Robert Davidson – Original Thinker, Innovator and Inspirer…

(Taken from my book Looking Back Moving Forward)

“Homeopathy is a technology, it is not a science. It will probably be another couple of centuries before we have anything close to a science that explains it. Somebody fell over it, picked it up and wondered what the hell this is and found it worked.”                                                                             

Robert Davidson, February 2005

“Homeopathy is the reason you prescribe. It is not what you prescribe and it is not how you do it. Homeopathy is a principle. A principle is a vague idea, a kind of overarching vague idea. Anything specific in it is an interpretation of principle, which can only be judged by effectiveness in the world.”                           

Robert Davidson, February 2005

“My fundamental social role is that of disruptor and I have faithfully stuck to that over the years and, as such, those who have an agenda don’t like me because I will disrupt it.”                                                                                    

Robert Davidson, February 2005

Jeremy Sherr: Robert Davidson was the first homoeopath who inspired me. In my first lesson in homoeopathy, what he did in two hours, that single dose, was enough to get me going. And even by the second year when I didn’t agree with a lot of what he said, it didn’t matter because he had given me that gift. He inspired me.

Mike Bridger: I really liked Robert Davidson. Robert is a saboteur who doesn’t understand why he sometimes upsets people. Actually he is much softer than he makes out. He is like a saboteur without a centre. He likes to throw everything into disarray, which I love. He is a wonderfully empowering man. I don’t know anybody who empowered students as much as he did and probably still does.

He does it by making everything alright, and because he is so exciting in what he does. There is an awful lot of warmth in him and a great deal of charisma. He just challenges everything as he is a nonconformist. The fact is he is always reacting and then moving off. He will never sit in a comfortable place where he belongs to something so people can get disillusioned with him because he doesn’t seem to commit himself to anything for very long.

So here is my interview with Robert Davidson… 

I had a hell of a journey to see Robert Davidson in Milton Keynes. It was a windy winter’s day, Saturday 12 February 2005, and I felt like my car was going to be blown across the motorway. I heard he was a little scary too, so even though I was keeping calm on the journey there, the wind upped my stress level and I needed to take some Rescue Remedy in order not to project my nerves of driving on to the interview! I had nothing to worry about though – Robert turned out to be the pussy cat those close to him had said he was, and very funny and entertaining too. The most interesting looking homeopath I had met so far, complete with piercing eyes and long pony tail; he showed me into his clinic room where I was introduced to his various machines.

Rowena: I wanted to start with how you got into all this. I know you studied with Thomas Maughan, but what inspired you to even go to him in the first place? Tell me your story.

Robert: In 1971 I was living in a macrobiotic communal house in Ladbroke Grove, London. I was just sitting there in the lounge reading a paper one Sunday afternoon. One of the people who had left a few months earlier came back for a visit. She was talking to someone else about a particular gentleman and inadvertently I heard the conversation. He was in his seventies and his wife was pregnant and a few other things like that. I thought I should talk to him but I had no idea why. So I phoned him up and said, “I would like to talk to you”. He asked me, “What about?” I said that I didn’t have a clue and he replied, “Right then, tomorrow at three in the afternoon.” And that was that. I had no clue about homeopathy; I didn’t even know anything like that existed. This was in the early seventies and it actually hardly existed at all.

Rowena: And what were you doing workwise at that point?

Robert: I was very bored repairing extremely primitive telephone answering machines.

Rowena: And how old were you?

Robert: In 1971 I was twenty five. I am only twenty seven now; it is amazing how slowly it has gone. After a couple of months or so I turned up at his homeopathy classes and this whole universe opened up. I was this complete nutcase who wrote down absolutely everything he said. I was watching everyone else at the table. They knew that they would never forget what he said and they didn’t write anything. Ha Ha.

Rowena: Oh, I would have done what you did!

Robert: You can get wrist muscles the size of an elephant, you know.

Rowena: Did you know what remedy he was? You observed him so much.

Robert: Thomas was undoubtedly Arsenicum album. He probably started off in his youth as Nux vomica, and there is a rare constitutional progression from the Nux vomica who lives life so intensely that they become different. Most people’s lives are too dull, boring and protected for them to change constitutions. How long will it take a Calcarea carbonica to get enough life experience to need to evolve? So the Nux vomica just goes in there, head down; usually goes through Ignatia amara and gets into Arsenicum album in old age. So many homeopaths actually turn into Arsenicum albums. It is more the nature of the work that they do. They often get ….

Rowena: Obsessive?

