Author:
Jan Scholten
Book:
Sense Provings
Type:
Info
Chapter:
0.3
0.3 Introduction
Companion of Wonderful Plants
This book is a companion of the book “Wonderful Plants”, where the Plant theory is described. My original idea was to publish the proving in this book in the Wonderful plant book. But gradually that gave more problems. The proving take up much space and Wonderful Plants would have become thicker and heavier. A second objection is that the provings, especially the long ones like the picture proving disrupt the flow of the Wonderful plant book. Therefore I decided to place the proving in a separate book., the book Sense proving. It is meant as a reference book for further study.
Provings
I started doing dream proving in a study groups. In dream proving we took the remedy the evening before the meeting and then put our attention on the dreams that following night and all other experiences and events. Those proving often were quite nice but they’re fragmentary and seldom led to a correct prescription.
Then I started with meditation proving during seminars, letting the participants of the seminar hold the remedy in their hand and meditate on it for about 10 minutes. The advantage is that they were short, taking little time. But the result was very inaccurate, containing a lot of noise. It was very difficult to find out the valuable symptoms in between of them. The change to picture proving made little difference. In picture proving a picture of the remedy, mostly a plant, is shown to the participants, mostly of a seminar, and they meditate on it for about 10 minutes. Also picture provings produced much noise and some valuable in symptoms in between, but difficult to recognise.
Bath proving
By accident I discovered the bath proving. I once did too much of an essential oil in one of my baths. The smell and other impression were so intense that I got all kinds of symptoms. I started doing them more regularly. But they mostly gave a kind of atmosphere, a kind of sensation and emotion and some physical symptoms. An essence was lacking. In hindsight I think it was because my lack of knowledge of the essential aspects of proving.
Classical provings
Classical provings were always an option. One reason to keep me from doing them is the amount of time and energy that go into them. Classical provings from other homeopaths also showed noise and many symptoms with a lack of coherence. The repertories got filled with symptoms of such proving without giving a real understanding.
Trituration provings
The next step was doing trituration proving, where 3 to 5 provers triturate a remedy to a C3 potency during 3 to 4 hours and meditate on it. I had heard good results from them from several sources such as Jonathan Shore. The proving seminar On Lamu, an island in front of the coast of Kenya, was very revealing. We did proving of 16 remedies with very good results. For the first time I had the impression that the proving result was quite reliable and good prescriptions could be made on those pictures later on. In the Lamu proving I also discovered the 3 phases of provings and that many prove nags get stuck in Phase 1, the expression phase. That expresso phase gives a lot of symptoms that are only expression. They gives a chaotic, fragmentary picture that doesn’t make sense. One has to go to the next phase, the problem phase to understand the problem. Than the picture gets meaning, becomes a whole. I also learned that one can facilitate that transfer form expression phase to problem phase. It is fairly easy for provers to reach the third phase of solution after reaching the problem phase. The next proving seminar in Kenton on sea, a city on the coast of South Africa, benefited very much form this understanding and the provers were grown into the way of those proving. The results were even better but especially achieved with less effort. The result of those two proving seminars are publish in “Lamu provings” and “Kenton provings”.
Sense provings
In the same period that I started with the Trituration proving I started also with the sense proving. A story triggered it. I read about a shaman who was disappointed in his herbalism and almost give up but then suddenly got the idea that he could talk to the plants to know what they could heal and for which patient they were needed. From then on he had good results again. I realised that one can get a picture by doing a simple kind of proving by just smelling, tasting, experiencing and looking at a plant. Sense proving can give a good result in quite a short time. One can do them alone or with others. The realist depends on how deep one can go into the proving. Also here on has to go one level deeper, from expression phase to problem phase. When that is successful, the result is also quite good, good enough to get successful prescriptions.
Result
Since that time the Sense and Trituration proving have been my main source of proving information.
In this book Sense proving one can find the sense provings, some trituration provings and the bath, dream and picture provings. They can be used as sources for later research and comparison.
Conclusion
The experience with different kinds of proving have learned me several things. The first is that the form of the proving is not very relevant. The main thing is the focus, the attention of the prover on the remedy. In Trituration and Sense proving the attention is very high, the focus is only on the remedy. In classical proving that is the opposite, there is very much diversion. A second aspect is trust. Provers have to trust the process to set their critical personality aside during the proving. The critic is a very helping personality in general, but during the proving he is detrimental, killing all the symptoms. The third factor is that one has to dive one level deeper than the expression level to get an idea of what the remedy is really about.
These aspects are described further in the Chapters “Theory of Provings” and “Phases in Provings”.