Eighth Chapter HEALTH AND DISEASE Inclination Towards Disease Comes from the Centre Having once drawn that ghastly staircase with people descending or ascending (though the majority through a natural development would be heading down), we could use it to look at the issue of health and disease from the homeopathic point of view. When a person stands at the top of the stairs, the immaterial governing centre (Hahnemann calls it the "spiritual dynamis") is in perfect order, the organism is well balanced. Such people cannot be touched by anything. They will not fall ill even in the midst of a raging epidemic of influenza. With everybody around them becoming neurotic ("because this is the sign of our times"), still their hands would not sweat and their sleep would be undisturbed. Nowadays few such people are around, but in the times gone by, as little as forty years ago, this was not so rare. Quite a number of people went throughout their lives without any illness until their old age, when they finally succumbed to a chill, died of "old age". People do not die of old age these days. People become chronically ill, particularly the youngest generation, even in their childhood. Why is it so? A person falls ill only when the governing centre is disturbed. The confusion brings about pathological changes in the organism. Let's refer to the hundred and eighty years old paragraph 12 of the Organon and then proceed along this line of thought: "It is only the pathologically untuned vital force that causes disease. The pathological manifestations accessible to our senses express all the internal changes, i.e., the whole pathological disturbance of the dynamis: they reveal the whole disease..." When the "dynamis", the organisational centre, is strong, the organism would not bulge. Perhaps you have noticed that spiritual leaders of mankind, such as the Buddha, Jesus, St. Anne, C.G. Jung, Hahnemann, Ghandi, and many others, were all extraordinarily healthy people who lived (with the exception of Jesus) and maintained a good condition to very old age. Interesting is the definition of longevity given by the authors Schwarz, Schweppe and Pfau (The Heeling Powers of the Druids, Alternativa 1994): "It must be admitted that neither the Druids, nor the Indian Yogis or the Chinese masters had ever reached the "biblical age"; on the other hand they had not died young either. It is reasonable to assume that all these masters lived as long as they had to live, to enable them to reach their goals and to get to the limit beyond which the body can no longer maintain a healthy spirit. When they had reached this boundary, they seem to have voluntarily left their bodies." A strong governing centre (Hahnemann's dynamis) always signifies a high spiritual capacity, healthy mind and emotions and a healthy body. Symptoms as a Defence of the Organism Homeopaths look at local diseases as a defence of the organism. As a defence of the governing centre against declivity, against developing a chronic constitutional disease, against weakening of the constitution. Remarkably, symptoms of disease also signify a certain level of inner health - ability of the organism to put up a defence against decay. Through tonsillitis the organism prevents the pathology from advancing inwards by allowing the tonsils, a lesser organ on the outer line of defence, to become infected. The organism is able to stop the advance here. If we interfere with antibiotics, the bastion is conquered and the disorganisation moves on. The next round of the fight might be fought out on our kidneys, on our lungs or on our heart. Let's return to our analogy with the staircase.
Each step represents a particular line of defence, an obstacle to further descend. If we demolish the step by allopathic drugs, the staircase turns into a slide. Another possibility is that the centre is too weak and incapable of placing any steps to bar the natural fall into pathology, and such a person slides right down to the most serious diseases, without any colds or rashes. I had a friend, who many years ago used to laugh over my interest in homeopathy: "Look at me, I for one don't need any remedies. I haven't been ill for at least fifteen years. I'm healthy." Unfortunately he did not belong to that minority group with an exceptionally strong organisational centre, but on the contrary, to those whose centre is extremely weak. While he never showed symptoms of any disease, he died at a relatively young age, of a malignant brain tumour. The pathology advanced without obstacles, straight to the most important organs. He never was on the staircase, always on the slide. Opposed to this we all have our experience with hypochondriacs, people who constantly complain of some pains, who always have some inflammations, whose bodies ever give them warning signals - and such people usually live to a ripe old age. They have a relatively strong governing centre, which stubbornly resists any moves towards pathology, constantly displaying some symptoms. There is yet another group of people, unfortunately growing fast. Here belong the regular drug addicts who use heroin and similar things, but also the "legalised drug addicts" - those who take sleeping pills and tranquillisers and all kinds of tablets, if possible as a prevention. Their practical approach to our staircase is as follows: They take a run up at the top and jump, evading all the unpleasant encounters with the steps. They want to avoid the suffering which the staircase (as a painful obstruction) would cause them. And they succeed to a degree. Nevertheless, the harder they crush at the bottom and the sooner it happens. Such a dive might result in the complete destruction of their immunity system (or the ability of their centre to combat pathology) and in other and most serious chronic illnesses, i.e. kidney disease, liver disease, heart disease, malignant tumours... From the homeopathic point of view, symptoms (the organism's defence) have another important aspect. They provide us with the main lead for selecting the remedy. Where there are no symptoms there cannot be any treatment. "No symptoms, no cure.", says a distinguished American author. The cases of patients who display only a small number of symptoms or "lesser symptoms" can be more difficult to treat, and sometimes it is necessary to try out several remedies before we hit the target. To a homeopath, the human body and the mind are like windows displaying the patient's inner state. When the display is meagre we learn little. It is sometimes easier to treat the patient with a large number of symptoms than the patient who is almost without symptoms. On the other hand, few people would pass as being healthy, in front of a homeopath. Few of those who declare that they are healthy, at any rate. Practically all people display some signs or symptoms that characterise their constitution, either in the mental area, in the general reactions, or in the minor physical pathology. This, of course, is great, as it enables us to give the constitutional remedy even to relatively healthy people, as a prevention. The Pyramid Let's go on drawing some more pictures. Imagine that our staircase is really a projected conical, circular step-pyramid. At the top stands the completely healthy governing centre, the mentally and physically healthy and perfectly balanced being. Naturally, such a hypothetical being would be difficult to find in our contemporary world.
