Paradigm Shift: Homeopathy as Applied Consciousness
By Douglas Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom(NA)
[published in Homeopathic Links: International Journal for Classical Homeopathy Vol. 19, Winter 2006]
Summary: Homeopathy departs from mainstream medicine not primarily through its different pharmacopoeia or methodology, but by way of its grounding in a fundamentally different paradigm of the nature of reality. Developments in the sciences of noetics (consciousness), cosmology, and physics are creating a context in which homeopathy can be more satisfactorily understood by both practitioners and patients. By making explicit the model of reality upon which homeopathy is based, practitioners as well as patients can join in a common language shared by others who recognized the primacy of consciousness and spirit in shaping the experience of reality.
Keywords: Paradigm, Consciousness, Case-taking, Synchronicity, Projection, Jung, Sankaran, Quantum physics, Chhabra
Working in a Different Paradigm
When asked to explain what I do by someone who knows nothing of homeopathy, I often experience a momentary panic as I glimpse the chasm between my own sense, understanding, and model of reality and that of my listener. How do we bridge that chasm? I imagine my questioner wondering: “Why should a healer with access to all the technological and scientific advances of the early 21st century be interested in the ideas of a doctor who practiced before the advent of basic knowledge of microbiology, radiology, genetics, and psychology?
When a practitioner trained in the prevailing medical science of today’s world undertakes to practice homeopathy, he or she does not simply change the pharmacy he or she uses. He or she commits to a paradigm shift.
Experience and Consciousness are Closer to Reality’s Core than Matter
The shift is from materialism, an assumption that the fundamental substance of not only the human organism but the universe is composed of atoms and molecules, combined and recombined to form the building-blocks of things, to a world-view in which we understand matter and energy as two forms of a single experiencing. It is the distance from Newtonian determinism, where fixed laws leave no room for events that are not caused by measurable material and electromagnetic forces, to an exploration into the ways in which consciousness itself shapes the universe.
Physicist Rupert Sheldrake postulates the existence of morphogenic fields of influence which give shape to the behavior of species. His theory developed from attempts to understand how the learning of complex tasks appears to happen in members of the species too far away from each other for that learning to have been transmitted in a direct, causal way. Is it logical, however, to limit the sphere of influence of this field to behavior and learning? In my view it is probable that something similar directs the consciousness upon which behavior and learning is based. Indeed, the demonstration of a complex behavior is evidence of an elaboration of consciousness. A nonmaterial field of influence shapes experience and meaning, which in turn guide biological material development from zygote to embryo to organism.
The ascendancy of quantum mechanics in physics has opened our eyes to a universe in which conscious attention directs the behavior of particles. We can now begin to imagine what the now really is: an interface between an atemporal realm of unlimited possibility containing a multiplicity of timeless forms and shapes on the one hand, with a temporal process which collapses the infinite into choice, limitation and finiteness, on the other.
Hahnemann: A Different Enlightenment
One’s medicine follows one’s paradigm. If you are a materialist, you will prescribe material doses of drugs, of course. But more importantly, you will conceive of the human body as a biological machine, with symptoms the pure expressions of pathological derangements which must then be fixed by the doctor. If, somehow, you are a materialist prescribing homeopathic remedies, you will prescribe based on pathological, material findings, while disregarding the consciousness upon which the pathology rests.
Hahnemann was out-of-sync with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Two hundred years ago Europe was approaching the climax of industrialization, mass production, and the triumph of logical positivism. In English we use the term “Enlightenment” to connote a spiritual achievement of realization; yet ironically in historical terms “Enlightenment” refers to the mainstream of 18th Century European thought which considered spiritual insight outdated by the discoveries of Isaac Newton, the rationalism of Renee Descartes, the skepticism of Pierre Bayle, and the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke. (1)
While mainstream medicine was beginning its love affair with scientific reductionism and objectivation, Hahnemann placed himself squarely in the vitalist tradition of mystics such as Paracelsus, speaking of the vital force as the most important reality with which the physician must be concerned.
