ROWENA:  So let us start with how you discovered homeopathy – the beginning of your journey, Peter.

PETER:  I split from my wife because I had a deep trauma, which affected my marriage. I didn’t know it at the time, I didn’t know it for thirty years, but it did. We had a daughter who was born but died at birth and we didn’t have a funeral. That created in me a scenario that I never understood, but I kept seeing my wife as a burnt corpse, a burnt small corpse. I didn’t associate the two. I split from my wife because I thought I couldn’t keep having images of her like a burnt corpse; it just wasn’t right. So I did some sculpting and I made images of her and this lead me into co-counselling, and co-counselling lead me to explore all the things I didn’t know about myself.

ROWENA:  How old were you?

 PETER:  I was twenty-eight and suddenly I was living on my own in house with six empty bedrooms so I decided to put all the co-counsellors that I met, whom I felt were interesting, into the house. Even with hindsight now, I have to say, they were very weird people. But the truth is, I think I was too. I got to know them and I tried to find out about what these people knew that I didn’t. I was an engineer and knew the conservative, conventional world of engineering, research and invention, but I didn’t know anything about anything else. I was what I would call a nerd in the classic sense. I had a very technical skill base, but I was hopeless at interpersonal relationships.

I went on and discovered all sorts of things, including homeopathy and I went to one of Thomas Maughan’s classes and thought that this was the first man that I had ever met who I regarded as a true man. Men are often boys really, despite what they might think. They have often not grown up yet and I think that is what women experience quite a lot too. One reason for this, in my opinion, is because partly men don’t have any rituals. Whereas women menstruate, and have babies and go through the menopause so they have systems for maturing and recognising their milestones.

I feel there are a lot of issues around loss of culture; Christianity suppressed culture over thousands of years. The two world wars took the lives of million or so people. It took out the best men; the bravest and the strongest went to the war and many died. And those that were left, especially the men, suffered enormous wounds. The ones who survived came back and didn’t talk about it so somehow we got crucified; the men and women got seriously damaged. So this process rolled up into me.

When I met Thomas he was teaching homeopathy one Saturday evening a fortnight. He had these classes in a middle-sized Victorian terraced room. It was full to the brim of people sitting on benches, stools and the floor; anywhere they could, making notes. He just read out materia medica; he didn’t do much else.

ROWENA:   Really? What kind of books?

PETER:  He read from his own materia medica, which we did try and publish at one point but we never got very far because it wasn’t particularly brilliant. He wrote it based on his experience. He didn’t teach about repertory, anybody else’s materia medica or any systems. He just inferred that all you needed to learn was materia medica. Most importantly he was inspiring. While studying with him I didn’t even know about the Organon; no one ever mentioned it or taught it. Kent’s repertory was around, but I didn’t know about it. It was just too complicated even to understand, since no one taught it. What we did was to make a repertory ourselves, based on Thomas Maughan’s materia medica. I took every single line out of it and put it somewhere in my index so I could access the information.

ROWENA:  Who was studying there at the time?

PETER:  Robert Davison, Martin Miles, Kaaren Whitney, Mary Titchmarsh, Jerome Witney, and Michael Thompson. Misha Norland turned up a bit later on, and various other people as well. There was another group in North London run by a man called John Damonte who trained Misha and a few others.

So that is how I got into homeopathy; I fell in love with this most amazing man. Of course I had treatment with him. He gave me Sulphur, which gave me a very deep spiritual experience. The remedy made me see myself exactly as I was – a very ordinary, poorly developed individual with endless weird thoughts and failings. I recognised a big long list of them and felt stripped of all pretentiousness and defences. I saw that I was perfectly alright just as I was. That experience and process lasted about ten years.

First of all, Thomas gave me Morgan followed by Sulphur. He then gave me the tissue salts Natrum phosphoricum and Kali phosphoricum alternating to take three times a day. That was his first prescription and he had a routine. He said not to give the indicated remedy if you could spot it but to wait until you had worked on other levels first. Basically he knew about toxicity and detox, so he detoxed the body first, tuned it up, and got the person functioning better. Only then would he prescribe a constitutional remedy. He would know it by then anyway, or have a pretty good idea at least. This obviously had many advantages including stopping you needing to be spot on right at the start of treatment and to fully and deeply understand the person.

ROWENA:  So was it because he wanted to get to know the person slowly?

