Those of you who have been following this blog (thank you thank you!) have probably noticed the deafening silence.  I made the big decision, following the essential rule that just because you have started something you have no obligation to finish it.  I did not complete my challenge to present the entire Organon in this blog by Hahnemann’s birthday, and here’s why.

Initially my objective was to stir interest in reading the Organon, in the hope of creating a community of people who were putting the Organon into their own colloquial language, interacting with each other and with me.  I did not want to provide interpretations – although I understand from some of you that this is something you feel you need, and that you feel you gained from the study we did here.  I did not want to teach the Organon within this framework, rather to study with others who wanted to take a deeper look, to work in concert towards the greater symphony.

However, I found that people were viewing my writing as interpretation, and even in some case as an alternate text to use to study the Organon INSTEAD of the original, at least from the English translation.  This was the final nail in the coffin of my project.  With sadness but with total conviction I have decided to close this blog.  It is crucial for you to study from the original, to look at the Organon through your own eyes, to challenge and question, and not to accept interpretations without filtering them through your own understanding.  Charismatic teachers who enchant you away from doing the hard work of trying to understand something directly, for yourself, are the greatest danger to homoeopaths and students of homoeopathy today.

Please remember, Hahnemann was a medical doctor, someone who dealt with the secretions and the stools and the abscesses of mankind.  He was not a new age practitioner.  Homoeopathy is a “nuts and bolts” medical therapeutic tool, using Hahnemann’s genius in harnessing the Law of Similars in a way that could bring about gentle, rapid and permanent cures.  Ultimately, beautiful stories relating Psora to the Garden of Eden after the fall will not bring you results.  Relating the word “Organon” in a contrived way to the Hebrew words meaning “light” and “little garden” (and I’m an English and a Hebrew speaker) – will not bring you results.  Regular, repeatable, teachable results will only come from a solid, hard-earned study of the Organon, and from in-depth rigorous study of proving symptoms. And that’s just for starters.

Here endeth this particular rant – and this particular journey through the Organon.  Thanks for joining me.  If you like my writing and would like to read more, I will be writing on a weekly basis (approximately) for a new site dedicated to presenting real homoeopathy for the practitioner, student and patient.  If you’d like to be in touch with me directly, feel free to contact me at vera@homeopathyonline.org.

Vera

You have to remember though – it’s not just that medicines have more power to affect human beings than diseases do.  That’s not why medicines have the power to cure.  It’s only when a medicine is prescribed according to its ability to produce a similar artificial disease in the body – that’s what gives it its power to cure.

It’s the SIMILAR ARTIFICIAL DISEASE – geddit?  That’s what does the job. First it obscures the natural disease from the vital force, and then kills it altogether.

Even nature can’t cure one disease with a new one that looks nothing like the first, that’s dissimilar, however strong.  We’ll see more about what happens in those cases – read on.

QED.

And that’s that.

It’s like the group of kids in the kindergarten – a lot of them get colds in winter, but not all.  Some don’t get sick.  The natural-disease-causer won’t always cause disease – only where there’s a susceptible organism which is willing and ready (or unwilling and dragged into it) to partner in the crime.  To join the dance of disease.  It takes the “morbific influence” a.k.a. “natural-disease-causer” AND the susceptible organism to actually produce a disease state.

[1] When I talk about disease as a derangement of health, an alteration of health, I’m not talking about something outside the world as we know it, I’m not trying to give a spiritual or metaphysical (Boericke translates Hahnemann here as “hyperphysical”) explanation of disease.

I’m really just trying to show what disease can’t be.  Disease itself can’t be a mechanical or chemical alteration of something material in the body, depending on something material that causes the disease.  The whole thing goes deeper than that – into that integral, deepest part of the organism that is invisible and immaterial.  And within that realm is where the disease happens, as a spirit-like, dynamic derangement of life.

(nb.  Bear in mind here that Hahnemann was a deeply religious, spiritually oriented person.  If he’d wanted to give a spiritual explanation for disease, I’m sure he could have done it.  Within this aphorism, however, he goes out of his way to emphasize that he’s not talking spirituality here – he’s talking of part of the body that is not material, not visible.  With what we know today about wavelength frequency and vibration, electric charges within the body, and more, we know that there is a whole realm that is neither mechanical nor chemical in itself.  This should make it easier to follow Hahnemann’s train of thought.  V)

In homoeopathic cure, we grab the vital energy’s attention by treating it to a slightly stronger artificial disease. We grab it and say “can you still feel the natural disease? Can you?” And as we treat with our “artificial-disease-causer”, creating a slightly stronger artificial disease in the body, the vital force can’t feel the natural disease any more.

When you can’t feel something, you no longer respond to it. Like someone calling your name in the street – if you hear it, you may turn around. But if you don’t hear it – you just carry on walking. To take the idea a little further, if someone insults you and you hear it – you’ll react. If you don’t hear it, or if it’s in a language you don’t understand and there are no clues in the tone – you don’t react. In vital force language – if the sensation of the natural disease is removed, the vital force is no longer reacting to it, no longer producing symptoms. The only thing the vital force is reacting to at this stage is the artificial-disease-causer – the medicine. We put that in – and we can take it out. At which point the vital force is at peace, no longer in thrall to the natural or artificial disease.

This approach in giving a probable basis how homoeopathy works is based on the following (in subsequent aphorisms), on the conclusions I have drawn from my work.

“…this true theorem [homoeopathy] is not to be reckoned among those which should be comprehended, nor among those for which I ask a blind faith.  I demand no faith at all, and do not demand that anybody should comprehend it.  Neither do I comprehend it; it is enough that it is a fact and nothing else.  Experience alone declares it, and I believe more in experience than in my own intelligence…”

This is my all-time favourite quote (as those who followed the radio show may know) from Chronic Diseases.  It seems odd that Hahnemann, who in so many ways was a true scientist, says it’s not important to know how homoeopathy works, what exactly is happening in the body.

This quote helps strengthen the perspective – that first and foremost we use the tools which are clearly helpful, the principles that work – understanding exactly how they are working is less important than understanding the prescribing principles (law of similars) which will show us how to use them for cure.

In addition, although in many of his writings Hahnemann comes across as arrogant, his true humility shines through in these words.

(in my edition – B. Jain Publishers, hardcover, 1998 – this is in the long footnote on page 212-3)

To recap:  a medicine can only work if it can produce symptoms similar to the disease, but stronger (see aphorisms 12-26).  The closer the remedy is in similarity, with the additional strength needed, the more certain we can be that this remedy will work to cure the disease rapidly and permanently.