A Homeopathic Remedy
A few years ago I had the good fortune of being ‘in relationship’ with a lovely woman who happened to be a practicing Naturopathic Physician. Her modality consisted of what is termed Classic Homeopathy. And as I understand it; the principal is to dilute the original organism that is apparently causing a particular disease by many thousands of times and administering it to the patient. The theory is, rather than fight the symptoms, we go in and shore up the immune system and administer the cure at the root. Anyway, just now I was reading some of an interview between Douglas Harding and Richard Lang. The word that popped up was ‘Homeopathy.’ By turning around and ‘looking from’ the so-called problem the solution becomes apparent. There isn’t anyone there to cause a problem! And it also reminded me of K’s famous quotation. “You are the world, and the world is you.” + + + + RL: This revolution in personal relationships must have an effect on one’s relationship with foreigners, animals and plants, inanimate objects – you name it. I’m thinking of all the conflict going on in the world today at all levels and how you might help. DH: I think that if we try to ameliorate, or abolish even, the dreadful things that are going on in the world – war and exploitation, starvation, all those things – if we try to do that at the level of the symptoms we’re not going to do very much. I wouldn’t say it’s useless, but it’s going to be insufficiently radical. We will not really make a contribution here until we tackle the root of the thing, and the root of the thing is to be found in each of our personal lives. If I’m suffering from this disease of confrontation in my relationship with you at this moment, what’s the use of trying to deal with the same problem of confrontation at other levels – national and international – confrontation between sexes, ethnic groups, religions, ideologies, power blocs, and so on? In other words, service to the world begins at home. Repeat: service to the world begins at home – if only because when you’ve found out who you are, you find you are the world. RL: How do you think it affects personal problems, psychological problems? Such as depression, anxiety, fear, loneliness? DH: There’s a sense in which it leaves those human things to carry on at their own level. At the centre of my life is this Awareness whose very nature I find is freedom – freedom not only from thinghood but from thoughts and feelings of all kinds. Certainly from problems of all kinds. As the source of those things, the origin of those difficult things, its business must be to leave them alone, free to be what they are. Who I really am doesn’t in itself change what I like to call my human nature. What it does, Richard, is to place it. This difficult and sometimes heart-rending stuff is not denied. In fact it is far more honestly reckoned with and cheerfully taken on board, from the state of freedom at the centre, than ever it was from that illusory person. Now there’s no necessity to deny and every reason to acknowledge these troubles in so far as they persist – loneliness and depression etc. It is part of the price of involvement in the world to have these feelings, some of which are agreeable, some of which are disagreeable, some of which are tragic. I can’t exist, can’t express at all, without this dualism out there. The dualism of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, black and white, etc. is the inescapable condition of expressing into the world from the place that is free of those dualities. So it’s not a case of being free from these things, in the sense that one abolishes them, but of being free from them in the sense that one locates them. They are no longer central. This not only removes one from them – without removing oneself from them: in the long run and when persisted in, it changes them. How exactly it does so remains to be seen. RL: Do you find in your own life that you have arrived at a sense of deep peace through this awareness? DH: Yes, I do indeed. It couldn’t be deeper. It couldn’t be more available, and it couldn’t be more natural or native to oneself. It’s been here all the while, and can never be achieved, or improved upon, or cultivated. It simply is here for the looking at. This peace is our very nature, not something we come across. It’s where we are, nearer than all else. We don’t come to it. we come from it. To find it is to allow ourselves to go back to the place we never left. Click here to read more