Robert: Anally retentive. Thomas held the homeopathy classes on Saturday evenings. It was very simple. On the first evening the theory took an hour and a half, just the once. I liked that. After that we did materia medica before tea, and cases after tea. And that was it. It was about a three and a half year cycle. We just went through all the remedies and everything was fleshed out with our own real cases. And as you went along, you gradually got cases and you just ended up doing it. It was an evolution.

Rowena: How many of you were there?

Robert: Not that many. There was a flow through; people would come and go. The classes were once a fortnight. It totally ruined my social life, but there was nowhere better to go so it was fine. When he died in 1976 I naїvely started teaching his Saturday night classes and at the end of 1977 I got the idea for the College of Homeopathy (COH), and set that up to start in September 1978. I had a lot of encouragement like, “Who is going to go? You will never get people. Oh, that is far too much money, nobody will pay that.” It was an exciting time, but it was the same thing in 1985 when I started the first full-time course, “Oh, nobody can come full time; you are charging too much money.” Yes, right. I like the beginnings of things, when they are usually impossible. When it gets administrative and ‘corporate’ I am out of there.

Rowena: At the time that you studied was there the classical/practical issue being discussed?

Robert: Oh, no. I started that one and here is the story behind it. Thomas had a particular way of practising; he used the totality remedy. However as there was almost always a difference between the organ and the organism, because of modern drugs, lifestyle, foods, sugar, alcohol and all the rest of it, often the organs would be specifically damaged out of proportion to the organism. For instance, if you prescribe for the organism – the totality – and it starts to repair the totality at a rate of twenty miles an hour, say, and the organ can only do ten, then you will either have prolonged aggravations or problems with pain and all sorts of other stuff. His skill was to be able to help the limited organ do twenty miles an hour and keep up with the organism. So with his way of prescribing you didn’t get the aggravations or the prolonged discharges. It was a very high level of skill and I don’t know anybody who has replicated that yet. And, naїvely again, that is what we taught at COH from 1978 through to about 1981-82.

It was about 1982 and ‘Greeks bearing gifts’ started to arrive. When George Vithoulkas first came over what he found, in his own words, were the best homeopaths that he had so far come across. Then he decided that, of course, like everybody else except him, we were doing it the wrong way. By that time, the interpretation of what George Vithoulkas was saying was about essence; that there was the central core, this absolute essence. Find that; prescribe the ‘right remedy’ and everything cascades better. This is not actually true in these benighted times, except in rare circumstances.

Rowena: So what is true?

Robert: In extremely rare cases, in a healthy culture, with sunshine, fresh air, bare feet on the ground, eating fish out of the ocean, ripe raw foods etc, then you will get that kind of possibility, of undisturbed integration. But what you had in this country were practitioners, some of them are quite famous now, doing that with a hundred percent of their patients. They did not individualise. Everyone got the same methodology, right or wrong. And the ‘essence’ concept survived on fanaticism for a while, because it was ‘right.’ The righteousness that came with it was intoxicating. To have the absolute truth of it was powerful. And it still exists, unfortunately worldwide now.

Rowena: Do you think they were having successes?

Robert: Some, I guess. Those who had been ‘Georged’ then went through several other teachers, after that too, jumping from guru to guru. Their need for truth from external ‘exotic’ set up the whole guru system essentially – you know making money and getting laid; that sort of thing.

Rowena: For men maybe, I don’t think women quite see it that way. I don’t think they study homeopathy in the hope that they are going to get laid more. Do carry on…

Robert: That was so close, I nearly opened my mouth and said something there, but luckily I made a complete recovery.

Rowena: Go, on, I heard you were really challenging; I was quite looking forward to it.

Robert: Oh no, no, I will be nice. I will be boring; it’s alright. So what happened was in 1982-3 George Vithoulkas arrived in the UK, to bring homeopathy to the UK and introduce it here. He presented in this huge hall down in Victoria to thousands of people. And everything became ‘classical’.

What he did to capture his audience was fascinating and it was all in the language he used and still uses. It’s very clever and I don’t think he knows he does it. He says something using ‘implicate’ language. You accept this, then he says something else, and then something else and you get pulled through it all. But what you have done is you have gone along with his unspoken assumptions, the hidden assumptions, to get from one spoken part to another spoken part. You agree with his implied assumptions just to follow what he is saying. And you never get to challenge that; he doesn’t like it when you do. It is one of the reasons he doesn’t like me, because I wouldn’t just sit and listen and agree. I used to tell people, don’t go to his seminars – listen to his tape recordings. If you go there you will be ‘got’. They all said “Oh no, I will not be affected. Not me.” And they were all ‘Georged’. It is quite astonishing and he creates that atmosphere from a place of certainty and by a subtle way of intimidating uncertain or innocent practitioners.