PETER:  No, he just wanted to make sure that they were ready for the remedy. His perspective was that if you give the indicated remedy when your patient is congested, for example, it isn’t going to have much of an impact because it can’t drive through the shit. If they are really full of toxins the indicated remedy won’t work properly so he prescribed routinely at the start of treatment using remedies to warm the person up.

He was inventing combination remedies at the time, which are still being used by homeopaths in the UK today. At the Practical College they talk about Ambra grisea, Anacardium and Argentum nitricum in combination as Triple A.  In those days he would think them up, order them from Galens Parmacy, and just see what happened. They have become folklore since but he was really just playing about.

He gave me Triple A once and one of them opened up my heart and had a very profound effect on me. I could argue for Anacardium, I could argue for Arg nit and could even argue for Ambra grisea, but one of them really deeply affected me and I will never forget it. It made me feel incredibly loving, as if my heart had opened and something shifted inside me. I think he christened it ‘the Love pill’ based on my response and that of others.

By the time I was about thirty I was starting to practise and I think it must have been around 1970. I didn’t know anything really but I thought you gave everybody remedies either in a 200C potency or 10M as their first prescription as that is what Thomas used to do. He would use a 200C for bowel nosodes and detox remedies followed by a 10M polycrest. I started practising using this system until I found my feet.

ROWENA:  How long did you have to study with him?

PETER:  Well, I didn’t have the opportunity to study any length of time, because after about two years he was dying; he even treated us in his pyjamas and dressing gown. He had very severe lung cancer, but he just didn’t want to give up smoking. I took him to see an acupuncturist in the final stages of his cancer and he was very impressed.

He used to love going out for the day; he didn’t drive at that point. We often went for breakfast to Galens, a homeopathic pharmacy in Dorset. He liked to leave at seven o’clock in the morning from South London before the rush hour and speed at ninety miles an hour along the not yet motorway roads to get to Galens Pharmacy for 10am to collect his remedies instead of having them posted to him. He just loved the idea of going out for a trip and he also gave me driving lessons. Because he was the Chief Druid of England at the time, he was a very heavy-duty spiritual teacher. He had a long white beard and he looked like the Asterix Druid.

When we drove to Dorchester, the roads were bad and if we didn’t overtake, the journey could take us all day. He would make me overtake on blind bends with only a fraction of a second’s notice to pull out. He was teaching me about consciousness; he was saying, “You have got half a second and if you take that half-second we could be out and back in before they know it” and I could. Just occasionally we would go around a blind bend and there would be a tanker coming towards us, and I would slam on the brakes and would just make it back in again in time. But those who drove him never had any accidents with him.

ROWENA:   Why do you think he wanted to teach you that?

PETER:  It was to sharpen up our minds. He came from the Golden Dawn Tradition; the true mystical and magical tradition of England. He knew a lot and had done a lot of things. He said he had to climb down several levels of consciousness before he could make contact with the people of my generation as they were pretty much wiped out by drugs. Even then he was having a hard time finding anybody to teach anything to. Anyway he was my introduction to homeopathy, and I just loved him! He also ran rituals in Druidism and other classes so I just queued up and took the whole lot. And while he was alive it was totally fantastic. It was quite good afterwards but his presence was all I really cared about.

ROWENA:  Peter, could you tell me some more about the Druid Order?

PETER:  Essentially, it was a spiritual self-development organisation that used philosophical methods and rituals. For example, every fortnight at a certain time in the evening a group of people got together to do a healing ritual. There were never any exceptions and it still goes on now. The ritual is always the same and it includes sending healing to list of people. For example, one time we were told of a child who was suffering at Great Ormond Street Hospital. They had an undiagnosed situation, the child was dying and they didn’t know what to do about it. So we put the child on the healing list and the next morning the specialist knew what to do. He had woken up in the night and had realised what the problem was and did a simple test to confirm it the following day. So the Druids gave me a spiritual foundation, but we hadn’t particularly trained as homeopaths. We had studied a bit, but we couldn’t really learn a lot, as the foundations weren’t in place.

ROWENA:   How did you learn all the rest of it?

PETER:  One time while I was meditating I got the ‘instruction’ to form the Society of Homeopaths. So I called a meeting and formed it and I was one of the driving forces in various guises for about five years. I looked around before we started the Society, but all the other homeopathic organisations weren’t going anywhere significant. Later Robert Davison and Martin Miles started the College of Homeopathy and gradually we built up more budding homeopaths and a larger body of knowledge.

