Structuralism and the Plant Kingdom

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Frodsham (Chester), Cheshire, United Kingdom
Interests: Philosophy, Homeopathy, Ayurveda, Buddhism, Psychosynthesis, Hypnotherapy and R.E.B.T.

Monday 26 March 2012

Enjoying, sharing and maintaining in Stage 11.

Stage 11 - in control?

Once we reach Stage 11 we want to share the benefits of our accomplishments.   The project is complete and we prosper. However, there is great tension in this Stage. You  have to keep checking that its all running smoothly.  The tension comes from  the feeling they are on the verge of  failure. Tension is reflected very strongly in the physical symptoms.

- The Stage 11 remedy of the Ferrum (work) Series is Cuprum.  All the Ferrums  want to protect themselves but they are usually obliged to  put up with “the rules of the game”, so their own feelings get suppressed, and they can feel guilty if their performance is sub-standard. 

In Cuprum the feeling is that they can't ease up for a moment.  They have to keep everything under control so they follow the rules carefully. They are always checking.   They think they are faultless, so they don't like criticism and will deal it out.

 - AMBITION - increased - competitive.
 - DUTY - too much sense of duty. Takes responsibility too seriously.
 - DICTATORIAL. FASTIDIOUS.  RITUALISTIC BEHAVIOR.
 - MIND - CHANGE - aversion to.  FEAR - failure, of
 - HARDHEARTED. RAGE. HATRED - revengeful; hatred and.
 - SUSPICIOUS. DELUSIONS - thieves - seeing.
 - THOUGHTS - compelling. 

 - DISCOURAGED.
 - MIND - FEAR - failure, of - confirmation; needs constant



- The Stage 11 remedy of the Silver Series (intellect) is Argentum.   In this series the focus is on performance and perfection.  They are creatively inspired and want to be special.

In Argentum they want to hold onto the success of their creativity.  They are full of ideas but their fear is that it will all come crashing down.  They are very social but their anxieties make them  tense.

  - SENSITIVE - opinion of others;  DREAM of quarrels with friends;
  - LOQUACIOUS. UNTRUTHFUL.
  - CONSCIENTIOUS about trifles.
  - MANIA - alternating with - depression.
  - IDEAS - abundant.  Ideas, deficiency of.
  - SELF-CONTROL - loss of self-control.
  - CHECKING - twice or more;
 
  - THOUGHTS - compelling
  -DISCOURAGED. 
  -DELUSON - fail, everything will.

Argentum is frequently given in the form of Arg Nit.  The Nitricum can add a sense of compression or pressure - they want something and want it now; it it doesn't happen they can become enraged.  They will fight for what they want or what they believe, a bit like Causticum, who is incensed by injustice to the point of becoming an Anarchist. However Causticum's objective is to protect others, family, friends, society - its a more 'social animal'; Nitricums needs are rather more self centered!
 


- The Stage 11 remedy of the Lanthanides (inner power) is Terbium.  The focus of the Lanthanides is on self-control and inner strength.  Their efforts are directed toward achieving  strength of mind.

In Terbium they need to keep control over themselves.  They appear confident but being out of control is a serious issue, so they often get into yoga and other disciplines.  


When out of balance Terbiums, rather like Arsenicums, can be very controlling (they can be a pain in the butt, to put it bluntly)This can develop when they are responsible for a situation that seems to be right at the limits of their capacity. So everything has to be perfect. Again, just like other Stage 11 remedies, the accounts have to be checked and balanced, and they have to show a profit. Only then can they can enjoy life! The nit-picking conflicts they tend to create in difficult times can be very irritating.  When their troubles are  acknowledged they begin to trust others and learn to delegate. 

Terbium Carb in particular, relaxes all this tension allowing the original autonomous personality to come shining through. Autonomy and self-respect need not depend on anything.  Others are capable of autonomy too, and that the river still flows without their help!

The physical tension in this remedy can very intense indeed.

 - SELF-CONTROL - radiating an aura of control.


- The Stage 11 remedy of the Gold Series (power) is Aurum.  The focus of the Gold Series is responsibility.  They use their power to rule – for better or for worse.

In Aurum they want to hold onto their power.  They are very serious and responsible, and don't like to be accused of negligence.


 - SELF-CONTROL - increased. 
 - THOUGHTS - compelling.
 -DISCOURAGED.
 -DELUSON - fail, everything will.

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Linguistic Methodololy

Linguistic methodology for representing and clustering rubrics (Cluster analysis)

 Recently I'v been looking for the common lexical ground shared by Sankaran's miasms and Scholten's Stages - so far with encouraging results. With care we can get some correlation between Stages/Miasms in *Minerals* and in *Plants*, so that 'Stage 17' for example includes all the 'antisocial' remedies, not just minerals.  The question of Plant or Mineral doesnt come into it initially - its the antisocial behavoiur we notice first -  so have the great homepathic authors sold us a pup in insiting that Kingdom Differentiation is the first step ... ?
 
Ferdinad De Saussure defines 'Langue' as the totality of the language and 'Parole' as the words we use most often e.g. in Homeopathy ... quite a small sub-set of what is available. The parole of Homeopathy includes keywords, concepts, themes, rubrics and so on.

These are the keywords we feed in to any analysis. However, these keywords trigger a huge spectrum of spurious associations across all the Kingdoms.

The answer? To reorganise conventional concepts and groups by grouping similar rubrics or keywords according to lexical distance or similarity.

A tree diagram (dendrogram) would highlight the lexical distance of the rubric DOMINEERING from the rest of a group of rubrics which included TIMIDITY and YIELDING. The result of this clustering method is a linguistic tree for each remedy based on lexical similarity … e.g. where the node TIMIDITY is not far from YEILDING and many branches away from the antonym DOMINEERING.

Since the remedy Silica is an oxide  the properties of the oxide enter into the picture  - it adds selfishness and a feeling of being abused (the source of Silicas' defiance and audacity). The main idea is that Silica is fragile and easily abused. The properties imparted to the remedy by the Oxide stand out clearly. This is a brilliant way to re-present Scholtens methodology.

In this simplified dendrogram there are 4 or 5 main lexical groups (leaves or nodes) in the tree …

Anxiety group (Sil)
Affection group (Sil)
Yielding group (Sil)
Audacity/Anger group (Sil + Oxide)
Abuse group (Oxide)

Silica - rubrics and concepts dendrogram




The branch lengths and junctions on the tree show how closely the neighbouring groups are related. All that remains is to match the clinical data to the remedy tree. These are all common rubrics, so the detail in the silica dendrogram above is only sufficient to create a new group of 'Silica-like' remedies...

[ Lyc nux-v sep sil staph puls ign sulph ]

This is the most minimal rubric data we need to describe the group. Once we include 'family' or 'stage' specific keywords i.e. the strange, rare and peculiar symptoms of a remedy the dendrogram is complete and identifies the individual remedy.


A Venn Diagramm is an alternative way of graphically and numerically representing remedy data. When we were taught to differentiate Silca (chronic of Puls) from Pulsatilla the tutor used a similar visual representation to good effect.  This is how the ' A.P.G. Tree of Life' is represented in the Plants Database project.