“The mind is an epiphenomenon of the body, and the body is an epiphenomenon of the mind. We operate as body-minds. The body is the visibility of the soul, and the soul is the life of the body. You cannot deal with everything by sheer will power or mental approaches. We are embodied in a physical cosmos, and we have our bill to pay to physical existence. And that includes our relationship to the physical aspect of the earth; it means to plants, stones, and animals.”
-Edward C. Whitmont, MD
Dr Ed Whitmont was a wonderful Jungian analyst and homeopath. His lectures and books continue to be highly relevant today, as we grapple with the meaning of the pandemic, the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of our humanity. As we broaden our view to society at large, seeing the suffering and struggle for freedom and expression of who we are, we see ourselves as expressions of our social and ethnic groups. And on a yet larger scale we are also facing a global reckoning with mother earth and our part in the conversation and living responsibly.
Seeing the parallels between our human body and the cosmos is a long held approach in some spiritual teachings as well as analytic psychology and homeopathy. Homeopaths use the symptoms of the body to hear the unconscious express itself in audible and visible ways. The idea that they don’t treat the symptom but the underlying disease sounds paradoxical on the surface, as all they are asking about are the symptoms. But the essence and the reasoning behind picking a remedy is a matching process with the unconscious patterns they discern. The patterns of the body and mind that both emerge from the same well. To expand the beauty of the prescription, the substances come from nature, where the plants, minerals and animal remedy sources express the larger archetypal patterns of the universe.
Our current global crisis is happening on all these scales and people like Dr Whitmont who saw the manifestations on those scales have a lot to teach to us today.
