HOMEOPATHY AN INFINITY REPLETE WITH POSSIBILITY

 by Charles Wansbrough published Prometheus Unbound Vol.2 No.2 1996

It has been said that every man is born either an Aristotelian or a Platonist. Such a contention leads to abstract thought that gives rise to a polemic of constant antagonism. It is said that every contention that has arisen in history has as its foundation in some question that either of these philosophers first formulated. A.Whitehead goes as far as to say that ‘the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato —alluding to the wealth of general ideas scattered throughout his writings’. (1)

Plato was both a poet and mystic and held the view that truth lay beyond the world of senses, and so his method of writing lay in dialogues which never represented doctrines but prepared the way for philosophising and performed the function of teacher. His genius lay in creating a dialogue within the mind of the student and left an enormous range of speculative thoughts that lent itself to numerous interpretations not unlike the great books of some religions. "The Corpus Platonicum shares many ideas with great spiritual traditions and its main tenets revolve around the following ideas; that the material world is not the ultimate, perfect one, but a corrupt imperfect one, an ever-changing reflection of the perfect, unchanging world beyond the senses; that the soul is immortal and returns to the other world and that the other world can be reached in this life through an inward striving , a dialectical process which takes one up to the point where a mystical connection may be achieved". (2)

In direct contrast we have Plato’s famous pupil Aristotle, sometime tutor to Alexander the Great, who departed radically from his famous teacher, in rejecting an immortal soul, creation and a perfect other world in favour of the sensible world as the only real one. He strove to systematically analyse and categorize our own world with monumental results, leaving behind vast encyclopaedic volumes including treatises on virtually everything. His works in principal are a set of empirically based detailed tracts, which contain much of practical application.

These contrasting philosophies may be envisaged as a relationship between antagonists, which represent a historical dialectic of thematic interplay, between mystic and scientist and still today is as eternally present as in the days of Greek civilization.

It is hardly necessary to say that Homoeopathy remains deeply embedded within the Platonic tradition. Moreover our position within a historical context is mostly indebted to Plato’s most monumental insight into the nature of reality. His outstanding contribution was his Theory of Ideas. This notion held the view that behind appearances lay certain eternal forms. Bertrand Russel explains thus, " whenever a number of individuals have a common name, they also have a common ‘idea or ‘form’ . For instance, though there are many beds, there is only one ‘idea ‘ or form of a bed. Just as a reflection of a bed in a mirror is only apparent and not ‘ real ‘, so various particular beds are unreal, being only copies of the ‘ ideas ‘, which is the one real bed, made by God. Of this one bed, made by God, there can be knowledge, but in respect of the many beds made by carpenters there can only be opinion.’(3) In other words everything in the material world can decay but at the same time everything is made after a timeless ‘mould’ or form that is eternal and immutable. In "Sophies World" , a history of philosophy written in the form of a novel to a fourteen year old Jostein Garder uses a wonderfully succinct simile of gingerbread cookies. If you happen to stumble into a bakery and see fifty gingerbread cookies, and though they might seem imperfect, for example part of an arm missing etc, you would still conclude that they all have a common origin. In fact they had all been formed in the same mould and this fact would entice you to want to see the perfect mould since it must be more beautiful that all the imperfect gingerbread men created. In the same way Plato concluded that there had to be a limited number of forms ‘behind’ everything we see and decided to call these immutable forms ‘ideas’. He also concluded that there must be a reality behind the ‘material world’, which contained eternal and immutable ‘patterns’ behind the various phenomena of existence. (4)

This eternal interplay between manifested form and its noumenal essence lies at the very heart of our homeopathic philosophy and has fuelled endless philosophical speculation throughout the ages, creating an infinite number of variations that still today dominate the fields of quantum physics and beyond. Since addressing the question of what the essence represents enters into the field of metaphysics, we can at least say, that Samuel Hahnemann’s genius lay in his ability to crystallise the Platonic ideal into some concrete form. That this crystallised form i.e. remedy is still the centre of a fierce polemic lies at the very foundations of the dialectic created by these two philosophers.

