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Archive for the ‘Homeopathic provings’ Category

The proof of the pudding

Monday, January 30th, 2006

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest…a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in it’s beauty.”
Albert Einstein

Pertinent to mention that most of this month’s blog contributions have been made under the influence of another proving!

This one’s particular focus at the more philosophical end of its spectrum has to do with the way in which the underlying state gives rise to its outward manifestations, and vice versa in how outer manifestations reflect the nature of the underlying state. It highlights the frequently paradoxical nature of the process – or at least paradoxical to western thought – and the way we tend to get things twisted back-to-front and inside-out.

Cosmic Sphere by Camille Flammarion 1842-1925

It was interesting that in response to January 27th’s post, Carol Willis mentioned the Golden Rule (see the Comments to that entry), and it’s right enough that it infuses the moral and ethical standards of most cultures on the planet right down to children’s stories such as Charles Kingsley’s 1863 classic The Water Babies featuring the redoubtable rulers of the water-babies’ kingdom, Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. If recognition of the value of such principles is pretty much universal, how is it that we fail so dismally to carry principle through to action?

It lies in the nature of the mirror. The underlying state is not something that can be perceived directly. It’s evident only by the manifestations it gives rise to which are like a mirror to its nature. Since our attention is captured by the reflection, rather than its source, we mistake this for the fundamental “reality” and see things back-to-front and inside-out, often entirely oblivious to the fact that there’s an underlying state generating these manifestations in the first place. The result of this is that we aim for the ultimates, the manifestations of the underlying state, as goals in and of themselves. Because we perceive them as goals, rather than reflections, we attempt to impose them on ourselves and others rather than focusing on the underlying state that naturally and spontaneously gives rise to them (much as Paracelsus highlights in the quote beginning the last post).

“What we are looking for is what is looking.”
St Francis of Assisi

As our self-discipline (or imposed discipline) strengthens and we succeed in acting in ways that are selfless, compassionate, etc, we believe we’ve achieved our aim. Which indeed we have – we’ve succeeded in imposing these qualities on ourselves. But the underlying state remains unchanged. It’s merely been strait-jacketed into a facsimile of the genuine article, but will continue as it always has to make its nature known in acting out, projection onto “other”, or in internal dis-ease, while we, delighted with our successes in overcoming our “base nature” and “doing the right thing”, remain ignorant of the fact.

We’ve made this error with each of the major world religions; the main reason why we’re left now with so much profound fragmentation, conflict and empty ritual. We’re making the same mistake again with the re-emerging spirituality of the “New Age”. Everywhere people are concentrating on the ultimates; trying to be in the eternal now, in universal compassion, etc, etc, learning techniques to impose this discipline or that discipline on themselves in the hopes it will lead to realisation, and ignoring all the reflections in the mirror which tell us what state we’re really in.

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Søren Kierkegaard

This isn’t to say that practicing such techniques can’t help us along the path to the realisation we desire, only that we’re very good at fooling ourselves into thinking we’ve “got it” when we haven’t. We want it so bad we ignore all the signs telling us we’ve still got stuff nailed under the carpet to attend to.

A lot of the stuff under the carpet comes from the basic assumptions we’re conditioned with since childhood, passed down from generation to generation, and which are so universal we can’t see them for what they are. The doctrine of original sin, for instance, has one helluva lot to answer for. The idea that we’re born bad and have to spend the rest of our lives struggling to keep the badness under control accounts for an awful lot of our bad behaviour, not to mention the backlash notion that we’re really full of fundamental goodness and anyone pouring cold water on the unending feel-good fest is just being negative. We’re born neither bad nor good. W’e’re just born: with the potential to destroy or create, to fragment or amalgamate. A potential almost as diverse and limitless as the life-force of which we’re an inseparable part, and equally free of value judgement. How we’re conditioned to see and value ourselves, how we come to terms with that, and the choices we make as a result, are what determine the “reality” of our lives and the quality of our actions.

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity … and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Albert Einstein



Stoned?

Sunday, May 22nd, 2005

This latest proving still continues! (See previous posts.) About a month ago I had the distinct impression its influence was waning, but no. It was just entering another phase. The physical symptoms are still around too – notably this remedy’s apparent affinity (in me at least) for the left deltoid muscle.

From repeating dreams featuring nested subroutines in either mathematical formulae or programming language, I’m now getting programming language addressing the relationships between various files and routines – how they call each other and incorporate aspects of each other within their own nested subroutines. This seems to relate to the evolving model of existence based on the theoretical understanding of black holes which I’ve introduced in the general essay Unscientific Attachment. More as it develops …

Having sent in my proving log last month when it all seemed to be tailing off, I now know what the substance is. Stangeria eriopus, the Natal Grass Cycad. An ancient plant first thought to be a fern and later discovered to be cone-bearing.