I remember one occasion, it was much later on, he met the heads of most of the colleges in the UK. He kept us waiting an hour and a quarter and then he kind of waltzed in with this phalange of German doctors. It was almost pantomime. He sat at the head of the table, with these doctors behind him and I thought, “What is going on here?” George Vithoulkas had a bit of a reputation at this point. He would get popular in the USA and then he would leave. Then he would get popular here, and leave. He would get popular somewhere else and leave. Eventually he gave up plans for world domination and then he went to Greece and let people come to him.

I remember one of the stories he told us that day. He was talking about this child who was sick, and no one could work out what was going on. She had been to all the diagnostic experts. No one could work out the disease. Finally George Vithoulkas recognised what the disease was, and from that basis they were able to work. So I asked him, “Does that mean we have to know more than all the specialists in all the specialities of medicine?” because that is what he had assumed. That was the intimidation. Everyone had swallowed it. Everyone else had just taken that on, that that is what they had to be able do. The intimidation of that is so huge it is almost violent. So I challenged him on that and the phalange of German doctors glared at me like I had just tried to urinate on their God or something.

But, it is fascinating – because of the way he structured it everybody just took it. All these Heads of colleges just took it; they were passive. I could not believe it. He never got challenged – he never does.

I remember in the late nineties he came over and tried to correct the obvious detrimental consequences of his visits in the early eighties. George Vithoulkas had become more unpopular here but his methodology hadn’t. Classical was King. It had shifted though and other people took over the same mantle, the same singularity and hierarchical point of view about how things are. The higher up this hierarchy you go the more powerful it is, but in fact the evidence is to the contrary. At one point David Howell and I started the ‘Not Just Classical Club’. Just to ruffle feathers and validate those who were actually practising the ‘medicine of their own experience’ rather than the ‘medicine of what someone else says’.

I saw the devastation that was happening in UK homeopathy with George Vithoulkas, et al, in the eighties because people were abandoning what worked for them to do what didn’t work for them. It just meant they had to do the next seminar. On seminars you get a kind of lift up to the perception place of the person who is guruing. You can see everything clearly for a short time and it’s wonderful. Then on Monday morning there is just you alone with the patient – and you cannot do it. A guru teaches people what he does; a teacher teaches people what they can do. And, of course, people like the guru better!

Rowena: Why do you think that is?

Robert: Glamour. They get visions of possibility. Pity its not their own.

Rowena: Narcissism?

Robert: To an extent yes. Watching Rajan Sankaran’s convulsions through the decades; he comes up with one thing after another after another just to stay ahead of the crowd. It is fantastic; like a Pied Piper. People like anything that has a methodology – a complete little paradigm, which is rigid and right – they love it. It means they don’t have to think for themselves. And they don’t critique it or themselves; they will just move to the next one.

Rowena: When it doesn’t work for them?

Robert: No, when the next one comes along. By this stage it is not about whether anything works or not; that is long gone. By the mid to late nineties you are hearing things like, “it is the patient’s karma that they are not willing to get well”. “I gave them the right remedy, they didn’t respond”. (Pardon? I mean just think about that for a minute) “You may be dying but you’ve had the right remedy so you will be born healthy in your next life.”

Rowena: Do you mean what is implied is the patient is their own obstacle to cure?

Robert: Yes, but we know that the right remedy is the one where there is a response. The whole idea that it was the fault of the patient had the usual ‘spiritual’ characteristics of being a convenient excuse; just an arrogant, vicious excuse because it condemned patients to the practitioners own limitations.

Rowena: When was this?

Robert: It has been going on since probably the mid 1980s but it just gets worse and worse, as each generation of practitioner comes through.

Rowena: So you set up COH. How long were you there for?

Robert: For a little while; ten years.

Rowena: So what was it like?

Robert: It went though many periods of turmoil. Sometimes it was really bad. For instance, a teacher who had been to George Vithoulkas; seminars standing up and telling the graduating year, two months before their graduation, that everything they had been taught was wrong and that they didn’t know the basics. It completely destroyed the students. What these teachers were doing, and there were quite a few of them, was so righteous, so hubris. They were so right that it was, and is, okay to attack, kill and destroy the ‘wrongness’ when you are in a position of knowing absolutely what is right. That, of course, is the single largest source of human conflict and mass murder. The levels of insanity that were going on were huge but not unusual for the species.

Rowena: At that time who were you influenced by? Obviously Thomas Maughan, but later on?

Robert: Well, I listened to all of George Vithoulkas’ tapes in the late 1970s.

Rowena: So you were influenced by him?

Robert: Sure, long before all that stuff started. I listened to it mostly while driving and what he said worked reasonably well. I basically pinched a lot of it and included it in the course at COH. Of course the ‘prophet in his own land’ syndrome endlessly stalked me. So whenever someone foreign came over and introduced exactly the same thing as I had been teaching them, it was greeted as something new and fascinating. It actually used to piss me off insanely.