We Create Our Realities
In Aphorism 9 of the Organon, Hahnemann writes “In the healthy human state, the spirit-like life force (autocracy) that enlivens the material organism as dynamis, governs without restriction and keeps all parts of the organism in admirable, harmonious, vital operation, as regards both feelings and functions, so that our indwelling, rational spirit can freely avail itself of this living, healthy instrument for the higher purposes of our existence.” He goes on to say, in Aphorism 10, that “The material organism, thought of without life force, is capable of no sensibility, no activity, no self-preservation. It derives all sensibility and produces its life functions solely by means of the immaterial wesen (the life principle, the life force) that enlivens the material organism in health and disease.
What does Hahnemann mean? This is the most important thing to understand: We create our own illness! Disease is not something that happens TO us. It is not ultimately the product of attacks by germs or faulty organs. Disease is, rather, an expression of a vital force. A spirit-like essence, a unity, which permeates the human body but is not limited to it. This life force energizes the human body; indeed it is responsible for the very materialization of the body. The wesen, Wenda O’Reilly, Editor and Annotator of Hahnemann’s Organon 6th Edition, notes, has a sphere of action which “includes the individual’s organism as well as the circumstances, events and conditions which inform the whole situation of the individual.” What an astonishing statement! The life force does not only govern the individual’s health, physical and mental, but also what happens to him. We can hear an echo of Hahnemann in Carl Jung’s description of synchronicity (the co-occurence of events in an acausal but meaningful relationship) in his observations that what one fails to be aware of in one’s inner life becomes externalized in the events and happenings of the apparently external life.
When we truly allow ourselves to absorb the discoveries of Einstein, Neils Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger, we cannot help but agree that:
1) form, idea, and consciousness are closer to the core nature of reality than matter, which may be more of an epiphenomenon, a shadow of consciousness;
2) consciousness plays a central role in determining the course of events which unfold in the material dimensions of our world.
Yet where is consciousness located? It is tempting to say it is in the brain. Yet neurosurgeons have not been able to localize it, and there is sufficient evidence from research into dreams, near-death experiences, and other paranormal phenomena to indicate that Mind transcends the organ with which we identify it. It is no longer reasonable (let alone psychologically salutary) to consider consciousness as merely an epiphenomenon of brain metabolism.
I believe that Hahnemann’s discoveries and insights provide us with not only a unique and profound method for healing, but with a window into the nature of consciousness. The homeopathic endeavor can do no less than tell us who we are. Indeed, it is not uncommon for a homeopathic patient to say, after receiving a really good remedy, that they feel more themselves, or that they have been brought back to themselves.
Finding the Story Behind the Story
Behind every illness is a story. The task of the healer is to uncover this story. The story we need to discern is not the story of pathologically-derived symptoms and the chronological measurement of organic derangements. No, it is a story that transcends the physical body, which is the screen onto which shadows of meaning are projected. We must perceive the story of the body in the light of the story of the vital force. What is the vital force trying to tell us with that pain in the right shoulder? With that wheezing in the lungs? With that sensation of the heart fluttering when the telephone rings?
Becoming a homeopath requires that we unlearn habits of perception and thought that we began to acquire as a baby. Thrust into the world from the dark insulation of the womb, we begin our attempt to make sense of our surroundings by noticing what we hold in common with what is external to us. Before birth there is no separation; there abides a deep unity. But after birth we are assailed by sensory experiences which apparently arise from outside of ourselves; since we want a story we can understand we describe or even explain what appears to be outside of us by reference to what is inside of us. This is the basis of projection.
This desire to understand persists into adulthood. We listen to others tell us their story, and we tell ourselves that we “understand”. What is really happening? We pick out the words and meanings that make sense to us in terms of our own experiences, and insert meanings and motives that make sense to us into the narrative of the other. We even rush to finish their sentences for them, or offer them the word they seem to be searching for; After all, aren’t we all travelers on the same experiential road?
