Lecture of Dr. Malte Hozzel
on an Aromatherapy Congress in Japan

Ladies and Gentlemen, honoured guests of this conference,

I take it as a special honour to be able to address all of you on this occasion, knowing that Japan is looking back on an age-old tradiiton of herbal medicine and natural healing. What can a Westerner from Germany add to this ? Certainly not the principles of natural healing and the knowledge about healing plants, which is as old as mankind and which – as the ancient Ayurvedic texts like “Charaka Samhita” describe – was handed down from the Gods to the sages or Rishis of early mankind. I am convinced that Shinto and Buddhist teachings which nourish the spirit of Japan since so long have both a long tradition of natural healing and left their imprint in the old culture of Japan.

So let me put it this way: We have nothing to add, nothing to invent. Everything universal or true, everything which has to do with the eternal continuum of life in the universe, whether gross or subtle, is already there. We just need to remember as it was ever before.

We have forgotten, that is for sure. Why have we forgotten ? We have lost the contact with our roots. We were given to believe that “out there” was something so incredible, so miraculously promising, that we thought: “maybe we should go out there and look after these things, which others have told us would be so great. Maybe it would be greater than what we have now, may be we wasted our time in playing around with all these ways of life that our forefathers adored…”

Karlfried Count Duerckheim, the famous German Zen-philosopher and knower of Japanese culture once dedicated a whole book on Japan, calling it “Japan and the Culture of Silence”. It is this silence from which all true cultures emerge, and it is this silence from where true knowledge of healing emerges too. Let me therefore make another statement:

Every healing comes from silence, and every silence is the beginning and the end of true healing

Medicinal plants have inhaled and exhaled that silence during the process of their evolution and individual growth. And they grow, ideally, in an environment far from the noise of the modern machine world, which we once invented to serve us, and which has started to invade our world and to enslave us to a hardly bearable extent.
“Herbs that sprang up in time of old, three ages earlier than the Gods…” says Hymn 97 of Rig-Veda, 10th Mandala, the oldest text of mankind, and continues: “Reliever is your mother’s name, and hence Restorers are ye called. Rivers are ye with wings that fly: keep far whatever brings disease…”

Yes, medicinal plants are incredibly old. We forget that they are – in a sense – our genetic ancestors reminding us of a primordial harmony with our own inner Self and with Nature. In their dependance from soil and air, the day and night rythms and the seasonal rythms, and in their intrinsic openness to the solar, lunar and stellar radiations they absorb terrestrial and cosmic influences which deeply profuse themselves into the core of their physical and chemical structure and which define the very fingerprint of their healing energy. The world of plants is still grounded in the basic unity of life which we have to find back in order to get healed in freedom. Plants are our allies on this path, created by Divine intelligence in order to help us rise in strenght, recreate health – if it is lost – and make our lives comfortable and in tune with the hearbeat of Nature. Thus plants help us to find the way to our own Atman or inner Light. And in this sense, plants are sacrificing themselves to the higher purpose of the Cosmos or the will of God. Vasant Lad, the renowned Ayurvedic physician, puts it this way in his famous book “The Yoga of Herbs”:

“Each thing exists to nourish all others, and, in return, to be nourished itself. In this manner, each kingdom of nature serves to receive and transmit life. This life is implicit in light and in the transmission of stellar and astral forces. These forces are not all material, but include subtle energies of an occult or spiritual nature. Plants transmit the vital-emotional impulses, the life-force that is hidden in light. That is the gift, the grace, the power of plants… The existence of plants is a great offering, a sacrifice. They offer us not only their own nutritive value but the very light and love from the stars, from the cosmos whose messengers they are.”