This classical fanaticism started to appear in the early eighties and it had the seeds of huge destruction. Having listened to Robin Murphy’s tapes, I got him to come over and had him do some seminars and that kind of broke it up and put the split in because it was important there was a split.

Rowena: Why?

Robert: So the lunatics could die – either from poverty or from their self-righteousness. If you stand still long enough your own despair catches up with you. They have to keep moving and eventually they just move away. So, one of the reasons I got Robin Murphy over from the USA was because what we needed to introduce were methodologies. The concept didn’t exist before then.

Rowena: What was it like then if there weren’t methodologies?

Robert: It was just ‘what we did’. A lot of people still practise that way, saying there are no methodologies, there is just homeopathy. Which is true, as homeopathy is similarity. But homeopathy isn’t what you do; homeopathy is the reason you do it.

Rowena: Okay, explain that a little bit to me.

Robert: Well, homeopathy is the reason you prescribe. It is not what you prescribe and it is not how you do it. Homeopathy is a principle. A principle is a vague idea, a kind of overarching vague idea. Anything specific in it is an individual’s interpretation of principle, which can only be judged by effectiveness in the world. (Read that one again..!) So the purpose of creating methodologies and distinct ways of doing things is that you create a set of rules within its own patient specific universe. Like Eizayaga’s layers methodology, which has rules that are completely the opposite of Kent’s? The methodologies contradict, but only if you use them to treat the same patient. That is one of the reasons I think there should be no philosophy in homeopathy; I am with Samuel on that.

Rowena: He said that too?

Robert: Yes. He said ‘have no theories’. Of course he then went on and had a theory but, hey, he’s human too, maybe. Essentially homeopathy is a technology; it is an application of principle. The philosophy is not philosophy at all; it is actually just rule systems. And the rule systems apply individually within each distinct method. So the methods are defined by the rules you use, and what you need to do is retain integrity in your method and not jump from one method to another to another. That is why we ended up eventually creating distinct methodologies – aetiologies, Kentian, physical generals, layers and sequentials. Each methodology has its own rules and expectations. Each, if you like, has its own philosophy. What you do is individualise the methodology to the patient. That is the bit most homeopaths are missing. Almost no-one, worldwide, is teaching how to find the most appropriate method for each individual patient.

Survival (and health) is the ability to adapt to changes. Extinction and disease are the inability to adapt to changes. The righteous have no capacity to change. If homeopathy doesn’t get that it has to be methodologically adaptable to the individual then it becomes extinct. It dies because its practitioners have never given up the allopathy in their soul.

Classical homeopathy is much closer to allopathy than it is to anything else. They don’t individualise a patient; they just look for the symptoms, which support the classical methodology. They don’t even look and see if a patient is weak, strong, damaged or poisoned. It is like the person comes in and you do your thing with them. And your thing is to find the symptoms appropriate to finding a ‘classical’ remedy and the theory being that the ‘right’ remedy will then fix everything. This is pure fantasy ninety five percent of the time.

As I said, homeopathy is a technology; it is not a science. It will probably be another couple of centuries before we have anything close to a science that explains it. Somebody fell over it, picked it up and wondered what the hell this is and found it worked. It is a bit like somebody from medieval times stumbling over an electric torch; you pick it up; accidentally push the button and wow. Okay, it works but how does it work. Duh? It is a bit like Shakespeare watching television and wondering how the little people got in the box. The intervening evolutions and their changed perceptions aren’t there. The glorious and amazing homeopathy simply becomes more sophisticated, over time, in what it does.

The uniqueness of homeopathy is that nothing ever developed becomes redundant. It never goes out of date. The monumental significance of this escapes most people. It is the one observation that makes science look like the kiddies playing in the puddles. With homeopathy you don’t have to change fundamentals and you never have to throw away anything developed from experience. I can take a materia medica published in 1830, put it on my desk and use it. What has changed? Nothing. Homeopathy doesn’t change because it is based on what is real. All the rest of it, science and all the other illusions of our time are based on what is not real. If science was true it would not be changing all time. It would be refining and exploring what is true, not scrabbling around looking for this week’s truths and hoping to get next year’s grants out of them.

Rowena: Okay, I am following you.

Robert: The problem with science is that it can only deal with one thing at a time; therefore it has to pretend that only one thing exists at a time. So what you then have is the concept of repeatability, that if something is repeatable it must therefore be real. Science was invented to work out the difference between fantasy and reality. Previous to that we used things like the Bible, Aristotle or some reference source and it would tell you what was real. So you thought that if it doesn’t say so in the Bible it is not true. And if you say it is different we will just burn you, is that all right with you?

