Group and proving phenomena Observations by misha norland, fshom
- Observations by misha norland, fshom
[This article, in part, is derived from an article published in The Homoeopath, the journal of the Society of Homoeopaths, and is re-published with their permission.]
We have been conducting provings within groups at the School of Homoeopathy since 1991. These experiences form the backbone of the generalised observations on the phenomena of dynamic influence that are presented here.
Understanding the healing potential within things rests upon the foundation stone of direct experience; that experience is gained during provings. Understanding-literally, standing under the influence of an outside agency, becoming permeated with its "intelligence" and thereby living out its "reality"-is the process whereby we come to know.
The experience of a proving is analogous with that of becoming ill. When disease is in our house, when that usurper has possession of our power, then our vital reaction is directed by its "intelligence"-our sensations and functions becoming perverted. The artificial illness that a proving initiates behaves in a similar way. Its influx alters inner states, which are apprehended initially through changed sensations, images, feelings, dreams, and the production of outer symptoms. It is a personal teaching, just as the extracted information of a proving group, becoming Materia Medica, is an impersonal teaching. Indeed, both illness and proving experiences, insofar as they become involved in the process of consciousness, are learning experiences. I am as fascinated by those aspects of provings that are peripheral to writing Materia Medica and generating rubrics, as I am by the revelation of a new healing agent-those aspects that relate to personal integration and healing. We also learn respect for the power of the healing agents themselves and for the relationship between sufferers and healers.
Jeremy Sherr has written, "by doing a proving you may come to know yourself, realising your inner being. This knowledge, true self knowledge, is the foundation of wisdom." I would like to take this opportunity to honour and thank Jeremy for his generosity and help, and for having written the seminal book on proving methodology. I wrote this verse about the celestial influence of the Muse, and I feel it is also about proving!
The experience of being "taken over" by the dynamis of a thing (substance or imponderable or indeed the personality of another) has at least two aspects to it. One is relatively objective, in that it involves noting changed sensations and symptoms. The other is highly subjective, involving, at least, changed perceptions and at most, plunging the prover into a new perceptual framework. Should this occur, then the prover cannot experience the "new" state as new, because their centre of being has become confluent with the other's, or thing's, being. To clock these changes, supervision is pretty close to essential, for someone needs to be outside of the prover's skin in order to appraise inner changes.
After a considerable lapse of time, it is usually easier for the prover to get a handle on what has been going on. (A technical point: it is a good idea to keep a proving diary and loose supervision going for at least three to four months.) The appraisal after time has passed gives the prover an overview of the process. This process is analogous to the course of healing, which, although initial effects are instantaneous, also takes place over time. This is because the sick person is "living out" the disease, singing the song of the disease, while, in healing, the unburdened Self needs time to re-experience itself and remember its "true melody." Throwing out the usurper takes time-it is according to Hering's laws of cure, and constitutes the healing crisis for which all natural therapies are famed. [The nature of the path of sickness and healing, and its role as a vehicle to wisdom, is discussed further in an appendix to this article.]
The degree to which a proving "takes" is, of course, related to susceptibility. Should the "take" be dynamic and deeply rooted, then aspects of the inner being are brought to the surface. This, however unwelcomed it may be, is healing. It is revealing of that which had formerly been hidden. It provides us with the opportunity to experience formerly-occluded aspects of ourselves and to bring them into wholeness, into body/feeling/mind awareness. In this way, we become known to ourselves as well as to those around us (including our supervisors, who, like good homoeopathic case receivers, are working to get our symptoms on record). The learning is directly proportional to the "take." I have known provings to "move" folk towards their healing in a way no previously prescribed remedy ever had. This may be attributable to the new remedy action and also, perhaps, to the sustained and focused attention and supervision that has been brought to bear upon the prover's state-this alone may be an in-depth healing experience. I have also seen prover's partners profoundly affected. As proving coordinator, I have been held responsible, cursed and thanked, thanked and cursed!
At the School, we have achieved results using a variety of stimuli-using material substance, by holding it, looking at it, and meditating upon it, as well as with the 30th to 200th potencies. We have also invoked group provings by one member "holding" the concept/image of a thing. We have carried out all our provings with unit doses. This stimulus, perhaps because it is amplified by the many co-experiencers, and is "re-awakened" at monthly gatherings when experiences are recounted, is sufficient to produce long-range effects.
