Third Eye Opening

The Third Eye — ājñā cakra in the Sanskrit chakra tradition, sometimes anglicised as the sixth chakra or brow chakra — is a symbolic and phenomenological centre of perception located at the forehead between and slightly above the physical eyes. Its 'opening' is a widely-reported experience in visionary and meditative practice: a sudden, often intense sensation of pressure, energy, or 'seeing' at the centre of the forehead, accompanied by an expansion of perceptual capacity that experiencers commonly describe as an additional mode of sight — one that operates on interior or subtle-body phenomena rather than on the external world.

The concept has ancient roots in the Indian tantric traditions and in Hindu iconography (Shiva is traditionally depicted with a third eye that, when opened, destroys the world). Buddhist iconography of the Buddha and bodhisattvas often includes the ūrṇā — a curl of hair or gemstone at the forehead — considered a mark of the third eye. Egyptian iconography's Eye of Horus (wedjat) has been interpreted by some scholars as a related symbol. Theosophical and later New Age writings identified the third eye with the pineal gland, an association that has been reinforced by the discovery of the pineal's photoreceptive origins in evolutionary biology.

The phenomenology of third-eye opening in contemporary experience is quite specific: a distinct pressure or tingling at the forehead, often with a felt sense of internal 'looking upward and inward,' sometimes accompanied by internal light-perception, geometric patterns visible with eyes closed, and (in the deeper presentations) the sense of a genuine new perceptual channel becoming available. It is one of the most-reported specific bodily signatures of psychedelic experience, and is widely reported by meditators as arising spontaneously at certain thresholds of concentration practice.

Whether the third eye names an actual functional structure of the subtle body, a distinctive somatic sensation with anatomical correlates in the forehead and pineal region, or a specific archetypal pattern of interior attention, is one of the open questions the codex holds. What is unambiguous is that the phenomenology is widely and consistently reported, and that traditions with careful phenomenological vocabularies (Tibetan Vajrayāna, Kashmir Shaivism, Sufi latā'if) have all developed sophisticated maps of it.

Sources:
Wikipedia — Third eye
Wikipedia — Ajna