How to Manage Dopamine and Other Feel-Good Chemicals Naturally 

How to Manage Dopamine and Other Feel-Good Chemicals Naturally 

[00:45] An Obsession With Control

Dopamine is a pivotal neurochemical neurotransmitter protein peptide, and it has more than one secretion site. Right in the core of the brain is a feature called the accumbens, which is one of the places that feeds on dopamine.

What’s wrong with all of this, from my perspective, is that old-fashioned saying of getting the cart in front of the horse—it’s the obsession that Western people have with control.

Rather than looking at dopamine as a product of human experience, people try to turn it into a source of human experience. So, let’s look at some of the functions of dopamine, and this is really just touching the tip of the iceberg.

When there is too much dopamine in someone, then we see in schizophrenic patients that there is an overabundance of dopamine, and the ability to conceptualize has gone off the scale. So when someone who is suffering from full-blown schizophrenia tends to have a tremendous amount of dopamine circulating in their system, dopamine exists not just in the brain, but all throughout the body. It’s all throughout the body. 

Too much dopamine means too much conceptualization, too much of an idea going into action without much discrimination. Too little dopamine, and we lose our ability to know what even the word “tomorrow” means.

So, for example, if a schizophrenic patient is given a particular drug that’s used to treat schizophrenia, it’s a very good drug by the way, it’s in the group of drugs known as phenothiazines, then what happens is it dries up their dopamine.

[02:53] Dopamine Should be Left Alone

And it’s a little bit like the old ways of doing cannon shots. You do a cannon shot from a ship, and the cannonball goes too high. You do the next cannonball shot from the ship, and it goes too low. And you adjust the cannon accordingly, and then hopefully, you’re on target on the third shot. Psychiatrists prescribing phenothiazine to regulate dopamine may not regulate it enough or may overregulate it. And if it’s overregulated, then another thing happens, which is Parkinson’s disease. In Parkinson’s disease, we see too little dopamine, drooling, and the tremor and all of the qualities of Parkinson’s. So a schizophrenic patient who is overmedicated with phenothiazine may have to take anti-Parkinsonian drugs to compensate for having too much of the cure.

So dopamine, too little of it, and we are Parkinsonian. Too much of it, and we are over-imaginative in a way where we lose our relevance socially. What’s the sweet spot? What’s the right amount of it?

Well, you can’t control it actually, and if you try to control it, you’re always going to get yourself in trouble. The idea that we can go into the human body and then begin regulating our dopamine in aid of getting certain desirable experiences is a fallacious approach and I would say, falls into the category of unsustainable approaches of life and living.

Dopamine should just be left alone, unless you’re schizophrenic. It should just be left alone.

When we practice Vedic Meditation, one of the things that happens is that there’s a normalization that occurs in the balanced release of all of these neurochemicals: dopamine, anandamide, a bliss chemical, serotonin, and an entire spectrum of chemicals that are very helpful to the body begin being regulated.

Too much of them, that is to say, if they’ve been overstimulated and too much is happening, then there’s a toning down. If there’s too little, then there’s a toning up. And getting the right cocktail, dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, DHEAS, is an anti-aging chemical, which, if you decide “I’m going to go to because the Food and Drug Administration or the equivalent in another country has approved it to be sold at Whole Foods, and so I’m going to go get some dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, some DHEAS, and start popping pills.”

[05:41] Scurvy: The Unintended Consequence of Vitamin C Supplements

Let me give you an example of something that happened long ago with vitamin C. In the late 60s and early 70s, mostly because of the work, the very legitimate work done by an old friend of mine, Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in the early 1970s for his work on the impact of ascorbic acid and calcium ascorbate, vitamin C roughly, on the human physiology and your immune status, people having no scientific understanding of what Linus Pauling was talking about just decided to go out and start buying vitamin C.

Let’s take tons of vitamin C. And so, 1,000 units of vitamin C in order for you to have 1,000 units of vitamin C, or in some cases I know people who took 40,000 units of vitamin C because they didn’t want to get a cold. Stand up to urinate or sit down if you’re a woman, and the urine is bright yellow. 

Why is that? It’s because it’s all going out of your system. You’re urinating it out. The body’s capacity to absorb it is limited. And so then the idea that “I’ll never have a cold again if I just take bottles and bottles of tablets of vitamin C” became popular until certain kinds of things began to be noticed.

So, for example, there is an illness which ancient mariners, sailors, used to suffer from called scurvy. Scurvy is vitamin C deprivation. And one of the reasons why a nickname for an English person is a limey, it was an old derogatory term for English people, limeys, is because English soldiers, sailors, excuse me, were frequently given limes while they were aboard long voyages so that they didn’t get scurvy, vitamin C deprivation. And very often they had the smell of lime all around their beards and things. They were called limeys. 

The amount of oranges or limes or lemons or other ascorbic acid-rich and dense foodstuffs that you’d have to eat to get those thousands of units of vitamin C in you would be equivalent to boxes of it. Boxes and boxes of fruit, which would roughly be the equivalent of a couple of tablets that you can buy at your local health food store.