In addition to following Jeremy's proving methodology, we record our experiences some minutes after beginning a proving. We get much data this way: images (such as black grave stones, waterfalls, orange flowers, and responses to these images such as associated feelings, sensations or thoughts); feelings (such as joy, sadness, and their responses such as smiling or weeping); sensations (such as floating, burning, itching, and their responses such as restlessness or scratching); and thoughts and concepts, which in turn may evoke images, feelings, and sensations. This then is our primary data. It would be in accordance with tradition to say that such responses are headed-up by image at the top of a natural hierarchy, which then proceeds downward, through thoughts to feelings to sensations. But provers vary here. For instance, some have a preponderance of sensation experiences or feeling responses. This depends upon their innate personality structure, as would be described elementally as preponderances of either Fire, Air, Water, or Earth.
During the course of the next two days, we take stock of thoughts, dreams, sensations, feelings and outer world happenings, while supervisors and daily proving diaries fill in from month to month.
I hold the proving phenomenon to have a similar dynamic to epidemic contagion. In both instances, the influence overwhelms individuals, and personal idiosyncrasies are temporarily submerged under the common symptoms of the disease/proving. Insofar as this is the case, a proving group reacts as if it were one. While each individual reveals only some aspects of the proving, the totality reveals most.
The action field manifests immediately. Once established within the economy, it continues for as long as it takes to exteriorise itself. The length of time a proving persists is directly proportional to the resistance it meets during its movement from centre to periphery. Should the prover provide, as it were, an unblocked passageway, then the proving experience is swift. If the passage is cluttered by past unresolved material, old pathology, then the proving experience may linger.
Naturally, I felt obliged to run a proving of placebo. You see, I had speculated as to whether we were proving ourselves, our group psyche. The result of the placebo proving was that no theme emerged within the group. This was a distinctly different experience from being under the influence of the proving of a thing, where common imagery, feelings, and sensations dominate.
A proving begins, in a literal sense, with the intention to prove a thing, with it being imagined, identified, obtained, and possibly potentised. Should the name of the thing be kept under wraps-double blinded, picked at random out of a hat, the proving date sprung upon the proving group-nonetheless, the event field of the proving is the moment in time that intention arose. It is similar to dropping a pebble into a pond, where the surface of the water ripples outwards into time from present to future.
Let me give an example. It is common experience amongst provers that certain individuals (who later reveal cardinal symptoms because of their affinity to the thing under test) develop symptoms that subsequently are confirmed as belonging to the proving before anyone else had "taken" the thing. I have quoted "taken" because those who meditate upon the thing come up with results that are no less pertinent. Furthermore, we have found that those individuals within the group who wished to remain outside of the proving have been unable to do so; they are automatically included.
The concept of "participation mystique" comes to mind in order to afford a description of this phenomenon. In the case of the School, provings have become a recognised cornerstone of homoeopathic training. This, plus familiarity, shared endeavour, and healing ideals, combine to engender group consciousness and participation mystique. That those who did not "take" the thing, that those who did not even know that the proving would take place within the group had been affected, demonstrates the dynamic nature of the phenomenon.
It is only matter that is bound to space and time. The immaterial essence of the thing, actuated by the intention of the proving group, constellates the action field. Forgive me labouring the point; the thing that we are dealing with is essence, spirit-call it what you will-and is not bound within the constraints of space and time. Those who key into it are part of it, irrespective of distance or time; they know it telepathically.
A group proving generates a gestalt to which everyone associated with the provers is connected and may be affected, depending upon their personal affinity with the thing being proved-their susceptibility and therefore their resonance. This gestalt has been called a morphic field by Rupert Sheldrake. Telepathy is another term that covers this. For example, once one monkey discovers that a sea-washed tuba is nicer to eat, other monkeys on other islands, who have not witnessed the event, also find themselves washing tubas. Another example is afforded by the well documented event, especially noted during the Victorian era, of inventors rushing to patent offices, hot on the trail of an invention, before another got there, because once an idea was thought of, it was out "on the ether." Another example was noted by crystalographers who saw that a new salt "found" a characteristic crystalline structure simultaneously in laboratories situated in different global locations. Once one solution developed its particular crystals, all others followed suit. Morphic field resonance may begin once the intention to prove a thing arises. Therefore, individuals susceptible to this influence and belonging to the group may experience proving effects ahead of the identified proving event.
The spiritual dynamis of intention, having no material substance, is not bound to either space or time. Should we accept this, then it follows that proving experiences may not uncommonly predate a proving. However, the experiencer would not know what to make of these experiences, for they must be held within the framework of the proving and given its context to make sense.
