Supplementary
So how does dowsing
really
work ?
Centuries ago, the ‘Kahunas’ (or priest-shamans) of the most extensive ancient civilisation the world has ever known – that of the Polynesians – compiled a profound working model of how various aspects of human consciousness interact and work together. Thanks to the study and documentation of their beliefs in the twentieth century by an American anthropologist named Max Freedom-Long*, it survives in use today where other ancient systems have been lost to us.
Its relevance to the practice of dowsing is that it presents us with an insight into not only how dowsing works inwardly, but how to use that understanding to diagnose the root causes of inaccuracy and to improve one’s technique.
The basic premise of this Polynesian model is that human consciousness has three departments, or modes of operation. The Kahunas call these three ‘selves’ . Each ‘self’ is responsible for certain types of thought and perception.
The most rarified ‘self’ is the High Self. It is connected to spiritual worlds and beings like a computer terminal. We are often unaware of its influence except when we are in an especially elevated state of consciousness (perhaps when we are dowsing spiritual matters) but its direct communications may be experienced at other times in the form of flash intuition – the sudden realisation that something is true, without having worked it out intellectually. It is the High Self which provides the instant ‘one step ahead’ knowledge of what a dowsing instrument will say in advance of its actual movement.
The late John Michell saw the High Self as the vector of ‘received knowledge’ i.e. knowledge which springs complete into our consciousness from inner sources without us having intellectually acquired it.
Our most familiar ‘self’ is the one the Kahunas call the Middle Self. This is our normal waking consciousness, where we have will, make rational choices and decisions, and communicate with other humans through language and writing. The Middle Self is focussed on present activity and on planning the future. It has no memory of the past.
When dowsing, it is the role of the Middle Self to synthesise, and to interpret impressions and results into a logical conclusion which can then be communicated to other people if required.
Clearly, in order to be able to do this, it has to be aware of what it is receiving from the other selves when dowsing, in particular what it is receiving from the Low Self (see below).
It is the third of the three Huna ‘selves’ which plays perhaps the most active role in most dowsing practice. This is the Low Self, which could be compared in its thought processes to an animal – let us say, a horse (those who have worked with horses will immediately see the similarities).
The Low Self is not stupid by any means but tends to be irrational in its understanding of people and of events in its environment and can thus be inclined sometimes to jump to illogical conclusions.
T
he Low Self is very close to the earth and to the non- physical matrix of energies behind what we see. It is the Low Self which will sense the presence and vibrations of water, or the presence of a ghost, or earth energies, or the subtle feeling of imbalance or dis-ease within the body.
Being closely linked to the running of the physical body, these perceptions can transfer themselves into bodily responses, which in turn can trigger dowsing instruments or responses within the dowser.
The Low Self is the keeper of memory and links with the past (personal or historical). It is therefore a great ally of the archaeological dowser.
Equally invaluable is the Low Self’s role as a kind of computer terminal to access other people’s Low Selves (incarnate or discarnate) and to access the mass consciousness of a whole group or collective of people. Such links enable it to pick up information and the understanding of archetypal symbols from vast pools of hidden knowledge.
The Low Self’s dowsing realisations, however, have to be relayed to the Middle Self if they are to be put to use or to help people. The Low Self cannot use language to communicate, as does the Middle Self. Instead it communicates via pictorial imagery (including symbols and dream imagery) and/or it sends out its impressions in the form of bodily sensations, emotional impressions or ‘gut feelings’.
To enable the Low Self to communicate with the Middle Self pictorially with greater precision and ‘vocabulary’, it can be enormously helpful if the Middle Self studies and learns a comprehensive symbol system (e.g Qabalah, alchemical or astrology) as all symbol systems are already known to, and available to, the Low Self. In this way, there will be a common pictorial ‘language’ whereby precise information may be accurately shared.
From the above descriptions, it can be seen how the practice of dowsing operates inwardly as a team effort.
However, if it was always slick, co-ordinated team work between the Selves, there would never be any inaccuracies in our results, nor any unanswered questions. Unfortunately this is seldom the case.
When troubleshooting inaccuracy, the answer is often found with the Low Self. Conflicts can arise in its view of reality either as a result of emotional interference and/or as a result of the Low Self having adopted an unhelpful irrational belief pattern which prevents it from doing what the Middle Self would like it to do.
To explain further: the Low Self builds its perception and understanding of reality by adopting emotional impressions, pictorial images and by registering bodily sensations. Like a frog sitting at the bottom of a pond, it only sees the few pieces of metaphorical twig and debris which drop down to its level from the surface. The vast majority of the dowser’s routine passing experiences (what is going on up on the surface of the pond, as it were), and all words, are lost on the Low Self (which is why verbal affirmations tend to be ineffective).
What does tend to get taken on board is emotionally charged experiences, especially those reinforced by physical action, and powerfully or repeatedly presented symbols and images. These it understands as some sort of blueprint from the Middle Self as to what it would like the Low Self to do.