The proving director sent me a photograph of the plant she used as the source of the remedy. Its single leaflet is uncannily similar in appearance to a stone carving of a leaflet I recently made. The carving came into being without any premeditation, and the design was created in about 30 seconds flat. The whole thing was completed before I knew what the proving substance was. Indentations in the edges of the leaflets similar to those in my carving can evidently develop in older plants, as can the wavy surface which I started to carve in the lower leaflets and then thought better of (still evident in bottom left leaflet). Even the manner in which the leaflets attach to the central stem is similar.

Leaves
Stangeria eriopus

A good example of sympathetic resonance in action? Certainly seems plausible. Now here’s one for all those people who feel that sympathetic resonance with a proving substance cannot be established prior to the ingestion of the physical token of it in the form of the remedy. This carving was made in December 2004. It was actually finished in the same week I received the invitation to take part in the proving, so at the moment of its initial creation, and for much of its execution, there was no conscious engagement with a scheduled proving. (I knew one was on the way because I had already started to experience a change in state, but had no idea where it would materialise from or when.)

The carvings I make seem to have a habit of resonating with provings. Last September I made a carving of a lotus/waterlily while doing another proving. That proving turned out to be an essence prepared from the sand used in the construction of a Tibetan Buddhist sand-painting, a mandala dedicated to the goddess Green Tara, which had been made in Glastonbury during that summer. Tibetan iconography traditionally has Green Tara seated on a lotus flower. These sand paintings are created over the period of 5 days or so, dedicated, celebrated, then ceremoniously destroyed. Since its completion, my carving has been steadily disintegrating, the only one of my works to do so.

Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not. Or is so-called “coincidence” just evidence of an underlying pattern and order we’ve yet to become fully aware of? And as for the disintegrating carving, well it just wouldn’t be good sympathetic resonance if it didn’t, would it?



Here be dragons …

Tuesday, April 5th, 2005

Dragon conversations

Somewhere amongst all the gyrations around vortices, recursions, guys and goodness knows what else, someone mentioned that a dragon had paid them a visit and encountered them with depth, darkness and other scariness. Took me right back into the symbolism of the dragon archetype, which is a fascinating one to explore within the collective imagination.

Dragon imagery often seems to arise in response to a need for communication between the personal or collective unconscious and conscious awareness. As a symbol, the dragon acts as a bridge or guide, often to elements of the psyche that are within the realms of the Jungian Shadow.

I first came across the dragon archetype in a big way in a proving I took part in during August and September 2001. Yes, then. As is usually the case, it was a blind proving. When the proving was finished and the identity of the plant was revealed, I was curious and started to explore more of its nature and ethnobotanical connections. One of the themes of the proving experience had been deception, trickery, monkeys and monkeying around. (Interesting in view of the events of September 11 and the subsequent questions about what really happened – see last month’s blog.) Initially, the plant was identified as Cordyline terminalis, originating from Hawai’i and attributed to the goddess Pele. I started to research the identification I’d been given and couldn’t match the supplied photograph of the plant in flower with any variant of its supposed species. Using the photograph, I started on a different tack and finally managed to discover its correct identity with the help of the Botany department at the Smithsonian Institute. The plant was Dracaena (Gr. she-dragon) fragrans … the Fragrant Dragon. Far from originating in Hawai’i, where the proving source had been grown and purchased, it came from West Africa. Monkey business indeed.

Another principal theme of the proving had been to do with communication between the conscious and unconscious realms. This is the realm of the Messenger archetype, typified in the Greek and Roman pantheon by Hermes/Mercury, who is also the Trickster. Everything was coming together nicely. I wanted to make a connection between my proving experience and the ethnobotany of the plant to complete the circle, but drew a blank on trying to source information on this. Eventually the library at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh came to the rescue and in a dusty old Victorian reference book I found what I was looking for. The plant, known in its indigenous location by the Yoruba peoples as peregun, is an Ifá herb used to mark boundaries and is sacred to Èsú, the Messenger deity of the Yoruba..

Focusing then on the name of the genus (Dracaena, she-dragon), I explored the potential connection with dragon mythology, particularly dragons from West Africa. It brought out much the same theme, as evidenced in the story below (from Susan Iles’ dracoBlu site), complete with associated monkeys.

Aido Hwedo

Human “…consciousness has lifted the transcendent ever higher and farther away from actual life. The bridgeable chasm has become a cosmic void.” It is our duty to recreate the bridge if we are to evolve. In West Africa the tribal peoples were aware of this rift and incorporated the dragon, Aido Hwedo, into their creation myths as the co-creator of the physical world.

