Too Occupied By Religion – Part II

Editor’s note:  This is the second part of the article Too Occupied by Religion published in Hpathy.com August 2019.

While we are listening to Heraclitus’ sentence, echoing through the centuries, that “A man’s character is his fate”, a sentence we strongly agree with, a new question arises: What makes a man’s character?

Character (coming from the Greek word charassein, meaning “to sharpen, cut in furrows, or engrave”) is the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of one person or thing or phenomena; a constant attribute of the will and modus operandi of a person that makes what he/she is. Character comprises the temper of a person, moral firmness, will, steadiness, consistency, honesty, or their absence. Religiousness sets up the framework for our behaviour both to ourselves and other people. It is the essence of our being; through religiousness we can make a difference between good and bad, we gain our strength… Our religiousness marks us as persons, and it is defining our character.

We will now consider how we can, through religious views and feelings, discover a man’s character and his fate.

Ara Macao (Scarlet Macaw)

Jonathan Shore did the homeopathic proving for this remedy. This remedy has a low frequency in repertory. It is better known for general themes of birds and its own central themes.

We don’t find this remedy in the rubric RELIGIOUS AFFECTATION, too occupied by religion, but we do understand that repertory is evolving from day to day and that clinical practice is contributing to the introduction of new rubrics. Since we have clear insight into religiousness of this remedy, it would be a mistake to dismiss information just because it is not present in rubrics.

Central themes of Ara Macao are the following:

• To keep individuality while belonging to a group
• To be honest with oneself while being accepted by society.

Statement of the patient:

“I didn’t feel free at any job. I always felt a lot of constraints. I cannot express what I want and think because it always has to be socially acceptable and because I must have tact in talking with anyone. I must think about how I should talk to someone, and it’s a burdensome for me.

Some important themes:

• Telling the truth
• Accepting things as they are
• Feeling of being bonded with the group

Statement of the patient:

“I cannot stand when I say what bothers me or what I don’t want and someone acts as if they accept it, but again and again they keep doing what I don’t want to. I don’t want to have a relationship in which something is important to me, and I need to be pretending just to save that relationship. I would like to be myself and to act just the way I think and feel, but I cannot achieve that in the environment where I work. I must be forbearing, and I must pretend to be something that I am not.” (Theme of freedom of speech)

Statement of the patient:

“In church, I feel bare, I can be myself, with all my emotions. Everything there compels you to introspect and you have to accept and admit and articulate even things that are disgraceful or that you would be ashamed of. Maybe also things you would like to hide even from yourself. To confess who you really are. And that moment when I see that something bad is repeating, after some time that has changed. I was just thinking about it, and it started to change. I mostly believe in change, that everyone of us needs to change. I easily accept that everything is God’s will. I achieved that mainly through the church.”

Rubrics:

• MIND – TRUTH – telling the plain truth (Complete Dynamis)
• MIND – NAKED, wants to be (Complete Dynamis)
• MIND – AWARENESS heightened (Synthesis 9)
• MIND – BEING in the present; feeling of (Synthesis 9)

“In church, I feel bare, I can be myself, with all my emotions.” – that is the essence of the Ara Macao patients, and they satisfy their needs in the church.

Pulsatilla

(Scene from the movie Best Exotic Marigold Hotel)

“When I got married, my husband told me: ‘Don’t you worry. I will take care of everything.’ And I didn’t worry. I didn’t worry about anything for forty years.”

Some cases are confusing. It happens particularly when the person has a rich pensive life and aspires towards spirituality. These persons will have the need to explain everything, they will talk about each aspect of their life in an analytic manner and with plenty of detail. In these cases, it is difficult to find the centre of the problem, the essence. If we look for what is central, essential in a person, their religious positions and needs will be important. I will illustrate this with a case.

“When people look at me, they see it as worse than it really is. I maybe look like I’m crazy, but I just wanted to have a good cry. I am selfish. I want to have everything I like beside me, and I want everyone I love to be there. Setting up boundaries is my problem in everything I do. My serious problem. I give lessons to a child, which I don’t want to do, but I cannot refuse his mother. In my case it is already a pathological thing. I want to satisfy both myself and everyone else.

I observe every fast. I always feel better when the fast begins. Fatty foods sit bad with me. Meat as well. My parents are not believers, and I started to go to the church as a child. I always cry when I am at liturgy or in church. There I feel safe and protected from everything. In church we all care about each other. For me it is important to feel that someone is taking care of me. When I am in church, I know that nothing bad can happen to me. We are all one big family there.”

