In the recent history of the British Society of Dowsers, one of its more philosophical members was Dan Wilson. A very accomplished dowser specialising in the medical side of the art, he often wrote short articles, or simply letters challenging the accepted orthodoxy.
In this letter, he is inspired to write to the Society following the Beadon cube controversy, the subject of the last blog post.
http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No211_1986_p235.pdf
He mentions his review of previous articles in the BSD journal, during which we found an instance of another device, which like the Beadon cube, supposedly removed the ability to dowse. This was in an article by A. D. Manning, who for 20 years had used a rather elaborate looking device, constructed from copper coils (figure supplied), to protect some 2000 properties from “harmful rays”.
http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No126_1964_p196.pdf
In the article, Mr Manning provides some examples of his practice and results. He was familiar with the work of Von Pohl, who was mentioned in the post of 06-05-2020. He ends by saying that harmful effects not only from underground steams but other influences. The effect is usually very narrow. (Contrast this with the finding of Dr Bailey, who says otherwise).
Enter Robert Leftwich, who was an extremely able dowser. It seems that he challenged another dowser, who also used a device akin to Manning’s to remove the ability to “neutralise” a stream, to perform his work; Leftwich, would then try and locate the same stream. This he did very easily, in addition, finding the stream’s rate of low, depth, and breadth.
http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No131_1966_p211.pdf
In his article, Leftwich asserts that the neutralisation of harmful streams, or rays, is purely a mental faculty.
In his article, Dan Wilson highlighted how extraordinary this observation by Leftwich actually was. It is clear that Wilson was no fan of the idea of “rays”. But what was happening? His idea was to dowse the answer. Through his “concept dowsing”, he tried to dowse, through a process of iteration, for a system of language, or vocabulary, that might allow him to better understand things. But at the same time, he realised that the results of such an exercise could not be trusted as facts, but only as “clues”.
He derives four principal reason for why dowsers get the wrong answers. To be honest, these are difficult to decipher from his writings. In attempting to understand, the nuances are very likely to be missed. Here is my attempt:
1. Our understanding of how things are, affects our interpretation of dowsing results.
2. He introduces “perceptual consciousness”. This seems to be a group consciousness, of which the dowser’s own consciousness is a part, and it may, or may not be matched to the task in hand. He suggests (and elaborates on this in other writings) that situations have very long histories and the perceptual consciousness cannot always comprehend the extent of this history. For many quests, it is sufficient to be in touch with only the most recent part of that history.
3. He suggests that there are subconscious concepts (he terms them SLWOTs) which are used to interpret reality. These reside in the group perceptual consciousness. They can arise from various sources, for instance from our collective human experience, or some may be added by individuals. He has the idea of a “perceiving intelligence”, which is a group effect of each individual’s intelligence, and works to select out the concepts applicable to a given quest, which may be helpful or unhelpful. Though he suggests that there are ways to abandon unhelpful ones.
4.The cultural framework of the dowsers can limit what questions they can pose. This can lead to them working with too many unhelpful concepts and gives rise to incorrect results.
Returning to the Beadon cube. There is the shared subconscious concept that the cube will remove the ability to dowse, but one group held another concept that the no-dowsing effect is not cleared using the cube.
Perhaps his thinking is best summed up (with the risk of over simplifying), by his statement that the whole affair was “… a case of unwitting self-hypnosis with the aid of subconsciously transferred belief patterns.” For which he recommends that “[one] stand aside for a moment and do your own thing.” Here he seems to side with Leftwich, suggesting that for a purely mental processes, no devices are necessary.
This brings us back to the post of 31-3-2020, and Dan Wilson’s letter, which is broadly saying that what concepts we think about, we can choose to make a reality.