Nick Churchill, 20 March 1998
The Homeopath, No. 69
http://www.homeopathy-soh.org/journal/backissues1.htm#4

N: Where is homeopathy taking you right now?

J: Really where I would like it to go is more and more into writing. I've been seeing patients for 17 years, and although it's still good, my main area has been more and more teaching. But running around the world and teaching is also quite a burden on energy and time. I'd like to write very much, and I have been writing, it's a matter of finishing it and publishing it. I find writing a very different medium to teaching, as most people do, and my aspiration would be to write something of quality in homeopathy, not just in terms of the homeopathic content of it, which I would like to be the best it can obviously, but more so in terms of the quality of the writing.

I've found that so much of the written work in homeopathy these days is just cut and paste or edited lecture notes, without lot of thought going into the format or way it's written. I'm probably not a great literary person or writer at all but I'm going to do the best I can to put it in a more interesting format than just edited notes.

N: That's really the one big thing you haven't done. You've gone a long, long way into homeopathy at just about every other level, whether practising - you've seen many thousands of patients; teaching - you've got hundreds or thousands of students all over the world; or provings - you've gone pretty much further into that than anyone else, in this century anyway. That leaves only writing.

J: Yes, and in a way it's right that writing should be left till later, because writing should be the last thing to come out of experience and learning. Whereas just throwing something into a book before it's really cooked well, is premature, because books are forever. A lecture is for experimenting.

N: And have you followed a conscious path or a chosen path or has it just panned out that way?

J: Both, in retrospect I'm happy that I haven't written that much before, I think in some ways it will contribute to the quality of the stuff. On the other hand, because I've been lazy in some ways and haven't written. A lot of the stuff I had to say that was original ten years ago, is now past the sell by date. Things have moved so quickly in homeopathy, so there was stuff ten or fifteen years ago, that if I had sat down and written it, would have been new, radical, fantastic and revolutionary, and today it's obvious stuff. Things have changed so much. So I'm not going to sit down and write that, and in that way because of my lack of writing, I've lost out in that area.

N: It's quite true, you did a lot of original stuff, and other people picked up the ball and ran with it.

J: That's right, and to my regret, but such is life. Because of the provings, because I put so much work into them, it took all my writing time. All my time went into editing the provings and fixing them up, so it's great to have the provings but nobody sees that as original work, that's a scientific work, not a new thought.

But I have a book that's nearly ready, which I just have to put the finishing touches to. It's temporarily nicknamed 'The Joys of Syphilis' but it probably won't be published under that name.

N: Tell me more...

J: Well, what I'm looking at is to understand the miasms rather than theorising about them. I'm taking ten remedies that are characteristically syphilitic and not much else, and studying them in depth to look at the common denominator that runs through them, if there is a common denominator, in order to try and understand the miasm. The reason for this is in order to understand miasms you have three approaches: one is from theory, of which there are too many in my opinion and many of them are not based on the original concept of Hahnemann - they are just free floating entities; the second is from clinical cases, and nobody can prove this was a syphilitic case or that was a sycotic case - there's so many different opinions on cases. If you ask a bunch of students what case is this, 40% will say syphilitic, 40% sycotic, and usually it's a psoric case anyway, so you can't work that way. So you are left with the third option, which is materia medica, and that's the obvious way to go beyond theory and the variableness of cases. And I'm trying to present my ideas about these remedies, two of which - Eagle and Scorpion, I've proved myself.

N: So you're trying to do what Hahnemann did for psora?

J: In a way yes, but he did it from his patients, not the provings. He looked at the psoric elements in his patients and found the most simple common denominator running through them, which was the itch. I'm taking the provings and asking what's the common denominator in terms of understanding the miasm on a deeper level? This is new, as far as I know nobody's done it in terms of taking the remedies and looking at the common denominator there.

N: But you are assuming these remedies are syphilitic.

J: Yes, I've taken remedies that are black type syphilitics. Now if we can't assume that these are syphilitic we might as well forget the whole idea, but remedies like Aurum, Platina, Mercury, there's no argument about it, you're talking black type. Somebody could take me to task on Scorpion and Eagle, but that's my idea about it. Hepar sulph is a tri-miasmatic remedy really, although I would say it's to a large extent syphilitic. Phytolacca is a strong... Guaiacum, Stillingia, these are remedies that are just listed in black type and hardly listed in sycosis. Remedies like Plumbum which you would expect to be listed are actually not under Syphilis and therefore I leave out.