So we bow down today to the Intelligence of the Plant Kingdom through which – 200 million years ago – the first essential oils were created. These messengers came up with a fresh, forestal, slightly pungent note typical for the oils of the conifer family. In their extremely versatile character the oils of the Pinacea family represent the oldest aromatic energy on planet Earth and are mainly linked to the oxygenation of our planet’s atmosphere. Their connection with the human respirational system is oldest folk medicine. It may well be that some rough conditions and transformations in the earth’s atmosphere forced these species to develop the first essential oils – highly turpenic by the way – to protect them against putrefaction on one side and against extremely cold temperatures on the other. It is not surprizing that the oldest tree found on Earth with its over 4 000 years of age is a Pine tree, surviving under the ice-cold winds and snows in the high mountains of Eastern California…

Let us look a bit more into the past and see what happened with the medicinal use of essential oils through time: It may well be that our ancestors “discovered” the healing effects of certain plants when they burnt these in their domestic fires. The smoke of the burnt plants was certainly full of “medicinal” compounds, as we would say today. Until today the ample use of burning incense of certain resins or woods like myrrh, frankincense, benzoin, agarwood and others, containing high amounts of essential oils, reminds us of the old times when essential oils as such were not yet known, but the effects of certain burnt barks, wood or dried plants well understood. Other “discoveries” were quite certainly due to the daily usage of food and decoctions with each of these primeval communities living in the vicintiy of numerous, often endemic medicinal plants. A burial place more than 70 000 years old, discovered in Irak decades ago, revealed the presence of over 20 medicinal plants – ritually placed around the buried bodies – among these plants were several species from the Artemisia genus.

It is quite doubtful whether our ancestors only through trial and error and through observations “discovered” the diverse effects of healing plants. Seen from a more holistic angle, knowledge of healing was sacred and occult, linked to the Shamans, the Yogis, or men of wisdom, and it is they, who through their direct contact with the world of the ancestors, the plant Devas and the Higher Beings, could absorb and transmit the precise knowledge of how to use the different medicinal plants of their habitat.

Distillation came much later, probably not before the Bronze Age. Certain highly developed civilizations between the Euphrat and Tigris and Aryan peoples on the Indian subcontinent were probably the first to use real distillation equipments made out of clay to extract essential oils. That happened probably not more than 5 – 7 000 years ago. The Egyptians are known to have used essential oils of Cedar and Myrrh to embalm their dead, but they also used them as medicine, as cosmetics and as perfume. “Kyphy” is probably the most famous of the ancient Egyptian perfumes. It was common practice to wear a cone of essential oils within the hairdress. The heat of the sun and the body would slowly melt the cone and disperse the aromatic fluid over the skin, enveloping the carrier with the fine fragrances of flowers, herbs and resins. The Egyptians also made large use of medicinal plants in form of pills, powders, suppositories and ointments.

When Egypt was conquered by the Greek, the latter inherited the knowledge of oils and ointments. It is known that Greek soldiers carried with them an ointment made from myrrh oil to be applied on open wounds incurred in battle. The famous Greek physician Hippocrates used numerous essential oils and ointments for his treatments, and when Greece in turn was conquered by the Romans, the knowldedge of medicinal plants oils went further West quickly to spread throughout the Roman Empire. Galen, a famous Roman physician under the reign of Marcus Aurelius, was extremely knowledgeable about medicinal plants and their oils. Himself being linked to a large school of gladiators in Rome it is said that none of these poor victims of public frenzy died from their wounds under his herbal treatments.

It is probably from the Greek, the Middle East and India that the Arabs received their knwoledge about healing plants. Ibn Senna (or “Avicenna” as he was known in the West) used exetensively distillation of medicinal plants for his remedies. When the South of Spain was conquered by the Arabs it did not take long to spread a huge body of medicinal knowledge first over Southern Europe and then further to the North. Fumigation, ointments, pills as well as essential oils, all based on medicinal plants, were used to fight off disease, often linked to lack of hygiene. In early 16th century the famous astrologer and physician Michel de Nostredame, known as Nostradamus fumigated whole villages with aromatic plants to fight off the plague. The “Black Death” had come back after its furious attack on the old Continent in the 14th century, when more than 80 million people had died from it within a few years, that is more than half of the population of Europe.

It may make modern man smile to see how probably the most devastating catastrophy of the middle ages, the plague, was understood by the educated people and physicians of that time. Nobody had any notion whatsoever about microbes, bacteria, fungal infections, let alone viruses or genetic diseases. And in the case of the plague, it would have needed thousands of physicians like Nostradamus to bring about a tangible success. But from a general viewpoint and taken without prejudice, it is rather surprizing to see, how our ancestors, without the scientific knowledge of modern medicine, were able to fight, often with great precision, against major health problems. The aromatic substances or essential oils contained in the herbs, burnt by Nostradamus to disinfect plague ridden areas in the South of France, are known today in exact details with regards to their anti-bacterial properties. Thyme, Oregano, Savory and others were largely available in the South, and their phenolic concentration was high enough to procure sustainable and repeatable results.

