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Provings
Unit 15
Provings – Misha Norland

The School has had a long involvement with provings, we have a lot of experience of doing it, so I feel it
would be nice to do some of this…….like a story, because this is what we do at the School.

Now, remembering the first person to carry out a proving was Hahnemann; as you know, he proved
cinchona and developed symptoms in himself. I’m sure he had the ‘Aha!’ before the china proving but the
story goes that this was the ‘Aha!’ moment where he saw that the symptoms that he was producing were
very similar to the symptoms of malaria. Big ‘Aha!’ moment because now he could apply the law of
homeopathy, which he already knew about, other people had spoken of it, for the treatment of this disease.
As we all know, it worked and so much more arose out of it.

Provings are the bedrock, therefore, for homeopathy. They were bedrock for Hahnemann and they’re a
bedrock for any practitioner because they give you the information you need to make the match of the
symptoms, of the proving with the symptoms of the disease.

Well, that’s the simple story. It is slightly more complicated because sometimes one person, like
Hahnemann, taking a medicinally active substance like cinchona could produce symptoms sufficient to
recognise malaria and have his ‘Aha!’, but this isn’t always the case. So, a group of people are involved, and
this is what Hahnemann stipulated. He said a group of people should come together under the umbrella of
the investigative team, which quite often in Hahnemann’s case for instance, was only him, but ideally is
more than one – the work is better split. So, you have a group of people who undertake an experiment,
which is to dose themselves with a medicine and become sick by it and a group of observers who take their
case day by day to make sure that all the symptoms are correctly recorded and none are missed. Then,
subsequently, to analyse the information that’s given according to the law of similars, where similar things
crop up, you give them a stronger mark. 5 people out of a group of 10 get that left-sided head pain in the
temple you say: “Oh, this seems to be quite a strange and important symptom of this remedy – we know it’s
a thuja remedy.” If 3 people get it, it’s not quite as significant, if 1 person gets it, it’s indeed even less so. This
is how the plan works – I’m sure you know this already – but what I want to tell you about is what happens
at the School.

So, here we have a ready-made group of students. They all know one another and have done for some
years. Like you they’ve been studying homeopathy together, so they’d make a very interesting group to

Copyright School of Homeopathy since 1981

 Unit 15: Provings

experiment on themselves and be observed by a further on cohort of students, so it’s like the fourth year act
as the supervisors for the third-year group who are the proving volunteers. That’s the idea.

Sometimes we can get the most amazing provings out of it, for whatever reason, something to do with the
susceptibility in the group that’s inherent there, something to do with the energy of the proving substance
that interplays with them and through them that the symptoms are produced. It may be just the moment
is right. I feel certain that the moment is important in any venture of this nature. It’s something to do with
the harmonisation of the energies that the proving material contains locked within it as it were and the
energy in the collective at the moment. So, like what’s happening out there in the world right now? If
there’s a correspondence between what the proving experience is and the experience of many out there in
the collective it’s likely to have a much stronger effect because it touches something which has already been
touched in the provers and there’s a coherence.

Let’s talk about the falcon proving because it was very, very, very strong. I remember how the provers sat
round and were altered, they looked different. One of the things that was obvious, in terms of a different
look, was that out of the group of maybe 15 or 20 provers, 5 of them had painted their nails – I know it was
5 because I counted – which was a bit unusual, since two of them were men who had painted their nails.
They’d actually been to a party and, for some reason, they decided to paint their nails, they had a nail
painting session at the party. But why did they do that? I mean, is that usual? Not as far as I know. They
described how they’d had absolutely horrible problems driving – especially they found roundabouts really
difficult. If you’re not English you won’t call it ‘a roundabout’, if you’re American you’d call it ‘a traffic circle’.
They’d get onto the traffic circle and would find they couldn’t…..they got disorientated and they couldn’t
work out which exit. Sometimes they had to go round several times before they could figure it out and
eventually escape that endless spiralling. Great, isn’t it, for a raptor that spirals to gain height before it
plunges down upon its prey. And so, indeed, are the talons painted, because you contact your prey talons
first and often just that impact of talons upon prey is sufficient to kill it – the bird doesn’t always have to
bring the bird down and rip out its neck. A lot of neck problems here in this remedy, of course, as you might
imagine.