And it is a similar thing with science now. If it is not ‘scientific’ then it is not true. Science has the same limitation as everything else human. It has this deluded concept of repeatability. Think about this for a second. In the real universe nothing is repeatable. The entire universe changes all the time, every nanoinstant, so nothing can ever be repeatable. The only way you can find anything repeatable is if you create a small segregated artificial enclosure every time so that nothing appears to be changing. This system of science means that you cannot have a scientific evaluation of a complex system, such as a human being. I love this because it makes the whole of allopathy wrong. Science is so not up to the task of dealing with a complex individuality that if you ‘get it’ you should be rolling around on the floor laughing so hard it hurts. Or shocked to the core at how deep our delusions and enchantments can be.

I am not a fan of science however it is fun to play with. I like the toys, they help technology develop. But basically everything that is ‘invented’ is going to kill us, from control of fire onwards. Everything they ever invent creates a crisis, which needs a solution, which creates a crisis, which needs a solution, and all the time we are just heading deeper and deeper in our own excreta, until we drown in it. (As we are now. Remember, no fish in the ocean in fifty years. Oops.) Science is not a methodology that works for finding what is true – because it has scientists in it. You know, people with mortgages, ambitions and hubris, are open to corruption and the highest bidder.

Homeopathy is probably a future science because it is a science of complex systems. The only way you can deal with complex systems is individually and uniquely. There are some statistical methodologies you can use to help, such as the Inergetix Diagnostic and Treatment Technology. Mostly though, homeopathy is an idea whose time has not yet come because people are too enchanted; spellbound by the evolving stupidities of an ever narrowing current science to be aware that the “Emperor has no clothes”.

Rowena: Did you always think this way?

Robert: There were long periods of time when I was really happy and didn’t think at all.

Rowena: Very funny. So what got you leaving COH and starting the College of Practical Homeopathy (CPH)?

Robert: It is a complicated story. Let’s say there were reasons I left but one of the major ones was that the thing was so huge it was like a dinosaur and you couldn’t change anything.

Rowena: How many people were there?

Robert: Hundreds. In the early 1980s we had about one hundred and fifty people in the first year.

Rowena: That is amazing.

Robert: And we kept most of them. Increasingly through the 1990s, (after I had left) they would have a large intake but lose far too many of them. This made it more manageable. But it was still too huge and quality control became a big and expensive issue. It was difficult to change or innovate anything because all the teachers would have had to change. No-one can pay hundreds or thousands of pounds a day to get teachers to come in for a seminar.

The College of Practical Homeopathy in the Midlands (CPH Midlands), started in 1988 and was something entirely new. I wanted to live in the USA for a little while and commute back here. So I needed a way to pay for my airfare. I had a look around and realised that there was this big black spot called the Midlands. I had known David Howell for some years and thought ‘he could do the work and I could just swan around and plan it, really’. So he and I started CPH Midlands. It worked really well. By about the third year it was getting too popular and expanding incredibly fast. Immigration had been sniffing around where I was in the USA so I came back to this depressed, grey, obnoxious, smelly, narrow, dirty little country.

Rowena: Where were you born?

Robert: Ayrshire in Scotland. I spent most of my summers in the ocean. It was many, many years later that I realised that less than a mile and a half down from the beaches and tidal fence swimming pools that we used to play in all summer, there was the chemical industry’s explosives factory. It was seven miles long and they used to just shove all this garbage into the ocean. I seem to have survived that reasonably well.

CPH Midlands just got busy and I came back and we just ran it. In 1993, because I was going to the Midlands all the time and living in London, I thought I would start one in London. We took a lot of students from existing colleges, which terrified them and they never forgave us for that. It showed them that their foundations were less stable than they thought. In 1993, I also got a phone call from Iceland saying that they wanted someone to come and teach homeopathy there and what were we like – they had apparently phoned around. We got the ‘deal’ and started a college in Iceland as well, which is still going strong.

The country has less than three hundred thousand people in it and we are now, thirteen years later, starting to get a socially significant number of homeopaths. One of the graduates over there, who is extremely good at politics, has just helped draft a new law, which gives homeopathy and the alternative therapies most of what they want. We will have to see if their parliament messes it up, but it is extremely unlikely as the committee doing it said that, in their opinion, it was the finest piece of legislation that had ever been drafted in Iceland.

Rowena: What do you think will happen to homeopathy in this country? Do you find it worrying?

Robert: No, I find it cyclical.

Rowena: So do you think it will go dormant again?

