Category — 06 - Homeopathy and Heilkunst - Advanced

Excerpts from The Dynamic Legacy: From Homeopathy to Heilkunst, by Rudi Verspoor and Steven Decker

Initially, Hahnemann was interested in diluting the dose so as to avoid unnecessary aggravations (homeopathic) whilst still retaining some degree of medicinal action (still conceived largely in this context as a chemical action of sorts).

…In the initial stages it is very easily perceived that he was astonished at the striking effect produced by highly diluted substances..

Thus, Hahnemann’s purpose was at first merely to weaken the medicine to such an extent that it was able to stimulate therapeutic action in a diseased organ without burdening this organ unnecessarily with medicine.

..In his Chronic Diseases, he now thinks that the dilution actually strengthens the medicine.

..”If the dose is to act more strongly it must be stirred in a little more water until dissolved before taking it, and in still more water if it is to act still more strongly, and the physician should order the solution taken a portion at a time.”

…Here we can see another principle emerging, namely that of the power of the dose being related to the surface area of contact. The just-noted increase in strength of the remedy through dilution must then occur because of the greater surface area contacted..

In an article written in 1827, Hahnemann expresses his wonderment at the therapeutic power unleashed in the diluted/triturated medicine.

The dynamic dose (in dilutions beyond any chemical laws) is not subject to the same stricture as chemical doses, such that the giving of..suitable remedies in mixture does not create a problem for cure, but rather enhances it. Earlier, Hahnemann had found that the dynamised doses increased in therapeutic power despite increased dilution.

From Dr. Wilhelm Lux:
STRENGTH AND DILUTION

The more the substances are potentialised [diluted and shaken in a way to activate the therapeutic potential], the more the dormant power (energy) is liberated… I have seen, with other experiments that a high dilution is more powerful than a lower one; this means that the medicinal power augments according to the gradual diminution of the matter. Since then I call it not “Dilution” but “increasing the power.”

If the organism is sensitive or of phlegmatic or lymphatic constitution and has become weak by chronic diseases, I use higher dilutions which I renew and thus I avoid homoeopathic aggravations.

In summary:
Chemically, diluting a substance makes it less active and therefore less powerful therapeutically. But “dynamic” remedies are acting on a deeper level than the biochemical, and on that “dynamic” level the remedy becomes more powerful even as it contains less actual material substance.

If you had acne and treated it with drugs to suppress it, and now your acne is “cured” but you have allergies that you didn’t have before - did you really cure the acne?

Most people think yes, you’ve solved the skin problem and now you have a different problem to take to the allergy specialist. This is the fallacy of conventional specialization, and the false belief perpetuated by the medical/pharma system that symptoms are always “bad” and need to be suppressed.

In reality, the acne is an inflammatory process that the body produces to try to get rid of some kind of toxin, whether from outside or a toxin produced by the body itself. For some reason, it couldn’t be eliminated at the level of normal excretion (sweating, urination, mucus, etc.). So it had to bring in the heating quality of inflammation to do the job by “burning it up.”

Here’s a very important concept:

When you suppress that natural detoxification process by suppressing symptoms, you’re pushing toxins more deeply into the system. Now the body is forced to find a different avenue to express the toxins, so different symptoms now crop up. And now more vital organs may be involved, and the disease is more difficult to treat. This is the direction that ends in tissue degeneration.

We need to know how to recognize the direction a symptom or condition is going in, and recognize that a symptom even if very uncomfortable, might represent a healing process that should be supported, not suppressed.

The Table of Homotoxicology, conceived by a homeopathic medical doctor named Dr. Reckeweg, is a wonderful visual aid and model for understanding the difference between a disease process and a healing process, so that when you have symptoms you can see the larger context of what they really mean.

This is a chart that shows the various phases the body uses to try to get rid of these toxins, and the various conditions that can appear at each phase. The idea is that we want to get the condition to move in the healing direction, to push the toxins out of the system.

But commonly, drugs such as antibiotics and anti-inflammatories, even some herbal medicines, are used to make symptoms go away. And they’re pretty good at that, but we’ll see how they actually can suppress the healing process and lead to a progression of the disease process.

In this article I’ll give you a little introduction to how to use the table of Homotoxicology to understand the direction of symptoms - whether they’re moving toward deeper disease or are going in a healing direction.

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Let’s take the example of allergies and acne one step further. You have chronic allergies, which means that your body isn’t easily throwing off toxins, and they’re on their way to beginning to cause cellular damage. But you’re treating that properly without suppressing it, and your allergy symptoms are improving, although now you have a bad case of acne.

