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separate, facts, to a patient, we are potentially going to influence the outcome. We must remember that when Hahnemann wrote these words, there were not thousands of available remedies, there was not the incredible understanding of the periodic table and plant and animal families, and there were no computers and repertorisation the way we know it. The art was to match the presenting signs of the patient to those created by a homeopathically prepared substances when given to healthy volunteers in a proving, and the numbers of substances were vastly less than we have in our modern armoury.
We, as the observing clinicians, also have a unique perception. There is a difference here between “thought” and “opinion” on the one hand, and our own, personal “Gestalt” on the other. The person we are, the body we have, the perceptions we hold, the world we see, the illness we see presented before us, all are created by our past. We do not need to actively or consciously “interpret” anything to be the interpreter; everything we see, every opinion we hold, every decision we make, is our perception of the facts as seen by our senses, based on our interpretation founded on all we have learnt over our lifetime (or lifetimes?). The way I perceive, or interpret, any situation will be inherently different to the way anyone else perceives it. Only when it is broken down artificially into a number of individual yet connected “facts” do we start to create common ground. Only by the dis-assemblage of a whole into artificial comp- onents, then it’s attempted re-assembly by a different perceiver, can we share information. This is not to say that we should not be doing this, but is simply to expose the weaknesses in doing so, thus it’s potential pitfalls.
So, to remain Hahnemann’s unbiased observer, yet to do so from within the Leib that we are (sorry to continue to use the German word, but hopefully you will understand how the meaning I am trying to portray is not served by the very broad English word “body”) is actually only
possible to a degree. Everything we think we know is as a result of learnt experience. In homeopathy we can try to reduce the inbuilt error in this by doing provings with a wide range of healthy individuals, in terms of gender, race, preferably even ideological and spiritual beliefs and understandings, age, previous experience etc. However, we cannot completely take out the variable that is the “beingness” of each of us.
So, what is this beingness? Can it exist alone? Actually, no. We know from quantum physics now that nothing can exist separately; in fact, to exist requires an observer, and that observer influences what is seen. We can further extrapolate all this information to the premise that the whole of existence only exists within the mind, and that nothing exists outside of it. There are some very convincing arguments that the universe only appeared AFTER consciousness, and is a result OF consciousness, not the other way round. Interesting, then, that the right brain was developed before the more recent advancement of left brain functions – such as many language and analytical processes – and we now know that the asymmetry of the hemispheres is due to the reduction in size and influence of the right hemisphere more than the increase in size of the left, so it has been suppressed in influencing the left hemisphere functions. Left brain is about grabbing, surviving, individualising, compart- mentalising; right is about union, oneness, empathy, looking at the whole rather than breaking it down into individual (recordable) facts, dealing with the new (rather than the previously experienced and recognisable, which is left brain work).
So what is Hahnemann actually asking us to do? He is saying to look at patients with the right brain. Do not look on a patient as a non-living list of symptoms which your biased mind compares to what it already knows (left brain) but to look at the whole as something never seen before,
taking the individual symptoms presented and creating a whole picture from them, one which flows between the symptoms rather than is made by joining the dots or painting by numbers. We need to shut off the left brain, and it’s dominance by what is already known and recognised, and allow the right brain to rule our non- thinking as we let the patient display the whole (holistic) story to us. As soon as we start to apply our incredibly advanced analytical programs, turning the individual symptoms into reproduceable rubrics, we are, of necessity, engaging LEFT-brain techniques into what is quint- essentially a RIGHT-brain assessment. Again, this is not to say that such analysis is not worthy or necessary, far from it, but we must be aware of the ways it may be restrictive. Nothing exists without an observer. The observer changes what is seen simply by observing. Every observer is unique and different due to the way he or she perceives the world, a world which is built on the building blocks of past experience, and based on the roots with which he was born (miasmatic inheritance and childhood influences). These are now all accepted facts. Think of the consequences of this. No two clinicians will ever see the same thing in the same patient; it is just not possible. We may see something very similar from the homeopathic viewpoint, and this is enough for the accumulation of data (left brain) which enables our sharing and case analysis to advance the
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