It's also a platform to present my ideas about the remedies, how I think about them. Because I try to write as nicely as possible, it takes a long time. The truth is I have the whole Dynamis course in note form typed out by many students and I could just get some professional to edit it for me and it would be out in a few week's time. But I can't bear to do that.

N: Why not? When I finished your course, the first thing I did was photocopy all my notes in case I ever lost the originals... they mean that much to me, and I still refer to them now.

J: It's good stuff, but you've heard me talking, and when you read it you know what I'm talking about. It's not literature, nowhere near. It's spoken stuff and not written stuff. I could give it to somebody to do it for me, but they don't know exactly what I want in terms of writing, I'm too particular!

N: Is it just a question of the elegance of the language or more to do with the ideas?

J: It's the elegance of the language, the ideas are all in the notes you have.

N: I've thought it's a shame that you haven't published more, or even got someone to do it, because what goes down in history is the written record, that's what survives. But it depends what you choose - perhaps you've reached more homeopaths more effectively than you could have done in a book. Few books could have done the same for me as listening to you teaching.

J: That's right, when you teach people, and I've taught thousands, you are producing something fantastic, but it's not going down as hardcore stuff. So OK, nobody will remember it in 50 -100 years time, but the energy of it is great. In terms of the energetic changes it makes in the world and in myself and in the students and for the patients, that's a great satisfaction, and from a Taoist point of view, I should be happy with that. Comes and goes, you know, comes and goes!

N: Certainly my experience of the teaching was that it wasn't something I could have got from a book. OK you can go and read Kent's lectures and get an awful lot and read them over and over, but if he was there teaching it to you...

J: ...it's not the same thing… I know that when people come and they do my first year, and I ask at the end of the year, now what did I teach, they won't remember anything. I've done it repeatedly, they forget the whole thing, and yet they know that they're not the same, they know that they've totally changed, because it's a potentisation, it's not about information. There is some information, but they become a different class of homeopaths. So you know what that process is, it's about inner change in the direction of homeopathy. Now it's very difficult to get that in a book, and you're not going to get that out of edited notes unless they have an impact that can go beyond and through the layers of protection that people have.
If you try and do it... you know when I teach, I have a certain way of putting it, a certain energy, a plan, a way to get inside people, and take them to a different level of viewpoint. When you write, if that's the effect you want to achieve, you need to go to a different place. It's like finding a potency, if you give mother tincture, it's not going to reach the place where other words can reach, unpotentised words. So, you see, hopefully it will be worth the wait in the end.

N: Yes, my experience of your weekends was exactly like getting my simillimum, nothing changes but everything changes, and suddenly I was making all these connections all over the place, I was seeing the world from higher up...

J: ...from a different place. A lot of people say that, a lot of people say 'you know I feel like I've had a new remedy every weekend...' It's the same experience for me too, even if I know the stuff in my sleep, backwards and forwards, because it's not only about intellect stuff. But nevertheless, I'm very happy with the methodology book, which is the only writing I've produced, because there's a lot of philosophy and a lot of thought in there. A lot of people think, 'oh well I'm not doing a proving so I'm not going to bother to read that', but the truth is there's a lot of stuff hidden in there. I purposely did it, there's something in me that didn't want to flaunt it as a philosophy book, so I kind of hid it behind a pompous title, 'The Dynamics and Methodology of Homoeopathic Provings', and it's there, but you have to want to dig a bit to find it. It's disguised as a book only for provers, but really it's a philosophy book that people should read, because there's a lot of philosophy in there that is important to all homeopaths, I feel.

Also you know all these Laws I've kind of made for homeopathy, I'd like to put them out, there's about fifteen or twenty of them, I think that's good and useful stuff. And like I told you, I've written most of the first year of Dynamis in verse form. I'm certainly not a poet, as you know and commented once even, but the reason I've done that is because when I sit down to write a lecture, I find that I can't penetrate with just prose, in ordinary lecture format, I can't penetrate the ideas to the place that I want to penetrate and it doesn't reach that potency. And really poetry is equivalent to a homeopathic potency, that's what I've found in writing, if you want to penetrate deep. In the Tao Te Ching it says 'that with no substance enters where no thing can go'. You want to give less and less, and poetry is about giving less and less, it's potentised words.

