Homeopathy and the Art of Salvation

Table of Contents Feature Articles Masthead Magazine List Shopping Home	Volume 1 No. 8 Heilkunst: Homeopathy and the Art of Salvation an interview with Rudi Verspoor, R.Hom. by Billii Roberti
	Homeopathy and the Art of Salvation Does the assurance of an effective cure for your illness, without side effects, seem too good to be true? What if the medicine is low-cost and easy to find and take? And what if continuing this treatment guided you into a totally new spiritual experience of life itself? Sound like a fairy tale? Then you haven't tried Heilkunst. Heilkunst is what Samuel Hahnemann called his complete system of healing, of which ''homeopathy'' is but one feature. Homeopathic treatment involves giving an ill person the identical substance that would cause that same illness in a healthy person. Heilkunst, or ''The Art of Salvation,'' is the more comprehensive and systematic medical science developed by Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), and explicated in his definitive book, The Organon of Rational Healing. Heilkunst includes homeopathy, but goes beyond it. The Spirit of Ma'at recently talked with Rudi Verspoor, dean of the Hahnemann Center for Homeopathy and Heilkunst, and chairperson of the Department of Philosophy, in Ottawa, Canada. We thought we knew a lot about homeopathy before we talked to Rudi Verspoor. We were wrong. Q: Can we discuss the potencies of homeopathic remedies? Many critics use the fact that the remedies are so dilute to relegate their effectiveness to the placebo effect. Rudi Verspoor: Some remedies are simply a ''mother tincture,'' a standard herbal preparation made from mineral, plant or animal sources, with no dilution. Then there are various dilutions that are vigorously shaken (successed), which we call potencies, as this process progressively releases the dynamic energy of a medicine. There are three potency scales, or ''scales of dilution.'' A dilution of 1 in 10 has the letter X or D after it. So a 3X would be a dilution of 1 in 1000. A dilution of 1 in 100 is termed the C or centesimal scale. In energetic terms, we're getting into a very powerful, rarefied energy in the higher potencies, such as 1000C (often called 1M) and above, that is able to penetrate into our being at a very deep level. The final scale of dilution is 1 in 50,000, called the LM or Q scale. In a 24X or 12C potency – both are a 10-24 concentration – there is theoretically no more material substance left in that solution. The liquid remedies are structured water – the water has been structured due to its sympathetic resonance with the substance that was in the original solution. However, it's not the potency that necessarily makes the remedy homeopathic; it's the degree of similarity between the medicine and the disease. Homeopathic remedies have been shown in double-blind clinical trials to be effective way beyond 24X potencies, with no side effects.[1, 2, 3] Medical scientists and doctors have difficulty accepting this, because it overturns the orthodoxy of biochemistry in medicine. We can show something works even though there's no biochemistry there. For instance, The Lancet published a review of homeopathic clinical trials.[4] They could not fault the research; yet in the editorials they still couldn't accept the findings.[5, 6] These studies were using homeopathy only, and compared to Heilkunst, homeopathy only scratches the surface of what can be done and what can be treated. Used without Dr. Hahnemann's complete system of healing, the success rate of homeopathy is only about 15-20% at the most. But it still works wonderfully compared to allopathic medicine. Heilkunst Dr. Hahnemann didn't call his complete system ''homeopathy.'' He gave it the German term Heilkunst, which is very difficult to translate into English, but essentially means ''the art of salvation'' [literally, ''the art of holiness'']. It's a way of making people whole, so that they end up fulfilling their spiritual purpose in life. Homeopathy, as Dr. Hahnemann meant it normally, is simply one form of prescribing on the basis of the Law of Similars. It is not the whole of his medical system. Homeopathy is one aspect of Heilkunst. He also included diet, nutrition, energy medicine, essential oils, and energy healing. All the approaches normally associated with the natural health movement. The Sustentative and Generative Forces of Life Dr. Hahnemann made a fundamental distinction, which we find almost nowhere else, between the two aspects of our Living Principle: the generative power, and the sustentative power. The sustentative side is what maintains our system in a state of health. It's what keeps us healthy. It digests our food, and protects us against disease in setting up the immune system. But once we actually are impregnated by a disease, this condition invokes the other aspect of the Life Force, which is the generative power. This is the part of us that has the capacity to actually create. And it is creative at all levels. It is the power we need to think a thought, to make another human being; the power we need in order for our cells to divide. When we get