This completely healthy tip that juts out over the pathology is possibly quite immaterial, it is the nirvana, the heaven, or something similar. All beings, even those who stand a millimetre below the top, are already on the slope, on the staircase, though very high up. And this conical pyramid is divided by radial lines into a number of partitions, with each partition representing a homeopathic type. Thus the individual beings can descend down the steps, on their different paths. Some stand just below the top, but already are on the path of Lachesis, others on the path of Sulphur or Lycopodium. The path, the symptoms that the person experiences on the way down, and their combinations, are characteristic of a particular substance. It manifests through a characteristic picture of one of the substances, described in the homeopathic Materia Medica. As we descend, so the pathology spreads, so it grows. If a suitable remedy of non material potency, or information addressed to the nonmaterial governing centre, is applied while on this path, the person begins to ascend along the same path that had previously lead them down. In the course of curative process, in exceptional circumstances, they might even move to an adjacent path, and change for instance from Calcarea carbonica back to Lycopodium, or from Pulsatila to Lachesis. Philosophical Connections While we are at play with the images, we could also ask ourselves, why this ascend in the reverse order, after taking the remedy? There certainly is no materialistic explanation (though there were certain experiments in this direction operating with such terms as "remembrance of water", nevertheless from the point of view of the Cartesian science these are meaningless), so we are not going to look for it. However, we know that in the Yoga Sutras, the author Patanjali who lived two thousand years ago, had said that the soul (identical with Hahnemann's "spiritual dynamis"?) reincarnates into this world in order to gain experiences, so that it may return to its Maker, to the Universal, whence it originated. Why should it return? After the bad experiences with its stay in this world, isn't this obvious? When it had established that this attractively looking descend can hide only more and more suffering. And we can easily imagine that a homeopathic remedy contains not only the information about the patient's past experiences on the path, but also about all the horrors and predicaments that lie in store, if he continues to descend. Thus the non material governing centre, having received the information in the form of a remedy, quickly loses its eagerness to descend into this and lower forms of existence (which might be applicable not only to the one human life, but even to the whole process of reincarnation) and looks for the fastest possible way out. It is not a coincidence that some modern Buddhists speak of meditation literally as of "homeopathic recognition of the reality". Perhaps the answer is to be found in the Indian philosophy. Small wonder that it is in India where homeopathy - originally a purely European method - gained perhaps its greatest number of followers. To the inhabitants it does not appear at all strange, but rather an ordinary and natural thing. The same cannot be said about the majority of Europeans. Hahnemann saw the cause of a chronic disease, of miasma, as inherent from the generations of our ancestors. This is one of his explanations of the fact that a person can already be born with a serious disease. Evidently, such a thought is not far from the Biblical theory of hereditary sin. In the Bible too, the hereditary sin, the state that follows the expulsion from the Paradise, is conceived as a disease and vice-versa, disease is conceived as hereditary sin - and not only symbolically, but also literally. In the Gospel of St. John the following story is related: When the disciples met with a man who was blind from his birth, they asked whether he was born like this because of a sin: "Had this man sinned or had his parents sinned?" Interestingly, this question can be polarised. On the one hand it may be connected with Hahnemann's theory of an actual hereditary sin ("... his parents..."). On the other hand it is closely connected with the esoteric or Gnostic point of view, which admits of reincarnation. This means that man does not have to inherit other people's sins, but simply his own, that he must suffer from the mistakes made in his previous lives ("... had this man sinned..."). This passage is often cited as one of the few Biblical references to reincarnation, which was the belief held by the original Christians. A great majority of such references were however removed from the New Testament at the Council of Constantinople, in the year 553 AD. Hahnemann was born within the Christian Protestant environment and would have been undoubtedly influenced by its ideology, even though he did not subscribe to any religious doctrine. Nowadays, two hundred years later, as there are other philosophical and religious currents known in Europe, which explain the