State of Disposition

[Kenneth L. Silvestri]

Dear List,

Just want to comment on the discussion of not separating "psyche from
soma." Hahnemann describes a wonderful example of "systemic thinking" in
the Organon, as does Boenniunghausen in his "wide angle" lens of
understanding the connections of different articulated patterns of a
patients' presenting context. I have trouble with dichotomies that are
somehow suppose to describe "out of context" the whole picture. It to
easy to create a paradox or double bind to say that something is what
the person may be articulating by mere inference. I am not saying that
we cannot fill in the blanks within a particular context if we are
sensitive to other connections that make up the whole (i.e. temperament,
constitution, family legacy etc.).

In the ecological movement we learned that the world has an entity
beyond the sum of its' part (Gaia). Something apparently good in one
context (i.e. DDT producing large crops), may "simultaneously" be
injurious in a connected wider context (killing natural predators and
DDT eventually causing the demise of many species and even entering
mothers milk).The way out of these double binds is to see contexts as
interconnected. Not always an easy task given our cultural and
linguistic constraints that may be quite linear. Anthropologist Gregory
Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballentine Books) once said that
the problems of human kind "is the difference between how nature works
and how human's think it works."

I think that the human metaphor for nature is "Aestheticism" (Hahnemann
understood this). Bateson also wrote that "love" is the recognition of
how our patterns of life are interconnected, and "wisdom" is the
understanding of how they are connected. Hahnemann said that "wisdom is
back to eden." It seems to me that to understand the state of
disposition necessitates an "I-Thou" (Martin Buber or William Blake)
paradigm not an "I-it" framework. The wonderment of how homeopathy
depicts the mental state and its connection to the physical is by the
systemic sense it imparts as one connects with the temperament, legacy
and evolving contexts of those it helps. The celebration of
possibilities to produce differences and change can be stifled in
painful paradoxes that may be imposed or implied. However, it is
difficult to to be locked into "content" or "cause and effect" when one
looks simultaneously at the wider interconnected contexts that start
with a "beginners mind."

Sincerely,

Ken