The answer to this question, like for so many of the important things in life, is apparently is both Yes and No. Rajan Sankaran (2) puts it beautifully, saying that each of us is singing two songs: there is the human song, which tells the story of human life on earth: the pangs of birth, the early memories of childhood and family, the search for individual identity, romance, friendship, adventure and hardship, achievement and adversity, enduring love, loss, aging, maturity, death. Yet there is a nonhuman song within each of us as well, a song that originates not from the experience that is common to humanity, but from a substance from the mineral, plant, or animal kingdoms of Earth. It is this song, beautiful in its own right, that not only causes disease where it is out of place in the human being, but causes the individual’s experience of his or her apparently human journey to be tinged with the consciousness of an alien sphere of influence.
How is it possible that we create our own illness, if disease results from the consciousness of an alien sphere of influence? Perhaps at some point in the soul’s journey, there is a decision made to conform in some way to this field. Perhaps it is because hidden within the information and layered meanings of each kind of experience, lies a lesson the soul needs for its own evolution. It is certainly a great mystery, this question of the origin of our respective states, and goes deeper than the abbreviated listings of “etiologies” we find in our Materia Medica. Recall that if three individuals are walking below an apartment windowsill from which a flowerpot happens to be falling, it will undoubtedly be the head of the fellow needing Arnica in his core upon which the flowerpot will fall!
So what is it that we have to unlearn? We have to disabuse ourselves of our assumption that “we understand” what the patient means, what his or her experience has been. An immediately intelligible story is a human story, a story behind which the state lies undiscerned. A story “we can relate to” is a story on to which we are likely projecting our own feelings. While in the normal course of human conversation the tendency is to strive for commonality of feeling, in the homeopathic case-receiving the goal is to strive for an understanding of a state that is wholly other, completely non-human, and from which emanates a consciousness and conflict which compels the individual to create a reality into which this consciousness projects itself into the material world.
Accepting that we don’t understand what patients are telling us is surprisingly the most difficult aspect of homeopathic case-taking. The drive to insert our own thread of meaning into others’ words is so deep and so unconscious that it takes a very active and awake consciousness to step back and observe. The illusion of understanding is as habitual as it is comforting. When we are able to suspend this illusion of understanding, we will feel both the thrill of embarking upon a true adventure as well as the terror of unfamiliar terrain.
Hahnemann’s Instructions
So let us take a look at Hahnemann‘s Guidelines for Case-taking. In his famous Aphorism 83 he says “The individualizing examination of a disease case....demands nothing of the medical-art practitioner except freedom from bias and healthy senses, attention while observing and fidelity in recording the image of the disease.”
I like to wonder whether Hahnemann was writing with intentional irony when he chose the words “demands nothing....except”. Imagine someone telling you “I ask nothing of you except that you discard all the unconscious habits of perception and thought you have acquired all of your life”.
In the next Aphorism, 84, Hahnemann becomes more explicitly didactic in his instructions. After instructing the physician to see, hear, and notice ...what is altered or unusual about the patient, he instructs us to “write everything down with the very same expressions used by the patient and his relations”.
I want us to focus for a moment on the direction to use the very same expressions used by the patient. It turns out that this is one of the most critical instructions Hahnemann has given with regards to case-taking. The choice of words, of expressions, by the patient, is critically important. There are often layers of meaning behind a single expression or word, and we must strive to perceive these meanings. If we glibly substitute our vocabulary, our expressions, our associations for the patient’s, we will end up taking our own case, not the patient’s case, and end up with a prescription that is good for us, but not for the patient!
Case-Receiving as Applied Semiotics
As I take a case I underline words that seem significant, peculiar, or emotionally charged in some way (3). Any words that describe the sensations, the inner experience of the patient, can be overlooked only with peril. Of particular importance are words which link the physical complaint of the patient to his mental state. Each word a patient uses may have associations that transcend the surface story, and, when explored more fully, give a picture of an inner state is using disease and pathology to express itself.