Lot of tears, the need for someone taking care of her and the need to be surrounded by people – that is the image of Pulsatilla. Pulsatilla would seek for someone to take care of her anywhere and in any circumstance, and we can easily see that through her religiousness. For Pulsatilla, church community means safety and satisfaction of the need for care and safety.

Lachesis

We will start analysing religiousness of a Lachesis patient with the statement of the patient to which this remedy has been proven as simillimum.

“In Israel I visited the Tomb of the Virgin Mary. I had a strange feeling while I was entering there on my knees. In that moment I was in those terrible tears, in a horrifying weep… A priest sat beside me and stood by me for an hour, while I was crying. He asked me why I was crying. I had a feeling of the ancient mother, the mother to all of us. It was fulfilling. A relief. For me, the feeling of the ancient mother means emotional protection. That I’m not all by myself, with my own fears, and joys.

Generally, I like to go to church, and I derive pleasure from crying in church without reason. I don’t need a priest. To take communion is not for me. I observe fasting when my body feels it right.

I travelled to Malta, and of 350 churches there I have visited 200. I was crying in every single one.”

Analysis

In Israel a miracle happened. She had a feeling of the ancient mother, a spiritual experience. And why she was crying in Malta? Why is she crying in every church she steps in, without talking to a priest, without repentance?

This lady had her own explanation, which sounds logical. Apart from excessive crying. We cannot cry every time we enter a church, especially not so strongly and so long.

We will find an explanation in the part of her statement where she describes how she feels after crying. She says loudly and clearly that crying brings her relief.

The key feature of Lachesis is tension. That tension is forcing him to speak fast (LOQUACITY), to be fast and intensive in everything he does. Lachesis is one of the remedies that have the worst symptoms before menstruation and have great relief with the beginning of menstrual flow.

This is a well-known remedy for haemorrhage. Tension all over the body and on all levels, which seeks for acceptable way for relief. Church is a great place for that. Crying because of religious feelings (disguised by religious emotions) is socially acceptable.

Persons crying in the church often pertain to Lachesis or Pulsatilla constitutions. Lachesis cries strongly, intensively, from the depths of the soul. Pulsatilla does that in accordance with its constitution, quietly and with a gratitude for what she gains from the religious community.

Natrium muriaticum

How can God allow innocent people to suffer?

Nat mur is strongly occupied by religion and his religiousness is very specific. Since it is a person who has gone through a lot of failures and suffering, his faith in God is unsteady to a great extent. He doesn’t understand why he is the one who, although being so correct and ethical, needs to endure all that pain and suffering. He is raising a question of sense and justifiability of faith in God due to earthly suffering and miseries of everyday life. If God is good, why does he allow evil to exist? If God is fair, why he does allow innocent people to suffer?

• MIND – DESPAIR
• MIND – PROPER – too
• MIND – RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS – too occupied with religion
• MIND – INDIGNATION

A mythological story is a symbol, i.e. a set of symbolic images arising from the human psyche. It is represented through symbols, which is the only possible way because it transfers the primal message which cannot be expressed with words. Once mythology did, through its universal message, bring people in line with the world they lived in. That’s why we will now look at a Biblical story about Moses to better explain the very nature of Nat mur.

After many hardships and difficult life, Moses led the people into better life under God’s leadership. The people who have been suffering for decades have lost their faith in the future and in a better life. On every obstacle, they were angry at Moses because he took them there to be in distress and suffer even more than “under the Pharaoh”.

They have quickly forgotten how they had lived and perished before. God helped the people in every trouble, he showed them the way, made them safe passage through the Red Sea, provided them food, water arose from stones for them. But people couldn’t see that, they couldn’t accept that. They became bitter, quarrelsome, and ungrateful.

They were not able to appreciate what has been given to them. As an answer, God sent them the 10 Commandments, written on two stone tablets. In other words, just like Calc, Nat mur feels outstanding, but for different reasons.

Nat mur has a feeling that his “integrity” provides him guarantees for comfortable life and absence of any trouble. Nat mur doesn’t accept difficulties as a reflection of God’s will or simply as tasks relating to personal development. That’s the reason why Nat mur sees every discomfort, annoyance or a problem as God’s injustice.

“I never did anything bad to anyone. I live my life quietly and properly. Why does God do this to me? Why does he allow me to suffer this much?”

