British Society of Dowsers 2000 - Radiestesistas del Mundo*

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BRITISH SOCIETY OF DOWSERS -CONGRESS 2000

The Congress was held over the weekend of 8-9-10 September in the
College of Ripon & York St John, a theological offshoot of the University of
Leeds and a favourite location. The buildings are kept spick and span
and the food is memorable. We were told that this was the last year the
College would occupy the Ripon campus and the site as to be be put up
for sale.

Groups Conference

As "delegate" (a truly comic term in view of our informality) of the
Ashdown Dowsers in East Sussex, I attended the preliminary Groups
conference held on the Friday afternoon before the Congress proper. This
session is where, perhaps, the BSD secretariat learn most about what
concerns grass-roots members, as it consists simply of a small circle of
desks with one of us at each and comments and opinions can be shared in
relatively intimate surroundings.

Michael Rust, half of the paid secretariat, gave us some figures.
Membership was slowly creeping up, 1401 at year-end 1998, 1422 in 1999.
Eight Council members had left, leaving five vacancies; someone with
policy ideas was needed.

The change of the Journal to an illustrated glossy magazine "Dowsing
Today" had had a good reception, but its ambit demanded outstanding
photos which were few and far between. Michael Guest (West Midland)
wanted to know if computer scan files would be acceptable. MR thought
that although photos were scanned, a very high resolution was employed.
He would contact MG privately with details. Mary Ison (retiring from
Council) suggested that if the matter of payment was clarified, people
might send in more. MR: Some people already send 200 as it is ! (Q: Does
the Society keep them all ?) MR: I'm not sure. Maybe we could pay for
the ones we keep.

The BSD was planning another International Congress in 2003, ten years
after the first and its 70th birthday. A sub-committee had been formed
to consider possible themes.

Groups were then invited to give reports on their activities.

Sussex (Chichester) had 70 members and was growing slowly. The mentoring
system had not proved as popular as hoped and instead, tutorials were
more often held at meetings. Field trips were popular and members had
been gained by holding a one-day beginners' course publicised in the
local media. A Web site would be opened before very long.

East Midlands (Nottingham) were 25 to 28 strong and mainstream dowsing
had recently gained interest. Field trips attracted four or five.

Northumbria (Whitley Bay) reported 30 of whom 20 were elderly. Little
happened unless an outside speaker was engaged. Talks were given to
local Women's Institutes about household uses of dowsing.

West Midland (Wootton Wawen, near Stratford-on-Avon) had the same
problem. Thanks to the group journal "Rod & Pendulum" whose subscribers
count as members, their figure is 160 to 170 and remains fairly static.
60% are healer-dowsers and matching speakers to the different tastes was
always difficult. A thing that had worked well was getting an outside
speaker to host a general forum.

Ashdown (Forest Row) meetings were monthly and varied unpredictably from
9 to 30, but there was no formal membership and the group doubled as a
Fountain (civic healing) Group for the district. Most attenders were
seasoned mediums and clairvoyants so dowsing was almost a side interest.

I mentioned the six email discussions of which uk-dowsers@egroups.com
was the nearest to being one devoted to BSD affairs. Few British dowsers
have computers or are online so there is minimal interest at present.

Beulah Garcin (President) then spoke briefly on the Millennium Water
Project which followed on some experiments that had been done with
"healed" water and plants. This was a project which should interest both
sides of the dowsing field. Regional committees were being encouraged to
assemble some suggestions as to the different ways water can be changed
by purposive thought, whether for softening, purifying or energising it.
Can water diversion be proven ? It was worth thinking about, at least.

Lorna Sharkey (Council member) mentioned a big change in the Glasgow
hospital in which she worked. A joint project involving complementary
therapistrs and doctors was assessing spa treatment for certain
conditions and there was a lot of enthusiasm.

A general discussion was then held with the theme: Dowsing in the 21st
Century

Professor Peter Stewart (RV training) suggested the effect of asking
permission could be a subject for measurement: did it affect dowsing
accuracy ? He was very interested in training systems which made dowsing
more reliable. Doris Frankish (Northumbria) remarked tartly that
confidence came from never being told dowsing didn't work. (This
coincides with an article by me on this subject in the current "Dowsing
Today" - DW).

Dr Patrick MacManaway (Scottish Dowsing Assoc), now almost half an
American as he spends half his year in Vermont, was interested in
outreach and advocacy. If you got the tonality right the media showed
plenty of interest.

