HOMŒOPATHY – THE INTEGRAL HEALTH MEDICINE

            Integral: Soul, Spirit and Body:  Single Unit.  All these three together, well integrated, is Life.  For purposes of convenience in discussion they are sometimes spoken of as if each one of them is separate.  They are notseparate.  Attention § 15 Organon VI.

            The individual unit of evolution is the Soul.  Until recently we have not, while we accepted that there is a soul, been aware of the existence of the Soul.  We have not considered what the existence of the Soul means in terms of everyday existence, in terms of the joys and pains and sorrows and fulfillments that make a human life.  We have not turned our attention to the needs of the Soul. We have not considered what is required by the Soul in order to be healthy.  We have not sought to help it attain what is necessary to its evolution and its health.  Because we have been fine–sensory.  We have focused upon the body and the personality.  We have developed an extensive knowledge of the physical apparatus that the Soul assumes when it incarnates.  We know of Amino acids, Neurotransmitters, Chromosomes and Enzymes, but we do not know of the Soul.  We do not know how these physical functions serve the Soul, or are affected by it. 

            We seek to cure dysfunctions of the body by controlling its environment at the molecular level.  In other words, our approach to healing is based upon the perception of power as external.  This type of healing can be helpful to the body where the ailment is purely bodily as for example from an accident, injury, etc, but cannot heal at the deepest, viz. Soul level.

            What we are accustomed to learn about Life is by study of dead matter, cadavers and end-products – Tumors, Ulcers, etc. – of disease.  We can never learn the ailment at the level of the Spirit and Soul by the study of the end-products, dead matter.   How can it be?  How can the dead teach us anything?  About Soul, Spirit.  Only when we see the connections of everything in this universe will we be able to understand the Soul, Spirit and we will stop studying dead matter and begin to explore the Soul and Spirit and then the Body.  The sufferings of a Life can be understood and appreciated only by studying with Life. 

            Body is the instrument used by the Soul and Spirit.  If the player of the instrument is sick what is the use of setting right the instrument?  The instrument’s performance depends more on the skill of the player and the spirit of his play.  If the player is happy and he plays joyously the instrument will respond accordingly; on the contrary if the player is dejected, and plays sorrowfully the instrument is not to be blamed.  Of course the instrument too should be fit.  Haven’t we experienced that the same player who played so great on a particular day plays so poorly on another day although the instrument – be it the flute, the violin or the piano or anything – was the same?  Can the instrument be blamed?  If the instrument needed a repair it can be done easily but it is difficult at the level of the player, the person, the Soul, the Spirit.

            Listen to HAHNEMANN: “Excessive hardships, laboring in swamps, great bodily injuries and wounds, excess of cold or heat, and even the unsatisfied hunger of poverty and its unwholesome foods, etc. are not by any means very powerful in causing the fearful malady of Psora which lies in ambush, lurking in secret to break forth into serious chronic diseases, nor of great consequence in aggravating a chronic disease already present; yea, an innocent man can, with less injury to his life, pass ten years in bodily torments in the bastile, or on the Galleys rather than pass some months in all bodily comfort in an unhappy marriage or with remorseful conscience.  A Psora slumbering within, which still allows the favorite of a prince to live with the appearance of almost blooming health unfolds quickly into a chronic ailment of the body, or distracts his mental organs into insanity, when by a change of fortune he is hurled from his brilliant pinnacle and is exposed to contempt and poverty.  The sudden death of a son causes the tender mother, already in ill health an incurable suppuration of the lungs or a Cancer of the breast.  A young, affectionate maiden, already hysterical, is thrown into melancholy by a disappointment in love.  … By far the most frequent excitement of the slumbering Psora into chronic disease, and the most frequent aggravation of chronic ailments already existing, are caused by grief and vexation.”         

            “Uninterrupted grief and vexation very soon increase even the smallest traces of a slumbering Psora into more severe symptoms, and they then develop these into an outbreak of all imaginable chronic sufferings more certainly and more frequently than all other injurious influences operating on the human organism in an average human life; while these two agencies just as surely and frequently augment ailments already existing.” 