• MIND – DESPAIR
• MIND – PROPER – too
• MIND – RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS – too occupied with religion
• MIND – INDIGNATION

Psorinum

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden and life in difficulties and misery is the central theme of Psorinum.

Those are hard working people, always on the threshold of survival, they fall into despair, but never lose their hope. We recognise them by how they lack everything in their life, everything is in dire straits. The house is small, coffee is cold…

Those are people that don’t seek much from God. They have modest, but essential needs.

“Give us this day our daily bread” is their motto. That is what they seek when it comes to anything in their life – only “daily” things.

Stramonium

Rubric DELUSION, pure she is is one of the leading rubrics for recognition of Stramonium personality and its religiousness. Let’s put some additional light on it through the following case:

A 70-year-old lady complained of obstipation that she had problem with for a year. It looked like a simple case, the symptoms were clear, there were many modalities that implied Bryonia. However, Bryonia did nothing.

Other homeopathic remedies were then prescribed to her, but there was no progress in this case until the day she came to the control angry. She was talking about how she observed fasting last week and wanted to take communion because she hasn’t done that for the last 30 years, although she was very devout.

When it was her turn for the communion, a priest asked her if she did her confession because he couldn’t remember it. She felt offended. Why to confess? She didn’t kill anyone; she stole nothing from no one! She didn’t have a reason for confession. She just wanted to take communion.

Now I understood her obstipation. The fact that she didn’t kill and didn’t steal gives her the right to believe that there is nothing bad in her, that she was completely clean from sin. Stramonium 12c in a split dose in the first 24 hours caused strong cleansing. Her comment on it was: “I didn’t know there was so much crap inside me”.

Stramonium is not aware of the fact that there is anything bad or wrong inside him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pl73duurs

I pray to myself, for myself.”

“Every time I’ve spoken to you, you’ve never spoken back, although given our mutual disdain, I can’t blame you for the silent treatment. Perhaps I’m speaking to the wrong audience. Can you hear me? Are you even capable of language, or do you only understand depravity? Peter, is that you? Stop hiding in my thoughts and come out. Have the courage in death that you never had in life. Come out, look me in the eye and say what you need to say. There is no solace above or below. Only us – small, solitary, striving, battling one another. I pray to myself, for myself.”

So, what is the nature of Stramonium’s relationship with God? First, in that relationship there is no humility nor acceptance of anything coming as God’s will. Actually, Stramonium doesn’t even believe in God. He believes in his own exceptionality, his own purity and sinlessness and in strength of his own prayer. God’s duty is just to answer to his prayers. His prayer is not a prayer but rather a demand for God. In a way, he is setting an ultimatum to God: I did everything, I’m good and I pray to you – well, dare not answer to my prayers. The truth is that many Stramonium patients will stay in this pattern for a long time, even till the very end, believing that they haven’t prayed strong enough if their prayer is not answered. They are therefore reading the Bible all day. However, some of them will actually give up after a while and say: “I was good, I didn’t do anything wrong, he has no reason to punish me but he still left me to suffer. I will handle it with the strength of my own will.”

And that is the turning point that we don’t recognise as Stramonium state and we search for some other remedy. He will not say “I trusted in God, but I don’t trust anymore”. He will say that he had trusted, but God didn’t answer his prayers, so he decided to solve his problems on his own. He is great, he can do it.

Sulphur

To understand the Sulphur person, the first thing to have in mind is his delusion of wealth and abundance. He doesn’t see himself separate from the whole world, nature, universe, God. He does not possess things; he considers himself as a part of divine abundance.

He doesn’t care about anything. Sulphurs are like Birds of Heaven, which sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. “Are you not much better than they?” (Matthew 6:26). They understand that they are precious to God and that they do not need to worry about things they need for life (Matthew 6:31-33).

• MIND – DELUSIONS – wealth, of
• MIND – DELUSIONS – abundance of everything, she has an

A problem arises when wealth or abundance start to disappear and there are no more sources for Sulphur to satisfy his needs. Here we come to the essential rubric for Sulphur:

• MIND – DELUSIONS – thin – he is getting

Delusion that he is losing his weight (getting thin). Getting thin means losing weight or becoming slimmer. This phrase can also be used when there is loss or decrease in the amount of something (for instance, my wallet got thinner) or some abilities (I can’t do things I could do when I was young anymore).

His philosophical mind can compensate a lot of things and to find hidden value in everything, except when it comes to food and faith.

