The reason Homeopaths are sad

- Anne Vervarcke, 'Homeopathy Strange Rare and Peculiar,' 
http://www.thewhiteroom.be/Books.html
 www.thewhiteroom.be  
(AV= Anne Vervarcke   AvdM= An van de Moortel)
AV: That is a good idea. 
First, I would like to go over a few things we went over during the training. Science as we know it today has in-doctrinated us with the idea that the universe is a kind of machine that moves according to certain laws, called natural laws. Within this view, the human consciousness is considered an epiphenomenon of the material brain, which is the basis or the origin of our reality. With the discovery of DNA we cracked the human code and when each gene has been mapped, it will become possible to create life, without the help of God. As everyone knows this optimis-tic prediction has not quite worked out the way scientists promised at the end of the last century. Nevertheless, there remains a stubborn group of materialistic scientists denying any other purpose in life as a whole than the pro-liferation of DNA. They argue that research shows how natural selection and spontaneous mutations result in the best-adapted organisms, how a combination of favorable circumstances has led to ‘life’ on planet earth. You can call it an ‘accident’ or ‘coincidence’; that is all that there is to it. Maybe you remember the television series ‘A Wonderful Accident’ in which the world’s leading scientists shared their latest findings and views on this wonderful acci-dent that is the human being? I find this a gloomy and depressing point of view, stripping life of all what it makes worthwhile….

I’d like to share Schrodinger’s1 view on this: “This is the reason why the scientific world does not contain any ethi-cal and aesthetical values, nothing about our destination, our ultimate purpose and pardon me, no God…”
AvdM: And so, if we react to this by filling our lives with ‘stuff’, it still leaves us empty and miserable. Whenever we wonder how people living in poverty can keep up their spirit, do we not betray our belief that only wealth leads to happiness, even though nobody would dare to admit to holding such a belief?

AV: Exactly. Medicine, the most conservative branch of science, which still bases itself on 19th century ideas and in which quantum mechanics’ implications have no reach, has nothing more to offer to humankind than to keep us alive: a joyless, desperate, depressing life. We should not forget, science is man-made, not a law of nature! Science applies terminology and methods and raises questions which do not apply to science but rather to philosophy. A vital instru-ment needed to do scientific research is language. Science needs this instrument to define terminology, but language also belongs to the field of philosophy. Every time a sci-entist uses words like “nature”, “reality”, “thing”, “truth”, “phenomenon”, “mass”, he or she uses terminology with a philosophical implication. Mistakes or inaccuracies in this terminology lead to wrong or inaccurate results: definitions are not the result of scientific research but a consequence of philosophy.

AvdM: That is perfectly clear.

AV: If science is to describe a particular attitude of man towards nature, the result depends on the terms used, the questions asked and the method employed. These are

1 Erwin Rudolf, J.A. Schrödinger, born in Vienna in 1887; died in Vienna in 1961, Nobel prize for the “Schrodinger comparison” in 1933

not in themselves objects of science but of philosophy. Scientific perception requires a confrontation of the re-searcher with his objects and the results are determined by his view on these objects. You can’t take philosophy out of science. It is possible to be unaware of that fact or disregard it altogether, which is by the way, not a very clever thing to do, the outcome will only add quantity to already accepted pieces of knowledge. They will never yield a qualitative re-sult which is the engine for progress.

AvdM: Although I know it’s inevitable to philosophy, we have to limit our philosophical journeys to the implications on ho-meopathy, I’m afraid.

AV: Sure. Let’s try to define the concept ‘reality’ first. When we as homeopaths are to discern what is a ‘disturbed view on reality’, which we then will to cure, the primordial question is ‘what is reality?’ Since everything in reality is a single, unique event that is in constant motion, we have to look for the lasting elements in this ever-changing complex reality if we want to understand the nature of that reality. Similarities in appearance and behavior led to a pooling of separate phenomena in groups and categories based on what could be measured and observed with the senses. In this way an unlimited diversity and complexity became manageable and quantifiable, which in itself is practical and inevitable. The renewal process in the field of home-opathy of the last decades has been all about categorizing a chaotic amount of information. In this respect, home-opathy follows the road of empirical observation, trying to identify patterns and organizing the obtained data into categories. But…

AvdM: I was waiting for that word…

AV: …in the process something got lost. To be measurable, phenomena need to be stripped of their immeasurable

properties, like purpose, meaning, value, context, goal, etc. It is the underlying idea or the philosophy which defines science as reflecting reality.

AvdM: I see where you are going! We’re about to embark on one of your favorite subjects but a very hazy domain to me: phenomenology!

AV: Maybe that is because I didn’t explain myself very clearly or because a lot of people started using the term ‘phenomenology’ in a different way from its technical meaning. The empiricist and phenomenologist in me were not on the same page and only recently I have found a so-lution for that inner debate!

AvdM: Before you share your solution, you might want to ex-plain the problem to me. We were talking about stripping of immeasurable properties…

AV: Yes, we were talking about reductionism, about strip-ping phenomena of everything that is not objective or measurable. We came to the ascertainment that this so called scientific attitude is the result of never-questioned or even non-conscious philosophy, namely that there is such thing as ‘objectivity’.

AvdM: A philosophy, if I’m right, that actually has been prov-en wrong by quantum physics?

AV: Yes, scientifically proven to be unscientific! There is a lot of literature out there on the subject!

AvdM: I can try to summarize what could be relevant to us. Most importantly quantum physicists concluded that on a sub-atomic level, substance was not as solid as was first thought. Research for the smallest building blocks of reality showed unexpected results as we stumbled onto an empty space or ‘vac-uum’ which looked more like a plenum than a void. It seems that atoms aren’t like little balls circling a nucleus, because we cannot even localize the atoms. Photons should be seen as

No matter, never mind

potentialities that become reality once they are observed. It is almost as if the observation becomes one of many possibili-ties of a substance’s existence exactly because of the observation made. This implies that it is impossible to remove the observer from the scientific observation. This is important for us, ho-meopaths, to realize.

AV: And accurate tests have shown we can talk of non-localization at this level, a theory which Einstein rejected. Non-locality means that there is –and remains to be- com-munication between phenomena that have been connected at some point, no matter how far they end up being removed from one another. And this communication happens be-yond the speed of light! We now know of this underlying communication in certain physical processes of the human body, which happens much faster than would be possible via physical communication.2

AvdM: The more one reads scientific literature, the more fas-cinating it becomes!