sick, it is this generative aspect of the Life Force that becomes impregnated with the disease. Disease for Dr. Hahnemann had a spiritual component. To him, a disease agent was not some mechanical microbe or physical agent, but a living, breathing spirit which interacted with our living power. The interaction of that spirit with our power is, quite literally, a generative act that gives rise to the birth of a disease spirit inside of us that Hahnemann called a wesen. The disease wesen growing in us is a bit like a pregnancy. We cannot alter the fact that we are pregnant simply by changing our diet or exercising more or reading different books or changing our lifestyle. The fact that we are pregnant through a generative act can only be changed by re-invoking, at a spiritual level, the generative power. So we have people who do all the right exercises, they eat all the right foods, they look after themselves in terms of lifestyle choices, yet they still end up dying of a heart attack or cancer or a lung problem or whatever. All of those good things we do for ourselves don't in any way destroy the disease in our system. Q: So then the question becomes, what can destroy the disease? RV: For Dr. Hahnemann, there was a fundamental difference between cure and healing. The two of them together made up a complete whole, or heil, in the spiritual sense. So the curative action is what the medicine or physician's intervention undertakes to accomplish, and this is the destruction of the disease wesen. Healing is what individuals themselves undertake, through the laws of nature, to restore balance once the disease is removed. So it's not enough to heal. Healing simply strengthens our own innate Life Force. It doesn't cure. It doesn't remove the disease. This is where the power of the remedies comes in. They are artificial disease agents, which we control by virtue of the dose. They disturb and alter the generative force. It's a bit like hiring a mercenary to get rid of somebody terrorizing a town. Since the original disease and the artificial disease create the same symptoms, they cancel each other out. Both ''diseases'' are wave energies; when they come together, like two sine waves 180° out of phase, they neutralize each other. In homeopathy we nullify the disease's energetic frequency, the disturbed resonance that is producing the symptoms, so that the physical body and emotional body no longer reflect this disturbance. Our physical state, which includes our material and our mental/emotional states, is a mirror of what's going on at the spiritual or energetic level. If we cancel out the disturbance at the energetic level we no longer have the disturbance taking place at the physical level. A simple example of this would be if you hit your thumb with a hammer. Normally, most people would expect pain, swelling, and a bruise. But if we take a homeopathic remedy of the right potency and frequency, and if we do this right away, we will not see these things. There will be no reaction; the thumb will look and feel normal. Most people find this difficult to understand, because they assume that when they hit their thumbs this is a physical event that must show up physically. They cannot see that the larger reality is pure energy, and that the physical can be influenced at the energetic level. Before anything can show up and have reality at the physical level it first has to register at the energetic level. If we can go in and erase the ''register,'' as it were, then there's nothing to reflect back on the physical level. The physical level acts as if the event never happened. It's seamless. It's like overwriting corrupted computer code, reinstalling software. Once it's corrected, your computer runs fine. By destroying disease with a remedy, we allow the Life Force, through its sustentative, healing power, to restore balance. What we have as a result of that cure, that profoundly generative act, is a change in our state of mind. This is where the whole concept of salvation comes in, because patients cannot go through a treatment of this nature without profoundly changing the way they look at themselves and the world. Q: So from a more traditional medical viewpoint, the altered state of mind is a side effect of curing the physical illness that was the presenting complaint. RV: Yes, except, from Dr. Hahnemann's view, the state of mind caused the physical illness. This is the whole concept of heil, or wholeness. Health becomes a profoundly different state from the states of whatever disease the person was afflicted by. The next step is to find out why we hit our thumb in the first place. We have to go deeper and deeper because the way in which our life unfolds – that we never have a satisfying job, or we're always out of time, or we never seem to have enough money, and so on – all of these things that we consider to be objective are, frankly, simply reflections of our state of mind. If that state of mind is diseased or disturbed in some way, it's going to be reflected in disturbances in the way our life pans out. Disease as an Agent of Evolution If everything were fine, we generally wouldn't change. So the impetus