So I've had to go into that format to produce the effect that I want to produce, to penetrate beyond with my ideas. It's just that writing drab long lectures sounds awfully mother tincture to me, instinctively, it's not a thought thing. I just recoil from it because I think, 'poor students, having to read this long long droning on ideas of philosophy..'

And the other thing is the pleasure it gives me in writing it, the lasting pleasure, is much greater. I've written a very dry philosophy / lecture book on the methodology, at least the first part, and I don't read it again, I know it's out there, but I don't want to see it. But for my personal pleasure, when I read those poems to a class, I get a lot of pleasure from it, it does something to me inside, and that means a lot for me. Look, I've never read poetry in my life, I've never studied it in my life, I've never studied literature, so I'm a barefooted poet, you see...

N: This methodology book, everyone cites it in their bibliography when they publish a proving, but few people seem to pay exact attention to it.

J: Hah, yes I'll tell you what happens, a lot of people read the first half, and when it comes to the second half, it's very concentrated instructions on how to do it. But it's all there, especially in the second edition, which is fixed on the problematic areas. People don't go that far, maybe I suffer from too high standards, but I think that's the way it should be, high standards. The dark side of it is sometimes you don't get stuff out because you've got too high standards and then it doesn't hit the road, but I'm happy with the provings that I've done that because I've set the standard as much as I can and if people reach it and surpass it, well it's great for homeopathy.

It's love of ease I guess, laziness and love of ease is as Hahnemann said one of the three deadly sins of the homoeopath. I certainly am a sinner in that one because I could have done more, but when it comes to provings, yes, it's surprising, isn't it, it's all in there, how to extract, how to arrange, how to edit, how to do the whole thing, and it still seems logical to me, but you don't get it in most people's provings, though there have been some very good ones.

You see most people when they look at proving book... there's a pyramid of how people approach it. It's like homoeopathy, not everybody's ready for homoeopathy, not all the patients are ready, and even if there were enough practitioners it wouldn't make a difference because the patients who come to homeopathy are ones who are top of the level of consciousness, as far as I can see it. It's only when they are at that place that they will come and hold it out and stay long enough in order to get better. And the people who come to practice homeopathy are also people who are in terms of awareness of the bigger picture are fairly much at the top of the pyramid, not the top, but high up there.

OK, now when it comes to provings, it's the same story again, most homoeopaths look at a proving and say this is too much, this is too complicated, I'm not going to read it, I need a quick fix essence. Some people glance through, but few people read the whole thing. Of course, that's where the real treasures are in reading the provings, as you know, but partly because of lack of education on how to read the proving, how to approach it, how to think about it, and because people have been spoilt with quick little pictures on a silver tray, they won't go into it. Now it's the same with provings, how many people are prepared to bother to edit it in the way it should be edited? I get a proving a week in the post, people say, Here's what I've done, I can't publish it, I don't know if you want to do something because I've got a drawer full of the stuff. Most of it I don't want to touch because it's just so messy that it's not worth doing. You know it's really easy to do the first stage of a proving, fun and easy, it's taking it onwards to the finale that's the work. So through lack of knowledge, lack of will, lack of understanding, people are not taking it to the place where it can be yet, but on the other hand, it's a lot better than it used to be, ten or fifteen years ago nobody was doing it.

But most people when they look at a proving will say here's one proving, there's another proving, there's a third one, they won't know what the difference is. You need a trained eye to see how it's edited, the fact that you spend days arranging the extremities in the order as in Kent's Repertory, so that 'Pain - burning' is just before 'Pain - bursting', and all the 'Pain in the knees' are together, and all the modalities are in the right order, most people won't even notice that it's done like that. And the same goes for the mind and so on. There are these new programs for arranging provings and I'm just about to do my first experiment with that. We're going to check it out and see how it works, I think to a degree it will for the first stage. So the latest two provings I've just done, Krypton and Argon, I'm going to try and put them on to this database program, and that should take you about 60% of the way, but the rest will probably have to be handmade, I'm going to have arrange it.

N: Can you tell me about the latest provings?