Case-receiving is therefore analogous to a meticulous sifting through words, a careful examination of the language of the patient to discern meanings. It is a kind of decoding, best accomplished through establishing an alliance with the patient while exploring her complaints, her conscious state, her dreams, and her associations.
What is Healing?
This simple question leads to many quick but somehow unsatisfying answers. “To make whole”. Resolution of inner conflict. Release of the inner state. Sankaran states that it is the bringing down of the volume and intensity of the nonhuman song. Clearly we can recognize healing by the patient’s increased freedom to create his own reality: a reality shaped by his uniquely human, individual will, rather than a compulsion driven by the need of a nonhuman state to project itself into existence.
I propose not an answer, per se, but rather a different question: How does the task of healing relate to our soul’s development? Or, in other words, How does acquiring a state (identifying with some nonhuman source) and then healing from it relate to both our individual destiny and our common humanity? I have no answers, but would love to hear your thoughts.
In his famous first footnote of the Organon Hahnemann derides theoretical explanations of disease: "The physician's calling is not to concoct so-called systems from empty conceits and hypotheses concerning the inner wesen of the life process...not to make countless attempts at explanation..." He may have overestimated humankind's capacity to perceive healing, however, without understanding how it occurs. As pop singer Paul Simon refrains, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest" (4). Until the mainstream of society catches up with the paradigm shift underlying homeopathic medicine, we are likely to remain a tiny minority of healers among a world of fixers. But along with the calling of healing the sick, we as a community must face the task of describing exactly what we are doing. The professions of teaching and healing are closely linked, and as we teach about the primacy of consciousness, we shall help to usher in the paradigm of the new world.
Footnotes:
1. Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th Edition. Columbia University Press, Houghton Mifflin Company. 1993. P. 877.
2. Sankaran, Rajan: Bombay Seminar, January 2004. Further elaboration of these ideas can be found in his latest book, The Sensation in Homeopathy
3. Divya Chhabra is a contemporary master homeopath and teacher of methodology for discerning the “Story Behind the Story”. In a recent seminar (Toronto, Canada, Sept 2005) she outlined 5 kinds of “Key Words”:
1) Spontaneous denial makes a word important;
2) Words which seem inappropriate, which don’t make sense in context, are critically important. Temptation is to not write it down, write it off as a mistake. It’s a “Freudian slip”, a word which was dying to come out. If you ask more about it at that point he’ll tell you “no, it’s the wrong word”; the fact is it’s the right word.
3) Polarities are important. E.g neat, clean, tidy vs. dirty, cockroaches;
4) Words which derive from the source of a substance;
5) Words which express a metaphor, or simile. E.g. “My life is a bottomless pit into which I’m sinking.” When a patient says “as if” he is saying he is telling you that he is clueing you into his delusional state.
4. Simon, Paul. “The Boxer”. 1968,
Bibliography:
Chhabra, Divya. Unpublished Seminar Notes.
Hahnemann, Samuel. The Organon of the Medical Art, 6th Edition, 1842. Edited by Brenda O’Reilly. 1996.
Jung, Carl. “Synchronicity, an Acausal Connecting Principal. In: Collected Works, v. 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (p. 417-420).
Malin, Shimon. Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality, A Western Perspective. Oxford Press, New York: 2001.
Sheldrake, Rupert. A New Science of Life; The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. Park Street Press. 1981.
Doug Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom graduated from Hahnemann College of Homeopathy in 2001. He has studied in conference with Rajan Sankaran, Nandita Shah, Sunil Anand, Alize Timmerman, and Massimo Mangialavore. He sees patients in Portland, OR, and Walla Walla, WA, and can be reached at (503) 253-6334, or by email at [email protected].
