I was inspired to write this article after speaking to one of my clients, a young man in his thirties. He was spouting his belief system about the state of the world. “Inflation is out of control. The Feds are going to keep on raising interest rates. There are more foreclosures now than there ever has been in history. We cannot afford to stay in our house. The property rates in California are going down and down. This house is worth much less than it was when we bought it. If the interest rates go any higher, we will not be able to stay in our home.”
This young man is a musician. “It is much harder for musicians to survive nowadays. Fewer people can afford to attend shows. Attendance has dropped significantly from past years. You can’t make money on selling music since Spotify came on the scene.”
The attitude I could see in all this is that it is hopeless. It is impossible to succeed. The cards are stacked against us. We are unfortunate. No matter what we do, we can’t get ahead.
This is a good demonstration of the syphilitic miasm [a taint; miasm is an obstacle to cure the deeper roots to disease]. The attitude in this miasm is that everything is hopeless. No matter what we do we will not succeed. There is worry and fear about the future, and a general negative attitude towards life.
Anais Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
In this example, the person with a dominant syphilitic worldview focuses his attention on all the flaws in the world; everything that is bad about it.
By constantly pointing out the flaws in the world, places where things have gone wrong, there may be some hope that they can somehow bring about change, because people wake up and do good, vote for the right politician, and change people’s beliefs and habits.
Sympathetic Remedy
This brings to mind the remedy Causticum, a sympathetic remedy. They have sympathy for the suffering in the world and they put energy behind causes, such as getting rid of 5G Towers, protesting vaccine mandates and so forth. It is interesting that this is a highly syphilitic remedy. The person wants to do good, and their bodies are rewarded by arthritis that disfigures the joints.
This also reminds me of Verse # 29 from Tao Te Ching:
Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.
There is a time for being ahead,
A time for being behind;
A time for being in motion,
A time for being at rest;
A time for being vigorous,
A time for being exhausted;
A time for being safe,
A time for being in danger.
The Master sees things as they are,
Without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
And resides at the centre of the circle.
Going back to the story of the musician, I said, “You are viewing the world in a negative light. What effort can you put in to change your personal situation.” The young man lives in a rural area where jobs are scarce, so I gave him examples of work people can do from home, like in the service industry. I asked, “Is it possible for you to get a job working for a company like Amazon, or GoDaddy, and be one of the people who helps troubleshoot problems when people call in?”
The young man told me that a company that manufactures the software that he uses to produce his electronic music is offering a course to get certified in this software. It is a one-month course after which he will have a certificate that says he is a certified instructor for this software.
“Ah, but I cannot afford to take this course. It costs $750.00. Where am I going to get the money from?”
I recommended that he charges it to his credit card and buys the class. “This is a wonderful opportunity for you to have an additional income stream.” The young man agreed and paid for the class. A month later he completed the course, and was excited to have the certificate. He advertised that he was now an instructor. He started to receiving calls for private classes from people who were interested in learning the software.
Direction Of Health
Now, this young man is moving into a healthier attitude. He is moving in the direction of health, which is towards the psoric miasm, or the creative phase in Eastern thought. In this phase, the worldview is that life is a struggle, but if you put in the effort, you will succeed, you will survive.
The focus in the psoric miasm is not on what is the matter with the world, but what can I do in a step-by-step fashion to improve my situation, or the situation of my family.
The individual is staying in the moment, and present with what is and what he needs to do. There is a feeling that the job is not impossible; that ‘I can do it.’
The psoric miasm by itself does not produce destructive processes in the body. It produces functional disturbances.
The next miasm I want to describe is the sycotic miasm. I associate this with the preserving phase in Eastern thought.
In the psoric phase the individual works — but not too hard — just the right amount. In the sycotic phase, they overwork. They work too many hours, too late, and loo long. There is a lack of a sense of good balance.
This manifests in the body as overgrowth of tissue. Here, you have obesity, warty growths and proliferations, excessive discharges and swellings.
On the mental plane, you have a lack of balance, a tendency to overthink things. You can see an excess in moods and behaviours. Sadness carried too far, anger carried too far. Excessive purchasing, excessive eating, excessive desires, and excessive reactions to stimuli. All manner of mental illness falls into the sycotic miasm.
When the three phases are out of balance, or present simultaneously within the individual we have what homeopaths call trimiasmatic disease. Cancer, allergies, and asthma are examples of trimiasmatic diseases.
Everyone has primary miasms in different degrees. These are the original three miasms that Dr Samuel Hahnemann, MD, the founder of homeopathy named. Subsequently, many other miasms were named, especially by Dr Rajan Sankaran, MD [Hom]. Most of these are combinations of the original three miasms. We can make an analogy with the colour wheel used by artists, where you have three primary colours, three secondary colours, three tertiary colours and so forth.
The more one embodies the psoric phase the closer they are to good health. The more one moves towards the syphlitic phase, the more one is going towards illness.
Conclusion
This is my brief introduction to the concept of miasms in homeopathy. An understanding of the miasms can help people build self-awareness, as they start to identify where their thinking is negative and self-destructive, and hopefully take steps to purify their thoughts and attitudes. Homeopathic remedies help to move people out of places where they are stuck mentally, emotionally and physically and move them towards healthier, freer and happier states of being.
