The Alchemy of Healing

While I sit on my stool at Riverdale Homeopathics I picked up a book by Edward Whitmont tittled The Alchemy Of Healing. The book eloquently explores healing in the context of Jungian philosophy, alchemy, and homeopathy. It's a brilliant illustration of how spiritual thought and practice is the basis of healing. Without internal transformation ultimate health is impossible.

Whitmont explains how our present dualist understanding of reality creates a barrier between us, others, the environment, and ultimately healing.

"Despite their differences, relativity and quantum theory both imply an an underlying "unbroken wholeness of the universe," Bohm's "implicate or infolded" order. What we perceive as "separately existent particles" and "ordinary notions of time and space" are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the explicate or unfolded order." (Bohm, op.cit.xv)
The habit of treating mind and matter as though they were fundamentally separated and incommensurable has serious consequences. It keeps us from dealing effectively with psychosomatic reality. It inhibits the acceptance of a holistic model of healing. It sanctions the and destruction of our habitat because it prevents us from seeing our planetary body as a conscious organism of which we are a part. In destroying our environment, we destroy ourselves." (Whitmont, the Alchemy of Healing, P.48)

By understanding that matter is a manifestation of energy, and that all energy is interconnected (and is actually all one single organism) then we understand that our thoughts are influential and can materialize in physical reality. We also understand that our actions affect everything around us. If this is true then there is a deeper understanding of illness, its causes, and its cures. We need to treat, or stimulate, or transform at an energetic level in order to heal at a physical, mental and emotional level.