J: Well, I've run two Dynamis schools in the last year, one in England and one in Ireland, and I've done Krypton and Argon. It was funny because I was sitting in the Jan Scholten seminar, you were there too, and he was saying nobody's done Krypton, and I had just started the proving the week before, but of course I couldn't say anything then, it was still top secret.

And as you know, they are both noble gases, and really this is hugely interesting for me, because I've done Helium and Neon, and now Krypton and Argon. That's four out of the seven, well only six exist as yet, but Luciferium should be around before too long, I don't know if we're going to do provings yet or not, but that's the nickname I've named it as, I'm reserving that for 118.

N: It's a noble gas?

J: It should be theoretically a noble gas because it's the completion of period number seven. Now, the way I see it is that because the noble gases are each a completion of their period, then they encompass the whole period, they have the fulfilment of the period. That means that essentially every element in the period is aspiring to be the noble gas at the end of it, and they are missing something from that possibility of not being a noble gas, each one is missing a different thing according to the number of electrons they have. So really in order to understand the nature of the whole period, the entry point should be by the noble gases, because when you've got the noble gases and you understand what they are trying to say, then you can go back to the others and see what the others are lacking, you can get the basic grid. And also just seeing the relationship between the group of noble gases is hugely interesting in itself.

N: Can you tell me more?

J: Well, it's new for Krypton and Argon so I won't go too much into that, I've got my picture for that, and actually there have been a couple of good Krypton cases already. Boy that was a tough one, you know it was a difficult remedy, I don't remember such a tough one since Germanium. People had a hard time, a few people had a hard time. Whereas Argon was... they had a great time.

N: I thought the noble gases were no pathology, nothing, they're just sitting in seventh heaven?

J: Oh no, they have their big problems because you're going to get the shadow side, however much they complete. They do all have that element of bliss, euphoria, completeness, contentedness, as you see in Neon for instance, but each one shows it in a different way. On the other hand you're going to hit the other side, the shadow side. One of the keys of understanding Neon is in a symptom where the prover says, 'I feel very upright both physically and morally'. And at the same time we know the remedy kind of makes a hole in the sky, a hole between heaven and earth, a hole in the firmament that separates heaven and earth. When you stand upright in a straight line totally vertically, you get that connection to the world beyond, to the stars etc, that's part of what Neon is saying. Now actually that element duplicates to a degree in the other nobles, that means that when you are standing in a vertical way, whether morally, physically, mentally or intellectually, whatever it is, you are in your centre, in position in that line that runs all the way from heaven through your vertex and down through your middle spine down to the centre of the earth.

That's one particular line, that's the line of being in position, in the here and now. The only way the nobles can be complete in the completeness is that they will be here and now, because there's nothing that can be content if it's not in the here and now. That central line of here and now it runs through the nobles, it runs through the centre of the vertex to the centre of heaven to the centre of the earth, you see it in all the provings, you see it in Krypton too, you know those drawings of the tall man by Fra ?? Angelico/Bartolommeo????. It's got that element in it... so in a way if you've got all the nobles, you've got the whole thing. You just have to extract from that, find the verb of the remedies, and see how it all works together.

N: So you're looking for a structure in the periodic table?

J: A structure, yes absolutely, not emotional pictures or something like that, but the deep inner structure, the verb, the motion. It's there, if you've got the end of each period you've got the key to the grid, and if you've got all the nobles, you've got the key to what changes from period to period, not only within the period but also how all the seven develop from one to the other. But to do that, the way I work, I need to see the proving, because I'm looking at the inner structure of what makes a remedy tick. And that's something that's collected through physical symptoms, through generals, through mentals, all the way along.

N: How close is the structure going to be, the way it's shaping up, to the hero journey that Jan Scholten has?

J: I don't know. There's some similarities, there's some differences, on the whole that is a different approach, because it's working from a methodological point of view, which is one viewpoint, that's great. I tend to think more in structural point of view of how things are in time and space. So I can tell you that Argon is 18 degrees out in it's pathology.

N: Why 18?

J: That's what came out in the proving, 18 degrees out, and it's also element number 18, suprisingly and interestingly, but it recognises that there's only 1% of a line in which you can hit truth, if you are in position. If you are in position then you hit the line of truth, that's enlightenment. If you are positioned in Neon, you hit the line of morality, uprightness etc.