What does it do to your body? It makes the body’s expectation for vitamin C go up dramatically, and when you don’t take your little vitamin C tablets, you end up getting scurvy.

In other words, scurvy began to reappear in the 1970s. People going into doctor’s offices with all the symptoms of scurvy. How are they getting scurvy? Well, they had ramped up their body’s expectation for calcium ascorbate, or ascorbic acid, vitamin C. And their body’s expectation for it had been made so unnaturally high that when they withdrew from it even slightly, their body started to show signs of vitamin C deprivation.

[09:05] It’s Better for You to De-Excite

You see, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You find out about dopamine and you find out that it stimulates the nucleus accumbens, which is the center core of the human brain, and that it’s your reward center, and that if you start figuring out how, rather than letting nature take its course, the human intellect takes over, and you begin applying or unapplying or doing things which are known to be dopamine-productive or things that are dopamine-reducing.

In other words, human intellect attempting to adjust on the basis of “I want to have a cool experience. So I want to have a cool experience of some kind. I’m going to start adjusting the neurochemicals.”

It’s better for you to de-excite. So what happens when you de-excite? You go into the state of least excitation during the practice of Vedic Meditation. The mind and the body settle down dramatically. The entire brain begins to de-excite, and in the least excited state, order increases.

This is the third law of thermodynamics. As you decrease excitation, you increase order. And then what happens in that least excited state, your body without the help of your human intellect, which by the way has no business trying to run the body, without the help of the human intellect, the body itself in that least excited state has the ability to examine carefully what it needs to do for itself. And it gets on with doing that.

This is why Vedic Meditation has such a powerful effect for a broad spectrum of physiological needs. If you happen to have too much dopamine, and you practice Vedic Meditation, the dopamine will be scaled down spontaneously by the fact of you practicing Vedic Meditation twice a day.

If you have too little dopamine, because of some other kind of physiological dysfunction or psychophysiological dysfunction, then the amount of dopamine will go up. The balance between dopamine and serotonin, anandamide, and half a dozen other neurochemicals and substrates of human experience, as I was saying, it’s not a singular molecule that we’re talking about.

[11:34] Active Ingredient Mentality

It’s a cocktail of molecules. It’s a recipe. We Westerners are very obsessed by active ingredient mentality. What’s the active ingredient? During World War I, there was a particular pharmacist who discovered that you could take the old remedy known as willow bark powder, and this is a powder made from the bark of a willow tree, and it was frequently used by people, put inside of a little piece of paper, powdered willow bark. Slide it into the mouth, drink it down with some water, and it had some desirable effects. It could bring down a fever, or it could resolve minor pain, or it could reduce inflammation in joints.

And there was a pharmacist who discovered what the active ingredient was: acetylsalicylic acid, a.k.a. aspirin. And aspirin was invented. And since it was wartime, and there was a lot of pain, aspirin suddenly became extremely popular. And aspirin in many ways is rightly heralded as being a miracle drug, because it’s very well known to thin the blood, and to reduce blood clots, and overcoagulation of internal blood.

But, it’s also an irritant. It’s also very hard on the kidneys. And, it can cause renal failure if you have too much of it. And so, aspirin taken for pain, for headaches, aspirin taken for various kinds of ailments, aspirin taken for de-coagulating the blood could be very helpful in reduction of clots in the blood in case people have cardiovascular blood clotting. This can be very helpful to thin the blood in that way.

But it also has another thing. It irritates the stomach lining and causes the stomach to bleed. And so if you take a couple of aspirins, in case you’re not in the habit of examining your poopoo, you have a look at your poopoo after you’ve taken some aspirin and you’ll notice that your stool is very dark.

What’s that darkness? It’s blood coming from your gut. And, so then, this active ingredient mentality, if you were to take willow bark powder, it has natural buffering agents in it, and it doesn’t cause bleeding. It has a lot of the other desirable effects, but doesn’t cause bleeding.

So what is the active ingredient mentality? “I want the active ingredient.” This is the Western mentality. It’s an addictive mentality that is a classic Western way of thinking about the world and what it is that’s desirable.

[14:22] Undesirable Effects

I want the active ingredient. What is it? Forget about willow bark. That’s too hard. You know, you grind up willow bark into a powder and swallow that with some water. Just give me the tablet. I want the active ingredient. And then you get the side effects. These are not really side effects. These are the effects of aspirin. These are the effects. We call them side effects, meaning undesirable effects, but they’re in fact the effects of aspirin.

Well, let’s look at how we’ve applied active ingredient mentality to all kinds of other things. “I don’t want a relationship. I just want sex. So why should I bother with having to clean up after somebody else’s toothbrush mess in front of my bathroom? Why should I bother with somebody else tossing and turning in the night? Why should I bother with somebody who ate too much and got a bit gaseous through the night?

“Just get me the sex, so I’ll have the sex, thank you. And, I don’t really want to bother with any other kind of human interaction. I know what I want. And then, let’s make it real quick. Let’s just, you know, what’s the part of the, what’s the active ingredient of the sexuality that I really want?