If the essential oils of these plants had been available on a collective scale and their properties understood, Europe would not have undergone this amazing tragedy.

Nostradamus himself did not use book knowledge or scientific research. it was more through the intuitive channels of their consciousness and the direct experience of orally transmitted folk medicine that these physicians approached true healing. And it has been this way until the uprise of modern allopathic medicine – with its blessings and its curse.

The tendency to replace ancestral medical experience by scientific research has become the plague of modern medicine. We have thrown overboard what thousands of years of human evolution had absorbed and filtered into oral or written knowledge.

This is my 3rd statement. We have thought, that we know all better. But we do not. At least, we do not know ALL better. We know SOME better, and that’s it. And we thought we can afford to forget what innumerable generations had learned, facing certainly not lesser problems in terms of health than our modern times. So, let’s look a bit into what has happened since.

To understand right from here: Not that medical Aromatherapy was or is the only key to get back to Nature’s medicine. There is Phyto-Therapy as well, the brother or sister of it, and both, plants and essential oils, as we have seen, have been used over thousands of years throughout different cultures. And in the meantime there is a lot more of natural therapies which have emerged from within the West – and the East alltogether.

But why this sudden upsurge of the New Medicine?

The main reason is that the pharmaceutical industry and the body of Western trained scientists had discovered the realm of synthetic molecules starting in the 19th century. And with this, natural therapies became folk’s practice, not the practice of the educated people. It was the same with what hapened to nutrition in the last century. White flower, white sugar… everything “refined”, “filtered”, isolated from the grosser layers of the total was considered to be better, more “en vogue”. And with this it was simply believed that science and technology were the only right answer to all the problems of humanity – including health. Since then we keep thinking that we have to re-invent Nature, make it better than Nature, force Nature into strict human obedience, as William Bacon, the famous English philosopher, expressed it.

The outcome is obvious: A highly technological and pharmaceutical approach to health and longevity. I do not want to condemn modern medicine. But it is true that – besides its blessings – it has taken a high price on the lives of modern man. Now that we have experienced that the doctors prescribe pills of the pharma-industry which are not always healing, not always saving lives, but may poison the body, may destroy lives, we have become more vigilant.

In his inaugural speech in 1961 Professor Conte declared:

“We will see that in the list of social terrors of mankind like the degenerative diseases, heart attacks, cancers, car accidents – and even statistically more important than the horros of our ancestors: syphilis and tuberculosis – the diseases caused by modern medicine will become more and more evident.”

The promise of allopathic medicine has not been kept

We count today more than 30 % of people hospitalized to be victims of iatrogenic diseases, which means: victims of medication. It is clear that the 4 best “horses in the stable” of modern medicine, namely painkillers, antirheumatics, psychodrugs and antibiotics are all in crisis, creating devastating side-effects, sneakingly poisoning the population, leading to increasing dramatic health care costs.

It is the same fight not to win as in modern agriculture. We bombard the body – the soil – with isolated chemicals which do not contain the holistic intelligence of Nature. At first, everything looks fine, the unwanted guests are destroyed, the microbes, bacteria, fungi, pests, viruses, parasytes etc. are gone. But then we see that the terrain, the matrix has been damaged too. And the unwanted guest come back – empowered with new weapons against a weakened vegetation and soil.

We loose ourselves in attacking the symptoms and not understanding the totality of the picture. Can we win this fight? Certainly not this way. Usually germs live with us in a symbiotic way. They do not harm us if the milieu remains stable and strong.

Therefore my next statement: The reason of all attack lies in the one who is attacked, not in the attacker. The reason for disease lies in the host, not in the germ.

And Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophic movement in Germany, pointed out: “A diseased organism contains the same forces as a healthy one, but out of balance. Disease is a crisis of evolution the human condition being to step from one stage of equilibrium to the next. The disruption of this balance is always at the cost of certain elements for the sake of other elements. Some decrease, others increase and develop beyond measure. Being out of balance the individual looses his link with the universal forces. It is always the same: The outer world either imposes itself too much or too little. Thus the outer ‘damages’ add to the loss of internal balance. A bacterial infection or the like are only secondary ‘accidents’, symptomatic expressions of the underlying DIS-ease.”