Each remedy represents some ‘ideal' essence which can only be ultimately elicited in a digestible form by the process of proving the remedy. Such an act of proving allows us to take on the quality of that remedy, in most cases not an enormous amount happens, but in some the state of the prover becomes so finely tuned to the remedy that he takes on the qualitative essence of that remedy and becomes a good prover. But the very process of proving with its infinite scope assumes that for every state of ' La condition humaine' a remedy can be found. That for every minute detail and nuance of human frailty somewhere a remedy can be created from nature to redress the balance.

But such an implicit assumption at the heart of our homeopathic philosophy, with its attendant search for the simillimum, can only be interpreted within the polemic of our two Greek philosophers. Either an imperfect similar reflects a possible perfection at another level leading to the contention of an ascending ladder of hierarchical levels which reflect the evolving state of the human spirit; and following the platonic ideal of an imperfect state being but a pale reflection of a perfect state. Or that the simillimum is one ultimate state that results in a perfect state of health and follows Aristotle' s ideal of final cause and effect. Neither interpretation can be totally separated from its partner, since the pursuit of the simillimum rests on a process of analysis and intuition.

Classical homeopathy has tended towards the Aristotelian ideal of spiritual impartiality , with enormous emphasis on the systematic categorization of materia medica and its insistence on detail. Nature is not only overwhelming in her diversity but is equally impressive in her capacity to evolve. Though we might conceive of a lifetime dedicated to absorbing and learning materia medica, and even introduce into our curriculum the old and faded art of memory created by Simonides inventor of the art of mnemonics, by which even the feeble minded might master the most intricate memory exercises. Yet our materia is so colossal that even a prodigious memory such as Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his army by name or Mithridates Eupator, who administrated the law in twenty two languages of his empire (5)would still find difficulty coming to terms with the intricacy of homeopathic materia medica. The English philosopher Locke in the seventeenth century toyed with, and then rejected the idea of an impossible language in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch would have its own name. Such an impossible language and its associated problems of assimilation begin to face us with the sheer enormity of an ever-increasing materia medica. ‘Only thought as theoretical and as far removed from fact as modern European thought, could have conceived the evolution of man to be possible apart from surrounding nature, or have regarded the evolution of man as a gradual conquest of nature .' (6) That nature and the individual are intimately related raises few comments, today quantum theory bears this out with rather alarming clarity. But that the Renaissance thinkers and Neoplatonists in particular regarded nature as a single living conscious being within whose body all things subsist, bears more than a passing scrutiny for the sheer brilliance of their insight. As a result of this view nothing is without life and everything is interconnected. This cosmic being was equated with a god and called the World Soul. This doctrine of the World Soul was first expressed in its classical form by Plato in which he relates in the Timaeus that the Creator fashioned the world as a mirror to reflect his splendour. Wishing to bring order out of chaos, so that ‘all things should be as like himself as they could be , out of pure goodness he brought into existence a copy of himself as exact as was possible for any secondary thing to be. He gave the world a soul because intelligence cannot reside where a soul is lacking and put the soul into a body because ‘ that which is created is of necessity corporeal, and also visible and tangible.’ The human soul then became equated with the world soul, so that nature and the human existential state became mirrors images of each other. This episteme, an example of analogical thinking, emphasises our total inter-connectivity of mirrors within mirrors and leads to the inevitable and unenviable task of creating a typology which will allow us to classify and contain the infinite diversity that nature clearly demonstrates.

