Chapter 10
A Bridge to Life
“It is impossible to put truth into words”25, says Bach and perhaps that is why he whittled his writings down to the minimum. People who have a familiarity with them will know of their simplicity. Yet they are still fraught with structured ideas of Soul and Divinity Bach sought for words to describe the simple truth he had perceived in his being while ultimately the only witness we can have to the truth is to be there in it ourselves. For that we must stay in being without thought or judgement seeing life simply for what it is.
Of course it is not easy. We want answers, we want structures. If this bridge is to be built it must have foundations of reason and purpose, the building blocks of meaning and the clear span of intellect. Oh? But they bring tension, worry, anxiety and uncertainty. Such fixed forms create stricture and control. Already I begin to doubt my existence, to doubt my being It is like it is like a tight-rope walker balancing high but beginning to falter when he looks down, it is fear and doubt that assail him as his foot slips Such are the difficulties of the mind
We should walk, as Bach did, into the fields and then look again. There we may see that life IS. Do you see the shift, from inside the head and out into the free spaces of being? In the field the grass waits patiently in service sheltering the earth and its inhabitants, thistles blow their seed, trees endure the spaces while the crows rattle noisily above the heads of the sheep. All are just being We may be struggling to understand in the noise of our thoughts until we stop and look outward. Then we may receive the gentle perception of being. Truly the half of our problem is that we try too hard. For understanding is just Being:
Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
God gave Solomon “wisdom and understanding beyond measure and largeness of mind like the sand on the seashore” and he “spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall...” He spoke of the natural world and his words were wise. But there is greater wisdom yet in nature itself. There we may perceive our being, not merely hear of it reflected in proverbs and fine teachings. Knowledge is available to everyone of us through the perception of our being. To know what this is we must do it, not think about it. And when we know this we will see the simplicity of it all.
It is the mind that always returns to theories. The heart works in practice. There is a gentleness like soft rain in this truth. And if we doubt its relevance to Bach’s work consider: why else did he spend so much time out in the countryside walking, watching, observing and being? He had travelled as far as he might in the realms of theoretical medicine and he then went to contact the only one great healer in this life.
Of course he still had questions. We still have questions. But we know where they must be addressed. That, as we suggested earlier, is the riddle of nature. They will be answered by intuition: which is nothing more than “being natural”.
If we wish to cross this bridge and so to cross the gulf of the unknown we need two buttresses to support our plank. They are clear enough. One is self-knowledge, the other a knowledge of nature. One comes with the other, they are not to be seen separately. To put it more simply we need to know what is life. Understand that and we will see well enough how
Bach saw it. Bach tells us this in so many words when he speaks of the education that will be needed by the physician of the future. And let us remember that he said that we are all healers, all able to help ourselves and others - so the education of the physician is the education that we all need:
The education of the physician will be a deep study of human nature; a great realisation of the pure and perfect: and understanding of the Divine state of man... He will also have to study Nature and Nature’s Laws: be conversant with Her healing Powers...,26
The study of human nature is no great matter, we can study ourselves. And we have ample textbooks in the material that Bach gave us. A study of the 38 mental states that Bach describes in The Twelve Healers & Other Remedies will provide us with a complete picture of the dispositions of our nature. That is why he drew up the list! He observed the variety of psychological states and found that they derived from these 38 conditions of “outlook upon life”. These negative traits like anxiety, frustration or guilt determine the way that we look from inside of ourselves at the outside world. If we can see and understand the viewpoint or disposition from which we look out upon life we will understand why it is that we have a distorted perception of what life is. Could we but harmonise and balance the outlook through self-realization and self-knowledge we would not see outwardly anything but the simple truth of what life is. Knowing that, we would know ourselves to be one with it — in the unity of life. No more conflict, no more difficulty. Simply being.
The other way around is equally appropriate: we may either feel discomforted with the outer world or with the inner. If we look at nature and see it for what it is, recognising the profound truth and simplicity that is written in every part of the natural world then we would reflect back into ourselves that truth and could not fail to be happy. What we see outside is a reflection of what we are. What we are is a reflection of what we perceive life to be.
To see a World in a grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
Bach puts it a little differently from Blake. For Bach the idea is put into a word rather than an image but the message is identical:
The development of Love brings us to the realisation of Unity, of the truth that one and all of us are the One Great Creation.
The cause of all our troubles is self and separateness, and this vanishes as soon as Love and the knowledge of the great Unity becomes part of our natures. The Universe is God rendered objective; at its birth it is God reborn; at its close it is God more highly evolved. So with man; his body is himself externalised, an objective manifestation of his internal nature; he is the expression of himself, the materialisation of the qualities of his consciousness.27
If we could develop this love (heart rather than head) and realise this sense of unity (simply being) we would come to recognise how it is. We would become one with life and understand the nature of life and that we are one with it because it is one with us. Then whatever we looked at (outside) we would recognise as part of ourselves (inside). and then we would understand that whatever we experience inside has its equivalent outside. We are no longer stuck with the problem of me and my life because it is all ours and part of the unity.
Returning to Dr Bach and bridge building it may be clear now that he discovered his flower remedies because he allowed the nature of the plant to be one with his nature. He also allowed his nature to find its true equivalent in the plant. Once we stop putting up barriers and shells of separation it is most likely that like will go to like and that we will find what we are looking for. Much of this is so simple that it hardly needs to be said. Why, we know that certain people like certain colours and are naturally attracted to them. Others are drawn to a place they feel related to, or to eat food that will help them. Children know it: they even play the game What’s your favourite colour, what’s your favourite flower...?
If we could retain the simplicity of children we would know instinctively what would make us happy. We still do know it as adults and may think of it as unconscious preference or an intuitive prompting although it is no more than our selves saying “that is what I really want”. But we have grown away from our simplicity and our intuitive faculty of “being natural and following our own desire absolutely”. We have forgotten the simple joy of living and the happiness that comes from the heart. Rather do we stand on one bank of the river looking with envy and dissatisfaction at this world. Or, looking across the water we gaze with longing to a place where the sun shines but we feel unable to go. The river runs in our land, both banks are of this world but, yes, we need a bridge.