So, the balance is important, not the symptom. Anyway, we know today that germs, microbes, pests etc. become resistent to nearly everything we infuse or spray on them. The only answer – it is clear now – lies in strengthening the terrain or milieu. That is what Louis Pasteur murmured on his death bed:

“Bernard avait raison. La graine n’est rien. Le terrain est tout.”
(Bernard was right. The germ is nothing. The terrain is everything)

No wonder that new approaches to health are needed which exactly do this, namely strengthen the milieu, give balance to mind and body at the same time. Aromatherapy perfectly does this.

It was René-Maurice Gattefossés merit in early 20th century to systematically study the effects of essential oils and to dedicate his lifetime to not only understand the bio-physical and chemical aspects of their compounds with regards to medical treatments, but also venture into what we would call today Psycho-Aromatherapy. As a visionary he was fascinated by the psychological effects of fragrances and the possibilities of a new medicine of Nature for future generations. He believed also that fragrant volatile substances play the role of anti-toxic and anti-viral active principles and can be compared to vitamines and hormones. It is Gattefossé who started to use the word “Aromatherapy”, and we can rightly consider him as the founding father of this young, but vigorously growing branch of modern natural medicine. So let us hear how he explains why plants produce essential oils:

“….essential oils play the same role in plants as hormones do in animals. It is a sexual function to maintain the specy, also to stimulate tissue growth and to trigger some other functions. Essential oils probably also play a role in mechanisms of defence due to cumulated vital energy. Today like in old times we can call volatile substances ‘vital substances’ …..volatility and fragrance are signals of considerable physiological activity.”

So we have an important point here: Essential oils are linked to “cumulated vital energy”. Not only that they successfully fight back microbes of many kinds without unwanted side-effects, but they have the properties to strengthen the milieu at the same time. Since they are energy reservoirs of the plants (every herb farmer knows that after some rainy days the yield of essential oils is less – the plants have “eaten” up their own energy reserves) they can serve us to vitalize our body, mind and soul.

Now, it was also Gattefossé who started emphasizing the importance to use unadulterated essential oils for therapeutic purposes. He made it clear for example that Spike Lavender oil, adulterated with Turpentine oil (which had become a common practice during his time) completely lost its woundhealing properties. Veterinaries complained that the animals they tried to cure only showed itching and eczema after the treatment, wheras pure Spike oil helped spontaneous healing of wounds, fur growth happened fast, scabies and tinea disappeared in no time. Is this surprizing ? Not only that the Turpenes added to the Spike oil are rather skin irritating compounds, but – in this case – they diluted the holistic complexity of the Spike oil to such an extent that it was no longer effective.

Adulteration is a major problem of the Aromatherapy world.It is important to understand that most of the essential oils produced wordwide go into the perfumery, flavour and soap industry. Only 5-10 % go into Aromatherapy. So, the remaining 90-95 % are used by people who do not care, do not even need to care about unadulterated oils. They need to care about price consistency and fragrance stability. Always the same, always – if possible – the same price. Now, Nature does not function this way. Every season, every year the flowers, fruits, leaves, roots, barks, woods, resins are different. Like wine, like vegetables, like anything which cannot be standardized by man.

Nature has definitely a horror of repeating itself. Nature does not create anything identical. So the young Aromatherapy people have little choice: they have to buy from the producer, if they want to get the right product. Anything after the producer is possibly adulterated. The GC/MS tests can help, of course. But betteris to buy direct – even though it may take a lot of travelling and learning a few languages in order to get to the “source”. Otherwise, if one buys the adulterated “sauce” as the farmers in Provence mockingly say, one looses the complexity of compounds. For any one of the numerous compounds of an essential oil – we know this today – contributes to its healing properties. That is what “holistic” and “natural” mean in contrast to the isolated molecules of modern medicine.