[published in Homeopathic Links: International Journal for Classical Homeopathy Vol. 19, Winter 2006]
Summary: Homeopathy departs from mainstream medicine not primarily through its different pharmacopoeia or methodology, but by way of its grounding in a fundamentally different paradigm of the nature of reality. Developments in the sciences of noetics (consciousness), cosmology, and physics are creating a context in which homeopathy can be more satisfactorily understood by both practitioners and patients. By making explicit the model of reality upon which homeopathy is based, practitioners as well as patients can join in a common language shared by others who recognized the primacy of consciousness and spirit in shaping the experience of reality.
Keywords: Paradigm, Consciousness, Case-taking, Synchronicity, Projection, Jung, Sankaran, Quantum physics, Chhabra
Working in a Different Paradigm
When asked to explain what I do by someone who knows nothing of homeopathy, I often experience a momentary panic as I glimpse the chasm between my own sense, understanding, and model of reality and that of my listener. How do we bridge that chasm? I imagine my questioner wondering: “Why should a healer with access to all the technological and scientific advances of the early 21st century be interested in the ideas of a doctor who practiced before the advent of basic knowledge of microbiology, radiology, genetics, and psychology?
When a practitioner trained in the prevailing medical science of today’s world undertakes to practice homeopathy, he or she does not simply change the pharmacy he or she uses. He or she commits to a paradigm shift.
Experience and Consciousness are Closer to Reality’s Core than Matter
The shift is from materialism, an assumption that the fundamental substance of not only the human organism but the universe is composed of atoms and molecules, combined and recombined to form the building-blocks of things, to a world-view in which we understand matter and energy as two forms of a single experiencing. It is the distance from Newtonian determinism, where fixed laws leave no room for events that are not caused by measurable material and electromagnetic forces, to an exploration into the ways in which consciousness itself shapes the universe.
Physicist Rupert Sheldrake postulates the existence of morphogenic fields of influence which give shape to the behavior of species. His theory developed from attempts to understand how the learning of complex tasks appears to happen in members of the species too far away from each other for that learning to have been transmitted in a direct, causal way. Is it logical, however, to limit the sphere of influence of this field to behavior and learning? In my view it is probable that something similar directs the consciousness upon which behavior and learning is based. Indeed, the demonstration of a complex behavior is evidence of an elaboration of consciousness. A nonmaterial field of influence shapes experience and meaning, which in turn guide biological material development from zygote to embryo to organism.
The ascendancy of quantum mechanics in physics has opened our eyes to a universe in which conscious attention directs the behavior of particles. We can now begin to imagine what the now really is: an interface between an atemporal realm of unlimited possibility containing a multiplicity of timeless forms and shapes on the one hand, with a temporal process which collapses the infinite into choice, limitation and finiteness, on the other.
Hahnemann: A Different Enlightenment
One’s medicine follows one’s paradigm. If you are a materialist, you will prescribe material doses of drugs, of course. But more importantly, you will conceive of the human body as a biological machine, with symptoms the pure expressions of pathological derangements which must then be fixed by the doctor. If, somehow, you are a materialist prescribing homeopathic remedies, you will prescribe based on pathological, material findings, while disregarding the consciousness upon which the pathology rests.
Hahnemann was out-of-sync with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Two hundred years ago Europe was approaching the climax of industrialization, mass production, and the triumph of logical positivism. In English we use the term “Enlightenment” to connote a spiritual achievement of realization; yet ironically in historical terms “Enlightenment” refers to the mainstream of 18th Century European thought which considered spiritual insight outdated by the discoveries of Isaac Newton, the rationalism of Renee Descartes, the skepticism of Pierre Bayle, and the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke. (1)
While mainstream medicine was beginning its love affair with scientific reductionism and objectivation, Hahnemann placed himself squarely in the vitalist tradition of mystics such as Paracelsus, speaking of the vital force as the most important reality with which the physician must be concerned.
