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Dowsing certainly is a most valuable ability and it often gives results whose accuracy and scope astonish the newcomer, but it is not "incredible" nor "supernatural" nor any of the other epithets that have been allotted to it by the skeptics. Dowsing is, as a fact, one of the most "natural" things a human being can do, belonging to the vital levels of our subrational existence.
Most usually a person seeking for water, minerals, or anything else by this method will use either a rod or a pendulum as an indicator, but these things, like the hands of a clock, are useful only to magnify and to show the orientation of the inward movement.
There are a certain number of dowsers who, even without any such indicators, experience almost convulsive bodily movements when detecting whatever the object of their search may be. More experience tingling or burning sensations in different parts of the body; nor are any of these reactions triggered by the conscious awareness of the presence of the object, for many examples show unmistakably that the reaction precedes its interpretation.
James A., for instance, a man personally known to the authors, had never thought of himself as a water-finder. Such a possibility would not greatly have interested him, and he had no reason to imagine it until some painful circumstances led to his talent being discovered for him
To begin with, he had a violent fall and cracked a couple of his lower ribs. These were set and healed normally, and he returned to his ordinary occupations. Inevitably, as with any fractured bones, he suffered, and expected at first to suffer, a certain amount of discomfort; what troubled him more and more was the fact that as he moved around at home he experienced now and then most violent twinges of pain from the mended ribs, and this particular experience seemed not to lessen as time went by.
Back he went for reexamination, but no medical cause for his affliction showed up. In the end, when he explained that apart from an occasional twinge when traveling his sufferings were all produced by walking from front to back of his house or vice versa, he was referred for psychiatric examination.
Now it was his psyche that was inspected inside and out, although with no immediate result. The psychiatrist however was an up-to-date intelligent man who mentally cross-referenced every fact that came his way, and at last by this method he found himself a clue.
Among the mass of wildly various details he'd collected from James in the hope one of them might prove fertile, somewhere was a statement that James always had his worst moments of pain when passing a certain crack in the wall of his hallway. Once again the evidence was sifted for negative associations to cracks in walls, but there was nothing much. So the psychiatrist looked at it another way. James A.'s ribs hurting and the crack in the wall were related. How?
Why was the crack there? he asked James.
Because the house had settled in the middle.
Why had the house settled that way?
Directed to put in some research on this, James discovered the existence of an underground stream he'd never known about. So, his lower ribs shifted each time he crossed that hidden water; and, because they had been fractured, they hurt badly. And so, he was a born water-finder and hadn't known about that either.
In reality, like every other psychic talent, the ability to dowse is inborn in every person to some extent, even though, again like the other abilities, some individuals have it in an already more developed state than others do. Such experiences as that of James A., however, naturally lead people to inquire what this mysterious ability called dowsing really consists in, and which of its characteristics enable us to identify its nature and the means by which it can be cultivated.
A favorite hypothesis with those who wish to seem scientific without examining the evidence for themselves, and one that tends to be applied to a number of subjects including dowsing, is that of "unconscious muscular movement." The idea is that the unconscious mind of the operator determines (by whatever means) the answer to the question, or the direction of the object of the search, and transmits through the nerves a series of extremely subtle impulses to the muscles, as a result of which they produce the appropriate movements. Aside from the fact that James A. (for example) wasn't searching for anything and wasn't asking any questions, it is not at first easy to fault that hypothesis, however, we shall find that the true cause of the movements of the body and/or the instrument in dowsing is quite other.
The keys to dowsing are to be found in the astral level of the psyche and of the external universe:
Dowsing is a faculty of the emotional-instinctual (astral) level of the psyche, released into activity by a complete absorption of attention that inhibits the monitoring function of the rational mind. This is certainly an altered state of consciousness, although not generally recognized as such.
What name is given to that state does not matter. Try, for instance, speaking to a person occupied in some creative skill, or to a mathematician or physicist pondering some abstract problem, or to a child building a castle with toy blocks, or to a pair of young lovers daydreaming about their future. You probably can't get through to any of these people, and even if they answer you sensibly they may remember nothing of it later, like people who have been spoken to while aroused temporarily from sleep. The dowsing state is very close to that, and the equipment helps in achieving that state by providing a necessary focal point for the attention.
Dowsing is dependent on the astral world for the impressions that lead the dowser to his or her goal. Although the dowser's quest is most often for something in the material world, the forces that are encountered, and which indicate the direction of that goal, are not of the material world (as the influence of the magnetic north upon a compass is, for instance) but of the astral world. This is demonstrated by some peculiarities in the mode of operation of those forces.
A good dowser has a high score of accurate findings, and so long as this accuracy is maintained we have no way of showing where the information comes from, but everyone slips up sometimes, and many of the mistakes made by dowsers are very instructive for that reason.