It would probably have been better if the poor soldiers of World War II would have carried along with their own little emergency kit of wound healing, mind soothing, and invigorating essential oils in order to allow them – in case of emergency – to immediately desinfect wounds and strengthen their immune system. Well, the miracles of chemical anti-biotics like Penicillin had just been discovered and admittedly worked wonder in their own way during that frenzy… But the Australian soldiers already carried flacons of Tea Tree oils with them – until the stock in Australia was depleted…

But to come back to the holistic effects of complex self-balancing compounds in essential oils: Rose oil contains up to 500 different compounds. Lavender not much less. Any of them we want in medical Aromatherapy. Any of them either was already existant in the plant or has emerged after harvesting (i.e. during drying) or has come up during distillation.

The complexity of the inherent balance of compounds in essential oils defines their special healing effects. Each of them has its special vitality or energy field transmittable to the human organism. They match with the body-mind filling up in a subtle way specific “energy holes” and fitting into these holes like key and lock. If we isolate the active ingredients – procedures which are used by allopathic medicine, but also through molecular distillation, rectification etc. of essential oils – we loose at least some if not all of the healing properties and risk to have adverse reactions within the physiology.

Jean Valnet, one of the founders of modern Aromatherapy, describes that the common use of Eucalyptol, isolated from Eucalyptus oil through repeated rectification, looses its major therapeutic effects on the mucus membranes and bronchies. This was already stated by Cuthbert Hall in 1904, exactly 100 years ago. Nevertheless, our pharma people still seem to know it better.

The complexity of an essential oil is also the reason why it has multiple healing properties. Peppermint oil – unadulterated – helps simultaneously against nervous, hepatic, circulatory, immunitary, intestinal, dermic and psychological disorders. And Lavender oil, according to Pierre Franchomme pioneer in the field of medical Aromatherapy, is used effectively against nervous tensions, spasms, insomnia, anxieties, dermatosis, allergies, skin ulcers, infected wounds, burns, disturbances of the heart rythm, inflammatory processes, hypertension, muscular pain and other problems. The same scientists have compared in several of their publications the utility of what they call the “eubiotic” approach of medical Aromatherapy versus the allopatic approach. They have pointed out the complex action of an aromatic molecule on the germ, the milieu and the immunitary system simultaneously versus the extremely limited anti-bacterial properties of chemical therapies with their numerous unwanted side-effects.

“Anti-Biotics should be used only if it is unavoidable”

such was the summary of the International Congress on Chemotherapy which took place already more than 40 years ago in Naples. Are our physician aware of it ? Do they know that essential oils have properties by far more powerful and more life-supporting than any anti-biotic medicine ? Today’s major killers of people in the Western hemisphere are heart attack and cancer. We should not expect any breakthrough in the near future with regards to treatments of these problems, if we continue to base ourselves on chemical therapies or surgery. On the other hand, knowledge of aromatic molecules associated with dietary changes and stress-manage-ment will help us substantially in defeating these devastating ennemies of human health. Therefore, the New Medicine is also about life style, personal growth, spirituality – and not just about replacing some pills or drops by something more natural.

There is no ailment without its herb to cure it

Such was the conviction of our forefathers. Mother Nature with its infinite reservoir of plant life is hardly known to us. Among the more than 1 Million plants on Earth hardly 20 % are described, let alone understood with regards to their specific medicinal properties. Only in recent decades, tentatively, have we recurred to the medicinal knowledge of indigenous tribes and our own heritage of folk medicine. But what happens then ? The scientists, payed by the pharma industry, grab some of the miracle plants, run expensive analyses in their labs over years – to come up with some finding of an active principle, which they try to isolate and then synthesize – not without the idea that only what you create yourself can be patented – and will yield the desired profit. Natural medicine cannot be patented, allopathic medicine can. And some deranged people even try to patent Nature – as it happened in recent years in India, where a US company tried to patent the holy NEEM tree… Can you imagine ? And why this sudden upsurge of GMO, and why all these hybrid plants without seeds…? It’s all about money and creating a network of global dependencies, nothing more.