We Create Our Realities
In Aphorism 9 of the Organon, Hahnemann writes “In the healthy human state, the spirit-like life force (autocracy) that enlivens the material organism as dynamis, governs without restriction and keeps all parts of the organism in admirable, harmonious, vital operation, as regards both feelings and functions, so that our indwelling, rational spirit can freely avail itself of this living, healthy instrument for the higher purposes of our existence.” He goes on to say, in Aphorism 10, that “The material organism, thought of without life force, is capable of no sensibility, no activity, no self-preservation. It derives all sensibility and produces its life functions solely by means of the immaterial wesen (the life principle, the life force) that enlivens the material organism in health and disease.
What does Hahnemann mean? This is the most important thing to understand: We create our own illness! Disease is not something that happens TO us. It is not ultimately the product of attacks by germs or faulty organs. Disease is, rather, an expression of a vital force. A spirit-like essence, a unity, which permeates the human body but is not limited to it. This life force energizes the human body; indeed it is responsible for the very materialization of the body. The wesen, Wenda O’Reilly, Editor and Annotator of Hahnemann’s Organon 6th Edition, notes, has a sphere of action which “includes the individual’s organism as well as the circumstances, events and conditions which inform the whole situation of the individual.” What an astonishing statement! The life force does not only govern the individual’s health, physical and mental, but also what happens to him. We can hear an echo of Hahnemann in Carl Jung’s description of synchronicity (the co-occurence of events in an acausal but meaningful relationship) in his observations that what one fails to be aware of in one’s inner life becomes externalized in the events and happenings of the apparently external life.
When we truly allow ourselves to absorb the discoveries of Einstein, Neils Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger, we cannot help but agree that:
1) form, idea, and consciousness are closer to the core nature of reality than matter, which may be more of an epiphenomenon, a shadow of consciousness;
2) consciousness plays a central role in determining the course of events which unfold in the material dimensions of our world.
Yet where is consciousness located? It is tempting to say it is in the brain. Yet neurosurgeons have not been able to localize it, and there is sufficient evidence from research into dreams, near-death experiences, and other paranormal phenomena to indicate that Mind transcends the organ with which we identify it. It is no longer reasonable (let alone psychologically salutary) to consider consciousness as merely an epiphenomenon of brain metabolism.
I believe that Hahnemann’s discoveries and insights provide us with not only a unique and profound method for healing, but with a window into the nature of consciousness. The homeopathic endeavor can do no less than tell us who we are. Indeed, it is not uncommon for a homeopathic patient to say, after receiving a really good remedy, that they feel more themselves, or that they have been brought back to themselves.
Finding the Story Behind the Story
Behind every illness is a story. The task of the healer is to uncover this story. The story we need to discern is not the story of pathologically-derived symptoms and the chronological measurement of organic derangements. No, it is a story that transcends the physical body, which is the screen onto which shadows of meaning are projected. We must perceive the story of the body in the light of the story of the vital force. What is the vital force trying to tell us with that pain in the right shoulder? With that wheezing in the lungs? With that sensation of the heart fluttering when the telephone rings?
Becoming a homeopath requires that we unlearn habits of perception and thought that we began to acquire as a baby. Thrust into the world from the dark insulation of the womb, we begin our attempt to make sense of our surroundings by noticing what we hold in common with what is external to us. Before birth there is no separation; there abides a deep unity. But after birth we are assailed by sensory experiences which apparently arise from outside of ourselves; since we want a story we can understand we describe or even explain what appears to be outside of us by reference to what is inside of us. This is the basis of projection.
This desire to understand persists into adulthood. We listen to others tell us their story, and we tell ourselves that we “understand”. What is really happening? We pick out the words and meanings that make sense to us in terms of our own experiences, and insert meanings and motives that make sense to us into the narrative of the other. We even rush to finish their sentences for them, or offer them the word they seem to be searching for; After all, aren’t we all travelers on the same experiential road?