Theoretically there were a few old homeopaths out there in the world and in the UK who could have been interested in forming an organisation, but when we actually tried to contact them they didn’t like it at all. I think they considered us upstarts, and refused to join in. I was the one with business skills, so I said, ”Let us start with a clean sheet”, and gradually we got enough people so that we could afford to bring in teachers. We got George Vithoulkas and Vassilis Ghegas to come over first. Vassilis was George’s number one pupil. Roger Morrison was also a student of George Vithoulkas at that point, and he came too. Vassilis had to learn English first, so for him teaching was tricky and quite a strain. Vassilis gave a most magnificent lecture the first time he came. He just radiated gold so we called him the golden man; he had a beautiful golden aura around him and he absolutely knew his stuff.

Gradually we got the numbers and finance together so we could call in people from all over the world. We had Eizayaga from South America visit us and he brought with him another form of homeopathy, his layers approach, and I thought afterwards that I needed to balance out what I then called the Eizayaga effect. As a result I invited Candegabe from Argentina, I wrote him a letter saying that we would like him to come for a seminar and we would pay him £5,000 because we could afford it. We could guarantee to get a hundred people to a seminar, and if they all paid £50 we could afford the £5,000. It was as simple as that. The sums were very easy to do.

And then of course Rajan Sankaran arrived and he was ace for me. He was about thirty then and it was like sitting at the feet of a master. He knew so much more than I did and he was stunning out there; honestly, I just lapped him up. Years later he sat in my consulting room for four days and we gave him all the difficult cases of Europe to treat. The patients would come in and sit down and he would then write the remedy on a piece of paper, screw it up and give it to us, not to open. Then he would take the case for an hour and go through it with us, explain all the rubrics and then we would open the screwed piece of paper up and there was the name of the remedy. He had already worked it out in one minute. He did that routinely, virtually every time. And he got it right and the results panned out just by making observations when the patient walked through the door.

He was really funny in those days. He would not look at the patient at all, he would just listen, and he would write down the rubrics as they came out in the case in the side margins and doodle on the main pages. He had no eye contact and we had to warn the patients about this. We learnt a lot from him, and he solved our difficult cases and made them look easy. Obviously over twenty years he has evolved and every time he writes a book he says it is a work in progress, which it is. Nowadays his focus is on the patient’s gestures so it is completely different. He has been going steadily step-by-step, and in Mumbai he has built up a base of people around him and they are all involved with each other.

I have never been Mumbai, but I think that there is a great group of practitioners on the same wavelength who all work with his methods and they get good results. He says to understand the real person, watch their hand movements and their body language, and don’t take much notice of what they say. As I understand it, if you want to know their unconscious processes, their deepest forming forces, or the shape of who they really are in a primitive way, you need to look at their gestures, because sign language came before verbal language. If you watch their hands you get the sign language; if you listen to their voice you just get the chitchat. Obviously, that is a simplistic version of what he does, but it conveys the depth to which he now goes.

He has taken individual homeopathy, what I call the first simillimum, to its peak. If I was practising now I would spend some time getting myself to grips with Rajan’s new system, so I was up to date. I would say that is where the energy is, if you want to be the best. Obviously, you can learn a lot from Rajan Sankaran, from Jan Scholten, from Jeremy Sherr and all sorts of other people, who are great teachers.

Having said that, I think what I have discovered is what I call the second simillimum, which is possibly the biggest step forward in homeopathy since Hahnemann. It is like the next step after Hahnemann because up until now what everyone has been actually doing is refining Hahnemann. However, no one had any idea about how you treat diseases. It is my conclusion that individual homeopathy never treats diseases, it treats people, it removes obstacles to vital energy flowing, which allows the disease to be overcome, but it doesn’t treat the disease. Now some very obvious remedies have affinities with diseases or certain types of pathology. Aurum and testicles, Sepia and fibroids, but that is because there is a relationship between the individual remedies inside a person and the disease simillimum.

For the first simillimum you must stick to the individual, and I would say you can forget anything in the repertory that has anything to do with pathology because it is at best only a confirmation, and materia medical likewise. You can say it has got some indications in that way, but fundamentally you need to stick to the individual.

ROWENA:  But that doesn’t fit in with, say, the Ramakrishnan method of treating cancer?

