Homeopathy, Healing, and You
Part One
UNLEARNING
The action of these remedies is to raise our vibrations and open up our channels for the reception of the Spiritual Self ... . They are able, like beautiful music or any glorious or uplifting thing which gives us inspiration, to raise our very natures ... . They cure, not by attacking the disease, but by flooding our bodies with the beautiful vibrations of our Higher Nature, in the presence of which disease melts away as snow in the sunshine.
--Edward Bach
1
VITAL FORCE
For the vitalist, there is a kind of music, an almost audible hum, that permeates all of creation. Each part of creation, each creature, each plant, even each of the basic elements of creation, is a part of that music. For the vitalist, all creation is one, just as each of us is one whole being, body, mind, and spirit. All creation shares the basic spark of life.
To understand homeopathy, you must first understand vitalism, a philosophy of healing that dates back to the time of Hippocrates in ancient Greece. Vitalism is based on the concept that the world, and everything natural to it, is alive.
The life spark is infinitely creative and ever changing, and it is through this spark of life, called dynamis by the Greeks, that we are able to heal ourselves. Dynamis, the root word for dynamite, encapsulated the ancient Greek concept of life. The word meant "divine breath"; for the Greeks, the concept of life was one of God breathing life into His lifeless creation. Just as modern charismatic Christians have taken the term dynamus to name the infilling of humans with the Holy Spirit, the early vitalists believed that, while life still existed within a person, the possibility for healing was present. Further, vitalists past and present believe that as all creation is alive, all creation is self-healing, and that, by making proper use of the lifeenergy of other parts of creation, be they animals, vegetables, or minerals, we can use that spark to empower our own healing energies.
Samuel Hahnemann, the father of modern homeopathy, was, like Hippocrates, a vitalist. On the subject, Hahnemann wrote, "The material organism, without the vital force, is capable of no sensation, no function, no self-preservation; it derives all sensation and performs all the functions of life solely by means of the immaterial being (the vital principle), which animates the material organism in health and in disease."
But this concept of an invisible force that carries and contains the life energy of the living being neither originated with Hahnemann nor is unique to homeopathy. Or to the Greeks, for that matter. In fact, every healing system contains a concept parallel to vital force, or lebenskraft, as Hahnemann named it in his native German. This same energy was named entelecheia by Aristotle. For Henri Bergson, it was élan vital, "the momentum of life." And perhaps it is best known today through traditional Chinese medicine, in which system it is referred to as chi.
Whatever it is called, there is a flow of energy that pours through us all, that allows the meat and bones from which we are created to get up and run around. When that force leaves our body, the meat first becomes rigid and then begins to rot. For some that force is the human soul. Others call it the immune system. For the homeopath, this vital force represents the energy that maintains life in the individual. And more, it is considered to be a force that is unique within each individual, with each system manipulating and mutating the force with its own peculiar qualities. The vital force must be considered as an energy flow that is different from any other chemical or physical phenomenon within the individual being. Therefore, it is neither soul nor immune system; it is a unique flow that sustains, heals, develops, and learns. It would be, for Hahnemann, a gift from God and not God Himself alive within each of us.
As homeopath William Boericke, in his A Compend of the Principles of Homeopathy, writes: "The connection between the immaterial, spiritual and immortal being, and the body is supposed by him [Hahnemann] to be effected by means of the vital force which he designates Dynamis. We have then, in Hahnemannian physiology, (1) the spirit, the true man, (2) the material body, receiving its life and health through (3) the vivifying force, the dynamis."
Therefore, for the homeopath, this "vivifying force," our vital force, is the connection between our invisible and visible selves. It is the conduit of the energy of all eternity within our mortal bodies. Hahnemann believed that the spirit within each of us was perfect and would always remain so. No illness or evil could destroy the perfection of God's spirit within eachof us. But the vital force, as the connection between the eternal and the temporal, not only was vulnerable to ailments and attacks of all sort but also was the seat of creation for all forms of disease.
In all of us there is the visible and the invisible, tangible and intangible. We all have muscles, bones, fat, and blood. We have eyes and ears and noses. But also we have emotions, intellect, and spirit. We have an invisible nature that defies chemical compositions and that allows us understanding of more than just physical creation. This invisible nature is dominant over the physical, and that which disrupts the invisible nature, the mind, and the emotions must ultimately also disrupt the physical body.
Modern science often reduces us to being meat machines, made of many parts that can be manipulated or removed or replaced like parts of a car. But we must never forget that there is an invisible being driving that car, and if that being is in a state of disruption, the meat machine is bound to run off the road and smash into a tree. For Hahnemann and for all homeopaths, all healing must take place on the level of vital force if healing is to take place at all.
