An Interview with Jeremy Sherr
by Beth Niles & Greg Bedayn
The American Homeopath, Volume 1 / 1994
http://www.homeopathy.org/american.htm

AH How did you choose homœopathy?

JS First, my dad was a doctor. He would always grumble about middle of the night house calls and that, so I swore I'd never be a doctor. So that's one good reason, although my "house calls" now take me around the world for weeks at a time. In 1976 I had a health food shop - I used to start baking in the morning, grind the flour myself, do the whole thing - so I started looking into alternatives. I was in a bar one night, and I said to somebody, "What're you doing?" and he replied, "Oh, I'm studying homœopathy." I said, "What's this homœopathy?" he said, "'Like cures like'" and at that moment I got it.
I was 24 - it was 1979 - I had a motorcycle accident and broke nine bones in my body. During my convalescence I had enough time to think "What am I doing?" And I decided to study medicine, but alternative medicine. So I was lying in hospital after the accident - I'd just bought this encyclopaedia of alternative medicine in which I had read about all the many alternative medicine systems, and the only one that made sense was homœopathy, and acupuncture a bit.
I went to England to study homœopathy. It was the second year the homœopathic college was going. I joined the college of acupuncture at the same time, which was a full-time college. That was in 1980. The acupuncture study was a four-day week, and the college of homœopathy was on the weekends. Everybody said "there's no way you can do it," but I'd come ready to study hard, and I was really into it. I said to myself, "Nothing will interfere with my study, nothing."

AH You really psyched yourself up for it.

JS Yes, because I had a great thirst for knowledge. I was 24 and I hadn't been to college, so I was really thirsty. From the first day I knew I was in love with homœopathy. I went to acupuncture college, but the day I finished was the last time I put a needle in a person. Not because I didn't like it - I just wanted to do homœopathy and that's all I wanted to do, so it was no contest really. I met my wife on the back bench during class. She was a student in acupuncture. At the same time I thought "I'm going to study every alternative medicine and be the James Bond of alternative medicine - do a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of the other...

AH The eclectic approach?

JS Yes. Pretty quickly I saw that if you want to do something, you do one thing and you do it well. So I said okay, homœopathy it is, and that's what I've done ever since. But I occasionally use my knowledge of acupuncture physiology - Chinese medicine physiology - and I think that Chinese physiology is much more suitable to homœopaths than western physiology. It fits nicely with the remedies, it fits nicely with energy pathology and physiology, and you can use it in a very creative way.

AH Where did you get your homœopathic education?

JS I went to The College of Homœopathy, London. At the time, it was the only school in England. I graduated in 1982. I sat on a very flat bench and looked over Murray Feldman's shoulder for three years. The two of us used to heckle the teachers together. That was the year the LIGA conference was held in Brighton. I was so broke I slept on the floor in Murray's flat, and for the conference I rented a headset for a few pounds and listened to the entire three day conference from the public bathroom. I remember hearing about Paschero's work; it was fantastic.

AH When did you begin your practice?

JS My first case was in 1981. I gave Phosphorus 30c and the guy was better, so I immediately gave 200c, then 10m - which put him out of commission for three months. I realized that this was serious medicine and that I needed to learn from the best, so I started studying with George Vithoulkas and Vassilis Ghegas.

AH You went abroad to study with them?

JS No, Vassilis was coming to the US, doing a series of seminars at the time with Roger Morrison. Roger and he were teaching together in London. And that was good at that time because it took us to a higher level of understanding, and then I started studying with George a bit, and that was 1984 -1985. I was in a group called "Academy of Classical Homœopathy". We were the group that brought George to England while Roger was working on bringing George to America. We brought him over and we did a three or four week intensive study with him at the time.
I moved out to the English countryside and I got a busy practice pretty quickly. I was working four days a week and studying with Vassilis and George and Roger, and I went to Alonissos a couple of times. That was a change from the kind of homœopathy we learned in school - once in a while there comes the opportunity to have a jump or a change to a new perspective, and I think it's really important to be open to this so long as it's on the path that you perceive to be true. Then one is able to see things from a different level, from a higher perspective.
So along came another teacher called Joseph Reeves from Israel and he made a big change for me, even though I studied with him very little. Just a couple of weeks, maybe, but we did a one-week intensive with him and it reminded me of everything I studied homœopathy for. It took me right back to the philosophy, whereas the study with George and Vassilis was much more materia medica and case-orientation. Reeves was more philosophically oriented and focused on trying to understand what we're doing as homœopaths, with more emphasis on case analysis and understanding the symptoms. And that changed my perspective totally; it was a huge shift. So I started getting into that way of understanding which was based on the Organon and Kent's philosophy which was not common at that time.
It was perfect timing for me. I am very grateful for Joseph's teaching, and I'm very grateful for Vassilis's and George's teaching as well. I would love to go back to homœopathic college and just listen to seminars all the time and hear different people talk and just get that little bit that you can get out of each person, because everybody has something to offer.