PETER:  I think that the big hole in homeopathy is that the individual approach is fine, but it ignores the disease as a valid entity. I think I have now solved the problem of what was missing in homeopathy; what to do about pathology. There have been endless teachers of homeopathy dying of cancer, for example. It is normal, because we know that a certain percentage of the population will always die of cancer. But homeopathy doesn’t address cancer properly.

To say the medical profession has got it wrong, going down the diagnosis route, is to dishonour God, because God is everything. You can’t say that God is just on the side of homeopathy, or say that the medical people have got it completely wrong; you have to look at the progress allopaths have made since Hahnemann, in terms of diagnosis and surgery. All we are complaining about is that their therapeutic medicines are suppressive, palliative or ineffective. Even at best it is incredibly mechanical. If you provide Insulin, a basic ingredient for life, to a diabetic, it keeps the person going but it ignores the bigger picture.

I think pathology is the great big hole in homeopathy; we ignore it because the medical profession has focussed on it. We have gone the opposite way and treat the person not their disease and I did that for thirty years too. When I went to work on AIDS in Africa I took seventy cases and I wouldn’t treat anybody who didn’t have AIDS. I don’t think that most homeopaths have ever taken seventy cases of any disease consecutively. It is a very salutary experience, because I realised that these people were Sepias and Aurums and whatever else, and also they have got AIDS and it is nothing to do with them; it is nothing to do with the individual.

Now I know that that is the theory; it is in the Organon, Aphorisms 100 to 104 – in an epidemic like measles or smallpox, don’t treat the person, treat the disease and take the totality of that disease. With that in mind, you realise that the individual remedy is there in the individual and that the disease is nothing to do with that individual. There is no connection between the two in an epidemic so you can ignore all the individual’s reactions to it.

People react in two ways – according to the disease and according to who they are, and the two are completely separate; they are nothing to do with each other. There might be a correspondence, but in an epidemic everybody has susceptibility. You have just got to have sex with the wrong person and you are in business. Even if you only sleep with your husband or wife, if they have slept with someone else, if they have got it, you have got it, end of story. And this confirms that it has nothing to do with the individual. So diseases reflect societal events. Diseases, like AIDS, represent a different level of consciousness; they have their own consciousness, they have purpose and they are part of the divine plan.

ROWENA:  So what do you think is the purpose of AIDS?

PETER:  That is a tough one, but it does teach about honesty, commitment and truthfulness. There are too many sexual diseases around and it is dangerous to the evolution of the human race to have unprotected sex without recognising the diseases you are likely to get. People with AIDS will often have gonorrhoea, syphilis, herpes, chlamydia and all sorts of other sexually transmitted diseases. I don’t know if that is the whole story, but there is a big story about AIDS.

ROWENA:  And the purpose of cancer? Perhaps you can put a moral twist on AIDS, but what about cancer?

PETER:  Well which chakra would you say affects cancer the most?

ROWENA:  I would say the heart.

PETER:  I would think so too. The disease holds the energy of compassion. I think cancer is about compassion and pathological oversensitivity.

ROWENA:  And suppression?

PETER:  And suppression of that; suppression of love, I would say, is part of cancer. But if you have lots of cancer patients you can figure this out, it is not so complicated. I don’t know all the answers.   Pathology is the bit that is missing in homeopathy, and all those combinations of remedies and all those inter-currents; they are basically an attempt to fill a void or shadow that we don’t know what to do with.

Now people have talked about miasms and Carcinosin as a remedy for the cancer miasm but cancer is not a miasm because it is not an epidemic disease. All the other miasms are based on epidemic diseases. I have renamed them actually, and call them CEEDS – chronic effective epidemic diseases. So miasms are based on epidemic diseases, which are based on micro-organisms. For the first two billion years of human evolution that was all that existed so we evolved from protozoa, bacteria, viruses, in other words, micro-organisms, and as a result they are very fundamental to our makeup. They are even more primitive to our makeup than minerals because they were the earliest forms of life and they are very powerful.

ROWENA:  As in Syphilinum and Medorrhinum?

PETER:  Yes. There are as many miasms as there are epidemic diseases, and there are technically thousands of epidemic diseases. So Psora is all the other miasms, which we haven’t identified. I think there are probably at least fifty main ones, of which we have identified at least five or six. Rajan Sankaran has recognised nine in his system, and you will notice he does not have Psora. Where the individual approach of homeopathy doesn’t work, there are all sorts of ‘unlike’ treatments within homeopathy to try and compensate for that. As I am sure you are aware, Ian Watson wrote a book about all these different methodologies.

