Editorial: Let it be more

In the cases presented in this edition of Interhomeopathy, individuals are helped by the remedy selected to overcome those patterns of dis-ease, constriction, and pathology that have restricted their body and spirit - nothing new there! In the majority of these cases, there is a history of childhood abuse - by a parent or custodian - and/or rejection and abandonment. Where this is absent, there was often bullying – at school, in the family. Again, hardly anything new… Or, rather, entirely in accord with what every TV channel and newspaper offers as part of that unrelenting diet called ‘news’.

It has become customary to place, at the start of some such articles or videos, the phrase: “Contains graphic scenes of violence,” et cetera. So, yes, be advised that the stories told by most of these individuals contain violence.

The individual patients are aided by remedies drawn from animal sources (one that snaps; one that climbs…), from plant sources (from the Compositae and the Fabiaceae) and from mineral sources (mineral salts combining, in total, four of the stages or series of the Periodic Table). The remedies have little in common. Is there something else, then, that holds this issue together? Some systematic insight, some new work on thematic groups, some theoretical innovation, perhaps?

The two observations, below, answer the question sufficiently and point us towards what has always been at the heart of the matter:

Homeopathy is not violent because it’s not looking for a cause, because it sees the whole picture. It’s only interested in the pattern, the relationship between things. As a practitioner all I’m going to do is mimic that pattern. Anything else involves judgment and violence. That is the reason we don’t have to diagnose. Anything other than mimicking would be arrogance. We see a pattern and respect it. I don’t care who caused it and why; there’s no way I can tell. So I give something in nature that has the pattern. Let it be. Let it be more. This is homeopathy, - let the symptoms come out fully and then it can go away. (Jeremy Sherr, - seminar, Portland, Oregon, 1992)

The work of love is the work of presupposing the wish for awakening in the other... The work of love silently acknowledges in the other the wish to become free from illusion, fear, egoism, false imagination, self-deception, tension and violence; free from the power of life itself to devour our inner possibilities. (Jacob Needleman, A Little Book on Love, Doubleday, 1996)