AH How did you start teaching?

JS Misha Norland gave me my first break to teach homœopathy. I'd done teaching before, in the army and in the Scouts and this kind of stuff. I learned early on that I had a knack for it, and I've been teaching ever since. Every time I teach, even if it's a video case I've seen ten times or a philosophy lecture I've done twenty times, I'll learn something new out of it or a student will say something with a new twist, and that's how it develops for me. So gradually through teaching a long time and in a lot of places, all the little bits of the jigsaw started coming together. Many bits from different philosophies, from different parts of the Organon, different remedies, case analysis, all kinds of things. Every time I taught it, a student would pick a hole in it; then I could say, "Okay, what's happening here, why is this not working, why doesn't it fit together?" So gradually, through a lot of teaching - and a lot of mistakes - I managed to start fitting the whole picture together into one coherent whole. That's the system I teach in my postgraduate college, and is the same course which I teach throughout the world. I'm trying to give people not so much the rote knowledge, but the technique of thinking, the technique of approaching homœopathy. That's what my teaching is about.

AH What about your Dynamis School?

JS The Dynamis School came in 1986. My students convinced me to start a two-year course so we started, but I really didn't think I had enough material for two years. I started teaching as a two-year, part-time, postgraduate course, and I start from the beginning. What I'm trying to do is take the philosophy, go deeper, take the remedies, go deeper, take the cases, go deeper - rather than go broader and acquire lots of knowledge on a lot of subjects. I see it as a group effort, I always have. I always insist that we sit at a round table, so everyone is sitting facing each other, which encourages equal participation.
The name Dynamis is important for me because dynamis means "vital force" in the Organon; but to me, the broader meaning of dynamis is flexibility, the ability to change. Dynamis is about using any potency that's necessary - from the lowest potency to the highest potency - and not being stuck on one particular belief, yet being true to the classic principles at all times. Just like the vital force should be - it should have a strong centre, but it should be able to adapt to the heat, to the cold, to the wet. If it's stuck on one thing then it's pathology. I enjoy the fact that my students finish the two years' study with the ability to think on their feet; they each develop their own system based on our classical principles and what they actually see in their practice. This is dynamic.

AH When did you start combining the Tao with your homœopathic teaching?

JS I was reading it during acupuncture college, and that's where homœopathy and Chinese medicine met for me. I was trying to join them on lower levels in the beginning, think what point, what remedy, how does it work? But then it started joining for me much more on the level of Taoism because to me, you read the Tao te Ching or Chuan Tu, and it's like a practical manual of homœopathy. I began taking paragraphs in the Tao te Ching and relating them to lessons in homœopathic philosophy.

AH What is the crossover point between homœopathy and the Tao?

JS The Four Elements, which I learned from Joseph Reeves, is what we call the circle and it fits homœopathy like a hand in a glove. It also includes times of the day, the colours, the seasons, the significant physiology, and more. I combine this understanding of the circle with my understanding of Chinese physiology, 15 elements, 8 conditions etc; that helps me understand the remedies and helps me understand the cases.
I'm fortunate to have constant feedback from my students. If they don't like it, they'll tell me, so through the years I've refined it through feedback about what works for them. This is as teaching should be, a learning experience. I see myself as a fortunate bee. You know how a bee goes from flower to flower and pollinates, and it gets the nectar. I get the nectar from my students, then I pollinate, and fertilize, then more nectar.

AH Nice metaphors. Tell me more about your Dynamis School.

JS First of all, I don't really want it to grow too big - with every organization, every college that grows too big, there's a loss of connection. Secondly, what I like about my college is that it's a one man show. What that means is that the students get a chance to learn the whole system A to Z with one person. A lot of the colleges go for the system of "let's show as many methods as possible, as many teachers as possible," and the students can put it all together and make what they make out of it. The main word I hear from people who finish that kind of education is "confused", because they haven't got a basic thread to follow, something to hold on to; they don't know whose system to use when.
The way I teach is akin to Steiner education, which says you have one teacher for the group. For eight years they have the same teacher, so with my school, for two to three years they have the same teacher, and I tell them on the first day, "Take what I'm teaching you, master it, then change it into your own system. Then go and learn from other people, and learn from them well." I think that's important, because there are a lot of people who get their education from going to lots of seminars; the good side is, of course, that they get lots of influences, and the difficult side is that they don't get a cohesive backbone running all the way through, so there's a lot of confusion.