As stated earlier, the action field of a proving is not necessarily set-up by taking orally or sniffing, nor is it necessarily either substance or potency. It may be derived from and by these means, or not. Directed meditation and attentive listening is sufficient to initiate and sustain a proving. We have invoked group provings by one member "holding" the concept/ image of a thing. (As an aside, practitioners often find themselves proving their fellow sufferers! This is what occurs when we become en rapport with them and empathetic with their suffering. Where this "proving" keys into our own suffering, there is potential for our personal learning.) Rajan Sankaran experimented with music provings; at the School we have experimented with "thought" provings. In none of these was pharmacy involved. There was no use of potency, no "memory" of water, no nuclear or crystalline patterning, because there was no substance.
However, in order for provings to occur, there has to be a receiver or receivers and something that is "sent" and actuated by dynamisation or another kind of intention. Obviously, there also must be innate susceptibility to rouse a response. This is analogous to resonance. To quote from my old Encyclopaedia Britannica:
"Resonance, a term used in physics and related fields denoting initiation, prolongation or increase of sound due to sympathetic vibration of some body capable of moving in the proper period (in other words, at the same or an harmonic frequency)."
And finally, another element: occasionally inanimate objects are involved in the resonance! Let me give you a recent example. In February 1998, we initiated a proving of Positronium. The stuff with which our proving was conducted was made by Chris Kurz at the particle accelerator of the University of San Diego, in the summer of 1997. Ethanol in a vial was exposed to the radiation of decaying positronium-approximately 1,000,000,000 annihilation events being captured over a 24 hour period. This was run up to the thirtieth potency at Helios Homoeopathics. This was the proving potency.
Positronium is formed of a positron (anti-electron) and an electron in mutual orbit; it is structured in a similar way to hydrogen, but it has almost no mass. In this configuration, the atom is semi-stable, although its components, electron and anti-electron, annihilate each other when they do come into intimate contact. This annihilation results in a "flash" of electromagnetic radiation. Since positronium is made up of both particle and anti-particle, it assumes a position midway between matter and anti-matter. It has been postulated that when original matter "came apart" in the big bang at the beginning of time, matter and anti-matter co-emerged, each having opposite charge and spin, and moving in contrary motion, one from time past to future, the other from time future to time past. It is therefore also postulated that, somewhere, there may be a parallel universe identical to our own, but composed of a preponderance of anti-matter, in which events occur in anti-time. Were we to meet with this anti-universe, we would annihilate each other in one mighty flash!
Our formal proving began amongst third year homoeopathy students in February 1998. In May, we video-recorded the group at the School as they reviewed their proving diaries of the past three months. As we have come to expect, provers who had not taken the pill were also affected. Many of the recounted experiences were heavy.
First thing next morning, before anyone had arrived, I played back the recording, finding that as the tape progressed, the images began to break up. As one of the provers delved into her sensations of contraction-as if squeezed into impossible denseness, accompanied by a sense of having touched pure evil-the videotape image blanked out entirely! Her disembodied voice, however, continued to describe her descent into this darkest of places. I stopped the tape and fast-forwarded, to find that at the end of the tape, the last provers' accounts were technically fine-perfectly clear images. I put in another tape-no problem. I put back the proving tape and rewound it to the position of the blanked-out prover-sound without vision. I marveled at the phenomenon of the intense psychic field that the recounting of the provers had generated, interfering with the electronics or the tape in the camcorder.
When we assembled for our morning teaching session the following day, we "ran over" the physics of positronium, from big bang to anti-matter and matter, connecting the signature to the proving-the basic split that had so clearly emerged-the "light" side, of spiritual confluence with beauty and goodness that some had felt or experienced as detachment from the gross physical aspects of the sensuous, and the "dark" side, which the "blanked" prover had so vividly experienced. Then I explained about the videotape, and about the closing down ritual that we had initiated the day before and were concluding today. And guess what? The video-tape image, while still breaking up somewhat, had begun to heal itself-the image had reemerged!
Of course, there is a perfectly materialistic explanation for this phenomenon, namely progressive contamination followed by decontamination of the videohead after repeated playings. However, the fact that this had been the first time that the head of this camcorder had clogged up, plus the fact that it now plays tapes perfectly, tends to mitigate against this explanation. Be that as it may, there must be a material component in order for the phenomenon occur! In any culture other than our own, it would be felt and understood as natural, that water, wind, stones, and leaves all "speak" to us, as do birds and beasts, making our experience of the sensuous world about us that of a living, sacred organism without a split.