Lorna Sharkey (Council) remarked that healer-dowsers were now into
dozens of practices of which dowsing was only one.

Michael Guest (West Midlands) was frustrated at dowsing being "sold" as
a fun thing. It should be something really skilled and taught as such.

Discussion disagreed about the ease of getting dowsing looked at in
science projects. Philip Garcin (Council) thought there was little
future in this while Mary Ison (Council, retiring) pointed out that the
Russians were running many experiments on it and, in general, what they called
"bioenergy".

For our diaries, we were told that the 2001 Congress will be at the
other old favourite location, the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester,
over the weekend 14-16 September.

Friday 8th September

President Beulah Garcin welcomed us and spent a little time on the
Millennium Water Project, whose details although previously
announced were somewhat obscure to most of us. This is a
half-formal, half-formulated research project into the different
ways dowsers can influence water to do anomalous things, such as
make plants grow faster, become unnaturally clean, bring about
healing, move into dry wells or alter the way chemical reactions
take place. How can dowsers working unsupervised ever represent an
unbiased research team ? They can't, but that doesn't invalidate the
experience from their point of view. At present, I gathered, the
project awaits some brainstorming by regional committees and
knocking into an agreed shape before anything exciting starts
happening.

Adventures in Dowsing: Al Heiss from the USA commenced the
proceedings with a series of anecdotes about his own life in
dowsing. He has had a lot to do with Indian effigy mounds and his
strong area is finding very valuable things at penknife depth. A
great enthusiast for "antenna rods" - telescopic radio aerials
reworked with a handle at right angles into dowsing tools. He has a
simple, almost naive pleasure in his discoveries which infected us
all.

Saturday morning

The Lighter Side of Water-Divining: Michael Cranfield
Water-Divining & Its Adjuncts: Sir James Morrison-Low

An almost double act by two tweedy Scottish diviners, who shared the
time. Cranfield told us of the wonderful watershed when Scottish
golf courses, which previously had only watered their greens,
discovered that the Americans irrigated their fairways as well ... a
great bounty descended on Scottish diviners. Normally a course will
consume "only" 150,000 gallons (75 road tankers) a day but a big one
like Carnoustie has a thirst for 700,000, more than a medium-sized
town. Like all true diviners, he had a system that was the only
correct one.

Cranfield was dismissive of modern electronic pipe locators ("work
down to EIGHT FEET, no less !") but Sir James was evidently
enamoured of them as an extra showpiece and had one to show us, a
low-frequency oscillator which clips to an exposed part of the metal
pipe you are tracing and has an earth prod positioned to one side to
create a potential in the ground. You walk over the pipe with a
large square aerial/antenna feeding earphones through an amplifier
and a slot of silence amid the noise is where the pipe is, as the
currents emanating from it to left and right cancel out. No good for
plastic, of course. He had a slide show which consisted largely of a
weathered garage door with four dented tins and drums resting
against it: the fool's guide to 1,2,5 and 45 gallons (when full of
crude oil, the "barrel" that dictates our lives). Also a domestic
oil tank: six feet by four feet square or 600 gallons. One
reasonably clean person's daily water supply is 1/20th of this.

Sir James had been told at the start of his divining career that too
much diversification was unwise, but did a small amount of lost
object location on the usual water-diviner's principle of being
forced to whether you find it works or not. On one occasion friends
were about to depart for a ferry and their car keys had vanished; no
amount of looking in the likely places helped. He eliminated the
rooms in the house one by one and finally found the keys in a high
drawer of clothes. Their three-year-old son had climbed onto a chair
to secrete them there, for inscrutable reasons.

He also mentioned a thing which is often skipped over in dowsing
talks: "switching", or reversal of your response when you are tired
or overworked. Having once been thrown by this, he now checked his
"yes" response at the start of every session and if he didn't get
the right one, got on the phone and postponed the appointment for 24
hours. (Luxury indeed !)

Saturday morning session 2 - Earth Energies Group

Another double bill, introduced by Jim Lyons, who remarked that the EEG
was now up to 150 members.

Ciaran Graham - "Vibrational Resonance of Earth Forts"
Jacqui Beacon and David Gillett - "Earth Energies in Relation to Modern
Living"

Ciaran is in the bearded Celt school, in his case Irish. I think it's
the first time I've witnessed a BSD Congress session opening with a poem and
a song. I especially liked the refrain of the latter:

And if you walk in the footsteps of a stranger
You'll learn things you never knew
You'll learn things you never knew

- a very good motto for dowsing seminars and indeed, understanding the
world generally. (Translation: the world is not what any of us think but
two lots of ideas about it are better than one.)