N: Like in the film 'The Fifth Element'.

J: Exactly, it's exactly the Fifth Element, that's what happens, you've got all four of them and each one of them is an element that is lacking, fire lacks earth and earth lacks water, they can't exist, but when you've got the four elements, and then you get the middle one, love, truth, nobility, all of those come through in Krypton, Argon, Neon, Helium, you've got the whole thing.

N: So whereas Jan sees the structure from the outside, you're going inside each remedy about as deep as anyone can go and seeing what's going on.

J: That's right, then I'll make the common denominator, the same with the syphilitics. But the only way to find a common denominator is to go to the most simple element, you have to go simple because complex will never be a common denominator. Like if you've got 1/32 + 3/16 + 7/8, you can't add them together unless you come to the most simple. So it really means potentising the understanding to simplicity.

N: So when you have this common simple element, what does this do to homeopathy, what do you learn?

J: Well, first of all in terms of cases, if you can perceive that in a case and you know it in a remedy, your work is exceedingly simple, which is how it should be. You can skip through a lot of stages and jargon because you go in from a simple idea, a simple language, a simple theme, and you know the remedy that 's got that theme, that's got that idea. Like you know Salmon has to swim around in a circle and go home, and that's its structure, or you know Germanium can flow one way and it can't flow the other way. Now you might see that theme in all sorts of ways in Germanium, with it being a semiconductor, but once you've got that simple idea, it's easy to apply it to any physical symptom or general or whatever. So in terms of prescribing, that's great, and also in terms of understanding the connection between remedies, families, and the themes.

N: So this is what I'm interested in, why are you looking at the common elements of Syphilis, why are you looking at the common elements of not one remedy but whole period of that remedy? You're taking it a bit further than the individual remedy or the individual case.

J: To understand the remedy, you have to understand something very simple about that remedy. As you potentise you come to simple, just like Kent says, simple substance, because you're coming closer and closer towards the oneness of things, and oneness has to be towards simplicity. So you are potentising yourself into simplicity. Now in order to perceive a remedy, you reach a certain level, in order to perceive a group of remedies, you've got to go even more simple than that, to find what's common to all of them, so it's really a simple idea, like kid's play. You have to go into a child's level of seeing what's the common theme. So by doing that you are also potentising yourself at the same time, you are potentising your understanding of cases, of everything, of everything you see. By just seeing the simple within the complexity. It stands to reason within the structure of homeopathy, that when you potentise a remedy to the 10m, you are taking it to its most simple element. So you are doing the same with your understanding.

N: How is your understanding of homeopathy developing?

J: You see, my best teachers are the students, really that's where I learn the most. When I teach I'm learning all the time. Although I have the whole course in my head and I can teach you paragraph 1 and 9 and 153 and 258 or whatever, what really grows is the understanding of how it all fits together, and that just grows and grows and grows. The understanding of how seemingly different sections of philosophy, for instance, provings, second prescriptions and stronger dissimilar diseases and paragraph 2 all format into one idea, simplify into one idea. The same thing with the relationship between the acute, chronic, epidemic, miasm, how that formulates into one idea, so really it's about seeing the bigger totality, rising above just being inside the Organon, inside the history, inside the philosophy or Kent or whatever it is, and trying to see the overview and how all the little bits fit into one thing, logically. That's in terms of philosophy.

In terms of prescribing, I'd say what develops more is the inner state, as well as outside techniques and things you can read in a book or get in a seminar. What develops is the inner state and that state is mainly about letting go of things. It's again potentisation, because potentising and the simillimum and homeopathy is all about letting go, like it says in the Tao Te Ching, 'when nothing is done, nothing is left undone'.

So learning how to do nothing is a process, but that nothing is not a passive nothing, it's an active nothing, it's being there all the time without actually putting energy into it.

For me, every time I teach, to come and not know what I'm going to talk about, and just to let whatever needs to come come, yet not be all over the show, to be right there, that's always a lesson, and it's a development. It's the same in the case, being free of prejudice means coming with nothing, not thinking it's going to be a mental case or delusion or physical or a miasm or an element or a plant, just not knowing where it's going to come from and having the faith that the real information, the key will be supplied from somewhere. And to wait for it to come and to recognise it when it floats by you.