Yeah, I was very struck by the falcons and also the provers……they reminded me, actually, of reptiles, or
equally birds. You know the way they move jerkily? They were doing a lot of this. And they sat, they sat with
their arms akimbo, with their hands, painted fingernails, on their knees and………….they literally had turned
into falcons. It’s wonderful and not always that one sees that. It’s more obvious with an animal remedy
because we can move into the gestalt of an animal more readily than we can into the crystal structure of
sulphur, for instance, (laughs) it’s obvious. But it’s great to see it happen. It’s like a possession has taken
place. The Vital Force is the agent whereby it is expressed. It happens at an energetic level, the ‘E’ side of the
E=mc3 equation. Obviously, that is how the information is transmitted, out of the bottle containing the
potency and into the prover’s being. But you really can see how the being is taken over. You don’t see the
agency of the Vital Force, of course, but you see the manifestations. The manifestations go on into the
symptoms and go on to be recorded by the supervisors and go into the notebooks and then are organised
according to similarities, similar themes and so on. So, that what looks like a list of individuals having
individual experiences becomes a list of everybody experiencing it as one. The influence is the same for
everybody, they become as one. It’s a bit like being overtaken by an epidemic, only in this case the epidemic
was falcon. We could, of course, do a proving of any of the epidemics but there wouldn’t be that much
point, do you see? Because during the epidemic, the people all develop symptoms, and we are symptom
gathering anyway. For instance, we’re right now in the middle of a Corona epidemic, pandemic indeed, and
everyone knows the symptoms of the disease – at least for the moment. Actually, it’s mutating, so by and

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by the symptoms may alter. But the collective common symptoms are the proving and we are the provers.
We didn’t ask for it, that’s the difference. We didn’t willingly put ourselves in that place. But we are
overwhelmed by it and then individual facets of our own natures are secondary to the superimposed quality
of the pandemic or, in this case, of the falcon.

Actually, in a proving, with a proving potency it’s not a complete takeover, it’s partial. So, the two run side by
side, there’s the way we normally are and the changed us and, of course, we’re mostly interested in the
changed us, not interested in the normal us because we wish to discover what the proving substance is.

OK, that’s it. That’s my little chat, really. We can keep it as short as this.

But I don’t want to. I want to tell you one thing more. It’s about the nature of the influence. Homeopaths
are for ever talking about the nature of influence. How on earth did the remedy get into the bottle and then
how does it get out of the bottle into the patient when there’s nothing in it? And we’re forever looking for
some agency whereby this can be transmitted. The idea of the memory of water is fascinating, isn’t it? Such
amazing stuff, water. And, sure, we know it does memorise things and we can show it at various levels of
subtlety. But in the proving there was no water.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention a missing link. Sorry about that.

In the proving group, not everybody takes the pill because some people say: “I don’t want to be part of this
proving group”. They did in falcon and they do in most. They say: “No, no. There’s various reasons why I
don’t want my life disturbed. Anyway, it’s a commitment for a couple of months, so it’s life, basically,
disturbed or disrupted for two months and I can’t deal with this, so I will not take the pill.” But do you think
that stopped them being provers? No, it did not. If they were susceptible the influence got there anyway.
How did it get there when they didn’t take the pill? That was the question. It wasn’t water that transmitted
it, it wasn’t lactose that transmitted it, it wasn’t anything physical that transmitted it, they got it on the
airwaves. Yeah, but what are the airwaves? It’s not electromagnetic because, you know, it’s…..what is it?
There’s a question. Nobody has an answer. But we know that it isn’t this and it isn’t that and it isn’t the
other, it’s something else. It’s every bit as mysterious as the Vital Force itself, that spiritual part that we can’t
see.

So, that was another very interesting experience that we all had. When you’re part of the group and
experiencing it, you know, it becomes visceral. It’s not some theoretical idea or some strange, mystical
experience, it’s very real and absolutely tangible. So, that’s the element I’d like to add, which Hahnemann
doesn’t talk about so much. Actually, in the 6th edition of The Organon he does talk about mesmerism,
which was going on at the time. He was living in Paris, the older Hahnemann, with Melanie, and imbued by
all these interesting, amazing things that were happening, revolutionary things that were happening and
mesmerism was just one of them. So, he talks about it, he talks about magnets and about mesmeric passes
and the healing of mesmeric…..the flux of whatever it was that was healing, making all of this. Hahnemann
understood but he….and he just begins to make reference to it in the 6th edition. If he’d written a 7th maybe
he would have made more reference to it. If he’d lived to be 100+, rather than 90+, who knows what else
would have flowed forth from his pen? He’s left us to do it.

Yeah. Very good. Provings are the bedrock of homeopathy, without them we wouldn’t have the science.
And we do have them and it’s fantastic and I consider homeopathy to be as healthy, as vital, dynamic as its
involvement in provings. And, you know, when I started studying homeopathy there were virtually no

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 Unit 15: Provings

provings being undertaken at all. It was like it had gone quiet, it had gone dead and then it re-awoke and
due to the efforts of many people – I’ve got to single out Jeremy because Jeremy Sherr – because of his
wonderful understanding of the philosophy of homeopathy and his fantastic work in the field of provings,
not to mention his work in curing people and helping people and, indeed, in the treatment of pandemics.
So, hats off to you, Jeremy, and to your beautiful enrichment in our understanding of homeopathy.

Thank you.

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