Ciaran had got into Irish earth forts when finding water on a dry farm
near Mallow, outside Cork. There are over a hundred of these forts in
eastern Ireland - low, roughly circular mounds of clay always concealing
a stone-lined underground warren of tunnels sometimes connecting over
long distances through "sous-terrains", also stone-lined and roofed, a
metre wide, 1.8m deep and 2m below the surface, to neighbouring forts.
Ciaran thought they had a healing role and detected a triple spiral
energy symbolised by a carved pattern on a stone at Newgrange.

This one was called Lehane's and work with rods, excavation and dowsing
had elicited the tunnel plan even though some of it had collapsed.
Sous-terrains ran to two nearby forts, one of which had been ploughed
level and erased. The orientation of the system was to the rising and
setting sun.

Dowsers detected unusual energies on and around these forts, some of
which Ciaran had mapped and showed us on an overhead projector. Lehane's
had a number of vortices and water placed on them had special qualities.
In one case, three stones placed on a healing vortex and than taken to
the bedside of a woman in coma from drowning had restored her.

Ciaran left a lot of questions hanging in the air. Why spoil the magical
effect with some down-to-earth dowsing ? An impressively presented
account.

Beacon and Gillett were in the business of very slowly demystifying
"earth energies". They had shaved bits off EE which they redefined as
electromagnetic influence and geopsychic effects. "Geopathic stress" was
a misnomer as it included elements of these - "environmental stress"
(ES) was altogether a better name. David Gillett was cautious about the whole
field and wanted it to be examined much more carefully.

Jacqui Beacon described some "house problems" she had worked on. In many
cases simply removing EMF generators like electric alarm clocks and
radios from a bedside was sufficient remedy. Children with learning
difficulties improved dramatically after being given a triple treatment
(ES, GS, EMF).

Gillett thought that trees close to houses were good at protecting them
from EMF trouble if they were allowed to grow higher than the roofs. He
had a partner in Ontario who had access to a number of ancient peoples'
sites on derelict farms and typically the unsuccessful farms had been on
top of burial grounds or massacre sites. You could tell if someone was
stressed by looking at their aura: a healthy person lived in the centre
of theirs. Beacon: some people take failure and GS around with them. You
need to examine their karma. Gillett: "karma" in Sanskit means "action"
- the ability to move energy around and stabilise it (DW: doesn't he mean
"knowledge to act" ?). On some sites there is great psychic confusion
and even when visiting them now, you couldn't think straight. Beacon: we
always attune before examining an environment and even then, there's
sometimes a psychic guardian who won't let us in to view.

(Comment: is this the start of the break-up of the great "earth
energies" monolith ? - DW)

Saturday afternoon was entirely devoted to speakers' workshops, six in
parallel with two sittings each. As far as I remember, having dowsed the
lists, I slept.

Saturday afternoon

Meet The Council

Beulah (President) and Philip Garcin, Guy Hudson, David Dixon, Mary
Ison, Patrick McManaway and David Mizen were lined up ceremonially on chairs
for inspection. Billy Gawn was absent. Michael and Diedre Rust (General
and Executive Secretary) also present.

The onus was on the audience to set the discussion and a question was
asked whether the Society took a position on mobile phone towers.
Patrick MacManaway said a good treatment of this was given by the PowerWatch
organisation who had a presence on the Internet.

Guy Hudson: if anyone is interested we can do a search and provide a
list of sites on our own web site (this is <www.dowsers.demon.co.uk> - DW*).
There is a difference of opinion on the dangers and the Society would
not want to take a position on them.

(Questioners numbered, Q1, Q2 etc.)
Q1: Where has the Rollright Stones acquisition got to ?
M Rust: The matter went into abeyance for a while. The Rollrights Trust
failed to get funding for an outright purchase and the time limit on our
£5000 pledge of support has now lapsed.

Jo Cartmale asked if the lapel badge could be revived.
MR: We had one batch made and sold them so slowly we didn't repeat it.
How many here are interested ? (12)
Q2: How about T-shirts like the (green) EEG one ?
MR: Again, how many interested ? (4)
MR: (silence)

Dudley Wheeler wanted to know if ideas for the future had been discussed.
Beulah Garcin said that the Groups conference on Friday had discussed
this - accuracy and scientific tests. The aim was to prove dowsing
rather
than try to explain it. Guy Hudson said the Council had a sub-committee
looking at strategy and provision of a Secretary after the retirement of
the Rusts was a critical matter.

