Homeopathic Principles

Homeopathic medicine encompasses a very different view of the process of healing and the purpose that disease and symptoms actually serve for you. The principles of homeopathic medicine can be added to the knowledge you already have and remains useful in its own way. Contrasting approaches to healing each have their place. You can be more successful in healing by adding to what you know and being open to a different experience of reality.

The purpose of this recording is to open your mind to an alternative view of reality.

Homeopathic Principles

Homeopathic medicine and homeopathic philosophy are not easily grasped. They are as complex as the human being is. In the homeopathic system, each patient is treated as an individual who has a unique nature and unique life experience.

Being open-minded is helpful in attempting to grasp the unique cause of a disease which is acting in each patient. In the homeopathic approach the emphasis is on the cause of disease as much as the symptoms of the disease. Knowing the cause of your disease is worthwhile because when you treat the cause of a disease instead of just the effects of the disease, the disease can be cured. The essence of being open-minded is being willing to admit that you may only be partially correct in your beliefs and perceptions. Knowing this can lead you to search for and find higher forms of truths than you previously knew. This search can become necessary when you face the reality that disease or suffering exists and a curative treatment is not being offered.

By definition, in a chronic disease, either the symptoms continue to exist despite treatment or an ongoing treatment regimen is necessary to minimize the intensity of symptoms. Both of these situations indicate that that the underlying disease process is not being cured and that the fundamental cause of the disease process is not known or is not being addressed through treatment. In this situation, a new perspective is needed.

The principles which underlie homeopathic medicine will likely present you with a very different reality than you now perceive. You may have to listen to these principles more than once for them to become useful to you.

The goal of this section is to open you up to an additional way of thinking and believing which can bring you a new experience of perception and of healing. This goal certainly represents a large undertaking but the magnitude of the suffering and disease that we now experience or might yet experience in the future is the motivation for our study of why diseases exist and alternative ways to heal them.

The most important concept for you to grasp is the reality that what you believe is what determines what you will perceive. Several examples are provided to illustrate the validity of this principle using the sense perceptions of sight, hearing, taste and what we generally might term “knowing”.

How Beliefs Determine Perception

EXAMPLE 1: The first example which demonstrates that your beliefs determine your perception relates to how you actually perceive what you see. We all see the same things, but we will see them differently based on those beliefs we hold to be true.

To illustrate this principle, we will use a mild example of the
typical presentation of a patient with anorexia. Whereas, this patient will be seen by most of us as being quite thin, almost underweight, this is not her perception. When this young woman sees herself in a mirror, she perceives herself as fat. No matter what another person might say or even what many people say, she will continue to see herself as fat, until her belief that she is fat is changed.

What she believes to be true creates her perception of reality. What everyone else sees as their true perception of reality is not as powerful for her as what she believes to be true. This example illustrates how powerful your belief system is in determining what you see.

EXAMPLE 2: For our second example of believing creates perceiving, the television show American Idol offers an opportunity to view the reality of how what one hears is determined more strongly by what is believed than the reality that is collectively accepted by the majority of people.

In the initial tryouts for the singing competition, many people come to compete and to be discovered as the next American Idol. When the judges and the public listen to them perform, in many cases the contestant obviously does not have the talent to become a successful singer. Despite the collective view of the professional judges and the watching public, the contestant is truly shocked when they hear that they have been rejected. The performance the contestant heard was not perceived the same as what the rest of us perceived. What they heard was the next American Idol. When the contestant heard themselves sing, they heard a great performance just waiting to be discovered. That is because they believed this to be the case, and this belief created a personal reality for them. So, our belief system can easily create a strong enough filter to our perception that it determines either what we see or hear as our view of reality.

EXAMPLE 3: A third example of believing is perceiving is to be found in the book Mindless Eating. The author relates an experiment done for the military to presumably taste test strawberry yogurt. To ensure the test would only evaluate the taste of the strawberry yogurt, 19 soldiers were blindfolded before given the yogurt to evaluate. 14 of the 19 soldiers rated this variety of strawberry yogurt as good and recommended that it be included in military rations. One soldier rated it as an exceptionally good variety of strawberry yogurt, which happened to be one of her favorite snacks.

Interestingly, in the experiment, all of the soldiers were actually given chocolate yogurt. In this experiment, their expectation or belief that they were taste-testing strawberry yogurt created a stronger perception than their actual sense of taste or smell in evaluating the yogurt. Clearly, what we believe to be true can be a strong influence on how we perceive our world.

EXAMPLE 4: As our last example, the Flat Earth Society still exists today and presents an interesting, historical example of how our beliefs influence both our perceptions and our behaviors. We seem to strongly cling to a belief even once it can be proven to be false.

Interestingly, examining what our beliefs are and how our beliefs have come to be, can be quite useful in addressing the cause of our current state of health.

It seems that familiarity with a belief provides some stability or comfort that causes it to be strongly cherished and defended despite what the reasoning mind is able to discern. Historically, those who were the first to expand science and the knowledge that the Earth is round were strongly persecuted. Similarly, today there is a strong resistance to homeopathic practice and philosophy among medical practitioners. To those who are invested in the physical-chemical system of medicine, the dynamic or energetic forms of medicine such as homeopathic medicine or traditional Chinese medicine are seen with great skepticism.

Just be aware of this natural, human tendency to be closed minded or to protect a belief system that you are using to filter your experience of living in this world.

Conclusion: The Principles of Homeopathic Medicine

The point in reviewing the principles of homeopathic medicine that follow will be to focus on yourself as a patient who is looking to recover from an ailment. Don’t bother trying to convert or impress those who have yet to have a need for an answer to a difficult situation, or those who do not yet know the possibility of a cure exists.

We are currently in a flat earth medical frame of mind where symptoms and disease are only seen as bad things to be attacked. The study of the principles of homeopathic medicine will introduce you to the usefulness of symptoms in the process of healing. The homeopathic approach to healing is different from the pharmaceutical, herbal, or supplement based approaches to healing. The homeopathic medicine in both the diagnostic emphasis and the response to treatment are holistic.

The different effects achieved in homeopathic medicine are because homeopathic remedies do not have a physical-chemical action on the body. They have a “dynamic” or energetic influence on the patient and therefore differ significantly from a traditional, Western approach that affects the patient through a physical or chemical means. The influence on health from a homeopathic remedy is an energetic influence.

Both homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine differ greatly from Western medicine in their understanding of the physiology of human health and disease. Yet, in any system of medicine, the healing process is experienced or measured as a physical or chemical change in the body. In the energetic systems, the healing is the result of a dynamic intervention rather than a physical or chemical intervention.

Five useful principles will be presented that have been part of the homeopathic philosophy of medicine for the last 200 years. These principles form the basis for understanding and implementing this time-tested system of healing.