But back to the real things which prevail. Aromatherapy is gaining ground every day. Hundreds and thousands of publications have appeared over the last few decades, praising without end the incredibly beneficial effects of essential oils. Pierre Fanchomme’s book “L’Aromathérapie exactement” contains nearly 800 research studies on medicinal plants and essential oils. Some of these findings are absolutely astonishing. A befriended physician in Switzerland told me a while ago that he had cured scuccess-fully 28 people from Crohn’s disease, a so-called “incurable disease”, using mainly Neroli and Verbena oil. When I asked him why he was not publicizing his findings, he answered, he had no time for such things, that his patients were needing him more. But many take this time, and they do publicize. Dr. Belaiche’s book on “Aromatherapy and Gynecology” and his publication on the Aromatogram are still a classic, and Dr. Patricia Davis, Ruth von Braunschweig, Dr. Jean Valnet, Pierre Franchomme, Robert Tisserand and many others have contributed enormously to the propagation of Aromatherapy data worldwide.

As an example let me quote Dr. Jean Valnet from his classic:

“A mixture of Ginger, Rosemary, Juniper and Lavender oil is used effectively against osteoporosis, arthritis and broken bones…..A blend of Cumln, Fennel, Celery and Parsley showed to regenerate the liver tissue in rats… Thyme is a strong weapon against Eberth bacteria (Typhus), staphylococco, dyphteria, meningococco, Koch Bacteria (Tuberculosis). Thyme oil is far more effective in its anti-bacterial influence than phenol, longtime considered to be the prototype of all anti-septic remedies… Garlic contains 2 anti-biotic compounds effective against staphylococco…”

Electro-microscopic research shows that essential oils of Geranium, Neroli and Niaouli were able to kill in very short time Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli , Herpes I virus and Candida albicans. Professor Griffon in France studied – decades ago already – the anti-septic properties of certain essential oil blends, among which lemon oil played a major role. Already Morel and Rochaix have proved that the evaporated particles of this oil are capable of neutralizing the meningococcus within 15 minutes, the Ebert bacteria (Typhus) in hardly 1 hour, the Pneumococcus in 1–3 hours, the Staphylococcus aureus in 2 hours, and the hemolytic Streptococci within 3 – 12 hours. Griffon also looked into the vitality of pathogenic germs contained in air. His blend of essential oils, containing Fir, Peppermint, Lavender, Rosemary, Clove bud and Cinnamon oil was evaporated at 15 cm over the floor where the pollution with germs is much higher than at “nose-level”. The analyses without evaporation using Petri dishes showed after 24 hours the presence of 210 stems of bacteria or fungi containing among many others large amounts of mould and of Staphylococci. Within 1/2 an hour of evaporation of the essential oil blend out of the 210 stems only 4 had survived.

Knowing this, I recommend to the frequent travellers to always travel with a diffuser of essential oils and a good quantity of fine smelling anti-septic essential oils. The carpets in hotel rooms are highly polluted with germs – measurements have shown that up to 9 million pathogenic germs / square meter happily cohabitate with you in the nicely furbished hotel rooms. Well, often you may even smell them – and then your blend is not only anti-septic but also helps you and your nose survive in a highly unhygienic environment. If at least the aromatic vacuum cleaner had already been invented to compensate the nuisance of carpets in public places…

I do not know how many people today are aware of this one fact: We are experiencing a new era of natural medicine as an answer to the failures of the modern allopathic approach and of modern life style. It is the “organic” versus the non-organic, the holistic versus the isolative, the human versus the techno-chemical. This era leads us to new understandings of health, environment, social ethics, nutrition, spirit, cosmos, God.

In terms of health, we are entering the era of self-healing. That is one of the reasons why essential oils are having such an incredible success in the world of today. They are easy to use, easy to transport, pleasant in their appearance and odour, practical to give away and to share – and tremendously exiting to experience. And they have the capacity to awaken the Shaman and the Yogi in everybody of us. Nearly everybody today wants to know more about Nature, everybody has the feeling that there is so much to discover inside-outside. This is true science, which comes from the latin word “scire” meaning: “to know in total”.

So I dare to make another statement: The new scientists are the ones who work in the laboratory of their own body-mind trying to know by themselves. They create health inside and outside of themselves, because they rediscover the meaning of balance, self-care, responsability, and commitment for the higher goals of human evolution – in short: they mean it to become free. And they respectfully use Nature as a partner, not as an element to fight against and to subdue.

