How to activate the third eye

After a lifetime of disuse, most of us have some trouble getting our third eye or pineal gland to function because it is quite dormant. On top of that, a Western diet doesn’t do it any favours. The gland, which is at the base of the grail cup-shaped hypothalamus, can become calcified through us not getting enough D3 and K2 vitamins to manage our calcium properly. A lot of this chalky solution ends up in places where it shouldn’t be, such as coating our arteries as well as our pineal gland. Fluoride can also cover the third eye in a sort of thick white slime, coincidentally a similar consistency to toothpaste.

There are various dietary methods for descaling the third eye, but the most powerful way of all is just to activate it. Activation is easily achieved by creating the right conditions for our brains to produce their own, innate DMT, such as prolonged darkness, which is, at the same time, the perfect antidote to the light pollution most of us suffer from.

In darkness, our brains no longer produce the serotonin that we need to see during the day. Instead, it secretes melatonin which is converted into pinoline – the biochemical involved in the dreaming process. Pinoline triggers our own innate dimethyltryptamine, aka DMT. Thus no illegal drugs are necessary to create these conditions. We just need to be able to sit in the dark for long enough, and wait for the activation of our own organically-produced ‘magic lantern show’. And so the biggest challenge then is to find a way to do that.

In the early 2000s, I went on a darkness retreat. We sat in the pitch black dark for three days, gazing in rapturous delight at the most extraordinarily tripped-out psychedelic visions, and exploring enchanted landscapes that were lit by an inner sun under which phoenixes flew from branches high up in a world tree. A huge eye appeared at one point, gazing at me unblinkingly. It turned out to be attached to the scaly face and the torso of an enormous golden dragon. At another time, a most beautiful woman with the kindest twinkling eyes floated past my eyes; she looked Middle Eastern and I wondered if she was Ishtar.

I experienced floating through a vast gilded palace which appeared to be devoted to the experience of love, pleasure and ecstasy. A couple was making love on a luxurious couch very slowly and tenderly, as if conscious that Time knew he had no business interrupting to curtail such a sacred act.

Even with my wordsmith training, I find it very difficult to describe most of what I saw. It was beyond the beyond … utterly inspiring and enrapturing… but perhaps the stately pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan that Coleridge wrote about could be compared, albeit that his visions were opium-inspired.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

By the end of the second day of darkness, my mind had given up trying to label all that I was seeing, and I just merged and floated unquestioningly through it, with all my world-weariness left way behind.

But back to Earth, you might be wondering how we managed to physically remain in the dark for three days? Well, we were diligently waited upon by very kind and attentive people. We were brought food and drink, and guided to and from the bathroom, whenever we needed it. So to get these sorts of amenable conditions is not easy to achieve.

However, I have discovered since then that sitting in the darkness for just one day is also very effective and, if I set up the room carefully, with food and water within easy reach, I can soon be off again into the land of Kubla Khan.

So in the following exercise, I will teach you how to do that.

This was an extract from my new book, which will be out by autumn.