So that's the change that happens, I mean that's apart from learning a new remedy here or there, doing a proving, all that kind of stuff, of course every proving you do potentises you, and as you know, the students are not the same before they do a proving and after they do a proving, you can talk about it till you're blue in the face, but when they've done a proving, a group proving, a proper one, taken it all the way, they are a different class of homoeopaths. So every time I do one of those, I get potentised, and that's great.

I don't go to many seminars, partly because I'm teaching and so on at the weekends, and I find it difficult sitting through long video cases and stuff like that. Look, there are two kinds of teaching in homeopathy, and in everything, and I say this both as a teacher and as a student: there's succussion and there's dilution. Succussion is the hard slog of good bad, up down, pleasure pain, in which you learn another remedy, another rubric, another repertory, another technique, another essence, another approach, another case, good one, bad one, bad one, good one, whatever, you're just learning learning learning information. Dilution is letting go of all that, forgetting, jumping a level of perception. Now there needs to be a balance between these two in teaching, if people get too much succussion in their teaching they just become dry, robotic, lots of information, not a lot of knowledge, knowledge, not a lot of inspiration, homeopathic technicians or engineers, workers.

If there's too much dilution, you just get a Cannabis indica style homeopath. It's all New Agey, it's not connected to the ground, it's all wow man, let's look at this essence or picture or something like that. It loses touch with the earth. So just like in homeopathy when you potentise a remedy you need ten succussions to each dilution, you need to go and slog out ten boring lessons and then come and be inspired.

So because the colleges dish out a lot of succussion, I'm fortunate enough to come once a month and dish out as much dilution as I can. And it seems like a lot more fun, for me anyway, and for the students, but I know that if they didn't have that succussion, it wouldn't be enough, they have to come knowing their repertories, knowing the techniques, knowing the keynotes. They need that stuff, and trying to get the balance right between the two of those.

N: Do you have any sense of a dialogue with the old master homeopaths? In many ways you must be the modern Hering.

J: Well that's a nice compliment, certainly when I read that quote from Hering on the back of my book I get a buzz every time, I love reading the good stuff from the old homeopaths. And we usually do a short meditation before a class or a proving and I often feel Hahnemann comes down there. It's not me alone who says that, many times students come and they say, wow I felt Hahnemann was in the room. Six or seven people come and say that and it's great.

When I read Kent, I blow my socks off every time, I just love that stuff that comes out of him, I can read lesser Writings or Kent's Lectures and it's fantastic stuff.

N: Kent is the writer who can give you the simillimum in his writing.

J: That's right, and I would aspire to come close to his feet in that, because you know he's produced something that when you read it, it's just pure pleasure, if people can get over the primitive moralistic Victorian issues, then Kent really does it. Hahnemann also does it, but with him it's more hidden. When you perceive the genius of the Organon or the Chronic Diseases, it's just like, a mind blower every time also, you just wonder... Kent is more flowery. Some of them don't do it for me, some of them are just the old classical homeopaths, it's just succussion, but hey, that's good too.

N: You recently made some videos?

J: What I have done now is produced three videos. I thought how can I at least get the remedies out there quickly. I stood on my soapbox for many years about provings, pure provings, I don't want to publish the essences until the time is right, like it's a mix when people publish a proving and the proving is already the essence. I really don't buy into that stuff, they've lost it before they've even begun. But now that the early provings have been out for 5, 10, 12 years and also there are dozens of cases, I can stand up there and give the picture of them as I see it. And I've done that on video, so I'm producing 3 videos, Germanium, Scorpion, Diamond, and we'll see how it goes, if it's a success, because it's like written stuff, live materia medica video.

N: Is homeopathy 'promising at the beginning, less so in the middle and hopeless at the end'?

J: Ah like Hahnemann says, you mean if you are talking to the full extent of what is possible?
Well, there is inside of it... people have to recognise it. You get people better with homeopathy, you get amazing results, you get miracles. But when you see it up to that point, you think this is great, and that's what Hahnemann thought, he said as you know the beginnings were great. But then when you carry on further and further and further, as he said the ends are hopeless, miserable, and to a large degree, it's true. It looks like a losing battle, because if you go away from the viewpoint of just each individual, and you realise what Psora means, it's that you can be as better as you want to be, but as long as one person in Afghanistan has got a common cold, you've still got Psora. You say, hey that's a tough one, as long as there's a war in Zaire and poverty in South America, you personally have still got Psora. Now beat that, you know and how are you going to beat that? And it's only if homeopaths develop a stage of consciousness from their constitutional treatment so to speak, from their acutes, into understanding what miasms really mean.