to change for most people, in terms of changing their lives, comes when they get sick. It forces them to reevaluate their life, their values, etc. We see this fundamentally in all the literature of people who have been profoundly sick through cancer, for example. If we can take the meaning of the disease and transform it, we then come through transformed ourselves, and we reap the benefit of that disease. But if we keep resisting change, or if we simply suppress the disease, of course we simply get sicker and sicker. Q: So when the flu comes around there's the possibility that if we make the changes in ourselves, whatever shift is necessary, then we may not come down with the physical illness because we've made the shift that it was geared to create in us? RV: Absolutely. This is where the whole preventive side of this treatment comes in. Dr. Hahnemann showed us how to make an identification of potential physical diseases in an individual and treat for them, long before nature would ever invoke them naturally. So once we are healthy, we are no longer susceptible to the normal types of diseases that nature sends around. Once we achieve physical health, we get into the whole realm of spiritual diseases. We spend our lives confronting these deeper issues so that we can evolve even more deeply and more profoundly. The process never really ends. Nature is very persistent in guiding us and teaching us to follow a particular path. Of course we have the right of free choice not to do so. But the price we pay is to become sick. Dr. Hahnemann also taught that what is going on in the patient's life, in terms of relationships, work, accidents, and so on, is all part and parcel of the state of mind, the state of disease of that patient. So if people are having heavy difficulty in relationships, or losing their jobs all the time, or always banging their knee into something, these are things that need to be taken into account in determining and diagnosing the disease they're suffering from. Because there are no coincidences. Heilkunst moves us forward in a very conscious way, which promotes evolution and keeps us centered. We have a very powerful system for identifying all these diseases in a patient. We know fairly accurately the path that they have to follow – until we get into the spiritual domain, which is pretty well unmapped so far. Knowing certain facts, a true practitioner, what the founder called a Heilkunstler, can lay out the whole series of diseases we will have to go through in order to become whole. And the beauty of it is, we don't have to wait for nature to take us through it – which is a very crude and slow process. Instead, we're working on issues that we brought into this life, karma, but we're doing it on a speeded-up scale. We can literally die and reincarnate artificially many, many times through this process. That's why it's so powerful. Because each time we take a remedy, we're no longer the same person we were before. Things we used to think were correct turn out not to be. And this is what our patients find during the treatment process. Q: You mentioned karma. So we can treat past-life issues? RV: By the treatment process, we are fundamentally dealing with past-life issues. And incidentally, we've found that most of what people believe about their past lives is incorrect. But we don't need to know specific details, anyway, because this treatment is based on archetypes. Cure Changes Our Perceptions Dr. Hahnemann's method is not a matter of changing how we think in a sustentative way. It's a function of going in and altering the disease state – generatively, qualitatively, so that we slip into a new state which requires no effort of will to carry out. It becomes our natural state. So, with Heilkunst, when we're in a crisis we deal with it in a way that is much more productive. One aspect of this new state is that it frees up more time, because it enables us to discover that time is actually a very plastic thing. Time is actually fluid. It is a function of our state of mind. We literally are the author of our own creation; we live in our own universe. The universe we live in is only a reflection of our state of mind. So to change the world in any radical way, we have to change our state of mind. Most systems of medicine and therapy don't do that. Instead, they quantitatively alter the circumstances. And by dint of will, we can alter some aspects. But once we slip up, the old state of mind reasserts itself. Why Affirmations Fall Short Q: What about affirmations changing the way we think? RV: Affirmations require continual effort. They operate on the basis of the Law of Opposites. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does not fundamentally alter the state of mind. To do that we have to use the Law of Similars. If we have a delusion that no one loves us, we can go around affirming, ''I'm lovable,'' and, ''Everyone loves me.'' But what we want, literally, is an energy which contains the thoughtform ''I am not loved,'' in order to nullify the energy of the feeling inside that ''I am not loved.'' When you put the two together, by the Law of Similars the one destroys the other, creating a new balance. And this balance exists in a whole new world, a new world in which ''I am not loved'' simply does not exist! There has been a shift of consciousness. We cannot go back to where we were before. It's like the movie The Matrix. Once you take the red pill, you are no longer in the same world — or, rather, state of mind. Spiritual Healing with Homeopathy Spiritual healing is all about generative change – stepping outside the illusion which is disease. This is the road of discovering our Selves. We don't usually want to look inside, because we're afraid of what we're going to find. So most people busy themselves with an external life in this world, and never really want to delve deep into that interior life. Yet that's ultimately what we have to do in order to conquer disease. We cannot make ourselves healthy without changing fundamentally in some form. That's why Heilkunst in it's true meaning is the art of salvation, because it's what saves us from the disease and the prison that disease creates. It also moves us forward into the state of consciousness that is our intended destiny. What most people discover after homeopathic treatment is that the way they have been looking at the world, and the world itself, were not real. So they may realize, perhaps, that their work was a deadening kind of work and was killing them. They may realize that many relationships they had were not healthful or loving. They discover aspects of themselves they once knew but had forgotten. People use words like ''I'm more balanced,'' ''I'm lighter,'' ''I feel more joyful,'' ''I feel more grounded.'' They feel centered, more sure of themselves. They feel very solid at the core, and that all the insanity is going on around them, but it's not pulling them in like a tornado. They're in the eye of the storm, where it's still. They have a sense of being, as opposed to an endless becoming. They feel they're able to experience the moment. They have a sense of contentment and an acceptance of the way things are going. They have a sense that the world has meaning. Previously they would say things like ''I don't know who I am,'' ''I don't know why I 'm here,'' ''I don't know what the purpose of life is.'' Partway through the treatment, they no longer say that. They know exactly who they are, why they're here, what the purpose of life is. They're actually engaged in a fundamental, participatory, creative way of living. They're taking back their power, the power that the disease took away. They are fundamentally changed; they are not the same people who came in the door. Two Case Histories 1. Crohn's disease. I had a patient with Crohn's disease, a debilitating intestinal condition. She was about 16 when I saw her. Previously, she had tried the standard drug treatment for that, and that didn't work. Then she went to a naturopath who put her on a good regimen of diet, nutritional supplements, exercise, and so on. And all her symptoms disappeared! But then, about eight months later, she received an emotional shock, and all her symptoms came back, only worse. And now the regimen of diet and nutritional supplements and everything no longer worked. The doctors recommended surgery, which was unacceptable to her and to her parents. So the family came to me. She was very weak, constantly hemorrhaging, could not keep any food down; there was almost no nutrition going into her body. It took me six months to stabilize her with fairly classical acute treatment. And then we started the process of digging at the origins and roots of her condition. And it turned out to be a combination of emotional shocks, vaccination shocks, and inherited factors. Then we had to get into some deep false beliefs about herself. She didn't think she was very lovable, she didn't think she was valuable, she didn't think she could do anything in life. This unfolded in a process of about five to seven years; in the latter years I saw her only about every six months. And finally, at age 24, this young woman had an insight into life that we normally only find in people who are 60 or 70 years old. This woman is aware that the disease accelerated her spiritual growth, and she is thankful for it. 2. Infertility I had a patient come in who could not get pregnant. She could have done all the fertility treatments, which have about a 20% success rate, but someone suggested that she see me instead. I advised her to try homeopathy before resorting to drugs. I gave her my opinion that as long as there was nothing structurally blocking the process – and she had been assured by her doctors that this was the case – the homeopathic treatment would probably succeed. It became clear as we discussed the case – and this is typical of women who have trouble getting pregnant – that she was desperate to conceive. I told her that the only way she could conceive, frankly, was to let go of her desperation about it. This is not psychobabble, by the way. If she's not relaxed when she's having sex, physically and psychologically, the sperm will have a very hard time. Stress produces all sorts of acids, imbalances, blockages, and so on, that make it very difficult to