Robert: It will go minimal, for sure. The same people that corruptly produced the EU (hence UK) legislation to wipe out all the supplements and vitamins; the same money will essentially try to wipe out everything else. It depends on how far homeopathy abandons common law. It should never do that; it should have embraced and rejoiced in common law because that is where the freedom lies. In my opinion, it is organising itself out of its own freedom to exist. But then again if you look around the planet, who isn’t? That seems to be the tone of the century – people giving up their freedom voluntarily. Selling the freedom of the individual for the rights of a slave is not ‘Fairtrade’.

The elimination of anything that might obstruct the truly obscene profits of ‘Big Pharma’ will be eliminated and the level of sickness will be controlled downwards, to ensure sickness, so that everyone has to take drugs with no other choices available. By the way that is a ‘done deal’. It is already set up and must be implemented by all countries signed up to the World Trade Organisation. What they are planning is so evil, so totally evil and unthinkable for most folks that it will be riveted into place before anyone notices, as it has always been done when totalitarian control of populations occurs.

It is insane. You get a whole country like the USA – what are these people doing? Millions of them died to get bloody freedom and now what are they doing? They are just pissing it away. You look at the USA and it has a major shortage, and the shortage is terrorism. It doesn’t have terrorism; it has to have Hollywood produce it. It has to have shows on TV about it because it doesn’t have any. The whole thing is a perverted fantasy; it is quite incredible. Where is the terrorism they are defending everyone against? It is, however, a politically advantageous position. The herd does that; it goes into sacrifice mode for the greater good. They will sacrifice their individual selves for the greater good, no problem. That is why men will agree to suffer and die in large numbers in armies for the good of the social totality. And politicians always exploit that in times of war or crisis. So they create the war on terror so they can exploit and get what they want.

And the USA is, now, a white van country. They can just come along in a white van, yank you off the street and dump you in the back. They don’t have to tell you what you are charged with; they don’t have to tell you anything else. They can just take you away and don’t have to tell anyone they have taken you anywhere. They don’t have to charge you. That is the state of it and it is worse than a lot of condemned countries but people are accepting it.

The sad thing is that it means that there is something wrong with the human species right now. We will have to be put into a place of extraordinary massive pain and violence with humungous quantities of dead people. At which point, maybe, we will get the point and maybe change things, evolve a little, maybe just enough to survive. It may well be done without war and projectile weapons, but that is usually the way it works. This time it may well be species extinction by pharmaceutical company or military biological or nuclear weapons. And probably also, death by Tesco.

The people with the money will then have all the money; they will all be sitting there, all these arachnoids, these spider people. They are not human beings. The people running these businesses are not human beings. There is a bit that makes a person human that they do not possess. They don’t have it and as such should be put down mercilessly.

Rowena: You mean like David Ickes’ conspiracy theories?

Robert: You could put it that way. It is like the bit that makes them human isn’t there. They will sell out of date drugs to third world countries that don’t need them. As long as that type of ‘opposite of empathy evil’ and insanity goes on; the big picture is not pleasant. But homeopathy tends to be filled with all these optimistic tuberculars who think if we just get spiritual enough, if we just find the right remedy to change everyone, then the big mother ship from the other side of the moon, which is parked invisibly, will come and rescue us all, clean up the planet, take away all the radiation and it will be a paradise again. Then we can all live together on this planet holding hands and singing Kumbaya

There is only so far you can go into fantasy before you die; before you self-extinguish. You cannot live in the world as if it is different to the way it actually is. Human beings happen to be the most vicious, vile, aggressive, ruthless species on the planet. That is who we are and we have to take that into account. One of the questions I ask all those nice mummies in the class is, “When would you kill somebody? When would it be alright for you to kill somebody?” “Oh my goodness” they answer, “I would never do that.” “Okay” I reply, “So you are walking down the street, your baby is in the push chair and some drunk, six foot six person comes up and threatens the baby, what will you do?”

Rowena: Kill him.

Robert: Instantly, the guy goes down. Absolutely. And society approves.

Rowena: I agree that we are all capable of everything.

Robert: We all are. And our self-inhibition of this ruthlessness is our civilisation. Inhibition is a positive quality; it is a restriction of our violence, our selfishness and all those other things. And you can see the kids; they are so sick they have got less capability of inhibiting. The sicker you get the less able you are to inhibit the human instinct of ruthlessness.

Rowena: I think we are all capable of psychosis too.

Robert: I suspect that most of us are already there. Most of us live in a complete delusion. Among this profession there is that stupid mindset that decides that homeopathy needs to be put into the mainstream; God help us. And that is what is happening. Someone who doesn’t understand the established group, because he is too deep in it, and has a completely unreal viewpoint of everything, decides we are now going to have to get organised to meet that unreal viewpoint. And then the politics and manipulations begin.