The biggest mistake about miasms is that people think it's a gimmick from Hahnemann to find the remedy, they think, hey here's a gimmick from Hahnemann to find the remedy, but it's not a very good gimmick, because it's not going to do anything very much for us, because nobody can agree what's a syphilitic case or what's a sycotic case or whatever, and anyway, it's only classification into three, so what the heck. So then they degrade it into a sort of nosode per miasm theory and stuff like that. But when you really hear what Hahnemann is saying it's that you've got to see the bigger totality of the picture. You've really got to deal with everybody as if one person, which is a large group of people. Then we are dealing with as if one world here, and that means both in terms of the number of people we treat within one prescription, and also the depth in which we perceive the case, each individual case. Because you can heal the whole of Psora in each individual case, you can heal that guy in Afghanistan if you're treating the case deeply enough, that's my enough, that's my belief anyways. You can heal Psora if you treat enough people, both those approaches, both quantitative and qualitative, but both of them need a bigger vision.

But bearing in mind that homeopaths in the last fifteen years have moved from acute keynote prescribing to the concept of layers to the concept of constitutions, then there's a potentisation, a very fast potentisation of understanding. People are seeing the bigger picture, but there's a long way to go. Most are not understanding in terms of epidemics, what they really mean both practically and philosophically, and unless there's a deep understanding of epidemics there can't be an understanding of miasms and what they really mean. So really the answer is education of homeopaths.

N: How close are we to getting a really good handle on homeopathy and the treatment of disease?

J: I think it's going really well, I think within the next ten to fifteen years... you see the big stage there has to be is when there's a homeopathic university, a good quality one. A homeopathic university that has a six year education to make a person a doctor, but a doctor where homeopathy is the main idea, and allopathy is just a sidekick. That's what's coming and that's what needs to come, so that the way I see it, once you finish the basic stuff in three years, you can spend the whole of the fourth year studying epidemics, theoretically and practically, sending people out to Peru to deal with cholera, as a larger picture. When they come back, they won't be the same, they'll have seen how an epidemic works, then you can start dealing with what does it mean, miasms, that's how Hahnemann reached that concept. So it's not hopeless, but anybody who thinks that the homeopathy we have now is enough to solve the world's problems is not looking far enough, because unless we solve the world's problem in its deepest roots, we haven't really solved anything, the problem's going to come back. Hahnemann saw that, but it took him thirty years of practice to see that, and most people haven't got thirty years of practice or the guts to see that, that problem is inherent, but the solutions are there too. So hopeless it's not, but it's a bloody big challenge I would say.

N: What do you understand by shamanism?

J: Shamanism is a healing art, it's a collective name for the healing arts. But it's based on experience, personal experience of delving into nature. Delving into the darker side of ourselves, of nature, in order to bring together ourselves and nature, our light side and our dark side, our conscious and subconscious, and to heal the great rift between them, the male and the female.

And it employs any trickery possible to do it, any voyage possible, it's a personal voyage, it's like the voyage of the hero, it's like the voyage of the explorer, of deeper territories, of mysticism and nature and the world of potency and imagination and drugs and experience and healing and subconscious. And homoeopathy is a modern shamanism.

N: You said provings are shamanism.

J: Provings are very much the shamanistic side of homeopathy, although other sides are too, the meditation of taking a case is a shamanistic experience too, but in provings you are delving into nature, you are taking a trip into the other side, and the other side of nature but the other side of yourself too, a side of yourself that you'll never reach from daily experience. And what's more you're doing it as a group, and when you do it as a group it's much more powerful, as a conscious group that's grown together, then you're taking a collective trip to an aspect of the self and of the universe that has maybe never been touched before in the whole history of humankind.