Time and time again many authors have tried to classify the homoeopathic materia medica into definable aspects to allow the human mind to contain and use this vast amount of material. Today with the use of computers this problem seems solved but at some point on that journey on the eve-rexpanding information highway, we find ourselves inundated with mental stupor. The problems of such tremendous diversity led Aristotle (338-322 B.C.) to classify nature as a progression of things from a less perfect to a more perfect state with living creatures occupying different steps in this single ladder of progression. ‘Nature advances by small steps from inanimate things to animate——after the realm of lifeless things, there follows the realm of plants——the plants appear to be animate compared to other things, but inanimate compared to animals——the top of the ladder is occupied by man’. He laboured intensely for many years to produce monumental treatises which classified every conceivable state in existence. This ladder of progress was tremendously popular up till the nineteenth century. Even the Swiss zoologist Bonnet (1720-1793) worked out in tremendous detail this ladder of nature beginning with man and going progressively through the kingdoms till finally ending up at the bottom with pure earth. But it is clear that animals are too diverse to be arranged in a single file since for example the anatomy of a bat is no way an intermediate between a mammal and a bird. Another notion of classification exists that is by type. This brings us back to Plato’s theory of ideas in which he assumes that though many variations exist of for example Man there exists an ideal type so in the same way many animals and plants are variable but also that many organisms resemble each other and so there are a limited number of basic themes or types. This theme was further elaborated upon by the great poet Goethe (1749-1832) in his Metamorphoses of Plants, in which he puts forward the idea of a ‘primeval plant’ through whose simplicity becomes possible the greatest diversity. He was aware that some ideal form played a major role in transforming parts into organic wholes. (7)

Both these aspects of classification have been used by the homeopathic fraternity, to compare and contrast the vast materia medica, sometimes by the Aristotelian process, other times by a process of analogy but never does the process seem complete, as so much over-weaning detail defeats the object of the exercise. In the thirteenth century Raymond Lully, devoted himself to the study of Arabic and mystical subjects until he evolved a system of concentric revolving disks of different sizes subdivided into sectors with Latin letters, with which he hoped to solve all the mysteries of the universe. Kurd Lasswitz , at the end of the nineteenth century, toyed with the staggering fantasy of a universal library which would register all the variations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols, in other words, all that it is given to express in all languages.(8) Both remain child’s play compared to the monumental task facing our own abilities at our capacities to assimilate our ever-growing materia medica. That principles of typology must exist none denies but since all modes of classifying materia medica ultimately rest on the subjective states of the human condition with its infinite variations, I feel at times the complete futility of the task. Nevertheless both methods of classifying our material, one from the particular, one from the general are used at times unconsciously by homeopaths in all walks of life, since the mind tends to shift from modes of analysis to those of synthesis. Each mode of thought tends to compare and contrast its own weakness and strengths in a constant state of dialectical tension.

The objective so far, has been to present the process of classification as a viable analytical tool in coming to terms with our materia medica. Nevertheless it could be argued that a more subjective approach to the process of assimilation and practise would //might arise from a different epistemological approach to the practise of homeopathy.

In the process of learning a remedy we generalise to an essential essence, which allows us to grasp intuitively, and organically its qualitative nature. But this process is only possible with those remedies that have taken up to a 100 years to fully develop into ‘user friendly’ polycrests, and was one of the outstanding contributions that Vithoulkas made to homeopathy this century. The infinite potential of materia medica reflecting the ceaseless activity of the human state needs to be addressed from the point of view of being and not knowledge. In the Search for the Miraculous by Ouspensky, he draws a sharp distinction between two lines of development that man may pass through, the line of knowledge and the line of being. In the correct approach to homeopathy both the line of being and knowledge develop simultaneously, but if one outstrips the other then the process of healing ceases to function correctly. Most people can understand knowledge and different levels of this knowledge but they fail to grasp its significance in relation to being. By ‘being’ most people understand existence, but there are numerous levels of being as in the difference between a plant and an animal so in the same way people can differ in the quality of their being. But far more significant is the fact that knowledge is dependent on being. To quote Ouspensky ‘ if knowledge gets far ahead of being, it becomes theoretical and abstract and inapplicable—the reason for this is that knowledge which is not in accordance with being cannot be large enough for, or sufficiently suited to, man’s real needs. It will always be a knowledge of one thing together with ignorance of another thing; a knowledge of the detail without a knowledge of the whole; a knowledge of the form without a knowledge of the essence.’(9)Moreover the level of being determines the level of knowledge and a change in the level of knowledge is only possible with a change of being. In order to fully comprehend this one must understand the relation between being and knowledge. Understanding is the result of knowledge and being. Knowledge creates the form but being creates the empathy, the result creates understanding. One without the other leads to an imbalance and an inability to act wisely.

