The Third Eye’s Bonus Side Effects
The third eye—let’s call it E3, because enlightenment sounds cooler if it sounds like a software update—has long been revered as the gateway to divine insight. Located just above and between the eyebrows (right where your sunglasses refuse to stay put), it’s said to be linked to the pineal gland and associated with everything from clairvoyance and heightened intuition to counting cards in casinos and channeling your cat’s emotions—especially when it stares at the wall for five hours.
Traditionally, opening E3 involved years of meditation, spiritual discipline, a guru who mistreated you, and giving up dairy; but in the age of apps for everything and attention spans measured in milliseconds, there’s a shortcut to enlightenment called microdosing–taking tiny, sub-perceptual hits of psychoactive substances. Also known as “spiritual tapas,” microdosing can allegedly open your third eye without all that inconvenient inner work. Some practitioners even report visions of ancient deities made of IKEA furniture, or the sudden ability to smell Wi-Fi.
Proceed with caution, however. There are spiritual party-poopers who insist that the third eye should open organically, like a haunted flower or a tax audit, not with the aid of a rolling machine or a vape pen. Forced activation, they warn, like prying open a “dead” mussel, can produce a cocktail of side effects: vivid nightmares, ED, cosmic anxiety, sleep disruption, projectile vomiting, uninvited astral projection, waking up mid-sentence in a language no one speaks, erratic behavior, and a sudden ability to detect lies with terrifying accuracy. Also, your friends might stop texting back.
E3, for most of us who do not dance in airports, is less an “awakening” and more like installing a mysterious firmware update from a sketchy source. You might unlock secret knowledge—but you also might start crying during insurance commercials, or compulsively whispering “I know your truth” to potted plants. Remember: just because your third eye is open doesn’t mean it’s happy to see you.