AH You are the faculty at your school?

JS I'm it, and I run it as a democratic dictatorship. And it works! That means I listen to what everybody says, and I make the decision. And it works like that until the point you need a big organization and you have a committee. The moment you've got a committee, it's dead; that's the beginning of the end. You know, a camel is a horse designed by committee!

AH What's changed for you in the past five years?

JS If I look back at six, seven years ago, I was more dogmatic then; in a way, I was more rigid. I've learnt to loosen up a lot. I have my system that will work for 70 percent of the cases, but for other 30 percent I have to use other approaches. We have to know how to use a bit of right brain and a bit of intuition on top of a logical structure. "Dynamic" means okay, you've thought of a remedy, fine, but don't hold on to it, be flexible, let it go. You take the case, and at the end of the case, maybe you've got a remedy in your mind, but be able to let it go. Like when you meditate. You should be able to meditate, and a thought will come into your head - it's not that you should have no thoughts in your head, but you should let the thoughts go through. If you've got the concept of "as if one person", you've got everything, because that's what holistic medicine works on. That works for understanding one case, it works for understanding epidemics, it works for understanding rubrics, it works for understanding miasmas.
Another problem is that a lot of homœopaths base all their work on the mind these days. The mind is the most wonderful, interesting part in homœopathy, the most fascinating part, but also the trickiest part - I often say, "the mind is a minefield". That's where people go wrong, especially students, because they want to do the fancy footwork, but it's so difficult. You take envy and it might be jealousy, you take selfish, it might be egotistic, you take indifference to children, it might be aversion to the family. If you look at the Mind section of the repertory, or the delusion section, you don't even find all the remedies there, not a quarter of them. So you're immediately at a disadvantage.
Kent started most of his lectures with the generals; then he goes to the mentals. When you start in on the generals, you know you're on firm footing. Every student should know how to work the Boenninghausen method. Today, with computers, it's much easier to work this method. That means you take five good generals, and you bake a cake. You put in the eggs, you put in the butter, you put in the flour, you put in the sugar, you put in whatever fruits and nuts, and you've got your cake.

AH Didn't Boenninghausen make some creative leaps as well?

JS Boenninghausen was very creative. He had a very broad vision. For instance, in saying, "If the person has burning pain in the knee, they can have burning pain anywhere," he was creative and, in a way, I believe he was right. Kent spoke against it very strongly, and Kent was also right. They can both be right, why not? That's part of being dynamic. So sometimes you work the Boeninghausen method, and sometimes you work the Kent method. And sometimes you work the Phatak way, which is a different approach. And sometimes you just go straight in with intuition. You utilize everything you've got.
I believe Boenninghausen had the biggest totality, in many ways, because he generalized. The person who generalized the most had the biggest totality. The smallest totality was Knerr because a practitioner would take a symptom and put in anxiety from seeing a dog in the street while walking to school in the morning. You had to get exactly the right combination or it wasn't the right rubric.

AH What else influences your case-taking?

JS You have to see what's happening. This is paragraph five in the Organon. You have to see the size of totality. If you are prescribing for the person who comes with a spot of eczema, and you prescribe a remedy for the spot of eczema, you don't see the totality of the case. You suppress the eczema, driving it deeper within the person. If you have a person that's in an acute or near-death situation, or with heavy pathology, and you start asking them about how their potty-training was a child, then you're just wasting time. Some homœopaths are stuck on big totalities only. They say, "you give one remedy for the whole life, and you wait two years. And if nothing happens, don't touch it." Some homœopaths say, "you give a remedy for anything that moves. If they breathe in, you give carbo veg, if they breathe out, you give ignatia, if they laugh, you give them hyoscyamus, and everything that moves, you shoot at, and you wait about ten minutes."
So there are two extremes - now, which are you going to go with? The best is the "dynamic extreme" in between. Any kind of rigidity means a static vital force. Stasis equals pathology. A person who is stuck will break like an old tree. A person who is flexible, but with roots, will bend, like in T'ai Chi.

AH What are the most important books in your practice?