Rowena: Statutory after that?

Robert: Sure. The people who want that are already in place. They don’t gve up. There are people who have been pushing that point of view for a very long time and won’t give up. It is just horrendous.

Rowena: How do you think it will affect homeopathy?

Robert: We will either have to be completely university trained like clones or practise illegally. This is the control and suppress century, and it is much more violent than anything else. Previously it was done with guns and armed forces and now it is being done politically and with massive deception. Just watch the way the European Union is set up. It has an unelected set of directors who decide how parliament votes and what they vote for. And if they don’t like the way the parliament votes they just ignore it. What the hell is that but dictatorship … and it’s only just beginning.

Rowena: So what brought you to set up the Society of Homeopaths?

Robert: In 1977 Peter Chappell had the idea of something like the Society of Homeopaths, so a bunch of us got together and talked it through and eventually set it up. It was his idea – and a good one at the time.

Rowena: You stayed involved for a long time though didn’t you?

Robert: Yes, I was a Director for seven or eight years. Fortunately my natural social role is that of disruptor and I have faithfully stuck to that over the years. As such, those who have a fixed or manipulative agenda don’t like me because I will disrupt it. If I were to be invited to speak at a conference, I would go there, do my thing and I would never get invited back. I remember at a Homeopathic Medical Association (HMA) conference I did a whole thing on nutrition. This was the HMA; totally ‘Hahnemannian’.

You could see seventy to eighty percent of people were saying, “Why is there a need for nutrition?” and I would say, “How are you going to build new tissue if you don’t have the physical materials to build it?” However this was not a problem defined in the Organon. and ‘the establishment’ wouldn’t get it. They would have to change, learn something new and they couldn’t do it. So I was rejected as a disruptor and never invited back again, of course.

Rowena: What skills do you think homeopaths need in order to make a fruitful income from their work?

Robert: If you are not making a fruitful income from homeopathy, then get a real job. Homeopathy is plagued by amateurs who live on their partner’s money. The kind of person who usually practises homeopathy seems to be the opposite of someone who can actually market it. It seems really hard for homeopaths to understand that all income comes from selling something. And that is what we are doing; we are selling our skill for so much per hour.

Rowena: So we need to be able to market ourselves but what are your thoughts on personal development?

Robert: Your question is based on the assumption that people can develop and I have a somewhat cynical point of view on this. The only time I have ever seen people change is when they are threatened with death or there is some huge personal advantage to it. However in the case of the latter, it is usually only temporary.

Rowena: I feel I have changed dramatically but maybe I have just compensated.

Robert: You have not changed; you have either become more who you are or less of who you are. At some point you were how you are now and someone crushed it, contracted you with fear and limited you in the process. What we can do with ourselves is to trust, lighten and expand. I see the incredible capacity for joy there is in my daughter. I want her to live in that joy chemistry for as long as possible before society messes her up. Schools are places where people who don’t like children try to make them exactly like themselves.

If she can live in that joy chemistry long enough so that it becomes a habit and it becomes difficult for her to be sad, melancholy and depressed, then maybe she can find a way to survive the contractive repression of schools so that she is socialised but not suppressed. The challenge is to be true to oneself in a world where individuality is seen as a crime. It is why homeopathy has a continuous problem becoming popular. When people are willing to be individuals then homeopathy will be as natural to their understanding as allopathy is now. I look forward to it.

Rowena: Well you certainly have given me food thought Robert. Thank you so much for your time, thoughts and challenges. I have lots to think about on my journey home!

And taken from other homeopaths interviews about Robert…

Linda Gwillim: I admire many homeopaths and many teachers and so many of my students and patients have taught me so much. There are bits I take from everybody. I realise as I say all this that one of the people who really influenced me was Robert Davidson. If I am really honest, when I started my training I was one of the students who wanted to be spoon-fed; I wanted to be taught how to be a homeopath and how to do it. As a result Robert said some outrageous things that really made me think that I had to do this for me and it changed my life, because previously my educational process had been being spoon-fed and he challenged me to challenge him and therefore to challenge myself. I have to really honour that because that was a turning point for me. He gave me the confidence to actually know that I had the answers that I needed for myself, in me. He empowered me and taught me that and it was the biggest gift that I could have had at that time in my life.

Ellen Kramer: Robert Davidson, influenced me the most, because he threw me in at the deep end and forced me to figure it out for myself.

Robert Davidson challenged all your belief systems and you either loved him or hated him. I left college hating him! It was only about two years after leaving college that I thought actually he was right!