The proving data of Positronium arranged schematically, and a repertory of same, will soon be available on the School's web site, alongside the proving and repertorisation of the nosode of the blood of an HIV-positive male, who subsequently died of AIDS-related diseases. Also on the site are Agathis Australis, Basaltic Lava, Dreaming potency, Salix, and others. We will be adding other provings as we have them. This information is offered to the profession as a gift, at www. homeopathyschool. com.
In Sickness and In Health: Speculations on the Homoeopathic Model of Disease
[Addendum to "Group and Proving Phenomema"]
by Misha Norland, FSHom
Dance and music are functions of life itself, found in the heart of everyday experiences, in places reached by highway, mountain pass, by alley-way and narrow track, in noticed moments of wind, water and bird song.
In health the body is transparent:
her dress a moving image.
In disease:
dense is the dancer, her movements weighted, slowed until we recognise each feature, for gravity and time have made her solid.
In health radiance within finds its counterpart without, and where a healthy person is,
others are also dancing to rhythms of eternity
which are as familiar as self forgetting is to a playing child.
In disease the dance is frozen and the song suspended.
What we are on the lookout for is the usurper that disease is; the one who has stolen the music and the vitality, using this for its purposes! Fortunately for us, the usurper is recognisable (far from the transparency of the healthy vital force) because the cloth which it wears (the signs and symptoms) are fixed in immutability (have become chronic). Time and repetition have woven the cloth of which the warp is Destiny and the woof is Necessity (innate susceptibility and morbific influence). Certain Greek classical philosophers spoke of four levels of weaving: Destiny, Fate, Necessity, and Chance. These enter into any event. They represent levels of fixity, stations along the track from immutability to free will, from inherited predisposition for disease, through miasms and karmic imperatives, to "accidental" happenings.
In health, the vital force (the music and the dance) through the medium of the defence system (the dancer) reacts homoeostatically to morbific influences, throwing them off. Acute manifestations are of this kind, such as fevers, discharges, diarrhoea, and pus, and on an emotional level, as shouting, hitting, moaning, and tears. However, should the being become encumbered by the disease through a deficiency of acute responses, due to miasmic influences or suppression, then chronic disease may begin to settle in. Then the usurper is in the house. Before the music and the dance can be re-membered and the dis-membered dancer put back together again, the usurper must be thrown out.
The consulting room represents the safe and private space of the birth of a new integration and the death of an old disintegration.
It flies in the face of clinical experience to assume that there is only one usurper at work within the dwelling, for there may be a band of them! However, it is usual for there to be only one active henchman at any one time. Symptoms which are here now, when they are related to their aetiolgical and historic roots, are the best guide to identifying the henchman. It is a matter of finding the golden thread that links time present with time past. Here it is that appropriate listening and observation during time spent with a fellow sufferer is most revealing. The consulting room represents the safe and private space of the birth of a new integration and the death of an old disintegration. The obscuring mechanisms of rationalisation and other defensive posturing may be by-passed by allowing the case to unfold within the safety of the consulting room/womb/tomb, in the sacred space that is created between healer and fellow sufferer. Then, words, inflections, and gestures "speak" the language of the usurper, an unobscured language of affect and effect, of feeling and response. We find what is felt and perceived to be "true" on the one hand (the delusion), and its characteristic outcome, its expression, on the other. We look out for what is desired, on the one hand, and what is realised on the other; thus we find the one who usurps the flow.
This revelation is not achieved by asking set or standard questions according to a prescribed format, but rather by allowing the other to follow their own associative threads. This is analogous to unweaving the web. We can feel and see this happening when a shift of level of energy from physical to psychical, or vice versa, occurs, or whenever a time shift into the past occurs. It is because this happens that therapeutic activity is associated with case receiving, even before similar remedies are prescribed. How much more powerful this is when it is coupled with a homoeopathic stimulus-because it speeds up integrative processes whereby past flows into present. The "now" happens, because suffering, which had been stuck in the past, is brought into acute discharge in the present. Rather like taking the past out of the deep-freeze for a thaw!
The utility of the homoeopathic system lies in the fact that results come from finding a similar-enough remedy, and not necessarily an exact symptom/essence/substance-signature match. Often we are working with archetypes of suffering for which there are a finite number of polychrest remedies, which is why homoeopathic practice has survived barefoot in war and in village, as well as in busy city consulting rooms.