JS One, the Organon; two, Kent's Philosophy; three, Kent's Lesser Writings. Those are the three major books in homœopathy. Four, Chronic Diseases. In terms of philosophy, those are the mainstay books. Many of the rest are repetition of the same ideas.
In terms of materia medica, the two main books that I use are Kent and Allen. I use Allen a lot, all the time - Allen, Allen, Allen. In clinical settings, I use Phatak and Boericke. But when I'm studying a remedy, I use Allen or Kent. Allen has all the provings and most of the stuff from Hahnemann as well. Hering is great, but Hering used only the clinically proved symptoms, whereas Allen has all the symptoms, clinical and proven. And Allen retains the language of the patient, of the provers, and Allen tells you who proved what so you can go and see, okay, that's Mrs So-and-so. And she was such-and-such, age that-and-that, and you can see that's a toxicological symptom or that one came from a 10m, etc. It is a dynamic thing; each book has to be used for what it's good for.
One of the projects I'm trying to instigate is that a lot of the provings are toxicological information. For instance, most of the remedies aren't proved. If you look at, for instance, Allen's Encyclopedia, most of it is poisonings - Phosphorus, Plumbum, even remedies that we think are well proven are mostly poisonings. Kent said, "Since the time of Hahnemann, there haven't been twenty-five good provings". And since the time of Kent, there have hardly been five. There have been provings, but not full ones.
So a lot of the information is toxicological, which makes it incomplete. What I'd like to instigate is based on the fact that today we have so much toxicological information. We have huge, immense, databases of toxicological information that could fill another fifty volumes of Allen's Encyclopedia. It's out there and it's easily accessible on the computer and e-mail.

AH I like it. How do we start?

JS You would go to a medical university, find the information, do a search on the computer - you might need a letter or a doctor or whatever - I don't know how it works here in this country. You have to know a bit to do a search, so you say "Thallium and poisoning", "Thallium and toxicology", Thallium and chemistry", Thallium and symptoms", "Thallium and that", - you mix it up. You get all the symptoms, then you've got to arrange them in the schema, and you have to put them by degrees; you have to say, "Thallium produces baldness in 90 percent of the people, so that's bold type. You have to say which come from toxicological in humans, which come from toxicological in rats, etc.

AH What else?

JS All homœopaths need to meet to discuss repertories and how to make additions to repertories, because this is one of the worst areas of homœopathy today, the way additions are made. It's a mess, to my mind. There are six, seven different repertories, and they've all been added to. Everybody adds in a different way, everybody adds with a different philosophy, everybody adds with a different scoring of what is black type, italics, low italics, etc. What we're getting is so much diversity of homœopathy, so much mish-mash. Now, I appreciate the people who are carefully doing this work, like Roger van Zandvoort and the Synthesis people.

AH What, would you say, is a minimum standard for a repertory addition?

JS The minimum standard, first of all, is that it comes from a proving. If it's not from a proving, then you should have seen it in a few cases. I mean, the perfect addition is of a symptom that aggravated, ameliorated, then vanished for a long time. Now, not every symptom is perfect like that, but I've seen additions where one person saw a few cases, and they added it immediately as black type, because they saw a few cases. So suddenly that symptom is black type, above and beyond other remedies that have been there for 200 years. Weird. Things get added too easily and too loosely.
The rubrics are not thought about deeply enough; things get added in sensation of isolation when they should be in estranged from family. Things get added in black type when they should be plain type. I think all clinical information should be added in low type. People should discuss whether they add by frequency or intensity. Half the people are adding by frequency, half by intensity, and you get a big confusion. As far as we know, Kent's was by frequency. But we have to make a format, and it's not that easy. If you have six people having irritability, you can add it in black type, but if you have a symptom "red stool with green spots" - strange, rare, and peculiar - and two people get it, it is a strongly emphasized symptom. I wouldn't mind giving three type on that, because - two people having a red stool with green spots - wow! Whereas, "irritability" - everybody and their uncle has it.

AH What types of provings are the best?

JS There's the proving that you do in order to add another remedy to homœopathy, and there's the proving you do in order to experience the remedy and what it's about, like when people do a proving during a seminar. Now it's very interesting and very useful, and everybody gets to experience the remedy, so from that point of view, it's good. But it is incomplete because you just give a remedy, disregarding what stage of treatment the people are in, disregarding the stage of health of the people are in, disregarding ongoing case management at Month One, Two, Three, etc. You have to be there and remain there if you take responsibility for a proving. I know that people can go through hell from a proving, from one dose. I've had people on Chocolate go through hell for a year and a half from one dose of Chocolate. So I think you have to take responsibility for your action. It's not a game. Hahnemann says in paragraph 141, you should do a proving "with all the caution and care here enjoined" - those are his words. So it's great to experience a proving collectively and to have it as a group, but you have to consider the bigger picture. A proving for posterity - you can do a medium-sized proving, and that might help a bit. If you do a really shallow proving, like a lot of Julian's provings, you get a lot of remedies of vaguely known qualities, and it fills up the repertories, but you barely ever prescribe a remedy from there because you can't get the character of it, because the characteristics are incomplete. Or you do a real good proving. Whose remedies do we use today? We use mainly Hahnemann's remedies.