The answer to this question, like for so many of the important things in life, is apparently is both Yes and No. Rajan Sankaran (2) puts it beautifully, saying that each of us is singing two songs: there is the human song, which tells the story of human life on earth: the pangs of birth, the early memories of childhood and family, the search for individual identity, romance, friendship, adventure and hardship, achievement and adversity, enduring love, loss, aging, maturity, death. Yet there is a nonhuman song within each of us as well, a song that originates not from the experience that is common to humanity, but from a substance from the mineral, plant, or animal kingdoms of Earth. It is this song, beautiful in its own right, that not only causes disease where it is out of place in the human being, but causes the individual’s experience of his or her apparently human journey to be tinged with the consciousness of an alien sphere of influence.
How is it possible that we create our own illness, if disease results from the consciousness of an alien sphere of influence? Perhaps at some point in the soul’s journey, there is a decision made to conform in some way to this field. Perhaps it is because hidden within the information and layered meanings of each kind of experience, lies a lesson the soul needs for its own evolution. It is certainly a great mystery, this question of the origin of our respective states, and goes deeper than the abbreviated listings of “etiologies” we find in our Materia Medica. Recall that if three individuals are walking below an apartment windowsill from which a flowerpot happens to be falling, it will undoubtedly be the head of the fellow needing Arnica in his core upon which the flowerpot will fall!
So what is it that we have to unlearn? We have to disabuse ourselves of our assumption that “we understand” what the patient means, what his or her experience has been. An immediately intelligible story is a human story, a story behind which the state lies undiscerned. A story “we can relate to” is a story on to which we are likely projecting our own feelings. While in the normal course of human conversation the tendency is to strive for commonality of feeling, in the homeopathic case-receiving the goal is to strive for an understanding of a state that is wholly other, completely non-human, and from which emanates a consciousness and conflict which compels the individual to create a reality into which this consciousness projects itself into the material world.
Accepting that we don’t understand what patients are telling us is surprisingly the most difficult aspect of homeopathic case-taking. The drive to insert our own thread of meaning into others’ words is so deep and so unconscious that it takes a very active and awake consciousness to step back and observe. The illusion of understanding is as habitual as it is comforting. When we are able to suspend this illusion of understanding, we will feel both the thrill of embarking upon a true adventure as well as the terror of unfamiliar terrain.
Hahnemann’s Instructions
So let us take a look at Hahnemann‘s Guidelines for Case-taking. In his famous Aphorism 83 he says “The individualizing examination of a disease case....demands nothing of the medical-art practitioner except freedom from bias and healthy senses, attention while observing and fidelity in recording the image of the disease.”
I like to wonder whether Hahnemann was writing with intentional irony when he chose the words “demands nothing....except”. Imagine someone telling you “I ask nothing of you except that you discard all the unconscious habits of perception and thought you have acquired all of your life”.
In the next Aphorism, 84, Hahnemann becomes more explicitly didactic in his instructions. After instructing the physician to see, hear, and notice ...what is altered or unusual about the patient, he instructs us to “write everything down with the very same expressions used by the patient and his relations”.
I want us to focus for a moment on the direction to use the very same expressions used by the patient. It turns out that this is one of the most critical instructions Hahnemann has given with regards to case-taking. The choice of words, of expressions, by the patient, is critically important. There are often layers of meaning behind a single expression or word, and we must strive to perceive these meanings. If we glibly substitute our vocabulary, our expressions, our associations for the patient’s, we will end up taking our own case, not the patient’s case, and end up with a prescription that is good for us, but not for the patient!
Case-Receiving as Applied Semiotics
As I take a case I underline words that seem significant, peculiar, or emotionally charged in some way (3). Any words that describe the sensations, the inner experience of the patient, can be overlooked only with peril. Of particular importance are words which link the physical complaint of the patient to his mental state. Each word a patient uses may have associations that transcend the surface story, and, when explored more fully, give a picture of an inner state is using disease and pathology to express itself.