What does the acne really mean, besides just being a new symptom that you’re tempted to suppress or make it go away however you can?

Now that you have the acne, that’s a very important indication! Acne is an inflammatory process, indicating that your body is trying to repair the damage of the chronic allergies. This inflammation, although it’s uncomfortable is actuallly a favorable response!

You see, we’re looking at the direction in which the process is proceeding. To go from acne to chronic allergies is an unfavorable direction - the disease process. But now with the acne inflammation, you’re proceeding in a healing direction toward proper elimination of toxins. The body is trying to move toxins outward so that they don’t progress to do damage on the cellular level.

What we need to do now is to support this healing process, and we can use nutrition, tissue salts, and various other regimenal methods.

If you were to use antibiotics for the acne, you might get some symptom relief, but you’d actually be suppressing this healing process, which would be like sabotage. It would be like anything else that gives you short-term gain but hurts you more in the longer run.

You would be driving the disturbance deeper into the system, and then it would be expressed later, most likely in a more serious condition. So we want to avoid that. You can be helped to feel better with remedies that don’t sabotage your long-term gain, while focusing the effort on what is going to maximize your healing.

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Now let’s look at the example, on Dr Reckeweg’s Table of Homotoxicology. Don’t let the name intimidate you - it’s a wonderful model and very clear visual aid for understanding the difference between a disease process and a healing process.

Here is a shortened form of the table

More detailed table

To illustrate how it works, in the table look under the column titled Inflammation Phase, and you’ll see acne listed there. Now look over to the right, under the column for Impregnation Phase, you’ll see allergies.

What this means is that if someone has chronic allergies, it’s usually because they have gone through the phases on the left side of the chart, over to the right side of the chart which represents disease processes that are beginning to affect the cellular level.

The left-hand half of the chart shows functional disturbances that haven’t produced actual tissue damage. In the functional phases, the body is still fairly well able to throw off the toxins, as they haven’t penetrated very deeply yet. Some of the symptoms in the functional phases can be quite intense, as with pneumonia or meningitis. But as you move to the right of the chart, the conditions are becoming more degenerative, more embedded in the tissues.

So if a person had acne, and then later they’re developing chronic allergies, you can see that they are in a disease process, going from left to right on the table.

But if someone has allergies, and they’re being treated properly to remove the disease blockages, and now they’re developing acne, now they are going from right to left, reversing the disease process, moving in the direction of healing!

In this context, the appearance of acne is a good thing and should not be suppressed with antibiotics but treated properly and supported so that the person can move through the inflammation phase and back to the excretory phase to the left.

The healing process goes from right to left on the chart, although not all the in-between phases will manifest, and this is really just a rule of thumb to understand what direction the person is going in, when they had one problem and then another problem crops up.

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The key to all this is that the symptom itself does not give you an understanding of what is happening and how to treat it. Depending on whether you’re going from right to left or left to right on the table, meningitis or pneumonia or acne (or other inflammatory condition) may be a healing process, and usually is!

Some inflammatory conditions can be serious and do need to be treated. Sometimes a bit of judicious symptom suppression is called for in the meantime, and professional judgment of a skilled naturopath or homeopath is called for.

I would not recommend that people self-treat for very intense or chronic conditions. But we need to understand the meaning of our own symptoms in order to participate consciously in our own healing.

The problem is getting stuck in the inflammatory phase, and then the person will often anxiously believe they need to suppress the inflammation in every case. What they really may need is to support it and treat it properly to get it moving so it resolves to the left on the chart, not to suppress it and drive it toward the right.

Here are some preliminary thoughts just to introduce the topic of nutrition from a “dynamic” view, beyond the biochemical model.

Let’s start with something our inner wisdom already knows - there’s a real difference between a “living” food and its overcooked, pasteurized, microwaved, or industrially processed counterpart. The difference is chi; prana; orgone energy. But what needs to be examined is how that energy actually works to nourish us.

What we’re really extracting from foods is not the biochemical constituents, not chemistry but energy. At the cellular level, we can see that process as hydrogen transfer - that’s why pH (hydrogen potential) is so fundamental.

Foods that sustain life are like little packages of condensed energy. What we’re doing when we eat food is essentially breaking down and appropriating the energy of the food. These forces within the food are foreign until we take them in and overcome the foreign forces and make them our own. That process is mediated through heat, and that’s what digestion is really about.

How do we come to a rational understanding of nutrition?