events and determining factors of the one life through the causal link with previous lives, we feel that it is possible to extend the theory of miasma into this dimension, known to the old Christians, to Christian mystics, to Buddhists, to Hinduists, to the ancient Celts, even to some modern psychologists. The supportive evidence that chronic diseases (constitutional diseases, miasma) are not only hereditary, lies among others in the fact, that it is not at all exceptional for children to display an entirely different constitutional type than their parents. It may even be possible that Hahnemann himself was strongly influenced by the Gnostic tradition. His personal relationship to alchemy may be unclear, but the relationship of homeopathy to alchemy is quite close, and it will be further analysed. Thus when Hahnemann speaks of the hereditary nature of miasma and when he conceives disease unambiguously as a sort of spiritual distortion, a confusion of spiritual dynamis, when he attributes primarily spiritual cause to a disease, he probably has something very similar in his mind. In relevance to these speculations it is necessary to unequivocally state: Homeopathy is an empirical method of treatment, it was deduced from experimentation, from medical practice. As a method of treatment in itself it does not embody any ideology. As such it should be commended. More so, because allopathy or the orthodox medicine, as we will see later, was principally built on ideological and theoretical presumptions. Homeopathy is a science entirely supported by reality. On the other hand this is what loses it some credibility, as it is often not quite clear where to slot it, what to think about it. Nevertheless, the aspiration of this book is to find such a slot. Therefore it must be stressed that all the theoretical about homeopathy, all the speculative and presumptive, does not really have anything to do with the actual method of treatment. Even if we remove such terms as the "spiritual dynamis", the treatment and its results would be unchanged. It is exactly the philosophical presumptions, the convictions, the spirit of the time, that prevent the large percentage of population from undergoing a homeopathic treatment. The methods of treatment were perfectly developed by Hahnemann, Hering, Kent and by their followers, the remedies are readily available in many stores, (even in our country). People, and this concerns not only those who are treated, but even those who carry out the treatment, mostly do not know where to place homeopathy. It does not fit the climate of general opinion. Therefore they do not trust it. It appears strange to them. It is so different not only from the orthodox treatment, but seemingly from everything else - from the scientific concept of the world, from the religious point of view, it does not agree very well with the economics and mercantilism, with the collectivist conception of society, etc. It hangs on in a vacuum. So it appears. Treatment from the Centre Let's get back to disease and health. The pinnacle of health is perhaps characterised by a person whose physical organs are in perfect order, but who also stands on a high level of mental, psychological development. And such a person can be created from a previously diseased one, precisely by the homeopathic method of treatment. The reason is that homeopathic cure affects both the body and the mind at the same time. Whatever is happening within the mind is reflected on the physical organs, and whatever happens in the body also influences the mind. According to Hering's Laws of Cure, when the correctly prescribed remedy is applied, the curative process first affects the mind, which includes the power of our will, evaluation, decision making. The next "envelope" in which the process of treatment, the "curative wave" manifests, is the emotional layer. From here the cure moves onto the physical organs, in order of their importance for the sustenance of life functions (the brain, the heart, the kidneys, etc.), or in the reverse order to how the symptoms first appeared (the former is usually virtually identical with the latter). At the same time during the treatment entirety of the whole being is maintained. As long as pathology exists in the physical organs, the mind cannot be entirely healthy either.
We often hear the orthodox allopathic doctors say, particularly after a prolonged unsuccessful treatment, and in cases where the physical cause cannot be exactly pin-pointed: "That problem of yours (those pains), it's only psychological. It's a psychosomatic matter." They imply that nothing can be done in this case, and that after all, it is not considered to be very serious. As opposed to that, a homeopath thinks of all diseases, acute or chronic, as being closely related to the mind and psychology. Even though he or she does not believe that the cause would be exactly in the mind. It is higher - in the nonmaterial governing centre, which can be influenced by the nonmaterial potency of the remedy.
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