Case-receiving is therefore analogous to a meticulous sifting through words, a careful examination of the language of the patient to discern meanings. It is a kind of decoding, best accomplished through establishing an alliance with the patient while exploring her complaints, her conscious state, her dreams, and her associations.
What is Healing?
This simple question leads to many quick but somehow unsatisfying answers. “To make whole”. Resolution of inner conflict. Release of the inner state. Sankaran states that it is the bringing down of the volume and intensity of the nonhuman song. Clearly we can recognize healing by the patient’s increased freedom to create his own reality: a reality shaped by his uniquely human, individual will, rather than a compulsion driven by the need of a nonhuman state to project itself into existence.
I propose not an answer, per se, but rather a different question: How does the task of healing relate to our soul’s development? Or, in other words, How does acquiring a state (identifying with some nonhuman source) and then healing from it relate to both our individual destiny and our common humanity? I have no answers, but would love to hear your thoughts.
In his famous first footnote of the Organon Hahnemann derides theoretical explanations of disease: "The physician's calling is not to concoct so-called systems from empty conceits and hypotheses concerning the inner wesen of the life process...not to make countless attempts at explanation..." He may have overestimated humankind's capacity to perceive healing, however, without understanding how it occurs. As pop singer Paul Simon refrains, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest" (4). Until the mainstream of society catches up with the paradigm shift underlying homeopathic medicine, we are likely to remain a tiny minority of healers among a world of fixers. But along with the calling of healing the sick, we as a community must face the task of describing exactly what we are doing. The professions of teaching and healing are closely linked, and as we teach about the primacy of consciousness, we shall help to usher in the paradigm of the new world.
Footnotes:
1. Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th Edition. Columbia University Press, Houghton Mifflin Company. 1993. P. 877.
2. Sankaran, Rajan: Bombay Seminar, January 2004. Further elaboration of these ideas can be found in his latest book, The Sensation in Homeopathy
3. Divya Chhabra is a contemporary master homeopath and teacher of methodology for discerning the “Story Behind the Story”. In a recent seminar (Toronto, Canada, Sept 2005) she outlined 5 kinds of “Key Words”:
1) Spontaneous denial makes a word important;
2) Words which seem inappropriate, which don’t make sense in context, are critically important. Temptation is to not write it down, write it off as a mistake. It’s a “Freudian slip”, a word which was dying to come out. If you ask more about it at that point he’ll tell you “no, it’s the wrong word”; the fact is it’s the right word.
3) Polarities are important. E.g neat, clean, tidy vs. dirty, cockroaches;
4) Words which derive from the source of a substance;
5) Words which express a metaphor, or simile. E.g. “My life is a bottomless pit into which I’m sinking.” When a patient says “as if” he is saying he is telling you that he is clueing you into his delusional state.
4. Simon, Paul. “The Boxer”. 1968,
Bibliography:
Chhabra, Divya. Unpublished Seminar Notes.
Hahnemann, Samuel. The Organon of the Medical Art, 6th Edition, 1842. Edited by Brenda O’Reilly. 1996.
Jung, Carl. “Synchronicity, an Acausal Connecting Principal. In: Collected Works, v. 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (p. 417-420).
Malin, Shimon. Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality, A Western Perspective. Oxford Press, New York: 2001.
Sheldrake, Rupert. A New Science of Life; The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. Park Street Press. 1981.
Doug Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom graduated from Hahnemann College of Homeopathy in 2001. He has studied in conference with Rajan Sankaran, Nandita Shah, Sunil Anand, Alize Timmerman, and Massimo Mangialavore. He sees patients in Portland, OR, and Walla Walla, WA, and can be reached at (503) 253-6334, or by email at [email protected].
Doug Brown, Homeopathic Healing, 833 S.W. 11th Avenue, Suite 216, Portland, Oregon 97205
© Douglas Brown, Homeopathic Healing • 503-253-6334 • [email protected]
© Douglas Brown, Homeopathic Healing • 503-253-6334 • [email protected]