So what could go wrong? Let’s start with the harm one can do by sending down the wrong message to the Low Self – let’s say, that it is not good at dowsing. Either by provoking an emotional response when suggesting to an inexperienced dowser that they are not very good at it, or by repeatedly making them feel inferior by repeating such insinuations to them over time, their Low Self tends to shy away from dowsing as an activity (having negative feelings about it now) or, having understood the subject is not supposed to be very good at dowsing, their Low Self will obligingly ensure the dowser’s results are poor, thus bring reality into line with this belief because the Low Self mistakenly thinks this is what the Middle Self is asking for.
A similarly disruptive result can result from putting emotional pressure on the Low Self to get a dowsing operation 100% correct. Such pressure immediately engenders its opposite: an emotional fear that it might not be 100% correct. Thus the conflict manifests as disrupted or inconsistent dowsing results.
It is far better for the Low Self to airily assume that dowsing is a fun game and that any and all results will, by themselves, invariably be just fine.
Like a horse, your Low Self needs to feel you are a considerate partner, not a slave driver. So when you (i.e. your Low Self) begins to get tired of the game, be ready to walk away and return at some other time when the Low Self feels raring to go again. Push it beyond its comfort zone and the Low Self will rebel and make its displeasure felt by throwing up spurious responses.
In the practice of dowsing, the Low Self’s trust in the authenticity of the results and in the accuracy of the dowsing instrument being used is vital. It is, after all, doing most of the work and supplying most of the results.
Here is a true life example of this point: a dowser I know started their hobby off using angle rods. Although they tried to use a pendulum on many occasions, they were more at home with their angle rods and pendulum results proved annoyingly erratic in their accuracy. Their Low Self never really trusted it to be accurate because the dowser had never really learned how to use the pendulum properly and it had not worked for them immediately.
Some years later, the dowser realised that a pendulum would be more appropriate than rods for the type of dowsing work they were doing by then. But they could not rely on the pendulum’s results because it had shown itself to be unreliable.
Now what was happening, of course, was that their Low Self had understood that rods were trustworthy but a pendulum was not. This was an impression it received emotionally from the Middle Self (including the exasperation at the pendulum’s early inaccuracies) and it had interpreted this as an instruction from the Middle Self as to how it wanted things to be. So it obligingly ensured that the pendulum remained untrustworthy by sabotaging its results. Thus there became a vicious cycle: the dowser wanted to be convinced that the pendulum would work for them. But it never proved it would because their Low Self believed it was unreliable and hence ensured that it
was
unreliable. In turn, the dowser’s Middle Self had no evidence that a pendulum was a trustworthy instrument because it always gave unreliable results when they used it. So the belief that pendulums were intrinsically unreliable was reinforced to the Low Self and the inaccuracy continued.
The answer is to re-programme the false belief patterns of the Low Self. However, the Low Self tends to cling on to belief patterns unless they are overridden powerfully and effectively on its own terms. Only then will it drop the original belief and take up a new one.
The methods which will be the most effective for this re-programming must be those which will reach the Low Self and thus they must be couched in the Low Self’s own ‘language’. Hence to be most effective, we must use any combination of energies, emotion, physical actions and pictorial imagery. These can either be repeated (the Low Self catches on to repeated stimuli because it has memory) or carry a good quantity of energy/emotion/physical stimulus in one fell swoop.
In this case of distrust in the pendulum, the actual solution worked like this:
The dowser in question obtained a new pendulum. This was a professional radionics pendulum, purchased from a radionics establishment and used by radionics practitioners who were at the top of their game. The Low Self visited, bathed in the energies and marvelled at the work of these experts and at their results with such pendulums. It felt awe, respect and that these experts were a higher authority on dowsing than itself.
To capitalise on this, their Middle Self treated the new radionics pendulum with great respect. It was kept in a special box out of sight, only to be brought into the daylight when ‘very important’ dowsing work was afoot. The Low Self soon came to believe that the new pendulum was different and somehow more sacred than any of the previous pendulums it had tried and hence that its results must be as accurate as those of the experts from whence it had come. It therefore obliged - accuracy immediately shot up, making the new pendulum the dowser’s most reliable tool to this day.
This is not a new ruse, of course: it is the same principle as Tarot card readers who insist on wrapping their cards in silk to psychically ‘insulate‘ them from disruptive outside energies. In the same way, many dowsers ‘dedicate’ new dowsing instruments (cleansing them with energy or in a short ceremony) to achieve a similar result. The treatment of a dowsing instrument as ‘special’ or as ‘sacred’ is a language that the Low Self understands as an instruction that this instrument is special and therefore infallible. This must be so, it reasons, for the Low Self has felt the energies poured into the instrument at its dedication and it remembers.
There are those who will assert that all such treatment of dowsing instruments is unnecessary and ridiculous. So it may be for those whose Low Selves do not require it (perhaps very experienced dowsers who long ago mastered the art of working cooperatively with their Low Selves). However, for those who find that their Low Self does require such persuasion, it is part of a process which will make them better – and more happy and confident – dowsers. Tread lightly on a dowser’s belief patterns.
Sue Watts-Cutler
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* Max Freedom-Long was not a Kahuna himself and relied largely on second hand accounts at a time when being a practising Kahuna was illegal. Nevertheless, his 1948 book ‘The Secret Science Behind Miracles’ about Huna beliefs remains a respected (and very readable) core work on the subject to this day. It has since been re-published by DeVorss and Co, California.