Editorial

Underlying the signs and symptoms of a diseased state we can find a belief about ourselves or the world around us. With the right remedy the whole reality of it vanishes like snow melting in the midday sun, and as a consequence so do the symptoms. For sure, new sensations and thoughts will enter the mind, but before they do, for a short moment, in the absence of pain or fear or whatever troubled us, there is just stillness.

Soon, as a reaction to being relieved from our complaints, happiness and gratitude or any other thought or feeling may enter the mind. However short it may be though, this moment of stillness seems essential to me. In it we experience a sense of well-being that comes from deep within ourselves. Not caused by anything external or by any thought, it simply is.

In the absence of an identification with a symptom, a disease, a role, a belief or even a thought we get this short glimpse of what self-realized people call our true nature. For sure, our mind soon breaks the silence with its endless activity. The supply of stories to be falsified seems endless, but each time we are able to drop one we can again experience the vastness of our true nature.

Iʼve come to understand that life is always similar to who we are. With or without homeopathic remedies life presents its simillimum to us. Each of us lives in a mind-created reality and through events and circumstances life continuously mirrors back this reality to us. Anything false in it hurts, and thus we live with memories of pain and fears for the future, and falsifying each and every one of them is what will make us truly free and establish us more firmly in this inner stillness.

There have always been teachers to help man do this. With plants being the main topic of this issue the tree is a teacher life provides us with that Iʼd like to mention here.

“When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself. You connect with it at a deeper level. You feel a oneness with whatever you perceive in and through stillness. Feeling the oneness of yourself with all things is true love.”[1]

Fig. 1 Banyan tree in Rishi Valley, Madanapalle, India.

A picture is only a faint reflection of its majestic presence, but if you take the time to really look at this banyan tree, you may hear its eternal message:

Harry van der Zee

¹ Eckhart Tolle in “Stillness Speaks”, Hodder & Stoughton, London 2003.