M Rust: We have decided for certain on another International Congress in
2003 to celebrate our 70th anniversary and ideas for a theme are to be
welcomed.
Dan Wilson: It will also be the 80th anniversary of Les Amis de la
Radiesthésie in Paris and seeing that their formation led directly to
ours, through the Abbé Mermet and Colonel Bell, it would be good to have
something from them. I believe that there is one member who attended
their first meeting who is still alive. I will discuss this with a
knowledgeable dowser I am visiting next week in Germany who knows the
French scene (i.e. Bernie Schaefer).

Q3: Do you think attenders here are the marketing class A,B,C1 dowsers ?
Are there C2,D,E dowsers who never come ? (The exact implication of this
categorisation was never quite explained, so the discussion moved
gradually into grading and assessment.)
Beulah Garcin: There are a lot of dowsers out there who would not want
to
come. (obviously a little puzzled)
Sig Lonegren: We've looked long and hard at grading dowsers. You here
know who the good dowsers are. It's risky - not the education but the
certification.
BG: A test is not the world.
SL: At least the new Codes of Ethical Conduct are a good idea. (These
have been published to listed dowsers - DW)
Q4: There is a feeling abroad nowadays that training should lead to a
recognition of some sort. People could accrue points ?
BG: We are asked regularly for a qualification, certainly.
Guy Hudson: We held a meeting for dowsing tutors two years ago and they
all agreed what a beginner should know if not do. We could tie something
to that.

Q5: Why is the Dowsing Research Group silent ?
GH: It's not dead. The next meeting is at Moreton-in-Marsh on Sept 30th.
(In fact, it isn't. It's at the pub nearest the Rollright Stones and
until Guy opened his mouth none of us knew of the meeting - DW)
Q5: I have applied to join three times and had silence.
GH (embarrassed): We are short of a secretary. See me afterwards. (This
was a difficult thing for him to say in public as the DRG does have a
secretary but her batteries have run flat - DW)

Q6: Many people do dowsing but don't regard themselves (formally) as
"dowsers". Would a gathering for them work ?
BG: We have thought of revival meetings for people who have let it lapse
somewhat.
Q7: We could have a list of members with their interests marked with a
symbol, like the EEG members' list.
MR: We do have a lot of that information. 30 or 60 categories ...
Deidre Rust: Enquirers get a list of practising dowsers.
Dan Wilson: But there are only three categories on that ?
DR: Yes, Healing, Site and General.
Q7: Well, you could add the symbols to that.

Dan Wilson (*Amendment Jan 2002 - BSD web site is now
<http://www.britishdowsers.org/> )

Saturday late afternoon

Kris Sundaram - "Continuous Dowsing"

Introduced by David Mizen who says Kris calls himself "a man who makes a
mean fruit cake". A double-entendre ? We were left to speculate.

Kris has been dowsing for 40 years without recognising it as such. He
works in high-tech areas of British Aerospace and anything that makes
dowsing reliable there is what will sell it there. He has worked in
several high-level European projects where dowsing has proved
increasingly useful. Or is it dowsing ?

What he does is to relax and think about the project and things he needs
to know about it come to him and talk to him. He started out flying
Hunter jets and when you fly planes like those, you become intuitive out
of self-preservation. Either the engine works or it doesn't and you need
a very long stepladder very quickly. The pilots developed "A1 ear" (the
engine was an A1). They would land working planes, say they were on the
point of failure and be found correct. Later they would even say where
the noise said the fault was - and get that right as well.

Explaining dowsing is always a frustrating thing. It was said in 1905
that the best dowsers were illiterate men. Intuition is not guess or
instinct. It is learnt. Research shows intuition is processed by the
left side of the brain and requires experience and learning to be effective.
Of the 100% of information transmission from someone, you only receive
60% via language. The remainder comes from appearance, body language,
manner, tone of voice.

A short lecture on orthodox psychology and eye movement.

would affect them in another circ.. | left and down |--/
| |

Liars flicker their eyes because they are both constructing and
recalling their false statements. Affirming innocence makes your eyes wider. In
fact, you know all this without doing the research ...

A story. Two ancient but rebuilt 400 MW (large) turbo-generator sets
were sold to Romania. Like the A1 engines, they would either be quite
reliable or blow up, so they were a concern. Kris parked the generators in his
mind and allowed them to come and talk to him if anything looked bad. So
far they have given seven major problems and in five cases he had
contacted PowerGen (the prime contractor) before the Romanians had.
Eventually he had had to let on he was intuitive. So there is dowsing
between dowsing. He treats his absent daughter like a generator set and
gets her to signal when things aren't right. You don't get overinvolved
or intense about it or it will distort the picture. Just set the alarm
system and relax.