Before the Earth was formed the genderless Creator God, named Nana-Buluku by the Fon people of Dahomey, created a companion dragon called Aido Hwedo who was both male and female. It was a dragon able to move with ease between Heaven and Earth who carried the Creator in its mouth. They travelled together into the physical realms to create the world as we know it. Each night when Aido Hwedo and the Creator rested, the dragon’s dung piled high making mountains filled with hidden treasure, nourishing the Earth so plants and great trees could grow. As the dragon writhed back and forth across the face of the Earth, it carved twisting valleys and coursing waterways. With the Creator’s direction (ie. the Word) and the dragon’s actions, the Earth was formed through hard work and spirit, the very essence of co-operation and co-creation.

When the work was finished the world was bountiful, but heavily laden with trees and large animals, mountains and villages. The Creator feared the Earth would collapse under its own weight. Aido Hwedo offered to support the world by coiling under it in a circular fashion, its tail in its great mouth. The Creator knew Aido Hwedo detested the heat and created a great cosmic ocean for it to sleep in. Red monkeys who lived in the sea were directed to attend to Aido Hwedo’s needs by feeding the dragon iron bars whenever hunger came. In this myth it was important for the monkeys to keep the dragon eternally fed, otherwise it would start to eat its own tail and the world would surely be destroyed.

Like the red monkeys with the iron bars, we must remember our responsibility to nourish the link which bridges our transcendent and physical natures. When spirit and action meet our world can begin to heal and sustain itself.

Note the connection between the dragon’s treasure and its dung. In symbolic terms, this resonates closely with the idea that much of our personal “treasure” is held in shadow – the parts of ourselves we tend to relate to as crap! The dragon eating its own tail is, of course, the uruborus or the symbol of infinity.

On revisiting all this dragon stuff, the imagery of dragon as creator of the manifest world connected immediately with the vortex of nested recursive thought patterns as the model for the creation of our manifest reality. Since, in our present state, this process is largely unconscious, it seems quite natural that the dragon should be involved, and that dragon should signify the process of creation within human consciousness. This it appears to have done in many cultures since ancient times, specifically in forming a bridge between worlds, whether that be between the worlds of gods and men or between the conscious and the unconscious.

Just as I was making these connections, and thinking about dragons and vortices as natural companions, I was sent the pictures below by a correspondent in South Africa. There really is no such thing as coincidence.




More gyrations

Monday, March 28th, 2005

Dervish

“ The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”
Jalal al-din Rumi

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre …” Yeats keeps coming around again. It’s that spiral effect. Another aspect of this proving has been the recurring dreams. Over and over again the same theme. Whatever’s going on in the dream (and it’s largely unimportant) it’s being simultaneously mapped in terms of either mathematical formulae or computer programming language. This has been a bit of challenge for me since my abilities in both of those areas don’t go much beyond elementary level. Still, I wasn’t about to ignore them. What seemed to be drawing my attention the strongest was the fact that these descriptions all featured repeating nested subroutines.

For anyone for whom this means diddly squat, it’s a means of describing an event such that within an overall context you have increasingly more specific things going on, each nested within its parent context. In mathematics this is described using bracketed expressions, and in programming language, by a variety of conventions depending on the language. But in each instance, the convention is always that each subroutine must be enclosed within its parent. If you don’t close the expression, the whole thing becomes a nonsense and doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.

Why I was getting these dreams was something of a mystery, but when I finally stumbled on the Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid just underlined it. Gödel’s Theorem is an interesting one – published in 1931 by the then 25-year-old logician, it demonstrated that “any logical system comprehensive enough to describe elementary arithmetic necessarily contains propositions which can neither be proven nor disproven.” Also, that “the internal consistency of such a system can never be proven except by employing reasoning which is not expressible within the system itself.” Or, as reviewer Curtis L Wilber states in respect of Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, “Every system folds in on itself, be it physics, mathematics, or any form of language. All these systems are inherently self-referential, and as such, take on a life of their own. A life their creators could never imagine.” In other words, the “reality” of what we take for reality cannot be proven or disproven within its own terms: we’re thrown back on the ultimate subjectivity of our existence every time, and the fact that we’re continually engaged in the process of creating our “reality” largely in our own image. The “life of its own” that comes back to us in the apparent objectivity of what’s “out there” is really little more than a mirror – an idea which the likes of Buddhism has held as a fundamental truth for millenia.

Escher vortex

At the same time as all this has been going on, I was having a conversation with someone in the USA about the Christian fundamentalist right and their belief in “the Rapture“. Scarey stuff. It even justifies environmental destruction on the basis that it will just speed up the End Times when Jesus Christ reappears to cart off the righteous to a better place, leaving the rest to rot in what’s Left Behind. It’s that “chosen race” theme again, isn’t it? All too reminiscent of Hitler’s “master race”. She sent me a couple of URLs to explore. As I was looking around wondering at the leaps in logic that allowed some quite outrageous conclusions to be drawn from what appeared to be exceedingly flimsy “evidence”, all I could see was Kurt Gödel perched genie-like atop a spinning vortex with a wry smile on his face. After all, exactly the same criticisms could be levelled at my view of reality, your view of reality, anybody’s view of reality.

