Paradigm Shift: Homeopathy as Applied Consciousness
By Douglas Brown, CCH, FNP, RS Hom(NA)
Homeopathy departs from mainstream medicine not primarily through its different pharmacopoeia or methodology, but by way of its grounding in a fundamentally different paradigm of the nature of reality.
Developments in the sciences of noetics (consciousness), cosmology, and physics are creating a context in which homeopathy can be more satisfactorily understood by both practitioners and patients.
By making explicit the model of reality upon which homeopathy is based, practitioners as well as patients can join in a common language shared by others who recognized the primacy of consciousness and spirit in shaping the experience of reality.
When asked to explain what I do by someone who knows nothing of homeopathy, I often experience a momentary panic as I glimpse the chasm between my own sense, understanding, and model of reality and that of my listener.
How do we bridge that chasm?
I imagine my questioner wondering: “Why should a healer with access to all the technological and scientific advances of the early 21st century be interested in the ideas of a doctor who practiced before the advent of basic knowledge of microbiology, radiology, genetics, and psychology?” When a practitioner trained in the prevailing medical science of today’s world undertakes to practice homeopathy, he or she does not simply change the pharmacy he or she uses. He or she commits to a paradigm shift.
Experience and Consciousness are Closer to Reality’s Core than Matter
The shift is from materialism, an assumption that the fundamental substance of not only the human organism but the universe is composed of atoms and molecules, combined and recombined to form the building-blocks of things, to a world-view in which we understand matter and energy as two forms of a single experiencing. It is the distance from Newtonian determinism, where fixed laws leave no room for events that are not caused by measurable material and electromagnetic forces, to an exploration into the ways in which consciousness itself shapes the universe.
Physicist Rupert Sheldrake postulates the existence of morphogenic fields of influence which give shape to the behavior of species. His theory developed from attempts to understand how the learning of complex tasks appears to happen in members of the species too far away from each other for that learning to have been transmitted in a direct, causal way. Is it logical, however, to limit the sphere of influence of this field to behavior and learning? In my view it is probable that something similar directs the consciousness upon which behavior and learning is based. Indeed, the demonstration of a complex behavior is evidence of an elaboration of consciousness. A nonmaterial field of influence shapes experience and meaning, which in turn guide biological material development from zygote to embryo to organism.
The ascendancy of quantum mechanics in physics has opened our eyes to a universe in which conscious attention directs the behavior of particles. We can now begin to imagine what the now really is: an interface between an atemporal realm of unlimited possibility containing a multiplicity of timeless forms and shapes on the one hand, with a temporal process which collapses the infinite into choice, limitation and finiteness, on the other.
Hahnemann: A Different Enlightenment
One’s medicine follows one’s paradigm. One’s medicine follows one’s paradigm. If you are a materialist, you will prescribe material doses of drugs, of course. But more importantly, you will conceive of the human body as a biological machine, with symptoms the pure expressions of pathological derangements which must then be fixed by the doctor. If, somehow, you are a materialist prescribing homeopathic remedies, you will
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