Dowsing

Dowsing for water or minerals is an ancient art, used worldwide throughout time. Armies and those living in tropical countries and elsewhere have used the technique to find a safe water supply. Col Kenneth Merrylees OBE of the British Army worked during the Second World War as a bomb disposal expert, when he used his dowsing skills to find deep, unexploded, delayed-action bombs. One he successfully discovered had burrowed under the swimming pool at Buckingham Palace. His skill in the Middle East and India at finding water in barren places earned him the title 'God of the water'.

I am not exceptional among 'sensitives' in that I am, after a short time, acutely uncomfortable if I stay on the lines of a fair-sized flow, and I know from experience it's impossible for me to sleep over one. I found it impossible to accept a purely physical explanation of the dowser's ability. I am forced therefore to look beyond the limitations of orthodox physics and the five senses.

Col Merrylees dismissed the idea that a dowser's skills are supernatural, though he maintained there is a connection made by the dowser's mind with a source of knowledge beyond all physical limits. Success in dowsing, he felt, requires effort, study and practice, and dowsing is sometimes discredited because dowsers make avoidable mistakes.

Col Merrylees was Chairman of the British Society of Dowsers. More recently Dr Arthur Bailey, former senior lecturer in Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Bradford, has been President. I encountered the Bailey essences after working with the Bach remedies. I wrote asking Dr Bailey to dowse for me and was amazed at the accuracy of his description. I must add that we did not know each other at that time.

Having someone you have never met dowse an accurate prescription for you is a little like having someone walk over your grave. It shakes you. Or rather, it threatens your highly cherished emotionally-held beliefs about the nature of the universe.

You have a number of options at this point. You can either deny what has happened, ignore it, dismiss it as a fluke or a coincidence, throw a tantrum, or consign the episode to a box labelled 'Paranormal' to be conveniently ignored. This may explain why a respected colleague once called me a charlatan, a dangerous person. After all, if someone challenges a belief that is emotionally dear, you can easily get angry, rather than ask yourself whether, perhaps, the earth does actually go round the sun, despite all you have been taught. People have been excommunicated or executed for less! By the way, someone once told me that 'Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous!'

Or, faced with something that has challenged your belief system or paradigm, you can approach it in an honest, inquiring frame of mind. I'm not saying that the first course of action is wrong, only that if you have a strong emotional reaction to something challenging, you are well advised to ask where this strong reaction is coming from.

Is it from your inner wisdom, a place of comfortable security and knowing? Or is it from the ego, that vulnerable part of us that craves security and can only obtain it by flexing the 'I'm better than you/you're different to me' muscles - those muscles that have to be continually flexed to maintain a confident posture, whilst all the time the ego suffers fear, a fear built on ignorance.

Facing these options, though I didn't understand them at the time, I chose to just take Dr Bailey's dowsed remedies. Funnily enough, they were a combination which opened up my intuition and enabled me to think laterally. Soon after this I also learned to dowse!