The problem we run into in understanding how nutrition works is that we have the language of chemistry and the concepts of energy, and we tend to use whichever one is convenient, or try to mix them together randomly rather unconsciously. We might be comfortable talking about chi or life energy in a certain context, but when it comes to nutrition we tend to want to stick to the material view and explain things in terms of chemistry, because that’s the realm of sense perception and perhaps easier to look at.

Our organs of sense perception and our ordinary cognition is more developed than the more etheric, supersensible knowing, so we use what comes easier. But to be able to grasp the meaning of the flux and flow of function, we need to develop a more etheric thinking that can see the living properties of things beyond the material level. This is what has been called the Dynamic view.

The entities and substances we’re looking at aren’t static and fixed in time and space - in this view, eating a fresh raw vegetable might be functionally identical to a practice that generates chi. The intellect looking at the material chemistry would see a big difference! But functional thinking sees a distinction rather than a separation. It sees the continuity, the same underlying phenomenon.

We need a deeper physiological basis for bridging the gap between chemistry and energy. Otherwise we have a sort of schizophrenic split between on the one hand the mystical realm of energy, and on the other hand the materialistic realm of only what we can perceive with the senses.

So we have to look at energy in a way that can be grounded in the cellular structure. The way that nourishment functions, there’s an etheric process going on whereby we use radiant energy from the sun, indirectly through food, air and water, and generate internal light. There’s actually a physiology of this inner light metabolism.

This is a true physiology that’s about the deeper functioning of forces and energies which drive the biochemistry. (Rudolf Steiner laid out this understanding clearly, although extracting it from his writing is quite a workout!)

Getting back to nutrition, there’s a critical difference between “living” foods and processed foods. “Living” water such as artesian well water could be assayed biochemically and found similar to other forms of purified or spring water. But looking at it biophysically, it’s been seen that the living water will enhance the function of cellular hydration, because of its crystalline structure, whereas processed water doesn’t. The materialistic view will just see all water as functionally equal, and focus on the presence of material toxins as making the difference.

We can sense the difference in food and water that has a lot of life energy - they feel better and taste better. That sensing is through supersensible organs, not sense organs, and isn’t measurable in the same way, but it’s no less real. Even if we’re not yet conscious of how we’re using those supersensible organs, we still know that there is something more behind the outer structure of things. No matter how microscopically we might analyze it, there’s some living quality apart from that, which we resonate with.

We can see on the biophysical level what happens when we remove the life energy from food and water. Industrial processing destroys the inherent crystalline structure which is the key to the life-giving property of food. Crystals transfer information, so at that level it’s really the information - consciousness - that we’re internalizing by taking in nutrients. Generate your own inner light, and live in truth, and you may not need to be concerned about ingesting living foods!

Although, then we’d be guided by the higher spiritual function of Reason, and resonance which is based in love would solve the problem of what to eat.

Most of us are still in the process of transforming our relationships based on attraction (potato chips, yum!) to those based on resonance. When we eat heavily processed food which is attractive but doesn’t resonate, it becomes like a dead weight, an energy drain. Animals fed on microwaved food for a month starved, although they had access to as much quantity of food as they wanted.

Some processes like culturing foods or natural fermentation or sprouting actually enhance the crystalline structure and bring out life energy especially when it’s dormant in seeds, and that’s why traditional cultures have always used those methods - they knew the benefits instinctively if not consciously.

Seen from this perspective, living foods like raw milk from healthy animals have little in common with their commercial counterparts. When we hear about the problem with milk, it’s about the commercial, pasteurized dead material that’s sold as milk, not the live food that it was to begin with.

Those live foods are suited to us, because the biophysical function of those foods promotes inner light and life. Then we need to determine whether a particular food is resonant with our particular typology - according to various typology systems like ayurveda, metabolic typing, glandular typing, etc., and take various other factors into account to put together a proper diet.

But aside from individual needs, we need to understand the functional reality behind nutrition. Let’s look at the way that carbs are stored as fat when we don’t need any more for biological function. We assume that we’ve simply eaten too much or the wrong proprortions of macronutrients. Or we look at smaller and smaller units of biochemical substances and relationships to try to explain what’s going on.

But digestion and metabolism has a supersensible function in the astral body, which is prior to all that. The breakdown of food is a function of the astral body. When the astral isn’t proprely engaged, even a diet that looks perfectly suitable to the person in theory, won’t be handled properly. (the Kidney is involved in this astral function of properly transforming food and generating inner light).

The astral takes us to the soul level, so this is how we can begin to bridge the gap between body and soul - they are really a functional polarity, which is not just an abstract concept but something that we can ground in actual physiology.

