Introduction

A bit of background

A book on dowsing, yes; but why the disciplines of dowsing? What’s the difference? What’s this all about?

Two reasons, really.. The first is that whilst there are plenty of good beginner-level books on dowsing, there are very few that go beyond that beginner stage. And almost all of those are on the general lines of “I did it my way” – which is interesting, of course, but not much help for identifying general principles from which we can improve the quality of dowsing work. This book aims to fill that gap.

In case you don’t know dowsing at all, we’ve included a brief introduction here – see the Dowsing in ten minutes chapter. But after that we’ll go straight into principles – the four core disciplines of dowsing, and the bridges between them – and show you how to adapt them in your own working practice.

The second reason for this book is around the need for quality in dowsing. Between us we’ve been involved in various aspects of the field for a fair few decades now: and it’s painfully clear that far too much of the dowsing work being done at present – especially in the study of earth-energies and the ‘earth-mysteries’ field in general – is of dubious quality at best. To be rather less polite about it, much of it is meaningless junk. Kind of pointless, really…

No matter how good the showmanship may be, we cannot escape the fact that quality depends on adherence to some basic rules and guidelines: and if the guidelines are ignored, the results cannot be anything other than rubbish. Which is a problem: a big problem. So here we’ll not only describe the guidelines – those Four Disciplines of Dowsing, and the links between them – but show you how to verify the quality of your work, and avoid the Seven Sins of Dubious Discipline. It’s only then that dowsing becomes useful.

In a sense, though, none of this is specific to dowsing. These concerns about principles, adaptation and quality are generic to all skills – especially those with a large subjective component. As one frustrated friend put it the other day, “I’ve had all these experiences and done all these trainings – shamanic journeys, earth magic, healing groups, meditation, ritual, spirit guides, animal energies, all that stuff – but what do I do with it? What’s the use?” One answer is just to celebrate it – enjoy it, accept it for what it is, and leave it at that. In other words, leave it in what we describe later as the modes of ‘artist’ or ‘mystic’. But to use it, to do something with it, in what we’d call the ‘magician’ mode, requires a purpose, a direction, a reason – and better quality.

In essence, if we’re going to get anywhere useful, we need to get beyond the dilettante ‘taster’, and commit to the skill. As we’ll see shortly, we also need to accept that we’re going to have to go round the bend a bit in order to go deeper, which in places is not comfortable at all. But that’s the only way we’re going to lift the quality of the work – and whatever we do, and however we do it, quality really does matter.

An emphasis on quality

Quality sounds serious. Don’t worry, this isn’t that kind of book – it’s perfectly okay to have fun and play around! In fact it’s not only a good idea, but really important to do so, for a lot of reasons – not least because it’s one of the few ways we can get round the fear of failure that would otherwise cripple all of our work. But – and it’s a big ‘but’ – what we find there in play is ideas, not facts. We need to choose that mode, deliberately, consciously, and know that we’re in that mode: but don’t treat the results of that ‘playtime’ as anything other than the output of the artistic idea-creating space.

There’s a place for seriousness, and a place for play. But we need to be very clear as to which is which. If not we’ll find ourselves on the dreaded New Age ‘pub-crawl’, full of glamour and grandiosity, full of excitement and exuberance, but somehow never quite managing to reach a useful outcome – “an empty thunder, signifying nothing”.

Where there’s reasonable quality, the work has a lot more meaning, and it’s a lot more fun, too. It’s not that hard to create quality, either: much of it comes down to a simple acronym, LEARN – eLegant, Efficient, Appropriate, Reliable, iNtegrated. There are some useful tips and tricks, too, that we can draw from the quality-standards used in business: they’re from a different context, of course, but as we’ll see later, the exact same principles would apply in dowsing and much else besides – and it doesn’t take much to adapt them to our purpose here. More on that in the chapter on quality – see A question of quality.

Dowsing and beyond

So what is “our purpose here”? These quality-concerns are not just about dowsing: they apply to any kind of subjective exploration. Yet we’ll keep the focus here on dowsing and the ‘earth mysteries’ field, to give us something specific to work with yet not drown in too many examples or side-excursions. Even if your core interest, though, is in a somewhat different field – healing, perhaps, or the so-called ‘psychic’ skills – you should still find plenty here that’ll be relevant to you, and we’ll trust that you’ll be able to adapt it to your work as you need.

Let’s play with an example here. When we put earth-mysteries studies to practical use, it’s called geomancy: feng-shui is perhaps the best-known form of this, though there are many others. It’s a broad field, with a very broad scope, but we could summarise how quality impacts on geomancy in generic form as follows:

Quality is a matter of skill. It requires experience – which we don’t get just from sitting in an armchair. It requires judgement, awareness, dexterity, discernment, even that rarity called ‘common sense’. It calls for a good understanding of the mechanics of the problem at hand, the choice of approaches to that problem, and the trade-offs that lead to appropriate methods in any given context. It requires an ability to balance between the content and the context of the problem. And yes, it kind of demands that we go round the bend a bit, in the labyrinthine process of learning each new skill…

Quality is a matter of luck. In feng-shui, for example, they talk about three kinds of luck:

  • heaven-luck – what happens as a result of our nature, of who we are, the milieu in which we live, and so on
  • earth-luck – what happens because of where we are, our surroundings and the like
  • man-luck – about our choices in finding a balance between heaven-luck and earth-luck, and how we use those choices.