            “As the good physician will be pleased when he can enliven and keep from ennui the mind of a patient, in order to advance a cure which is not encumbered with such obstruction, he will in such a case feel more than ever the duty incumbent upon him to do all within the power of his influence on the patient and on his relatives and surroundings, in order to relieve him of grief and vexation.  This will and must be a chief end of his care and neighbourly love.   … for even the most masterly management of the case with the remedies that are the most exquisite and the best adapted to the bodily ailment will avail nothing, nothing at all, with a chronic patient thus exposed to continual sorrow and vexation, and in whom the vital economy is being destroyed by continuous assaults on the mind.”

            Most of us don’t perceive the fact that there is more to a Myocardial infarction, to Heart attacks than Cholesterol in the blood and other physical findings. 

            Every distress and every dysfunction of the physical body, every illness, can be understood in terms of power loss to an external circumstance or object through one of several energy centers within the body.  You lose power when you distance yourself from your fellow-humans out of resentment or bitterness, or a sense of disappointment or unworthiness or superiority.  You lose power when you long for something or someone, when you grieve, and when you envy another.  Beneath all these is fear, fear that you are vulnerable, that you are not able to cope without the person or the situation that you miss, that you are at a disadvantage without that which you envy.  Fear takes away power. 

            [See  article on Mental Precursor of Myocardial Infarction, also 1992 B.H.J. on Christian Mission doctors experience with AIDS. ]

            Spirit:  The Spirit of everything and of every being is to be found both within and without.  Be it a metal, a stone, a fruit, or a flower, everything has its Spirit within it, even if it be in a hidden form; and this Spirit continues to exist even after the object has lost its apparent life.  Sandalwood keeps its perfume even when dry; in the stone which is cold a spark of fire is hidden; in fruit there is a seed which contains its essence.  There is nothing existing which has no Spirit although we cannot see it.  We see the outside, but the Spirit is inside.

            The qualities of all things are to be found in their Spirit rather than in the things themselves.  Knowing this, ancient physicians tried to extract the essence, the Spirit by grinding, burning or washing them great number of times.  The Spirit that was thus got out was many, many times more powerful than the substance itself.  This is Alchemy.  We homœopaths know very well that it was exactly this alchemical action that takes place in our potentisation, a unique technique discovered by Samuel HAHNEMANN.  Indeed, HAHNEMANN is a mystic and missionary at least to the extent that he not only perceived the fact that substances have their own Spirits within themselves but also that they have extremely great healing powers which can be harvested by serial trituration or succussion, and serial dilution.  What a great discovery for the benefit of life on the earth!  All glory to him. 

            It is also evident, from a consideration of the sources of the homœopathic medicines that healing powers, powers that do greatest good – namely relief of suffering – are derived from whatever we imagine to be harmful, poisonous, etc.  The healing, health-restoring powerful medicines are taken out deep from within the poison (Vishamadhye Aushadam)!  In fact, HAHNEMANN said, the greater, the more dangerous the poison, the more healing and the more beneficient are the remedies derived from them!  Thus there is nothing that is totally harmful; all are helpful (ref. HAHNEMANN’s What are Poisons?, What are Remedies?, 1805)  What a revelation! We keep on refining the poison and take out the ‘Amrit’ in the core of the poison, the Amrit that is the spirit of that substance. 

            HAHNEMANN uses the word ‘spirit’ ‘spirit-like’ in many places in his major work the Organon.  Spirit and matter are two names of the one life; although we see it as two.  Actually the primal aspect of life is Spirit and its dense form is called matter.  It is like water turning into Ice.  Spirit is fineness, Matter is gross.  Spirit is Dynamis, activity.  It is Spirit that enlivens Matter.  Some people describe that Spirit and Matter are linked; it is not so.  It is one, they are not separate and linked or delinked.  Without Spirit an object has no distinction.      

[Paper prepared for the Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Integral Health, Pondicherry = KSS.]