Third Eye

The Third Eye (also known as the "Eye of Siva") is proposed to be an invisible eye which provides perception beyond ordinary sight. In Hinduism the third eye refers to the ajna chakra. Mme Blavatsky said that the third eye is the partially dormant pineal gland, which resides between the two hemispheres of the brain. The third eye is often associated with religious visions, clairvoyance, precognition, etc.

General description

References to this eye can be found in the Greek legends of the giant one-eyed Cyclops, as well as the mystical "Eye of Siva" represented in Hindu statues of gods endowed with four arms as an eye in the middle of the forehead. This, accoding to Mme. Blavatsky, is a reminiscence of what realities in the early Root-Races:

There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females (androgynes), with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.

These early Root-Races, being on the descending arc of evolution, lost their psychic faculties as they became more and more material, personal, and sensual:

Spiritual and psychic involution proceeds on parallel lines with physical evolution . . . the inner senses--innate in the first human races--[were] atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses.

It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the cycle ran down toward that point when the physiological senses were developed by, and went pari passu with, the growth and consolidation of the physical man, the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development, that median “eye” ended by atrophying along with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man.

The "eye of Siva" did not become entirely atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the deva-man of the Third had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the eye lost its powers. But such was the law of Evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, no FALL. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but in misusing them; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a god, the fane of every spiritual iniquity. And if we say “sin” it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning; as the term Karma would be the right one to use in this case; while the reader who would feel perplexed at the use of the term "spiritual" instead of "physical" iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the psychic, if not of the "Spiritual man." While in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual being which sinned, the Spirit element being still the "Master" principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.

Pineal gland

The first written record of the pineal gland was by Greek physician Herophilus in the third century B.C.E. The name comes from the Latin pineus, meaning that it is shaped like a pinecone. This organ, the size of a grain of rice, lies deep within the human brain at its geometrical center, and has been a mystery for nearly two thousand years. Interestingly, it is the only part of the brain that isn’t divided into two hemispheres. Awareness of the pineal gland grew when Rene Descartes, in the seventeenth century, proposed that the only singleton organ in the brain was responsible for generating thoughts. He also postulated a direct connection between the pineal gland and our eyes, claiming that the pineal was the chief interpreter of vision. Descartes proposed that the pineal was the "seat of the soul" and was the meeting place of the physical and spiritual. The human pineal gland is not actually part of the brain. It develops from specialized tissues in the roof of the fetal mouth. From there it migrates to the center of the brain where is has the easiest contact with the brain’s perceptual and emotional centers.

According to Mme. Blavatsky the pineal gland was the organ of vision in animals which became inactive, something accepted by modern Science:

In the beginning, every class and family of living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal, whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their coats of skin, viz., to evolve from within without the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the third eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes developed later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrata, in our day, i.e., beneath an opaque skin. Only the stages of the odd, or primeval eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the “Cyclopean” eye was, and still is, in man the organ of spiritual sight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by nature for further use in Æons to come.

Mme. Blavatsky wrote that the pineal gland "is in truth the very seat of the highest and divinest consciousness in man, his omniscient, spiritual and all-embracing mind".

Pituitary gland

The pituitary gland, or hypophysis in vertebrate anatomy is an endocrine gland (known as the "master" endocrine gland). In humans it is about the size of a pea and weighs 0.5 g (0.02 oz.). It is a protrusion off the bottom of the hypothalamus at the base of the brain, and rests in a small, bony cavity. This gland secretes nine hormones that regulate homeostasis.

According to H. P. Blavatsky this gland has an important role from an esoteric point of view:

There are seven cavities in the Brain . . . These cavities are called in Occultism the “Seven Harmonies,” the scale of the Divine Harmonies, and it is in these that visions must be reflected, if they are to remain in the Brain-memory. These are the parts of the Brain which receive impressions from the Heart, and enable the memory of the Heart to be impressed on the memory of the Brain.
The fourth of these cavities is the Pituitary Body, which corresponds with Manas-Antaskarana, the bridge to the Higher Intelligence; it contains various essences.

The Pituitary Body is the organ per se of the psychic plane. Pure psychic vision is caused by the molecular motion of this body, which is directly connected with the optic nerve, and thus affects the sight, and gives rise to hallucinations. Its motion may readily cause flashes of light, seen within the head, similar to those that may be obtained on pressing the eyeballs, and so causing molecular motion in the optic nerve. When molecular action is set up in the Pituitary Body these flashes are seen, and further action gives psychic vision, as similar motion in the Pineal Gland gives Spiritual Clairvoyance. Drunkenness and fever cause disorderly motion in the Pituitary Body, and so produce illusions of sight, visions, hallucinations. This body is sometimes so affected by drunkenness that it is paralyzed, and the strict forbiddance of alcoholic liquids to all students of Occultism turns on this effect which alcohol produces on the Pituitary Body and Pineal.

Online resources

Articles

• Pituitary Gland at Theosopedia
• The Eye of Shiva by the Avatar
• The Third Eye and Human Evolution by John Van Mater, Jr.
• Third Eye and Counting by Theosophy Watch
• Waking the Third Eye by Theosophy Watch

Videos

• Awakening the Third Eye by Felix Conradi