The usurper is that dense dancer whose crude music is off-key and offbeat, and puts us out of step. When this happens, we cannot experience unconditional love or return unconditional love, cannot trust or be trusted, but feel separated from grace. It is an uncomfortable revelation to me, that most editions of the Holy Bible begin with the Fall and end with the Apocalypse-from Psora (the Fall) to Syphilis (the Apocalypse)-with a good measure of insatiable and guilty Sycosis in between. We have been writing this into our everyday script of disenchantment, shame, and desperation for a very long time, forgetting that everything celebrates life itself, and in so doing, keeps the usurper at bay.
Now, a meta-commentary. From the perspective of the sufferer, disease may indeed be experienced as a usurper, a thug, a bully, a destroyer, a murderer of life itself. Yet from the perspective of wisdom, which is not to imply that sufferers are not wise (far from it, as we shall see in a moment), disease is a teacher, even a friend.
Why? Because the process of externalisation, from within to without, throws out such symptoms as make manifest and reveal the nature of Nature. Why? Because apparent Nature is apparently suffering Herself! Perhaps this is why apparent Nature seems to elude too close a scrutiny. Nature secretes Herself behind the veil of forms. The forms of mind (sentient consciousness) co-emerge as awareness of polarity. Each end of a polarity, from the viewpoint of the other, expresses a contradiction. Arising out of this contradiction, suffering-in the form of a discontinuity-is born: the separation of watcher and watched, within and without.
To put this in another way, when unity or one-ness wants to know its own nature, the sense of self is born. In order for self to know it-self, it has to draw a boundary between what it is and what it is not-what is myself in here, and what is apparently not myself out there. Individual consciousness now sees itself as separate from the continuum of creation. In this manner, Psora is born.
Closely regarding suffering in any form leads to an understanding of its evolution; at the very least, the sufferer's anaemnesis and aetiology. From the perspective of a searching inquiry, the process of tracking dis-ease leads to awareness of oneself, which in turn leads to inquiry about the nature of the Self. This line of looking "telescopically" can lead to a view of the great inter-connectedness of phenomena (an anti-psoric view), as well as to a view of the detailed steps that plod relentlessly upon the path of causality (a psoric view). Wisdom is born of other-regarding and self- regarding in the light of these understandings-ultimately clarifying the meaning of opus contra naturum as the Alchemycal tradition has it, the "opus against Nature" that wisdom-seeking requires and reveals.
So, to come full circle: symptoms are the voices of the disease. Listening to these voices leads to the source of the sound-the interior disturbance. We are back to the analogy of the music of life in sickness and life in health. The common denominator is life, or rather, the attachment to life that an individual has. The lesson of suffering (because of our attachment to the usurper and the usurper's attachment to us!) can lead to the wisdom of discrimination. Thus, we can view disease as a teacher as well as a usurper.
One step further. We can also place ourselves upon the path which suffering sets us-of burning for enlightenment. Whether we reach this goal or not is of no consequence, it seems to me, because it is the journey itself (upon the path of discovery) that is Self revealing.
Here's a little tail/tale concerning a hatch of tadpoles in a roadside ditch. They were an aspiring bunch. Each morning before sunrise, afternoon before lunch, evening after sunset, they sang mantras, folded their tails into Lotus Asana, and meditated for an hour. Their sincerest desire was to become frogs. Perhaps many secretly hoped to be kissed by a platinum princess! Now, it often happened that a passing lorry, swerving out of the path of oncoming traffic, would stray into the puddle where the tadpoles lived. Some were splattered or thrown far afield, where they desiccated upon dry land or roadside verge. This provided them with ample fuel for their philosophy of hard work and transformation. All the more ardently, they endeavoured to reach froghood! Now, there was one rebellious tadpole who would have no truck (excuse the pun!) with this nonsense. Thrice daily observances were not for him. Thundering wheels and the threat of sudden death did not scare him into continuous efforts of self-improvement. He was into hanging loose, gaining experience from the school of life, instruction from passing gurus, wisdom from his many friends and acquaintances in neighbouring ditches and puddles... Weeks passed, and lo, all tadpole tails diminished, while limb buds began to grow. Now hear the jubilation, the self congratulation, the delight at the achievement- "brothers and sisters, we have done it!" they proclaimed- while the rebellious one, who also had beautiful limbs, laughed.
Misha Norland is the Fellow of the Society of Homeopaths (UK) and Founder and Director of The School of Homeopathy, Devon, England. For information on his Flexible Learning Program in North America, call (203) 624-8783. For the Attendance Program in New York, call (212) 570-2576.
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