conceive. So I treated her with remedies designed to deal with her emotional issues around conceiving, the fear she had about not being able to do so, and the fact that she didn't consider herself of any value unless somehow she was able to have a baby. And there were other complex emotional issues involved. Six months later, after several consultations, she came in and told me that she still wasn't pregnant, but she said, ''You know, it doesn't really matter anymore if I get pregnant or not.'' I remember telling my wife that she probably would be very soon, and three months later this prediction came true. Homeopathy did nothing to physically aid the process. It was just a question of removing the energetic blockages that were having an impact at the physiological level. Of course, it is difficult to prove in a ''scientific'' way that the homeopathy achieved this result. But knowing how it operates, and knowing the fundamental impact of the mental/emotional state on the physical body, it's not very difficult to see why it worked. And I see this pattern over and over again. Initially, I was quite impressed by these kinds of results. But we see them so often that we lose a certain amount of wonder. It becomes so commonplace. At first, people tend to spin their wheels a lot, but when they start making changes everything starts to shift. People who decide to sell their house sell it within forty-eight hours. Because when they are moving forward, everything moves forward. The universe just lines up, as it were, to make things possible, once we're moving in the direction we were meant to move. What is important is that the treatment be done within a coherent system, otherwise it's a bit hit-or-miss. If we know what to do, we can actually speed up the natural evolutionary process. It doesn't have to take long. We can take someone who normally in their lifetime might have arrived at a certain insight by age 80, and we can get them to that in six short years, and at the same time help them to be healthy. And therefore the rest of their life now is going to unfold at a pace and depth that would never have been possible before. We get to a state where we almost look forward to these shifts, because of the spiritual joy that comes out of it. So these two cases were examples of how we heal ourselves by letting go of illusions and spiritual beliefs – I don't mean religious beliefs, but spiritual beliefs, beliefs about ourselves at an energetic level – in order to be able to fulfill our potential. It's the fear of letting go that prevents people from doing things in life. We have to confront that fear and deal with it. Homeopathic remedies allow us to do that. And once we let go, what we discover is the opening up of a whole different world. Q: By ''letting go,'' do you mean the nonattachment that Eastern mystics talk about? RV: Exactly. Let go of the idea that we can control the outcome. It's not just an intellectual letting go. It is a very deep fundamental letting go. Many tell me ''I've done ten or fifteen years of psychotherapy and I've worked through this and I've done that, I've really dealt with my emotions.'' But at a deeper level, they are only deluding themselves into thinking they've let go. It's just another ruse that the mind uses in order to maintain control. By destroying the illusion, the remedies allow people to see that they have previously been living an illusion. Until we fundamentally alter our state of mind by invoking the generative power, nothing has really changed. The pattern of our relationships, whether with work or family or intimate partner, is not going to change until we change. Once we are healed, we see the world functionally, not as separate or split, or good or bad, not as a polarity but as a unified dualism. We see distinction, but not separation. And that is Heilkunst. The art of salvation. Footnotes: Kleijnen, J., Knipschild, P. and ter Riet, G. ''Clinical trials of homeopathy,'' British Medical Journal, Feb. 9, 1991, vol. 302: 316-23. Kleijnen, J., Knipschild, P. and ter Riet, G. ''Trials of homeopathy,'' British Medical Journal, Feb. 9, 1991; vol. 302: 960. Reilly, David, Morag A Taylor, Neil G M Beattie, Jim H Campbell, Charles McSharry, Tom C Aitchison, Roger Carter, Robin D Stevenson. ''Is evidence for homeopathy reproducible?'' The Lancet, December 10, 1994, vol. 344: 1601-06. Linde K, Clausius N, Ramirez G, Melchart D, Eitel F, Hedges LV, et al. ''Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials,'' The Lancet, Sept. 20, 1997, vol. 350: 834-43. Vandenbroucke, J.P. ''Homeopathy trials: going nowhere,'' The Lancet, Sept. 20, 1997, vol. 350: 824. Langman, MJS. ''Homeopathy trial: reason for good ones but are they warranted?'' The Lancet, Sept. 20, 1997, vol. 350: 825. References: Fischbacher, Elise McCrea, ''The Medical Science of Homeopathy,'' arnica.com. Verspoor, Rudi, Hahnemann Center for Homeopathy and Heilkunst. Verspoor, Rudi, What Is Heilkunst?. Ullman, Dana, ''A Condensed History of Homeopathy,'' excerpted from Discovering Homeopathy: Medicine for the 21st Century, Dana Ullman, Berkeley, CA, North Atlantic, 1991, ihr.com. Top of Page Print Version