In my opinion, all chronic diseases are unique combinations of epidemic diseases. Epidemic diseases exist inside the same person for a long period of time; for example TB and malaria co-exist together in Africa inside many people, it is just normal. There is no way that you can have only one disease at one time; everybody has got lots of miasms running all at the same time, it is just impossible for them not to. It is just a question whether the immune system keeps them under control or not. But if the person has AIDS or is subject to enormous trauma, the miasms start becoming active; the vital force can’t keep them under control and they just start to manifest.

Hahnemann says if you have got no symptoms, you have got no disease and there is no way that this can be true. That is only an ideal. There are lots of things that are wrong with what Hahnemann said, but you know he wrote the Organon two hundred years ago, for heaven’s sake, and things have moved on. I have written a book called The Second Simillimum and in it I have pulled homeopathy apart, reformed it and said what I think about it. I might be completely wrong in some of my formulations, but I had a go at it based on my experience of homeopathy.

What I observed was that things join together in the micro-cosmic world by symbiosis, and in the real world they do too. Turtles have fish that swim with them to keep them clean. Buffalo have birds that sit on them to keep them clean and eat the flies. Symbiosis is everywhere. Inside our guts we have enormous numbers of bacteria to help us eat and snails have certain animals inside them to help them eat too and without those they couldn’t live. I think diseases are combinations of miasms and therefore you can treat diseases like chronic miasms; you just take the totality of a disease and you find the remedy and prescribe it.

Carcinosin is not a miasm, it is the first example of a disease remedy. I am not breaking new ground here. Donald Foubister said how brilliant Carcinosin was in treating incipient cancer, and it is pretty close. It is brilliant and totally curative at times. I have a case in my book, Emotional Healing with Homeopathy, with a seven-year follow up; complete cure of diagnosed cancer based on one dose of Carcinosin.

ROWENA:  Is that because it matched the situation?

PETER:  Yes, but it should do. Unfortunately, the reason why Carcinosin generally doesn’t work is because there should be a hundred different samples in there of different types of cancer. Or you could take a Carcinosin made typically from ten people with a typical cancer you are working with. You could have cancer of the testicles or cancer of the prostate. Ten different men with prostate cancers from around the world, all samples mixed together at the same time by some intelligent process and made into one remedy. Then you have got a remedy that has got a possibility. At the moment we have one remedy for cancer and it clearly doesn’t work. If it did then the Ramakrishnan method wouldn’t have evolved. So I have worked out a different way of making remedies, which does work, and I now have remedies for miasms and remedies for diseases.

ROWENA:  So have you been using your cancer remedy to treat people with cancer?

PETER:  Well I don’t treat people except in Africa; I wait for other people to get me the evidence.  Also it is more convincing if other people do so. Disbelief was a real issue for me in Africa with my AIDS remedy so it was good that practitioners other than me treated patients and they got the same results. So my system seems to work and I have got enough results now to show that it seems to work across the board. There are results for cancer treatment documented on my web site with two-year follow ups, but not enough results by a long way.

ROWENA:  Are your results mainly for your AIDS remedy then?

PETER:  My early results are all AIDS. Later I started work on chronic diseases. While not everybody gets a result the first time they used one of my remedies, sometimes they get a fantastic result beyond anything they have previously experienced. In some cases practitioners have given patients who have been treated for twenty years without a very satisfactory result, one of my remedies and they have responded very dramatically and successfully.

A homeopath reported back that the diabetes remedy looks fantastic. She said she has patients with diabetes who are so much better as a result of taking it. Their energy levels are up and their Insulin levels have dropped and all the things that you could expect to have happened, have happened; it is a fantastic result. And now, she says, “I am looking for gold. I want to see if I can get the remedy to cure diabetes completely; to get people off their Insulin completely.” I think that is pushing our luck.

So I think I have discovered the most significant improvement in homeopathy since Hahnemann. But actually I think it is bigger than that, because once you look at the implications, diagnoses and difference in remedies, it doesn’t take a lot of genius to work out that this could create a problem; a big problem. It means that doctors could use it and get good results, which is fantastic. Just imagine if doctors could prescribe the second simillimum. They couldn’t do the first simillimum because they are not trained as homeopaths and they don’t have the time, but they could do the second easily. There is a huge amount of skill involved in getting a diagnosis, but once the diagnosis is worked out everybody could do it.

