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.

In early Root-Races

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, according 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.

According to her, in these Root-Races the third eye was at the back of the head, its positioning on the forehead being an exoteric licence.

This eye served the double purpose of physical and spiritual vision. But 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, and the third eye retreated inside the skull:

A KALPA later (after the separation of the sexes) men having fallen into matter their spiritual vision became dim; and coordinately the third eye commenced to lose its power. . . . The third eye likewise, getting gradually PETRIFIED, soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair.

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 . . . 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.

This third eye, in its spiritual function, can be awakened by means of spiritual development and lessening the influence of the physical senses:

During the activity of the inner man (during trances and spiritual visions) the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it and regulates his action accordingly. . . . The undefiled Lanoo (disciple, chela) need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity (who is not chaste) will receive no help from the 'deva eye'.

This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection between abnormal, or Spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked, "Why should celibacy and chastity be a sine quâ non rule and condition of regular chelaship, or the development of psychic and occult powers?" . . . During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation.

Pineal gland

Mme. Blavatsky identified the now inactive third eye with the pineal gland:

The third eye is dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the 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. This seemingly useless appendage is the pendulum which, once the clock-work of the inner man is wound up, carries the spiritual vision of the EGO to the highest planes of perception, where the horizon open before it becomes almost infinite. . .".

Relationship to other organs

Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the medulla oblongata, reacts powerfully on the pineal gland, for, owing to the number of “centres” in that region, which controls by far the greater majority of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, there must be exerted a very powerful “inductive” action by the medulla on the pineal gland.

The medulla oblongata connects the higher levels of the brain to the spinal cord. It is also responsible for regulating several basic functions of the autonomic nervous system which include: respiration, cardiac center (sympathetic and parasympathetic system), vasomotor center, and reflex centers of vomiting, coughing, sneezing, and swallowing.

Chakras

In Hinduism the ājñā chakra, the subtle center located at the eyebrow region, is traditionally considered as the Third Eye. However, neither its position nor its functions agree with the Theosophical view of the Third Eye. C. W. Leadbeater connected the "brow chakra" with the pituitary gland and not with the pineal, which he connected to the seventh chakra, called Sahasrāra in Hinduism. He described the latter as follows:

The seventh centre, the coronal, at the top of the head, is when stirred into full activity the most resplendent of all, full of indescribable chromatic, effects and vibrating with almost incon­ceivable rapidity. It seems to contain all sorts of prismatic hues, but is on the whole predominantly violet. It is described in Indian books as thousand-petalled, and really this is not very far from the truth, the number of the radiations of its primary force in the outer circle being nine hundred and sixty.

. . .

This chakra is usually the last to be awakened. In the beginning it is the same size as the others, but as the man progresses on the Path of spiritual advance­ment it increases steadily until it covers almost the whole top of the head. Another peculiarity attends its development. It is at first a depression in the etheric body, as are all the other, because through it, as through them, the divine force flows in from without; but when the man realizes his position as a king of the divine light, dispensing largesse to all around him, this chakra reverses itself, turning as it were inside out; it is no longer a channel of reception but of radiation, no longer a depression but a promi­nence, standing out from the head as a dome, a veritable crown of glory.

Regarding its function, he wrote:

When the seventh centre is quickened, the man is able by passing through it to leave his body in full consciousness, and also to return to it without the usual break, so that his consciousness will be continuous through night and day. When the fire has been passed through all these centres in a certain order (which varies for different types of people) the con­sciousness becomes continuous up to the entry into the heaven-world at the end of the life on the astral plane, no difference being made by either the temporary separation from the physical body during sleep or the permanent division at death.

Online resources

Articles

• Pituitary Gland at Theosopedia
• The Eye of Shiva by the Avatar
• The Races with the “Third Eye.” by H. P. Blavatsky
• 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