Guy Hudson: The Japanese say all machines have ghosts in them.
Kris: We get companies to compete making the same items to the same
drawings with the same materials and test them rigorously. The best ones
always come from the the people in the best mood. Of course I sense it
anyway, but we do the tests, of course.
---
After Kris's talk, three presentations were made:

The Pogson Cup "for the greatest act in dowsing" - presented for the
first time in 30 years - to Elizabeth Sulivan for the construction of a
stone labyrinth, a replica of the one in Chartres Cathedral, on the
former rose beds of her home Benton Castle in West Wales. (It takes 17
minutes to walk it and the labyrinth solves the question you entered it
with. It is known in the district by passers-by on the river below for
its shaft of white light at night, with orange balls which float slowly
round. For some reason it only produces this effect when she is absent.)

The Bell Essay Award to Prof Peter Stewart for his article in the
current "Dowsing Today" (Vol 39/269), "Remote Perception" which is a lengthy
report on his remote viewing workshops at the 1999 Congress at
Cirencester and other group experiments he has carried out.

The Roy Talbot Award for outstanding acts of water divination, to Father
James Kimpton of the "Water For Life" scheme, where he has found water
for 2000 villages in India and the funds for boreholes, pumps - and
schools.
His success record was compared with that of Government geologists in
1996 and found to be 90% against their 30%.

Sunday afternoon - a late presentation to suit those who didn't want to
leave early

David Ashworth - "Neighbours From Hell"

David had had second thoughts about his title and then third thoughts,
and kept it. It referred to the entities he met in his healing work.

His presentation might be decribed as a series of artistic dogmatisms
not much connected by any attempt at argument or explanation, so I must more
or less repeat my notes as a semi-verbatim account and let you sense
what thread was intended. So, direct quotation follows:

I have heard of the desirability of "pure dowsing". What is "pure" in
dowsing ? Scientists can't even agree on the meaning of "consciousness".

Consciousness is embodied in the chakra system. The base chakra feeds
the body. The sacral chakra is the energy of creativity. Solar plexus = the
"big motor" which spins energy out to the others. Heart = love. Throat =
communication. Brow = perception. Crown = higher self.

We can use these energies in our own work. They are all parts of
consciousness. Look at the caduceus, the wand of Hermes, symbolises the
chakra system and was inherited by the Masons without full knowledge of
what was symbolised.

The aura is consciousness too. A lot of people have misconceptions about
the aura. It's a much bigger field of consciousness than people
appreciate. (Demonstration of aura behaviour on Lorna Sharkey:) It goes
to half size when she is stood on a "negative" point, and double size
when she is given a crystal to hold. (Short talk on energy bodies, using
a diagram.)

Entities; there are a lot of different ideas on what entities are. I say
they are beings and they are looking for electromagnetic energy. Dowsers
are not as much at risk as healers, who pick up higher frequencies, of
becoming a target for them. Panic and anxiety sufferers have a hole in
the outside of the aura which an entity is exploiting. Supermarkets are
good places for harvesting entities. My partner was reduced to crouching
on the floor of one but soon lost the entity again. She has an active
system and that lays her open to entities.

Spirits are the same as us but without the physical body. They are
trapped in this dimension but still need food. So they too can attach
themselves to you. IME trapped spirits have no concept of dimensions.
They are attracted either to a home or a person and often move into a
home and feed on you when you are asleep. A localised pain is often a
sign of an attached spirit. In a former consulate in Bradford, the
central heating came on by itself with the controls off and stored shoes
were relaced starting at the bottom.

Pure dowsing, for me, is to follow your own dowsing inclination and feel
comfortable with that and not worry about it not coming up to snuff in
other dowsers' opinions. That is to be respected.

I don't usually tune in unless I'm working as it destroys the
protection.
Dowse before starting to ensure you have the power to deal with the
entities and spirits.

Guides - find out who your guides are. Mine have multiplied over the
years and I now have 93. Fresh ones appearing mean a fresh job is coming
up shortly.--- end quotation

The President then closed the Congress. It was probably the last Ripon
Congress and next year would be at Cirencester (see report 1 - DW). She
thanked the speakers and workshop leaders and there was acclamation for
the work of the Rusts.

Dan Wilson