Information As Medicine

INFORMATION AS MEDICINE

Faced with such apparent illogicalities, it is not surprising that the scoffers have an easy time presenting homeopathy as a superstition. But on the other hand the successes of homeopathy are so unmistakeable that attempts to explain them away in terms of placebo-effect, spontaneous healing, autosuggestion, and so on, do not sound very convincing. Anyone who can say of a doctor who has worked exclusively with homeopathy for thirty years that he has been relying all that time on the suggestibility of his patients, must be naïve in the extreme. If such a thing could be true, orthodox medicine would have to be ashamed of itself for not being able to achieve the same degree of success with the placebo-effect. But in any case, if homeopathy works through suggestibility, how is it that it can be used successfully on animals? This question has not yet been satisfactorily answered by science.

Here I could mention a whole series of purely experimental tests proving the effectiveness of homeopathy, carried out by Pfeiffer, Kolisko, Voll and others. But my purpose is not to convince the ignorant of something that they cannot and will not understand. I would simply point to the fact that the effectiveness of homeopathy far exceeds that of all orthodox medical techniques. This is a fact which anyone can verify for himself if he wishes. Instead of concentrating on experimental proofs it is more profitable to ask how and why homeopathy heals in the way it does and why it goes against all the conception of ordinary medicine.

The contradictions rapidly dissolve if we make a distinction between two things: information and the bearer of information. Consider a cassette of tape for making recordings. This consists of a plastic casing containing a reel of coated plastic tape. With this cassette one can record, say, a concert or a lecture. The music or the words are the information. If you look at two cassettes, one containing a lecture, the other music, there is nothing to distinguish them unless they have different labels.

The same is true of a book. A book consists of paper, glue and printing ink. The contents might be, for example, a history of Europe. If you analyzed this book down to its atomic structure you would end up with a list of data about the volume: its weight, its exact dimensions, its chemical composition and so on. But one thing would not emerge from the analysis, namely the history of Europe. The contents of the book, the real information in it, would have been lost in the process.

From the standpoint of the opponent of homeopathy the multiplicity of books that are available is a pure fraud since all books contain broadly the same physical material and are distinguished only by their titles. The the different titles also represent different contents is something that is not proved by this limited analysis.

Information is always something non-material and needs a material bearer in order to be disseminated. Such a bearer can be made of many different substances – magnetic tape, the plastic of a record, paper, wood, stone, metal, air and so on – yet still perform the same task. Similar information-carriers can disseminate different messages. By the same token different bearers can carry the same message. Usually the important thing is the information rather than the bearer. If I wish to acquaint myself with Goethe's Faust it is a secondary consideration whether the text is printed on paper, etched on metal or recorded on tape. What is essential is the information itself. And if I acquire a copy of Faust in book form, this one copy is sufficient. Ten more copies would give me no further information.

Now let us apply these simple examples to the problem we have been discussing. We have already said that when an illness takes place it is the person who is ill not the physical matter from which he is made. Matter as such can never become ill, since all matter is already “ill”. In the body it is only the footprints of illness that are visible. If healing is to take place this can only happen – as we already emphasized – through an extension of consciousness, that is to say an influx of information. If a medical preparation claims to be a healing remedy (i.e. a transmitter of wholeness) then it must convey to the person concerned the information he lacks.

We have seen that man as a microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. Thus everything that is lacking in an individual must be present in the macrocosm. All macrocosmic principles are individualized as minerals, animals or plants. The essential thing about a medicinal plant is precisely its nature as a representative of a primal principle, the quality of soul that is expressed in its physical organism. If a person is lacking in one of the primal principles it can be looked for in the macrocosm, and the relevant information can be transmitted to the sick person. In order to do this, however, it is necessary to separate the information contained in a mineral or plant from its physical manifestation, to free it from its material bonds. This released information can then be transferred to a suitable information-carrier in order to be transmitted.

This is precisely what happens in the homeopathic process of potentising. In the procedure that we have described the individual essence of the plant is released step by step from its corporeal form, and as it is freed the information is simultaneously transferred to a different and neutral carrier – such as alcohol or milk-sugar. The longer one goes on doing that and increasing the potency, the more the essence is released from its material prison and the more strongly can it transmit its information in the non-material realm.

The effectiveness of a remedy increases so steeply with the potency that in the case of D200 a mere two drops or globules suffice to dispel hitherto incurable illnesses for ever. If, instead of two globules, one were to swallow a whole pound of the stuff it would make no difference, for, as I have already said, ten copies of the same book contain no more information than one copy, and a hundred visiting cards the same address as one single card, and no more information about that address. As a true homeopath is concerned only with information he will work almost exclusively with potencies over D30, since the lower potencies still have a material component and therefore take the more indirect, physical route to the cure. Hence they often have to be given in more numerous doses.

Anyone who has understood that potentising is a process of spiritualising matter will also recognize the distinction between diluting and potentising a substance. Homeopathy, in Hahnemann's sense, is not a therapy “using miniscule doses of medicine” but rather a therapy that uses material medicine not at all.

This must be emphasized in view of the fact that recently a group called themselves “critical” homeopaths have spoken out loudly against the high potencies and wish to make the lower potencies conform to the materialistic thinking of orthodox medicine. Any attempt by incompetent followers to adapt esoteric disciplines in this way is an act of betrayal and bears witness only to the shallowness of those responsible. It was Paracelsus who said: “Medicine is not something that can be chewed with the teeth; no one can see medicine. It is not a matter of the body but a matter of power.”