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know what the other has been doing, and the patient information is shared as a series of facts, miniaturised down to electronically transmissible reports. The final state of the patient is thus the result of accumulated data of many individual and separate diagnoses from many different consultants. The basis of his or her disease is represented only by recognisable facts, lab results, and measurements of clinical parameters. Das Korper is separate from any understanding of feelings, emotions, or consciousness. The “scientific” community get a bit upset if we start to introduce such unmeasurable variables!
Der “Leib” is also translated as “body”, but this encompasses the living, breathing, feeling, experiencing, thinking, being body. Leib in many ways is “Korper plus”; to use a poker analogy, it sees your skin and bones, guts and nerves, heart and liver, and raises you by adding consciousness and ability to perceive. It does not see the body as a Lego kit of bits, all of which are added together to create a working machine, functional yet impersonal, but as a unified whole of physical and thinking/emotion/brain, a consciousness represented by the physical, the whole and the holistic. This gives recognition to the experiencing of being, and thereby the individualisation of perception. No two people can experience the world in the same way, because the world can only ever be what we individually perceive from within the limitations of our perceiving vessel, which is our body. This could get into a far deeper consideration of what do we mean by our “soul”, considerations of astral bodies and causal bodies, and so forth, but that would be beyond the scope of the immediate exercise. Let it suffice to say that if we accept that the world is one, which we all see from our unique standpoint, then that means that there are infinite interpretations of the same “facts” based on our individual perceptions. This does not mean that we are all separate, far from it; however, from the sense-limited confines of
our Korper (physical incarnate vessel), our Leib (consciousness endowed being) will be experiencing the world as it’s own, very individual, perception.
So what relevance does this have to George Vithoulkas and his scary utterance back in 1997? Whether an established homeopathic master with many years clinical experience, or a relatively new, albeit enthusiastic, student with very limited clinical knowledge, our understanding of homeopathy is individual, and dominated by the way we perceive the world and ourselves – so shaped by the way we choose to shape it. If we are all so fundamentally different, and we perceive the world in a unique way, then every clinician is also fundamentally different, so perceives the patient in a fundamentally different way.
Paragraph 6, The Organon
“The unprejudiced observer, even the most sharp-witted one – knowing the nullity of supersensible speculations which are not born out of experience – perceives nothing in each single case of disease other than the alterations in the conditions of the body and soul, disease signs, befallments, symptoms, which are outwardly discernable through the senses. That is, the unprejudiced observer only perceives the deviations from the former healthy state of the now sick patient, which are:
1 Felt by the patient themselves
2 Perceived by those around him, and 3 Observed by the physician.
All these perceptible signs represent the disease in its entire extent, that is, together they form the true and only conceivable gestalt [entirety] of the disease.”
Hahnemann urges us not to start to interpret, reason, or impose our individual ideas, but to be the unbiased observer, remaining passively aware and alert to the often
subtle changes in the patients normal state as the body displays the disease process within the limitations of the physical body, which is the mode of expression of the underlying imbalance. There have been many times when I have been guilty of not listening to these wise words, comparing a patient before me to others I have seen with similar problems. Our e-mail discussion group [BAHVS2020@googlegroups.com] is also an exchange of ideas based on clinical diagnoses and an individual patient’s imbalance, the perception of which is restricted by several limiting steps:
• The limited ability of the patient to express the underlying imbalance due to the confines of the physical body and it’s limitations
• The ability of the patient to show characteristic and recognisable signs
• In veterinary homeopathy, the inadequacies of the intermediary, the carer of the animal, in relaying the characteristic information necessary
• The ability of the clinician to recognise those characteristic signs
• The further restriction created by the recording of the clinician’s understanding of the disease into the confines of language
• The limitation within an online group to compare the patient to our previous experience and learning, so either to previous patients or previous learning from Materia Medica and provings (so other people’s previous experience).
Now try being that unbiased observer!
The real issue here is that we are trying to apply left brain oriented facts, the reduction of a whole into it’s individual parts, then trying to re-assemble them into the original patient. Whenever we try to apply analytical processes, of necessity reducing the ailment to a series of related, but
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