Who has done a voyage into Krypton? Not Paracelsus, as far as I know, not Hippocrates, as far as I know not even the old caveman has, as far as I know. You are going into unknown territory of Krypton. Yet it's been there before in other forms, in its other archetypical formats, it's been there, you're just delving into it from a new point of view. And usually shamanism involves going through that period of pain for growth, and there's pain in proving, there's pleasure and pain in proving, because it's a learning experience. It's not a dilution, it's not a forgetting experience, unless you're lucky to hit the right remedy on the nose during the proving, it happens to some. Out of the Argon proving about six people hit the jackpot, they were having a good good time, at least six people there, they did really good on that.

N: And is this something we all must go through, as homoeopaths, if we want to grow?

J: I think so, it's definitely part of the education. If you want to model your homeopathic education on the history of homeopathy for instance, well the history of homeopathy involved provings. You don't really understand what it's about, otherwise, in a way, although there are no doubt excellent homoeopaths who haven't done provings. But a proving takes you one step further. And it's strange the fear the old generation has of provings, it's a strange thing. It's that gap of the generations between the 50s people and the 60s people, something happened in those years. Something happened with Sgt Pepper, where the old generation is saying you can't go into that territory, and this new age of Aquarius say, Yeah we are going to go into that new territory, we are going to go beyond the boundaries and explore them. The fear that the old generation have of provings doesn't come from a scientific thought, it comes from a deeper level of going... just like in those days you couldn't see as far as Pluto. Pluto was discovered in 1933, we extend our boundaries, it's the same in homeopathy.

N: Some classical homeopaths say they don't use new remedies, we have got enough, there's no need for new ones.

J: I think fine, if you're happy with what you've got, that's great, but there are a few things to say here. Firstly, Kent said there are only twenty-five good provings since the time of Hahnemann, and he was being generous. And since the time of Kent, there are fewer. Now the people who say there are enough remedies, are using all kinds of small remedies that hardly have a proving, that are difficult to know. They might be using Adrenaline, or even __________?????

So they are using these minor remedies and proudly presenting their cases where there's no basis to go on, yet you have these new remedies which are probably better provings than most that have been done in the homoeopathic history, and you're presenting complete full pictures. Why not use them? All I can say is that with the amount of cases of Germaniums that I get from all over the world every day, when I hear from anywhere from Canada, South America, Australia, Europe, every week I hear of a few cases that have been healed with Germanium, Diamond, Scorpion. The theory is fine, unless they come across one of those patients, and then they can theorise all they want in the world that they've got enough remedies, but nothing but the right remedy is going to do, so they are not fulfilling their paragraph 1. And where does it come from? From a fear, because it's very strange thing that the old generation of homoeopaths should be safeguarding the tradition, and that's true, they should be keeping people on the ground, and they're doing that, but it's the wrong ground, because they think keeping people on the ground is keeping people with what was. But really keeping people on the ground is keeping people within the same tradition and the same ideas that Hahnemann and the other classics developed, and they said do provings, and do good ones. Instead of that, what ends up is just like holding on to the old book, to the husk of the tree but not to the inside of it. It's an empty tree, hollow.

I have got twenty or thirty successful Diamond cases. Maybe you say that's me, but I know other homeopaths that have the remedy, they have at least five cases. So what do these people do when they get a Diamond case, do they use Calc sulph?

It's a laziness and a fear, it's a laziness too, I would say, and it's a lack of knowledge of how to study a proving. That's also at the bottom of it, and I partly accept responsibility for it, because I'm advocating materia medica pura and classical provings all the time, and refusing to give out the easy essence, even though I've been under tremendous pressure from homeopaths to do that, with the books. They're not going to read Diamond, but if I came and taught it, I taught Diamond, and Scorpion or Neon, and I gave them a nice easy on the dish thing, they would use it. So where's it really coming from?

N: Have you got a word for this, obviously essence is problematical word. Do you say the simple idea of a remedy?

J: Pattern, I think pattern is the best word, because essence is trying to distil one idea out of it, but a pattern is trying to connect all the themes together, without losing touch with, for instance, physical things and generals and each individual symptom.

N: When I think of you and what you are doing and where you are, you're either teaching or you're travelling or you're proving. This makes a pattern for me, you're spreading yourself around the globe, you're acting like a pandemic for homeopathy.

J: Yes, I am.

N: Is this something conscious on your part?

J: No, it's a pathology!... But it's a fun one too.