0.1.5 Foreword Pieter Kuiper
‘Wonderful Plants’ is not a book, it’s a ‘Work’.
Jan Scholten has distinguished himself repeatedly before, but most distinctive has been his clarification of the Periodic System of Elements for practical use in homeopathy, including the so precious Lanthanides.
What he has presented with his previous ‘Homeopathy and the Elements’ is in fact unveiling specific Laws in Nature behind the Periodic System. These Laws reveal a kind of structure of Nature in the form of the 7 Series and the 18 Stages as a universal principle. The Series and Stages represent the true intrinsic character of the building blocks of Nature with all their existing combinations, described in terms of our era.
This ‘Work’ has already inspired many homeopaths all over the world and lead to many a cure.
And now, in ‘Wonderful Plants’, we are shown that these Laws of Nature behind the organization of the Mineral Kingdom are just the same principles behind the magic world of the Plant Kingdom. This even applies within all its specific Phyla, Orders and Families. We see the same 7 Series appear with similar traits and characteristics. The Stages also come back as the so called Phases and Subphases within the Series, but they distinguish every plant within its own Plant family as well.
Hence, these Laws and principles, which are to be found on a large scale in the Kingdoms and on a smaller scale in Classes and even Plant families, appear to be like a ‘fractal’, a concept well known in physics.
Like in the Periodic System, this may imply that we could predict what character or idea a specific Plant family, unknown in homeopathy, might represent. And though the Plant kingdom is far more complex than the Mineral kingdom, all those different pictures of the great variety of Plant Phyla, Classes, Orders and Families are now embedded in a clear taxonomic system.
As a friend and colleague I know Jan since 1986. He was the first participant to arrive when I organised the seminar for George Vithoulkas on Alonissos.
Since then he not only developed as an eminent homeopath but he also became an expert in botany and taxonomy.
Before, during or after the seminars he presented all over the world, he visited dozens of botanical gardens where he made thousands of pictures of plants. But apart from making and organizing these pictures he incessantly proved many a plant himself with the direct aim to understand the nature of the enormous variety within the Plant kingdom. We can read about these pictures in his newly published ‘Sense Provings’.
It is impressive to see how many years have been necessary to establish all the clarifications from the intuitive notions Jan already had about the Plant kingdom from the beginning. I remember he explained more than 15 years ago how the Series from the Mineral kingdom could also be applied to discriminate the organisation of the Plant kingdom. And even at that time the Stages were used to distinguish the different plants within their family.
In his practice he kept on applying all these ideas intuitively and methodically through the years. More and more difficult cases were solved or even cured by completely unknown remedies.
Just read some of those hundreds of cases which witness and illustrate the clear and methodical approach of how to prescribe remedies from the Plant kingdom.
After reading the book myself, including all the cases, I noticed he also honours Hahnemann in the sense that in almost every case the mental-emotional picture of the problem of the patient chiefly determined the selection of the remedy (§ 211 Organon).
To present us the complete pictures of specific plants, families and orders in such a logic and detailed taxonomic system, fitting the problems of our time, is therefore truly a ‘Work’.
A more complete and living Materia Medica of the Plant kingdom has never been created before and it could well be The Book of the future of homeopathy.
I consider it as a great honour to introduce ‘Wonderful Plants’ to the homeopathic world of today.
Pieter Kuiper, Bussum.