ACQUIRINGFIRST-HANDKNOWLEDGE 473
THE PITUITARY BODY AND THE PINEAL GLANDIn the brain, and in approximately the positions shown
in diagram 17, are two small organs called the pituitary body
and the pineal gland. Medical science knows but little about
these, or the other ductless glands of the body. It calls the
pineal gland “the atrophied third eye,” yet neither it nor the
pituitary body are atrophying. This is very perplexing to
scientists, for nature retains nothing useless. All over the
body we find organs which are either atrophying or
developing, the former being milestones, as it were, along
the path which man has traveled to reach his present stage of
development, the latter pointing out the lines for future
improvement and development. For instance, the muscles
which animals use to move the ears are present in man also,
but as they are atrophying, few people can use them. The
heart belongs to the class indicating future development; as
already shown, it is becoming a voluntary muscle.
The pituitary body and the pineal gland belong to still
another class of organs, which at the present time are neither
evolving nor degenerating, but are dormant. In the far past,
when man was in touch with the “inner” Worlds, these
organs were his means of ingress thereto, and they will again
serve that purpose at a later stage. They were connected with
the involuntary or sympathetic nervous system. Man then
saw the inner Worlds, as in the Moon Period and the latter
part of the Lemurian and early Atlantean Epochs. Pictures
presented themselves quite independent of his will. The
sense centers of his desire body were spinning around
counter-clockwise (following negatively the motion of the
Earth, which revolves on its axis in that direction) as the
sense centers of “mediums” do to this day. In most people