So whilst we never have control, we always have choice – though there’s always a weird twist somewhere in those choices! Murphy’s Law is the only real law that there is, but it’s so much of a law that it has to apply to itself too – which is where ‘man-luck’ comes to play. Hence what we might call ‘inverse-Murphy’: things can go right if we let them – but if we only let them go right in expected ways, we’re limiting our chances! Hence too much of geomancy is not only the art of being at the right place at the right time, but not being in the wrong place at the wrong time…

Quality is a matter of belief. Let’s face it, much of what we do in dowsing, geomancy and the like is pretty crazy, by any ordinary standards. Yet as scientist Stan Gooch put it, there’s an important paradox at play here: things not only have to be seen to be believed, but also have to be believed to be seen. In subjective skills, beliefs are tools: they play a key role in how well we’ll be able to achieve the intended result. But there’s a catch, of course. Sometimes things can work – for a while, anyway – because we want them to, or because we’ve paid the issue some attention: yet if we’re not careful about it, when the belief fades, so do the results. And we also need to be very careful to learn the boundaries between reality and wishful thinking…

Quality is a matter of context. Rules and guidelines are useful, but only useful: we forget that fact at our peril.. Every theory or model expects ‘sameness’, or at least close similarity; yet every place, everything we deal with, is itself, different and distinct. So a key part of geomancy, and the practice of dowsing and similar skills, is about knowing to stick to the rule-book, and when to try something else. The rule-books define the likely content; yet in practice it’s context that determines what will work, and what won’t…

Dowsing is a really good test-case for all of this, because there’s almost nothing to it other than those subjective skills. (As we’ll see in the next chapter, the physical skills we need for dowsing are trivial: you can pick the basics up in a couple of minutes. It’s the rest of the skill that’s not so trivial…) So even if dowsing isn’t your usual forte, do have a play with it here: there’s much you’ll learn that you can apply to every skill or discipline.

Which brings us back to this matter of discipline: what’s all that about, you might ask?

A question of discipline

A slight risk of confusion here, perhaps, because we’re dealing with two meanings of ‘discipline’ here – and both of them are valid.

One is the fact of discipline itself, doing things consistently – resolving the mechanics and approaches to that skill, in a manner that’s elegant, efficient, appropriate, reliable, integrated. That’s the only way we can achieve and maintain quality in our work. More to the point, if we don’t do that, what we get is rubbish – even if at times we can perhaps try to pretend otherwise… If we want our work to mean something, there’s no way to get round this: discipline matters.

The catch is that subjective skills such as dowsing depend on a personal balance between the mechanics and approaches: there’s no predefined “the right way to do it” that works for everyone, and certainly no fixed method that covers everything. There are some generic principles that work well – see A question of quality – but otherwise that’s about as close as we get to “the method”. Beyond that, we need to move up one step to a kind of meta-level, to get to what we might call ‘the methods to derive methods’.

This is the other meaning of ‘discipline’: disciplines – the plural – are what we use to guide the discipline of our work. At the practical level, each kind of work has its own disciplines – the disciplines of water-divining, healing, archaeological survey, earth-energies and so on. What we’re interested in here are the disciplines at the next level up, that guide quality and choices within each of the practical disciplines. We could describe the different modes of these ‘meta-disciplines’ – see the chapter The disciplined dowser – as the Four Disciplines of Dowsing:

The ‘artist’ mode is about ideas, experiences, whilst the ‘mystic’ mode is more about meaning, belonging, deep belief and so on. We also need to link all these different modes together into a unified whole, such that each mode consistently supports the next – see The integrated dowser. We’ll show later how all of this comes together, with some detailed worked examples in dowsing and archaeography – see the ‘practice’ sections, starting at Practice – enhancing the senses.

But if we don’t do this in a disciplined way – for example, if we play a random New-Age mix-and-match between the modes – we won’t get useful knowledge, we’ll get a useless mess. In short, we need to be clear which mode we’re in at every moment, and act accordingly – don’t mix ‘em up!

Killing quality

Mixing the modes is just one of many ways to kill the quality in our work. Some of the (many) others include:

  • getting caught up in the hubris and hysteria of hype
  • losing sense in the quest for some imagined ‘Golden Age’
  • indulging in the casual New Age carelessness that we could unkindly call ‘newage’
  • making mistakes about the meaning of meaning
  • trying to cling to certainty and ‘truth’ by possession
  • failing to allow for the risks of a reality in which ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ can collide in unexpected ways
  • skipping over skills-development steps in the labyrinthine process of learning

More on all of those later – see Seven sins of dubious discipline. But again, this isn’t just about dowsing – it applies in general to anywhere that involves any kind of subjective exploration. For instance, at times we’ve seen archaeologists come up with some absolute howlers, in terms of ill-thought-through explanations of ancient sites; and most of the attempts by self-styled ‘skeptics’ to explain dowsing – or, more often, to dismiss it – have been almost text-book examples on how not to do science. Discipline matters in every discipline.

In our ‘practice’ sections’ starting at Practice – enhancing the senses, we’ll cover a broad range of areas, showing how to identify and avoid those mistakes, and maintain discipline whilst moving between the modes. As we’ll see, there are a fair few challenges there, and sustaining that discipline does take practice.

But then so does dowsing itself: and in case you’re not familiar with that as yet, that’s what we need to turn to next.

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Dowsing in ten minutes