Kurt Gödel

Kurt Gödel

Isn’t it amazing where dreams get you …



Gyrations

Monday, March 21st, 2005

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
 
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
William Butler Yeats ‘The Second Coming’

W B Yeats’ poem The Second Coming (above) has been coming up again and again (Third Coming? Fourth Coming?) in the way that raw onions have a habit of repeating on you. It started for me within the first 24 hours of this latest proving (I’ve no idea what the substance is yet). I mentioned it on a list I subscribe to and then started hearing from people all over the place that the poem had been coming up for them too. So obviously it’s not unique to the proving energy: rather the proving energy is demonstrating its sympathetic resonance wth the energies of these times.

Some explanation is perhaps needed here. Over time, participants in homeopathic remedy provings have come to notice that concurrent events well outside the sphere of the proving frequently conform to the same themes as emerge in the detailed symptomatology. This is not to say that provings have the power to influence what happens beyond their immediate sphere, rather that the time in which they happen to externalise their energies is one in which they are in sympathetic resonance with mass consciousness.

Provings for me are always an adventure. The experience of playing host to another energy form is a bit like a voyage of discovery crossed with a detective story. I get to be Agatha Verne, or perhaps Jules (rather than Julie) Christie. Themes and images present themselves with a quiet insistence, and I’m driven to pursue them until the insistence goes away, usually at the point where I’ve made some connection or derived some meaning and relevance from the thread.

With The Second Coming, it was specifically the first 4 lines that kept intruding. Then I kept getting snatches of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock … “‘Twas brillig, and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe” … so it then became clear that “gyre” was the word I should be focusing on. I had a reasonable sense of the word from the context and from “gyrate” but looked it up to check. A gyre is a vortex, spiral, a series of concentric circles. Most often (evidently) used in the context of ocean currents.

The Widening Gyre from http://www.yeatsvision.com

Then, like Yeats, “hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight”. I see a massive vortex within the ocean of the spacetime-consciousness continuum which, at its narrow-point, connects to a mirror-image vortex so the two together appear like an hour-glass with the direction of flow passing from one to the other through the narrow-point. A sense that some kind of inter-dimensional boundary exists at the narrow-point, and that the vortex is a means of penetrating that boundary.

The vortex imagery made sense of the present energies – the sense of increased velocity and compression that many people have been experiencing. Today I discovered that Yeats himself had formulated an entire esoteric system over a period of 10 years based on material channelled by his wife George via automatic writing. It is contained in his book A Vision. Gyres feature as a fundamental structure within the system. Not only that but hour-glass double vortices as well. Sympathetic resonance in operation again!

While all this was going on, someone was posting their experiences with an energetic vortex in California. Thanks to an amusing “accidental” truncation of the subject line of the post which rendered the chapter numbering only as “chap”, a conversation started up around the English word “chap”. This quickly led on to the derivation of the American “guy”, and its imputed origins in the English Guy Fawkes and the annual custom of burning effigies of the man in a celebration of his attempt to send the Houses of Parliament into the stratosphere on November 5 1605. I Googled [guy etymology] and in the 4th URL to come up – again purely by “chance” by virtue of the two words I’d chosen to search on – Guy Fawkes got mentioned in the same paragraph as gyre! This was not the sort of “coincidence” to ignore, especially since the “guy” thing had originated in a post about a gyre. (Has this got you spinning yet?!)

So what is the relevance of “guy” to “gyre”? A guy is an effigy, a simulacrum, a superficial representation of something which in itself is not authentic, yet serves as a guise (!) in which we recognise the idea of something. This means that the gyre, the image of the vortex (whether in macrocosm or microcosm), is the representation of what is happening in these present times, but has no authentic reality of itself.

As Fred Alan Wolf so succinctly puts it in the movie What the #$BLEEP*! Do We Know!?, “There is no out there out there!”



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Thanks to the current insanity revolving around homeopathy in this country, in both media and blogosphere, it's become necessary to insult your intelligence by explicitly drawing your attention to the obvious fact that any views or advice in this weblog/website are, unless stated otherwise, the opinions of the author alone and should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice or treatment. If you choose to take anything from here that might be construed as advice, you do so entirely under your own recognisance and responsibility.

smeddum.net - Blog: Confessions of a Serial Prover. Weblog on homeopathy, health and related subjects by homeopathic practitioner Wendy Howard