ROWENA:  How do you feel about that?

PETER:  I feel a bit weird being in a position where I have got something, which could cause a massive upheaval in human consciousness, and it works!

ROWENA:  How did it come to you?

PETER:  Well, after I had got all my seventy AIDS cases, I just realised homeopathy doesn’t have the answer to this and nor does any system. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a lot of money, I had to have a solution, and I had to have it quickly because otherwise I would run out of money and I wouldn’t get to the point of trying anything else. I thought, “I have only got one shot at this, and I have got to get it right.”

I took eight weeks pondering over it around Europe and came to England and talked to my friends and my mentors but I saw that no one had ever thought deeply about it; no one had ever faced the issue.  And I knew the issue because it had gone inside me; the seventy cases were inside me. I knew every single one of those individuals. In Europe people don’t know about AIDS so much; it is not seen as a problem. In Africa it is life and death.

The people I have come across who understand the AIDS issue are people from Africa. Jeremy Sherr is South African, for example, and he understands it. Everybody in Africa has lost a relative in the family; it is that simple. We don’t have that problem. To give you an idea of the size of the problem, in every extended family one person would have died of AIDS. And no one talks about it in Africa, because of the stigma; of the twenty five million people or so who have died, only very few have officially died of AIDS. That is the reality of Africa.

I didn’t really think I could do this job but I focused in and thought, “Well Peter, you are good at inventing things and this is the job for inventors; it is a new path.” So I thought, “I know where I want to get to and I know what I want to solve, but I don’t know the connection between the two.”

Many years ago, I did a post-graduate course at Cambridge University and my professor was solving a particular equation with the assistance of two computers, one analogue and the other digital. The analogue was very expensive and would fill up the whole of this room and the garden and cost ten million pounds. My professor had already been working on it for six months and I put the equation up and solved it in one afternoon. I just literally put it on the computer and played around with it to see what it did. I looked at the equation on the computer, using it as a microscope-like device, saw it moving and said it does this. He worked from first principles. We both agreed with the solution to the equation but I used a modelling tool – the Buckmaster Fuller method – and he used a theory. And that is my approach to life. So when it came to solving this problem I just thought, ”What can I do about it? How can I get around this problem?”

The issue as I saw it was how do you formulate the disease into one coherent pattern; how do you take those pieces of diverse information and form them into a spiritual essence? In a way what we are talking about is spiritual mathematics. I did manage to do it, but I want to prove that I have done so and therefore I have to do a lot of research. I want a theoretical mechanism for describing what I have done and I need some research tools. I know what I need, but I am not going to get them in a short period of time. I know which universities could offer me the research facilities and I know how much money is involved but it is not my top priority at the moment. If I am successful, people will throw money at me and then I can do it. And if I am not successful, no one is going to give me the money and it won’t be needed! So I had better build a success base and evidence first and then think about the research later.

On a different subject, I have to say one of the weaknesses I perceive in homeopathy is that homeopaths are not sufficiently trained; they haven’t done enough internal, therapeutic inner training. The world is emotionally illiterate and I think emotional intelligence in homeopathy is still limited. The results of critical life events and emotional trauma are often in the way when we are seeking the individual simillimum and we shouldn’t be giving an archetypal simillimum at that time, but a traumatic one and that is usually enough. Most people go back to functioning okay when they have dealt with their trauma.

There is a constitutional pattern below the trauma that is archetypal and comes from the animal, mineral or vegetable kingdom and it might be a very satisfactory life pattern and doesn’t always need treating. You could treat it, and it will open up a whole lot more if the life pattern is too constrictive. You often see by giving the remedy for that life pattern, that the person will open up and their energy will flow more efficiently. But the traumatic pattern is often laid on top of that, and I think homeopaths are not trained enough in that area and they don’t understand themselves sufficiently, and therefore they don’t understand this. You can’t understand other people without understanding yourself; that is a given. What is often not recognised is that the trauma miasm – if we can call it this – is in the way of the deeper archetypal remedies and the trauma needs to be treated first. Traumas pass down from generation to generation, as I have shown in my book Emotional Healing with Homeopathy. It is common and is a dominant part of human make-up.

Sexuality is such a good example of an area where there is insufficient training. If a group of homeopaths went on a weekend course in sexuality training, I bet you on Monday morning when their patients sit in front of them again they would be asking questions they have never asked before. And they would be getting information or responses they have never had before, because they would then be much easier with the subject. And that is the same with all these areas.