AH Hering, Allen, Swann?

JS Most of Hahnemann's remedies - Swann, maybe Allen and Hering here and there - but mainly Hahnemann's remedies. Pulsatilla, Aurumn Sulphur, Silica, Calcarea. Phosphorus - all these are Hahnemann's remedies. Why? Because they were great provings. One well-proved remedy is worth twenty poorly proved remedies because you get the whole character, the whole totality, the whole meaning, and you can know that remedy and understand it and use it. That's partially why they're called polychrests, because they're well-proved. Take any substance, prove it well, and it may become a polychrest. A mineral will always be more than a plant, a mineral high up on the table. Is Beryllium a polychrest? No, because there's not a good proving on Beryllium. So it all depends how we do that. I like to do things properly if possible, so I try to do my provings as best as possible. So, it took me, for Chocolate, four years; for Hydrogen, four years; for Scorpion, two years - to do each one. And all that is in my spare time, because it's not sponsored, it's all voluntary work.

AH Send money!

JS Send money now!

AH How many hours of work went into your proving on Chocolate?

JS My work personally is over a thousand hours, and all the people together many thousands, something like that. It's so much work, but I believe in doing it properly and doing as good a job as possible. Although there are a lot of symptoms there, I've thrown out more than I've kept in. My main rule is "if in doubt, leave it out". There's not a lot of information out there on how to do provings. Now, today, in the last year or two, a lot more people are wanting to do provings than they used to, and they're all suffering from lack of information on how to do it. I've been writing an article over the last three years on how to do a proving from my point of view, from my understanding. It's not the definitive work on the subject, it's just a work of my collected experience of what a proving is about.

AH Why did you choose to prove Scorpion?

JS Well, I chose Scorpion because I'd just come from Israel, and a lot of people get bitten by scorpions there, so I just saw what it does and I said, "Ah! Let's see the proving of Scorpion." I open the book, there's no proving of Scorpion.

AH Was the Scorpion indigenous to Israel?

JS Yes. I actually went and hunted down a scorpion one morning, and I caught it. I'd read in the books that you could eject the poison by connecting it to twelve volts, so I connected the two car cables, the battery cables, to the scorpion, revved up the car, and it ejected its poison, but I didn't use that because we didn't have a definite identification on that scorpion. It's really important when doing a proving to have a precise identification. Like with the scorpion, or whatever you want to prove - you should know what type it is, what age it is, what sex it is, where was it taken, what part of the body, what weight it was, how much alcohol you used, all that information should be precise. So then I went to the Institute of Bugs and Scorpions in Israel, and they gave me a well-documented scorpion. It is the most virulent scorpion they have in Israel.

AH And why did you choose to prove Hydrogen?

JS I'd started a big study of the periodic table,and I use the periodic table a lot in my studies and analogy and thinking. So, when I was studying it, four or five years ago, then I understood that the higher up you go on the periodic table, the more basic you go, and that Hydrogen is the mother of all things. So I decided we should start proving the whole periodic table and we should start from the beginning. So I started from Hydrogen. And later on, during the proving, I though, "I've taken on something too big." Because it was such an amazing proving, so fantastic, and then I thought, "I have no right to be starting this". But seeing as I had started it, I had to finish. Since then I've done Neon and I've done Germanium and now I'm doing another one, so it keeps on happening. It'll take me another two or three years, at this rate, to finish Germanium. The data is all there, but the real work is in extracting, collating, editing, and then publishing. I do all the publications myself, because it's too small a market. People don't want to pay ten or fifteen bucks for a book that has one remedy in it. They'd rather pay fifteen bucks for a book that has fifty remedies.

AH Can you foresee a time when the provers' unions will come back?

JS I think that so many people are really getting hot on the provings and doing it now. Lots of people contact me about provings. Homœopaths are doing provings in Newcastle, Norway, California, Germany. But, you know, a lot of people start a proving and they get stuck when they find out how much work it is. It happens. I know a lot of provings that are stuck in the middle.

