A theory of dowsing involving the future

This post is a departure from the usual posts, looking at the applications of dowsing. Many dowsers have offered up their speculations, about how dowsing works. Although these are sometimes proposed with considerable authority, when one looks back at these explanations over the years, one cannot help coming to the conclusion that dowsers should probably just stick to their dowsing. Certainly, the lack of a comprehensive theory underpinning, not just dowsing, but psi-related activities in general, is a problem for those who wish to convince die hard materialists of the efficacy of these activities. The approach I am taking in this blog, is simply to recount the myriad ways in which dowsing is and has been applied. Interested readers may take away from this what they will.

However, of the accounts I have read, there is one that stands out. This was written by a dowser named Alasdair Beal. After eliminating common explanations, he makes the novel conclusion that dowsing is “the art of foretelling possible futures”. This is done through the search question(s) which the dowser poses, and the dowser duly gets a result, even if they never receive any feedback.

Although he does not elaborate further on the idea, one might consider that each possible future is then feeding information back to the dowser working at an earlier time, about how things turned out. Of cause there’s the thorny issue of causality, but that our understanding of that seems to be rather a mess anyway.  If one considers, from physics, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and from parapsychology, the retro-causal experiments of Helmut Schmidt, for instance, maybe Mr Beal has an interesting point to make.

Anyway, the article, entitled “A theory of dowsing”, is here:

http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No225_1989_p504.pdf