• MIND – DELUSIONS – beautiful – rags seem, even
• MIND – DELUSIONS – rags are as fine as silk; old

But:

• MIND – FEAR – starving, of
• MIND – FEAR – faith; to lose his religious

There is no compensation for the feeling of hunger. To some extent one can get used even to pain, or – like Stramonium or Opium – one can separate himself from it and be able not to suffer because of usually painful problems. And that can last for years. But, when it comes to hunger, everything is happening very fast and cannot be denied.

What is left for the man when he loses his faith? This question will not have the same significance for everyone. A man without faith can cultivate the land, work and earn money. But Sulphurs don’t cultivate the land, they are generally not persons who work, and they usually don’t earn a lot of money. They are Birds of Heaven and if they lose their faith, they also lose everything that feeds them and makes them rich. Therefore, Sulphur is afraid of losing his faith.

Veratrum

“Some joys, it’s true, are wrong in Heaven’s eyes;
Yet Heaven is not averse to compromise”
Tartuffe, Molière

Religiousness of Veratrum is very specific and confirmed in many rubrics:

• MIND – DELUSIONS – christ, himself to be
• MIND – DELUSIONS – god – communication with God; he is in
• MIND – DELUSIONS – god – messenger from God; he is a
• MIND – DELUSIONS – great person, is a
• MIND – DELUSIONS – heaven, is in – talking with God
• MIND – DELUSIONS – voices – hearing
• MIND – DELUSIONS – influence; one is under a powerful
• MIND – DELUSIONS – religious
• MIND – ECCENTRICITY – religious
• MIND – EXCITEMENT – religious
• MIND – EXHILARATION – religious
• MIND – INSANITY – religious
• MIND – LOQUACITY – religious subjects, about
• MIND – PRAYING – kneeling and
• MIND – PREACHING – religious psychotic preaching
• MIND – DELUSIONS – bells; hears ringing of

Eccentricity means any behaviour of individual which is in some extent perceived as unusual, “strange” or as deviation from parameters of “normal”. It is usually understood as behaviour that reflects unusual means for solving certain problems and unusual priorities in everyday life, but does not disobey moral or legal norms of the society. People who display benignly eccentric and socially acceptable behaviour are labelled as weirdos or eccentrics.

On the other hand, eccentricity is often associated with the members of upper class in the society, and their wealth and influence make them immune to criticism or astonishment that unconventional behaviour would cause in the case of members of other social classes.

(Source: Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian version)

If we add rubrics describing his character, we come to the pure essence of things.

MIND – HONOR – sense of honor – no sense of honor
MIND – FAECES – swallows his own
MIND – BITING – shoe and swallows the pieces; his
MIND – GREED, cupidity

“Biting his shoe” and “swallows his own faeces” – tells us what kind of person it is. That is the person able to do things that can cause disbelief and disgust in others.

He is preaching religion and thinks of himself as a Jesus; he is inspired while doing that, but in his behaviour we can notice overflowing madness, delusions and entering into zone of mental disorders. Besides, he is lascivious, he has uncontrolled sexual desire and socially unacceptable contacts.

MIND – OBSCENE, lewd – man searching for little girls

Religiousness should prevent him from behaving immorally, but he does not have a problem with it.

(Tartuffe, worshiper, trying to seduce Elmire, spouse of the man who welcomed him in his home)

Verses

TARTUFFE
If Heaven is all that holds you back, don’t worry.
I can remove that hindrance in a hurry.
Nothing of that sort need obstruct our path.

ELMIRE
Must one not be afraid of Heaven’s wrath?

TARTUFFE
Madam, forget such fears, and be my pupil,
And I shall teach you how to conquer scruple.
Some joys, it’s true, are wrong in Heaven’s eyes;
Yet Heaven is not averse to compromise;
There is a science, lately formulated,
Whereby one’s conscience may be liberated,
And any wrongful act you care to mention
May be redeemed by purity of intention.
I’ll teach you, Madam, the secrets of that science;
Meanwhile, just place on me your full reliance.
Assuage my keen desires, and feel no dread:
The sin, if any, shall be on my head.

The sentence “The end justifies the means” describes the essence of Veratrum in the best possible way. His goals are high, he does not choose means and the fact that he represents himself as a highly and uncompromisingly religious person gives him opportunity for many manipulations and frauds. For him “Whereby one’s conscience may be liberated, any wrongful act you care to mention may be redeemed by purity of intention”.

Author: Maja Letić   – All rights reserved