Science & The Art of Dowsing

The Dowsers are coming: the Dowsers are coming!  The Annual Convention and Expo of the American Society of Dowsers will be held June 14 through 19, 2017 at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.  The Dowsers are coming to teach you how to unlock your dowsing skills.  

The word “dowsing” may conjure up thoughts of an old farmer walking around the field holding a fork-shaped stick: for others, dowsing conjures up esoteric thoughts.  Dowsing can help you find water, lost objects, and people; clear your energy environment; and get correct answers to questions.  Every culture around the globe uses or has used dowsing in one form or another.  Dowsing was thought to be the work of the Devil but many early clerics were also Dowsers (for example Saint Basil).  The “rod” was employed by the Church during the Inquisition to detect Protestants. 

Conventional science says dowsing doesn't exist.  But why?  If a phenomenon has been reported so many times by many observers across the centuries and from different parts of the world, then mustn't it hold some truth?  If we cannot offer a good scientific explanation, our science is lacking.

Newtonian sciences of the 1700s could not explain dowsing, so it was ignored or ridiculed.  The theories of Newton are fine to explain everyday things that are studied by the high school physics student, but they are incomplete.  Physics has been revised, expanded, and progressed over the time since Newton.  

150 years ago, James Clerk Maxwell formulated his famous equations about electricity.  Finding these equations cumbersome, Oliver Heaviside, a self-taught mathematician and physicist, simplified them.  Heaviside's work is credited for laying the foundations for many non-local phenomena, including the scientific basis for dowsing.  Some of Albert Einstein's early work dealt with analyzing the mathematical terms in Maxwell's equations.  Einstein's body of work in physics, including his "General Theory of Relativity" and his famed equation E=mc2 changed much of what we knew about our world.  It was the birth of our modern understanding about our universe, and, like Heaviside's work, it laid the foundations for "modern" physics, eventually giving us the scientific explanation of dowsing.

In 1924 Louis de Broglie discovered that all matter consists of the solid part (mass) surrounded by a wave.  In the late 1990s, Dr. William Tiller, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, found that while mass travels slower than the speed of light: in order for Einstein’s theory to be correct, the wave pattern around the mass must travel faster than light. 

All of the other pieces that are explained by quantum science, including the flexibility and even reversal of time, are associated with this "faster than light" phenomenon.  Another strange result included in the quantum field is the idea that our reality is a holographic projection of light.  This holographic principle has been championed as a refinement of quantum theory.  David Bohm (ca 1990) tells us that the holographic theory is based upon the information exchange among physical processes.  Jacob Beckenstein tells us that holographic phenomena guide physical processes and is the “stuff” of the universe.  In a holographic universe, the sum is greater than its parts and even the smallest shard carries all the information of the whole (every cell contains the DNA information sufficient to create another you).  Everything is connected to everything else.  

This has been verified by the quantum entanglement experiments of various researchers including Richard Feynman who demonstrated back in the 1960s that two "entangled" electrons respond to one stimulus at the same time, even though they were very far apart.  Once you start understanding holism's ramifications, you quickly realize the weird or strange in our everyday lives, like dowsing, is very real and very normal.  Dowsing starts in the mind.  But our mind is not our brain.  There is good evidence that our mind and memories are not even located in any specific organ and are not wholly associated with the body.  They are in the realm of the holographic universe.  

Biochemist and New-Age thinker, Rupert Sheldrake, while studying the microbiology of cells, developed what he called the "morphogenic resonance theory" that says we are all tuned into a part of the information field (morphogenic field).  By simply tuning to different areas we can pick up different information.  His theory explains how we can train our minds to find water, minerals, underground lines, or even simple yes/no answers while dowsing.  It is not magic.  It is not a matter of learning a new skill: it is a matter of paying attention to what you are currently ignoring.  Dr. Claude Swanson wrote two very well researched books about consciousness supporting Sheldrake's work.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies of “seasoned” Dowsers conducted by Jurka and Stillman in the 1990s demonstrate there is a specific brain wave activity associated with dowsing.  The studies show the Dowser enters into a mental state different from everyday consciousness.  It is suspected that the “dowsing state” is receptive to the electromagnetic influences (Morphogenic field, Holographic properties, quantum entanglement, non-locality) of the dowsing target.

Studies of the science behind dowsing are ongoing and are far from complete.  We have had the instrumentation and computational means to study its subtleties for less than a century.  Modern scientists are making daily discoveries.  One thing is for sure, however.  There is enough science proving the existence of dowsing to make it difficult to dismiss dowsing as non-scientific.  

All of us may not fully understand how dowsing works, but that shouldn't keep us from accepting what our eyes, our minds, our senses, and our scientists are telling us.  A woman once asked Thomas Edison what electricity was.  Edison answered, "Madam, electricity is.  Use it."  We may not know precisely how dowsing works, but we can still use it.

To the explore about dowsing and what it can do for you, come to the Annual Convention & Expo held at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, June 16 through 18. For more information, visit www.dowsers.org or call The American Society of Dowsers, Inc. at 1-802-684-3417.