Misha Norland: We sat in on Thomas Maughan’s ongoing homeopathy class. This was in the early seventies. There was a wonderful crew of people including Peter Chappell, Robert Davidson, Martin Miles and Kaaren Whitney. Thomas was really hot on esoteric teachings – he felt that these underpinned homeopathy because true practise requires wisdom. If you just practise homeopathy as a technician and don’t underpin it with the perennial philosophy, it is one dimensional. So he was really strong on bringing in that second dimension.

Francis Treuherz: So I went to see the principal of the College of Homeopathy (COH), Robert Davidson, and asked if I could find out what he was teaching. He replied that the only way I could enter his classes was if I enrolled as a student. I appreciated the way an observer changes the subject under observation and that it would be less of a problem if I was one of the students so I agreed, although, I thought, the notes I would be taking might be different. I wrote down everything the teacher said and before long I became so fascinated that I ended up carrying on seriously studying and the PhD was abandoned along the way.

Jerome Whitney: Robert Davidson had taken over the teaching of Thomas’ class after he had become too ill in early February 1976, and later on, Martin Miles also taught the class. The two of them founded the College of Homeopathy (COH) in the autumn of 1978. In the meantime, I was teaching physics and chemistry in American International Schools to earn a living while Kaaren and I were studying homeopathy, first with Thomas and then with Robert and Martin Miles. Kaaren went on and began actively practising while I was working and teaching and also I was very involved in the Druid Order’s organisational structure after Thomas’ death.

On another area of evolving professionalism, in 1960 Thomas Maughan and others founded the first society of homeopaths and he became the first chairman, but it did not last very long. They wrote a constitution, and when the discussions in 1977 started with a view to form a Society again, I gave Robert Davidson a copy of that original 1960 constitution. It became the discussion document around which the Society of Homeopaths was founded. Currently there are ten registers and for the past few years they have been working to create a single register.

Gordon Sambidge: Robert Davidson was incredibly inspirational as he had a revolutionary way of seeing things. Because I was a bit of an anarchist myself, I loved Robert’s rebellion, disdain and anger. I liked his humour too. So he was very inspirational.

Anne Waters: I think someone should recommend Robert Davidson for an OBE or MBE for his services to homeopathy. I think he is a man who is full of frustrations, and I think it is because he is not acknowledged. I think that homeopathy is in the position that it is in this country because of Robert Davidson; there are others but in my opinion he is the one who has really done it. He can be totally inspiring

Martin Miles: Our small group – Robert Davidson, Peter Chappell, the Whitneys, and Mary Titchmarsh – we had to do something to secure homeopathy. The torch had been passed to us. We had joined the European common market, and in most of Europe if not all of it, homeopathy was banned. People were not allowed to use it unless they were doctors.

We first thought that we should approach the North London Group established by John Damonte. I remember going up there one day, suggesting it and they thought it was a good idea. We used to have regular meetings and from those meetings came the Society of Homeopaths in embryonic form. We established it and then we all took up offices in it. I was the first chairperson. Then Robert Davidson and I started the first school, the College of Homeopathy (COH), which then became Barbara Harwood’s organisation before it collapsed completely, and disappeared. We enrolled thirty students in the first year.

Linda Razzell: Through my study of the Organon, I could see that you can justify almost any course of action homeopathically. If you read the Organon you will come up with perhaps a hundred different methods, including giving two remedies at once. Read Chronic Diseases and you will see. It was a revelation for me, that right from the start I was taught there were many ways to do this that could be appropriate to the patient. As Robert Davidson said, “Appropriopathy”. One must be patient centred not practitioner centred.

Nicky Pool: Martin Miles and Robert Davidson also inspired me. Robert had this lovely art of being at the vanguard and then when everyone else joined ranks he would go off and find something else to do which was equally enthralling. He used to really make us sit up and take notice.

Barbara Harwood: When Robert Davidson joined Thomas’ classes in the early 1970s, he became a very serious scholar. He really worked and was very dedicated. One day, when I called him for help, he said to me, ”I want to start a college.” I said, ”If you start a college, I will sign up. I need to get more involved and I need to become more efficient with my homeopathy.”

When Thomas died, my understanding is that he left his patients to Martin Miles and his students to Robert Davidson. Martin had what it took to be a practitioner but Robert was more leaning towards being a teacher. Thomas had tried a couple of times in the 1970s to found a society of homeopaths in his lifetime, but without real success. When he died, his students got very active. There was a sense of urgency to try and put into practise some of what he stood for. Teaching homeopathy, trying to make homeopathy widespread, having a society for non-medical homeopaths, trying to establish non-medical homeopathy; these had all been big issues for Thomas.

It was just Robert Davidson and Martin Miles teaching at the time. They had no syllabus; they decided what to do the next weekend out of the questions we asked. It was real organic teaching.