In the case of the homeopathic process they are intimately related since the healing situation is a function of both being and knowledge. In such a healing process the epistemological approach i.e. the way we perceive the process, reflects intimately what our being assumes to be the problem. They are mirror images of each other and are difficult to separate without bringing into question the entire healing process.

The resultant discussion has been for the sole purpose of describing another possible mode of epistemological insight into the nature of the remedy. Some of the following has been taken from an article on an informal method of proving using meditation.(10) From the aforementioned interconnection between knowledge and being it becomes of paramount importance to discover a process by which we can intermarry both aspects to produce a state of organic wholeness. The actual process of prover and proving initiate a temporary alignment between nature (the world soul) and the state of being (human soul) of the individual. This process is at its most conducive when the state of being of the individual is in some sort of meditative state since knowledge and being are at their most balanced in this state. The provings are then carried out by a group (our particular experiment has been carried out by thirteen) one member of the group is the objective control and chair for that session, and is responsible for taking notes and any other observations in the group. One dose of 30c is given to each member of the group, after which they are conducted through some relaxation procedures before entering into a meditative state. Over a period of some hours all their feelings and sensations are noted. Such a process I feel can bring the act of knowledge into an act of becoming one with the remedy where partial identity bypasses our rational states and leaves us in a far greater state of empathy with the remedy. The group dynamic not only creates a far greater state of resonance between group members, but also demonstrates different aspects of the remedy.

The interaction between prover and proving may be summarised as

1 Provers may observe immediate improvement

2 Provers may be acutely perturbed and react intensely

3 Provers may react with a minimum of activity

4 Provers on placebo may seem to take on the properties of the remedy.

But whatever the response, it represents the possibilities between prover and proving of partial ontological coherence. By this is meant that the state of being of the individual can be in some cases aligned with that of the remedy and thereby creating some form of illumination, thereby creating an organic understanding of the remedy. Coherence between remedy and prover then becomes the most outstanding feature of this informal proving. Since it is a process of becoming where the state (of being ) of a prover becomes intuitively immersed in the knowledge of that remedy, thereby creating a qualitative appreciation of that remedy.

In an essay J. Hillman makes the point that we shy away from the ignorance of the child by trying to educate and change his state with the process of growing up with much knowledge. But this very act detracts from the fundamental spontaneity and creativity of the figure of the 'child within'. Sometimes we are helpless in the face of such ignorance and tend to smother the spirit of the child by fostering methods of education that ultimately detract from their original objectives. At times the child's naiveté becomes the source of enormous insight when least educated, so unformed yet so wise. Nicolas Cusanus (1406-1464) , a great theologian in the service of the Pope whose most important writings are both philosophical, wrote De Docta Ignorantia and De Conjectoris libri duo.

"He maintains that all human knowledge is conjecture, that wisdom lies in the recognition of ignorance and that God can be apprehended by intuition in an exalted state of consciousness. "

T. Moore comments that ' such a book written about the importance of 'educated ignorance,' says we have to find ways to unlearn those things that screen us from the perception of profound truth. We have to achieve the child's unknowing because we have been made so knowledgeable"(11). Zen also recommends that one must not fail to lose the 'beginners mind ' since it is that only which can bring on the overwhelming immediacy of an experience. So in the same way, an informal proving with the immediacy of its dynamic state and its movement towards a different state of being that can bring more insight that any other method so far developed.