Born in Leeds in 1940, David qualified in medicine at Pretoria University, South Africa and became a member of the British Faculty of Homeopathy in 1965 and a Fellow in 1996. He has been in homeopathic practice for 56 years.

David was fortunate to be born into a homeopathic family. His father, William Henry Lilley, was a professional homeopath and a remarkable psychic healer gifted with clairaudience, clairsentience and psychometric sensitivity. David grew up in a home in which the spirit dimension and the material plane were experienced as interpenetrating, interactive and inseparable. The immortality of the soul and its continued existence in a higher and finer dimension after the death of the physical vehicle was not a belief, a hope or a philosophical concept but a realised fact. From this foundation came the understanding that the manifest world though actual, is not Reality, and that we are all souls in transit, ascending, through experience gleaned from many sojourns on the material, relative plane, towards a state of Self-realisation or transcendence in which the soul achieves at onement with the Divinity that is its Essence.

This quest constitutes the hero’s journey, the path of individuation, traversing which, the soul attains wholeness or perfection: a journey fraught with trials that test and season the soul, and most significantly, the advent of the ego-self: the pseudo- or false-self dwelling within every psyche – a counterfeit being, or psychic structure, fashioned by the soul in compensation for the loss to consciousness of its divine heritage: a loss that robs the soul of Basic Trust in the perfection, unity, wisdom and benevolence of a loving, sentient Cosmos. Gaining power and influence through the doubts and fears of the soul, the ego-self assumes control of the psyche and usurps the identity of the soul. Seeing the world through distorted, prejudiced, paranoid ego-vision creates a state of delusion, misconception, or fancy, that constitutes the very core of disease. Regardless of diagnosis, the ego-self is the disease that afflicts the soul, paradoxically, impeding, yet facilitating, its spiritual advancement.

These precepts, imparted by his father’s spirit guide and mentor, Dr Letari, determined David’s approach to healing and were woven into his teaching.

A busy practice, averaging 25 to 30 patients a day, afforded him every opportunity to develop expertise in the practice of clinical homeopathy: an essential skill, demonstrating the efficacy of homeopathy in challenging and critical conditions. However, more important still was the need to allay the emotional anguish that pervades society. This demands healing at the interface between the soul and its perennial enemy, the ego-self; healing in the turbulent divide between the conscious and unconscious minds; healing that integrates the structures of the psyche and releases rejected, repressed, unresolved and unrealised energy from the Shadow; in effect healing the soul of its ego-based sickness: a transformation that expediates the ascent of the soul towards its own radiance.

In 1994, David commenced teaching fellow medical practitioners the art and science of homeopathy and to this end founded the South African Faculty of Homeopathy, acting as dean until 2012. In 1999, he commenced teaching internationally and continues to do so.

His teaching encompasses the structure and dynamics of the psyche; archetypal profiling; Enneagram personality profiling; the archetypology of numbers, colours and forms; chakra science; symbolism; the interpretation of myth and legend; dream analysis; Freudian psychoanalysis; Jungian analytical psychology; all informed by the perennial wisdom of universal spiritual philosophy.

In December 2007, after 41 years of intense practice, David moved to Cape Town, and most recently to Somerset West, where he continues to see a small number of patients, and devotes his time to writing and lecturing. David has written four books: Healing the Soul, Volumes One and Two; The Wolf – A Mythological and Comparative Study; and The Raven – A Flight through an Archetypal Force Field. He is currently writing: Healing the Soul, Volume Three.