PRISONER EXPRESS

It takes very careful fine-tuning to stabilize the correct dosage of any psychotropic drugs; the horror stories abound of depressed patients who reacted really badly to the meds and that committed suicide.

For every chemical breakthrough there is also a chemical barrier. The good news is about neurotransmitters, and that is that they are material.

A thought, whether sane or mad, is hard to grasp because it is so intangible; it is not something you can feel or touch. The neurotransmitters, however, are certainly tangible, although they are extremely tiny and often short-lived. It is the neurotransmitter's role to match up with a thought. To do that, it's molecules must be just as flexible as thoughts, just as fleeting, elusive, faint and changeable. Such flexibility is a sort of miracle but also a curse, in that it throws up a barrier that is almost impossible to pass.

No man made drug can duplicate this flexibility, either now nor in the foreseeable future. No drug actually pairs up with a thought. This is apparent just by looking at the structure of the receptor.

Receptors are not fixed; they have been accurately described as looking like lily pads that have floated up from the depth of the cell like lily pads, their roots sink downward reaching the cell nucleus where the DNA sits.

DNA deals in many kinds of messages, and potentially an infinite number. Therefore, it makes new receptors and floats them up to the cell wall constantly. There is no fixed number of receptors, no fixed arrangement on the cell walls, and no limit to what the are tuned into. A cell wall can be barren of lily pads, as a pond in winter or crammed full as one in full flower in June or July.

The only thing constant about a receptor is its unpredictability. Researchers recently discovered that a neurotransmitter called imipramine is produced abnormally in the brains of depressed people. While looking for the distribution of imipramine receptors, they were startled to find them not just on the brain cells but on skin cells.

Why should the skin receptors for a mental molecule be created? What do skin receptors have to do wit depression?

One plausible answer is that a depressed person is depressed everywhereâ€"he has a sad brain, sad skin, sad liver and so on…

A human brain that changes its thoughts into thousands of chemicals every second is, after all, not so much complicated as inconceivable. In ancient India, it was supposed that intelligence existed everywhere; it is called Brahman, from the Sanskrit words for ‘big' and was just like an invisible field.

Our whole physiology can be transformed as quickly as a neuro-peptide which is an integral part of the quantum mechanical body, because we can change like quick silver, the flowing quality of life is natural to us.

The material body is a river of atoms, the mind is a river of thought and what holds them together is a river of intelligence.

It may seem that the quantum mechanical body is involved only in life or death situations, but that is not so. We live in it, casually and without thinking, just as we live in the body as a whole.

But, once you give in to the helplessness and fear, this chain breaks apart. You start sending out the neuro-peptides associated with negative emotions, these catch onto the immune cells and the immune response loses its efficiency. Exactly how this happens is not known, but the decreased immune statuses of depressed patients are well documented.

If you reacted to cancer as you react to the fly, you'd have a great chance for recovery; yet diagnosis itself sets up every patient on the vicious cycle, or circle like a snake biting its own tail until there is no more snake.

How beautiful is the immune system, and how terribly vulnerable at the same time. It forges our link with life and yet can break it at any moment. The immune system knows all our secrets, all our sorrows.

It knows why a mother who has lost a child can die of grief, because the immune system has died of grief first. It knows every moment the depressed (or those ill with cancer) spent in the light of life or the shadow of death, because it turns those moments into the body's physical reality.

Depression, cancer or any other disease is nothing more than the sequence of these fleeting moments, each with its own emotions, its own mind-body chemistry.

If I find a green meadow splashed with daisies and sit down beside clear running brook, I have found medicine and healing. Meditate on positive things; this will help overcome depression.