Well, if you're dead, I assume that protects you from psychic attack.

Another article I read indicated an extremely high incidence of cancer in persons who had been inflicted with a pinealectomy. Seems there's a link between numerous cancers and Melotonin - I mean that higher levels of M tend to pair with lower incidence of cancer. That was very interesting.

Also, imaging studies show a marked increase of heat/bloodflow in the pineal gland during meditation. Found that very interesting as well.

Also, those who practice/follow Kundalini focus their chi to balance between the pituitary and the pineal. In Chinese medicine, the kidneys are the powerhouse of the body because they have the highest bloodflow among glands. The pineal is second behind the kidneys. According to a couple different articles I read.

Also, the pineal is gaining more attention in relation to mental illness - especially schizophrenia.

Fascinating stuff! Thanks for the link and info.

I disbelieve in coincidence as arbitrary/random/purposeless. I believe in powers of the mind because I have experienced them repeatedly myself and witnessed them repeatedly in others. In my estimation it is more related to animal instinct than anything like magic. It's a matter of being open to subtle energies. Being animals of a higher order, why is it we lack the simple facility to sense coming danger such as earthquakes? We lack the facility because it is trained out of us.  Because we are trained to distrust instinct and intuition. Almost all psychic phenomena I've encountered have been directly linked to intuitive intelligence and the development of such through meditation, concentration, and visualization. It's mostly a matter of people either ignoring their senses or rationalizing them.

As for the idea of psychic attack . . . I only give it a little credence because someone close to me has bipolar disease, and any time he's manic and within about 100 yards of me I can feel his mania like too much static in the air. And if he gets angry at me, I can feel that as though he were flicking me in the temple repeatedly - physical pain inflicted by psychic distress. And all the disbelief I can muster only changes the interpretation of the event, not the event itself.

This was a fascinating subject to research (in the literary sense, not the scientific). Evidently, the pineal gland can be removed without killing the patient. However, it tends to have a great many negative and often devastating side-effects. It comes up a great deal in schizophrenia. It is suggested as a causal gland involved in both transcendence and madness, hallucination and vision (fine line?).

A century ago it was believed to be about as useful as the tonsils or appendix. Now it is quite respected as a vital gland operationally responsible for circadian rhythms. That makes it a major factor in SAD (something to look into if you have seasonal blues).

And lots more.

Rob,

I love this discussion. Thanks for chiming in.

Those 'ghosts' are something I think Rick Jarrow refers to as 'wrathful deities'. In some forms of Buhddism, they teach mendicants to either block them out by 'inflating' their own auras, or for the more advanced to embrace them in complete compassion. Numerous esoteric schools of thought agree with your assessment that they feed on the strongest, most accessible energies. Consequently, such spirits tend to gather around those with a great deal of psychic energy according to the nature of that energy. Thus a person who is filled with compassion is often surrounded by beneficent spirits, and a person full of rage and hatred is surrounded by 'demons' or wrathful spirits. Unfortunately for the latter, these relationships often amount to a psychic feedback loop. And these a bear to break! And the matter of feedback loops brings us back to the pineal gland . . . As with the entirety of the brain, the pineal is subject to the chemical play of emotions. A constant barrage of negative emotions tends to lead to either depression or mania, the main difference being whether the rage or grief is projected inward or externalized. So this brings up for me the question of whether the above two feedback loops describe the same phenomenon from different perspectives, whether the first is an ignorant superstition to describe the latter, or whether each describes a different aspect of an inextricable pair of parallel phenomena.