If we can accept that illness begins in our invisible nature, then we can quickly move to the next step: By treating symptoms and looking only to the physical body in terms of treatment, we can never bring about a true healing. Take for example the angry man who has colitis. The usual treatment for this disease involves only the pain and not the anger. Even if this "treatment" seems to be successful, that still-angry patient soon needs treatment for migraines or some other disease. While the physician sees these new problems as unconnected to the earlier digestive disorder, the homeopath sees them as the logical progression of illness for this particular patient.
In other words, if we refuse to look to the vital force and to the invisible nature, we spend our lives chasing ailments one after another, as the weakest links in our system break down and more and more serious illnesses set in. But if we clear the block in the vital force with a homeopathic remedy (just as an acupuncture needle clears the flow of chi), we work on a more profound energistic level, one that treats the underlying cause of the ailment rather than its symptoms. Homeopathy, like acupuncture, is a form of energy medicine, one that relates to the invisible nature and, through it, to the physical body and its ailments.
Sooner or later, someone always gets the idea of taking a homeopathic remedy and running it to a lab to see what's inside. The results always come back that nothing is inside. The implication is always that, because there is nothing in the remedy, the remedy does nothing and homeopathy isquackery. But put the remedy in its proper context and you will see that it holds great healing potential.
Far from denying the basic principles of science as we all learned them in high school, the basic tenets of homeopathy fit very nicely into the realm of science. In fact, the scientific principles set forth by Newton and Einstein form the foundation for our understanding of homeopathy.
The basis for both homeopathic exploration and practice is the idea that nature is knowable. If we cannot believe that creation is governed by set principles instead of a sort of functioning chaos, then we cannot look to any form of medicine, homeopathic or allopathic, to be of any consistent assistance in the restoration of health. It is only by believing that we can uncover a set of unchanging rules by which creation functions that we can proceed.
Newton's philosophy tells us that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. He states that "action and reaction are ceaseless, equivalent, and reciprocal." All action has response. It is by working with this tenet that homeopathic remedies--our actions--bring about healing reactions from within our vital force. This is the heart of the Law of Similars: "Like cures like." It is this principle by which homeopathy functions. Homeopathy is a reactive medicine, one that places the healing impact on that "equal and opposite reaction," rather than an active medicine, such as allopathy, that places the force of the cure on the first medicinal action and calls that equally potent reaction a "side effect."
As Einstein's discoveries enhance our view of creation, they also enhance our understanding of homeopathy. Einstein gives us this tenet: Matter and energy and essentially interchangeable and their transformations are eternally continuous. All matter, therefore, is energy. It is all made up of swirling bits of energy of different sizes and speeds. The chair you are sitting on is made up of energy, as are your clothes. As are you. You are an energy being.
Further, Einstein tells us that matter/energy is indestructible and persistent and infinitely divisible. Take a handful of dirt and try to destroy it, take it out of existence. You can smash it into smaller and smaller bits, but it's still there. We are forever proving this tenet to be true; as we look into the atom, we are finding that the smallness of matter/energy is as eternal as the vastness of the universe. It follows that there is no lower limit to the quantity of action that is necessary to effect any change. In other words, a minute amount of energy may well be as efficacious in bringing about a change as is a large amount of energy. Therefore, even if you cannot find molecules of a remedy within a remedy, perhaps molecules aren't really necessary to effect a change toward healing. What if there is somethingsmaller, something as yet invisible to our best ability to look within creation, that, while invisible, has an action still potent enough to effect a reaction within our human system? The universe is a wonderfully crafted spiral that is eternal in its vastness and its smallness.
As we are spiritual beings, energy beings, then hasn't science itself taught us that we are eternal in our natures, as our final tenet states it, "indestructible and persistent"? Perhaps it is our perception that is at fault, or the lessons that we have been taught: We should pay attention to our physical symptoms and deal with what we can see and touch and cut in terms of medicine and healing.
If we accept what Einstein has taught us, then we must begin to see our allopathic tradition of medicine as old-fashioned, mired in a universe made up of only what we can see and taste and smell. The universe of acupuncture and homeopathic medicine is an energy universe, one that is alive and harmonious in creation. These philosophies, both thousands of years old, have yet to be proved scientifically because of the limitations of science, not because they are not true.
If we accept the principle of vital force, then we must look elsewhere for our healing. Not to our meat and bones, blood and phlegm, but to our eternal selves--our spirits.
HOMEOPATHY, HEALING, AND YOU. Copyright © 1997 by Vinton McCabe. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