“Well, it’s the orgasmic climax. Get me the orgasm. I want orgasm. I don’t want the broad spectrum relationship, love alliance, everything else that goes with it. Sounds like a big headache. I want the active ingredient. Make me orgasmic now.”

[15:57] The Addictive Mentality

I asked once, a doctor who was a professional in the field of addiction, “What’s the basic mentality behind addiction?”

His answer was, quote, “Give me an infinite amount of everything right now.” That’s the addictive mentality, and it’s all about active ingredients. This is why addiction occurs.

And so, people who get into dopamine manipulation, serotonin manipulation, anandamide manipulation, vitamin C manipulation, acetylsalicylic acid manipulation, sex manipulation, and all of that, all we’re really doing is extracting information and leaving wisdom behind.

You extract the specific thing and you leave all the wisdom behind.

[16:48] Nature Knows Best How to Organize

What we need to realize and come back to is, Nature knows best how to organize. Nature knows best how to organize. Well, how do you get Nature to organize for you the full, broad spectrum impact of all natural experiences that, if you have them, you lead a sustainable lifestyle, rather than wasting days and nights on experimentation?

Well, what you do is you practice Vedic Meditation twice a day. Sit in a chair easily, comfortably, let your consciousness settle down. Allow your individual awareness to unify with that least excited state, the Unified Field of Consciousness, which is the home of all the laws of Nature. It’s the home of all the laws of Nature.

When you settle down into that state, anything that got disorganized throughout the interrupting patterns of the day gets reorganized. Order returns to the system. Balancing returns to the system. And then you come out of your meditation, you engage the day, having reinstated order, then you bring order into all of your behavior, all of your interactions, all of your dealings, but then the impact of daily life, the disrupting effect of daily life, may throw you off kilter, so, late afternoon, early evening, you settle down into that state of optimum orderliness.

And then, once again, the restorative effect of bringing in the full potential of natural law into your brain, into your nucleus accumbens, into your serotonin, dopamine, and anandamide, and all those other neurotransmitters, production and assimilation.

All your vitamins, your needs, and all of that, whatever it is that you should be having, your inner nature will figure out a way of finding that through the natural nourishment to which you have access.

[18:56] It’s What You Do with What You Eat

And when you get rid of the stress in your body, the accumulated stress by meditating twice every day, then when you eat food, your capacity to extract and assimilate, to extract and assimilate the nutrients that are in the food goes way, way up. 

When you’re very stressed, you can eat perfect nectar like food, everything organic, everything perfect, even right down to all the cooks and the preparers and everything were all in a jolly mood when they made it. Made by people only in a jolly mood, who loved what they were doing while they were making the perfect organic, nutrient-dense food. But if you’re a stress bag and you eat that, your body turns it into poison. Your body turns it into toxins.

Whereas, if you are a fully integrated, highly aware, Cosmically Conscious human, you could eat marshmallows and Fritos and your body would be able to extract whatever’s in there to make your whole life perfectly well balanced and nourished. You wouldn’t have to be racing around trying to figure out which of the particular health food stores has the exact nectar-like food that you need?

You see, the point I’m making is, it’s not what you eat, it’s what can you do with what you eat. What can you do with what you eat? Are you like some big bag of irrelevant reactivity, that’s stress, irrelevant reactivity, attempting to ingest something which, properly should be nectar-like, nutrient-dense, good food, which, you know, this is a completely futile exercise.

And people often wonder, “Oh, somebody just ate, they ate healthy food their whole life. Nothing but healthy food and they got to be 56 or something and came down with metastatic cancer. What the heck?” Well, that wasn’t caused by the beautiful nutrient-dense organic food they were eating for all those years.

It was caused by the inability to actually make use of whatever that nutrient-dense food was. So much of that would have just been passed as waste material, not even absorbed or assimilated.

And so how accessible are the nutrients? It’s not based on the nutrients. It’s based on the human physiology, which is a product of our consciousness state.

[21:48] Awaken Perfect Balance in the Human Brain

Consciousness conceives the body. Consciousness governs the body. Consciousness conceives and constructs and governs and then prints out as a body. This body is a printout of your consciousness state. Yesterday’s mind, today’s body. Today’s mind, tomorrow’s body. What is your consciousness right now? Is it a consciousness of just a whole lot of jumble of thoughts that you’re madly trying to organize and stop thinking this and start thinking that and trying to figure out where your mind should be?

Or are you completely aligned with the total potential of natural law, by bringing your awareness into contact with the underlying Unified Field, which is deep within you.

Meditation does not create Unified Field Consciousness. Meditation reveals the pre-existing Unified Field Consciousness, which already is there at the baseline of your individual awareness. To what extent are you able to avail yourself of it? 

When you practice Vedic Meditation, you have 100 percent capacity twice every day to avail yourself of the underlying Unified Field of Consciousness and to awaken perfect balance in the human brain, in all of the neurotransmitters, in all of the human needs of life generating relevant behavior that meets the need of the time.

Jai Guru Deva.