AH And why did you prove Chocolate?

JS When I proved Hydrogen, I proved Hydrogen and Chocolate at the same time, to double-blind myself. I didn't know what was Chocolate and what was Hydrogen during the trial. I chose Hydrogen on a theoretical basis, because I said, "okay, begin at the periodic table, at the beginning," and all that. In contrast I said, "what's a thing that clinically I see every day?" So many people have a strong desire for chocolate, often more than any other food, and it's a food that is well connected to the emotions but only very slightly represented in the repertory. I thought, "we have to see what this is about". So I proved it, and the result was so unexpected, it blew my mind. It took me a long time to understand what it was about, really. Now I've started to understand it. We saw some nice chocolate cases; it was great. The result from the Chocolate proving was very weird. We could never have guessed the results, never in a million years.

AH Didn't the toxicological reports tip you off finally?

JS That really brought it to light. Without the toxicology, I wouldn't have understood the proving. And fortunately on chocolate, we have a lot of toxicology. I interviewed homœopathic students who are chocoholics, all over the world, and I put all the data together, and videos, and TV clips, and stuff like that, and then I started to understand what it's about. The toxicological information enhances the proving very much.

AH What is your home life like?

JS I have three kids - they're great kids - eleven, nine and seven. My wife is an acupuncturist and a midwife. I'm a "man on a mission" and it's not very conducive to family life really. She knew when she married me that I was deeply committed to homœopathy and she has been wonderfully supportive. I couldn't have done it without her.
I'm doing a lot of travelling and teaching now, and it's very difficult for me to decide where to go - a lot of people want, and there's a lot of demand. I'm teaching in Holland, Norway, Finland, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, New York, California, Portland, Seattle.

AH What do you do for fun?

JS I'm a rogue, by nature. I used to drink whiskey, beer, go to blues bars, smoke, you know. In the old days we'd smoke dope, drop acid, listen to the blues all night. But in the last five or six years, I've become a boring old fart. Now I do T'ai Chi, I do Kung Fu. I am conscious of my food-combining. I go to the gym. That's what I do for fun. My heart's desire is to be able to take a year off to read and write, because I have all my lectures typed out, verbatim, in the computer. It's all typed out, enough for four books on philosophy, materia medica, repertory, and provings. But I haven't got time to edit them. So for me that would be fun, to have a year of peace to read and write. Because after fourteen years, I need a kind of sabbatical.

AH Do you have a favourite quote, book, film, food?

JS Yes: "'Tis an ill wind that blows no mind..." My favourite book is Kent's Lectures. My favourite movie, "Like Water for Chocolate" - I could see this movie every day for its rich imagery and homœopathic parallels. The last movie I saw was Demolition Man, I enjoy martial arts movies. I crave chocolate and sushi, but not together... My favourite chocolate is Belgium white.

AH What else do you want?

JS Lots! I want to belong to a six-year college for homœopaths which would give them the MD degree. The main emphasis would be homœopathy; we would turn out excellent homœopaths. I have a curriculum in mind, which includes classes for memory enhancement, an obstetrics ward, and a general hospital ward. We would produce doctors with no unlearning necessary. Everything would be geared to homœopathic understanding. If we started such a college we could accomplish a lot, Hering did it; so can we. Homœopathy is on the brink of actually doing something. The next couple of years will be the proof of whether it will continue on or not. All the recent grass-roots interest and strength cannot be denied; this is probably our greatest strength. I believe homœopathy can make really big changes. This is a simple vision and I know it is going to happen.

AH What else?

JS After the health food store, I went back to Israel and bought a piece of land with friends of mine. We started an alternative village - wind-powered, solar-powered, organic farming and all that - I bought a nice piece of land there. I planted sixty olive trees - in the rock, you know, I really dug in the rock. That's the place I'm going to retire to, if I make it that far. It's good to know where my land is, whether I own it or not, somewhere I can put my foot on the earth and say "that's where I know it is". It makes a big difference in my life to have that.
The olive trees were growing away, and then there was a big fire and they all burned down. I went there to check it out. The whole village had burned down in three minutes. The government came and said, "What you must do with the trees is cut them down, cut them down right to the end, paint them with white stuff, calcium and prune them - " and do this and that and the other, and we did it. I left a few trees that I didn't do anything to, as an experiment. The trees that we did what the government said did terribly. The trees that we didn't touch did great. The lesson is: Do nothing; let Nature take her way, because she knows best.