What are the real principles that determine whether a vegetarian or meat diet is appropriate for a particular person?

The choice to eat meat or not is an emotionally charged issue for most people, and it taps into deeply held beliefs.  But we can look at it from a dynamic view.

Plants contain etheric forces which are easy to assimilate, whereas animals contain more astral forces which require more energy to break down. This doesn’t mean that we should always go the easier route and eat only plants!

And depending on how the animal was raised, the quality of the astral forces will be different, hence animals raised on pasture and killed properly will yield more digestible food than factory farmed animal foods. And it will ground us in the body, which creates an important balance for many people.

So the choice depends on the dynamic physiology of the individual and which functions they need to stimulate and strengthen.

Animal foods are grounding, and good for a person whose “upper” bodies (ego and astral) need to be grounded in the lower metabolic pole.  For those who need the grounding and incarnating properties of animal foods, a more vegetarian diet even if done meticulously with the highest quality foods can be profoundly weakening.

A more vegetarian diet frees the  consciousness from the earth pole, which is why it’s favored in certain spiritual traditions.  When the upper bodies are too deeply incarnated in the earth forces and need to be freed up, then a vegetarian diet is appropriate.  Often the diet a person needs will change from time to time according to these functional changes; particular health challenges presenting at a particular time; typlogies such as blood type, body/glandular type, etc.

Another aspect of this issue is that animal foods with their higher astrality challenge us to bring our own digestive forces to bear to strip away the foreign astrality. If the ego/astral forces are weak, it can be difficult for the person to break down those astral forces in the food, and the foreign forces lead to food allergies and immune problems. Eating animal foods raw instead of cooked can mitigate this problem to some extent, as the raw food contains more etheric forces that are easily assimmilable.

Vegetarian diets are in this sense less challenging especially if the person doesn’t have strong ego/astral forces. But less of a challenge isn’t always what we need - it’s the challenge itself that strengthens the upper forces.  We want to provide just enough stimulation for the activation and development of our own forces, but not so much as to overwhelm our resources, just as a good teacher finds that balance with a student in any learning situation.

When you’re sick, you want to concentrate on the etheric and not challenge yourself too much with breaking down the astral forces of higher protein foods, so you can take meat broths and the raw foods that are more easily assimmilable.

And so ends this brief introduction to a profound and vast field of study. I find it fascinating and challenging as it exercises the etheric thinking function, which is not an easy task!

Recommended reading:

Water and Salt: The Essence of Life, by Dr. Barbara Hendel
Nutrition: Food, Health, and Spiritual Development, by Rudolf Steiner

Personal Experience with Heilkunst
July, 2006

[Note: This article was written for an audience of Heilkunst patients, students and practitioners, and assumes some familiarity with Heilkunst. Coming soon is a companion piece that will be a gist of the principles of Heilkunst. Meantime, see the article on Healing and Curing.]

I came to Heilkunst almost four years ago, in time for the real healing and curing that all my previous struggle had been leading me to.

As my practitioner, Rudi Verspoor, pointed out from the beginning of treatment, Heilkunst might actually be using many of the same remedies I had tried many times before with homeopathy. But the previous trial and error method, with no real systematic approach, apparently hadn’t made good use of all those potentially useful remedies.

With the “classical” approach to homeopathy, I had many so-called “aggravations” that confirmed to me that the remedies did have some energetic effects. So why weren’t they helping? My understanding now is that those aggravations were really healing reactions, but because they weren’t considered within any meaningful context, they were kind of tossed aside as par-for-the-course discomforts.

Eventually my classical homeopath recommended that I try Vega testing instead, so I did that for a bunch of years too, taking an enormous hodgepodge of remedies. I knew that there was a kernel of truth somewhere in homeopathy, or related to homeopathy, so I kept trying to find it. I certainly held the common thought that “The next Rx might be the one.” Plus I had compelling emotional attachments to kind, compassionate homeopaths! But I guess I was following Hahnemann’s example even when I didn’t know it, as I eventually discontinued the treatment that I knew was wrong, even before I knew of a treatment that was right.

Then, about 10 years later, in 2002, I found Dr. Elmiger’s book, Rediscovering Real Medicine, in which he described a sequential method of treatment that removed the obstaces-to-cure that were responsible for the failure of so many cases. That was a turning point. I emailed him to find out how I could receive treatment, but there only seemed to be one person in the US who was trained by him, and that was too far away. But I kept researching and finally came across Heilkunst.

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