Another area where homeopathy is relatively undeveloped is belief systems. I figured out that there are a whole lot of remedies out there in the ‘belief structures realm’, which are different from anything that we have proved before, because we don’t deal with belief structures. You can give people really good remedies but their beliefs won’t change. All sorts of other things change, but their beliefs stay the same. I have developed remedies that work on that level too.

My thought process behind this is based on my perception that the spiritual realm is the only solid reality; the rest of it is rolled out by our mind and is not grounded in reality. Being in a physical body is an enjoyable learning experience but it is not solid reality. The spirit is what is solid and we choose to roll out a body every now and then by a process we have evolved. So I started rolling out remedies for belief structures, and a simple but profound example is fat and famine. My Fat remedy is brilliant because there is a belief structure that there isn’t enough food to go around. That is an easy one to understand.

ROWENA:  So you wouldn’t give it necessarily to someone who was overweight, because there are lots of different reasons why people are overweight, only if they have that belief system in their consciousness?

PETER:  I would prescribe it when there is an eating disorder related to there not being enough food. But the whole human race has been through that issue as poverty and malnutrition were epidemic for centuries; you don’t have to go back too far before people were dying because they were starving in the winter. In a way, it is a trauma miasm. They wouldn’t be aware of it; it is completely unconscious and there is no way that you can approach the consciousness of that one. You can acknowledge that you are fat but you won’t know that it might be because of a very deep issue.

I think that all colleges suffer from one big problem; they can’t educate properly because they haven’t got the funds and if they charged the fees to do it properly, they would never get any students except the very rich ones. There are not enough funds to do the clinical training properly and there is not enough emphasis on self-development. And it is very hard to push people through a fixed programme of self-development, because actually each person needs their own system. So a college would need to have, say, ten self-development modules out of which students have to do their choice of three. There ought to be development modules in spirituality, psychological, sexuality and psychotherapy and half a dozen others.

The students would choose which ones to do with the support and guidance from the college, perhaps in the form of a counsellor, who would help them identify their issues and the areas where they are weak, so they could do training in those. The courses would be run independently of the college, to help students become more rounded individuals. A lot of us need psychotherapy; we need to develop and find out who we are. I would say that homeopaths should have at least a year of weekly therapy, with a good therapist, just to deal with their own issues.

I would also like to see a module that focuses on the work of Bert Hellinger. He helped give me understanding to the meaning of unresolved deaths in the family and lack of closure. That issue has dominated my whole life so it is important to know how to give people funerals with homeopathy. People have so many unconscious, unrecognised and unresolved issues in their lives. Homeopaths need to know the purpose of funerals and how to achieve them. My observation is that none of the colleges provide adequate training in these areas and this is partly because they focus on the homeopathy and they do not provide enough time and space for the self-development of the person.

Another problem with our homeopathy education system is that we can never offer enough clinical training. Often it is the blind leading the blind. If they have their recent graduate students supervising the clinics it is a complete disaster. Graduates need to form really good support groups so they can partake in peer supervision as well as bring in experienced teachers to support their development and progression. Doctors don’t leave the nest until they are thirty minimum and even then they receive enormous support and career structures.

It takes a long time to mature as a homeopath. It takes a long time to get good enough to earn a living and it is a lot about intention too. Many practitioners don’t need to make a living, because they have got a supportive partner but if you want to make a serious living, it is hard I think, and this is not just a homeopathic phenomenon. Many people who train part-time in therapies don’t make it into practice, because they are not adequately trained. It is very easy to learn homeopathy theories but it is a much bigger task to learn the practise and be wise enough to do the practise.

It is lovely going to college for three or four years. You hang out with a nice group of people; you study an interesting subject and learn lots of fascinating things. But to do homeopathy for a living, that is a different story all together. As I said before, the support structures are not there therefore it takes a lot of willpower. Even the idea of being self-employed is not natural to most people. My parents were self-employed so I was brought up with that mentality. Self-employed people, in general, come from self-employed families.

I have to say that when I was in Africa working for nothing, and even giving my patients money so that they could eat, I loved it. I loved the fact that I didn’t have to charge them any money at all.

ROWENA:  What an interesting conversation Peter. Thanks so much for your insights and good luck with your new remedies.

Long Live Homeopathy!