In terms of health they are very much aware that – apart from the already existing medical data – there is a lot more to add. Of course, it is good to know sometimes that Lavender oil enhances alpha-brain waves, and Rosemary beta waves. But this is more for the sake of proving some information that the oils truly work. It is actually meant for the sceptics, who at first do not believe that simple Nature does work, and so they need hard facts, “machine data” so to say. But the best data come from experience. And that is what true medicine has always been: The cumulative data of experience of mankind, advancing in togetherness as if one single collective being, as Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematician and philosopher once put it “as if all the sequences of generations through the centuries could be looked upon as ONE human being, who continues to live and always continues to learn.”

So, nothing is forgotten. Everything is rightly placed and okay. Even the failures are okay, because they are necessary for the next step of improvement. We might go astray here and there, but there is a flow, a peace, a harmony in all this. Aromatherapy today is not what it will be tomorrow. We are just scratching the surface. All the beautiful shools and associations of Aromtherapy, the conferences, symposia, seminars, the magazines, the research data, publications, the Heilpraktikers in Germany, the doctors in Switzerland, the nurses in France, the manager in Japan excited by the better performances of their secretaries and staff using essential oils in their offices, the housewife in the US, preparing the bedroom for an “exotic” night with her husband, the massage therapists from our friend YO-JUNE’s famous Hot Springs Spa in Taiwan, the cosmeticians in Norway, the “aroma-missionary” doctor in Provence teaching his gospel of a New Age Global Aromatherapy Medicine… they are all just beginning. And so my last statement here is

We are just beginning to understand Nature. There are millions of more secrets to uncover. This goes hand in hand with the progressive knowledge of our own inner Nature.

But this is how evolution works. Can you imagine how our grand-grand children may laugh when they hear about the approaches of Natural medicine or Aromatherapy today ? But maybe they will just be wise and adore those who had started again to feel that pull from Mother Nature… And that feeling that things belong together, that nothing is unspiritual, nothing without its unique value in the long corridor of time. In this, also the errors and traumas of our modern world make sense and loose their stings.

Aromatherapy in its domestic beauty to enhance comfort and well-being as well as in its medical form will definitely play an even greater role in the coming decades

It is already very much present everywhere. Believe it or not: The number ONE Christmas present over several years in Germany was essentiall oils. And countless have the Naturopaths in the meantime become who prescribe essential oils. There are pharmacies in Europe which already sell more essential oils daily than allopathic medicine. Quite surprizing. And we can imagine that we will be able, may be soon, to pick up our personal aroma diffuser at the hotel reception with a small bottle of natural essential oils. Numerous hospitals worldwide are already using essential oils for their anti-septic properties or for comforting their patients. So do homes for the elderly generation, shopping moles for their customers, schools to enhance the learning ability of kids, etc. etc. …

And we could also imagine that going to the doctor could mean one day: first to go to smell something really really marvellous. Because we have learnt to understand that health has to do with nice odour and every disease has its own bad smell. And we do not want this around us, and definitely not at a place where we expect to be balanced and healed.

So the door of the doctor’s practice opens, and some special fragrant blend envelopes you, concocted personally by this master-physician, who – you are lucky – has just come out of deep inner silence… And with a serene smile he hands you over to some sweet looking massage therapist envelopping you – after a warm shower of course – for 20 minutes in fragrant ointments of the real kind – and then she guides you back to the doctor who will know through direct intuition and knowledge where to put his hands on and what kind of oils or herbal treatment to prescribe.

Or imagine airplanes where the refresher cotton handkerchiefs are not smelling some awful artificial cologne, but real essential oils made from concentrated sun-moon-and-star-energy, and that there are some perfect fragrances to wake you up, and others, at choice, to soothen you and make you doze away in the arms of the invincible Morpheus…

Well, some dreams come true. The plants are working on it. As Balraj Maharishi, a very holy man from India, once said at a conference on Ayurveda: “The plant Devas invited me to a congress. They told me that they are aware of the human problems. They have decided to do more for humanity.”

So let us hope that this outer Sun which nourishes all plant life will inspire everybody, including the doctors, to connect with our inner Sun, the Light of God within us – so that the outer and inner can merge in harmony for true freedom in the fullness of the Divine, creating a festival of living on our dear planet Earth.