous psychedelic that stimulates creativity.  You know, the association between breath and spirit, ‘inspiration,’ and so on.”