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5.0 _DOWSING AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH_
Problematical Truth_
At the 1991 ASD West Coast Conference, several times I heard the remark "If you don't believe
me, dowse it for yourself". This bothered me for several reasons.
First of all, we beginning dowsers all know from our own experience that asking the wrong question, or an imprecise question, may result in dowsing misleading information - misleading in the sense that the response is, at best, only partially true.
We beginning dowsers are also aware that answers from dowsing may only reflect our own,
or someone else's, fantasy or projection, or our own subconscious predilections. With
experience, we become better and more accurate dowsers.
Secondly, we are aware that verifying what we dowse can be problematical. When an experienced water dowser consistently finds her/his predictions confirmed by well drillers, we
have verification. But what of dowsing for health and UFOs? In health problems, all sorts of things are going on in a person, and it is problematic whether dowsing
is successful, either in describing a problem accurately, or in helping a person to heal.
When a person recovers, it is problematic what effect dowsing had: was it a placebo effect, a prayer, a harmless adjunct to medical treatment?
There are so many variables involved, and so little that we truly understand
in such situations. With UFOs, the situation is worse: What is "true" seems dependent upon the conceptual framework of the
believer (Vallee 1988).
Thirdly, there seems to be something peculiar about a dowser saying, "If you don't believe
me, dowse it for yourself", when the majority of the human community may not believe in
dowsing at all. Certainly, it has a peculiar ring in a nation whose scientific
community (by and large) claims that dowsing is silly folklore. Having stated
the problems as I see them, I shall attempt to sort out some of the issues.
Veridical Perception and Truth_
Our FIRST level of what is true seems to grow out of "what we believe from our own eyes".
This is the sense in which we claim that our perceptions are true (veridical perception), but hallucinations, mirages, dreams,
etc, are not truth. Even in perception, there are problems and mistakes.
For example: I am walking in a field, and I see what I take to be a person waving at me. I walk on, and I realize that what I saw was a small tree moving in the breeze. On the other hand, there is a sense in which we may argue that dreams, etc., while
not literally true, are true in some metaphorical or symbolic sense.
Also, we are familiar with the problems of
the legal system: how can people who saw the same scene come to such different
views of what they "saw"?
I believe it is within the framework of veridical perception that we agree who is, and who
is not, a successful dowser of water, minerals, and other phenomena that we can perceive, and that it is within this framework
that we discuss and resolve differences of opinion and interpretation of our dowsing work.
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Communal "Common Sense" Truth_
However, there is a SECOND level at which truth becomes entangled with our personal beliefs,
and the beliefs and the conceptual framework of our community. This is the sense
of truth in which we say that our forebears truly believed that the earth was flat, but today we truly know that it is round.
This is the realm of the saying "Today's science, tomorrow's common sense, and the next
day's nonsense", for human history is strewn with beliefs which were outlandish when first announced, later accepted as common
sense, and still later discarded. The most common
example, I suppose, is our theory of gravity: from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein.
Today, our scientific community acts as if Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics were
the end of the story for all time, but any historian of science can cite examples over the past 500 years when scientists
felt that way, and were later proven wrong.
We dowsers know that dowsing can lead to truth, no matter what scientists and our 21st century
world community believes. Also, we dowsers know that there is wisdom in the beliefs
and practices of Feng Shui, Geomancy, and Shamanism, even if practitioners of those
ancient arts were ignorant of modern science and technology, and even if we today are puzzled as to how to reconcile
those ancient traditions with our modern society.
Historically, religion and science, in their separate ways, have sought to overcome cultural
relativity (culturally relative truth) by claiming to have found an absolute method to absolute truth. Given the diversity of religious and scientific "truth" over the centuries, such claims to "absolute truth"
become problematic. So today, many theorists in both fields adopt a learning
approach and a tolerance for error.
In our own time, we have heard Christian leaders say that, yes, at one time some Christians
thought non-white human races were inferior, but today Christians know that was morally wrong; and we have heard scientists
state that science is a self-corrective methodology, that all of today's theories are subject to becoming false in the future.
Realism, Conceptual Relativity, and Theoretical Truth_
These considerations lead me to a THIRD level of "truth seeking": what are the ground-rules for understanding dowsing claims to truth, in a society that, on the whole, denies
the validity of any dowsing claims?
I'll introduce this topic by responding to those who might ask: "What difference does it make, as long as our dowsing techniques work?" - shades of "pragmatic truth". My response is to consider the history of radionics machines:
- At first, skilled specialists built and used these electronic machines.
- Then someone found that the machine worked, even if were not plugged into an electrical
outlet.
- Then someone else discovered the machine was not needed, just use the wiring diagram.
- Then Fran Farley found she got the same answers, using a small pine board (no machine
at all).
- Nowadays, some dowsers just rub their fingers together, and feelings of rough or smooth
skin provide answers.
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What is the truth? From the story, I gather
that as a practical matter, the machine worked when plugged in, when not plugged in, when represented by a wiring diagram,
when reduced to a pine board, and when reduced to the dowsing reaction of rough/smooth skin. This story (from Fran Farley)
is typical of human technology: the original technique worked, but was not the whole story, and gave way to new techniques.
The critic would like to know what event causes what reaction. If the key to radionics is in the operator's smooth/rough skin response, then the machine itself does not
play a necessary role in the causal chain of events, so the machine is not part of the "ultimate truth" of the matter. What
I am getting at is that when we speak of "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth", we want an account that
conforms to the reality of the world, not just something that happens to work. Historically, "reality" was problematic.
Traditionally, philosophers fused logic, morality, and causality. Thus Leibniz (circa 1700)
proposed that this is "the best of all possible worlds" because God is constrained by the laws of logic and morality to create
none other. But Wittgenstein (circa 1920) pointed out to Bertrand Russell that all of mathematics/logic is "tautologies, hence
no surprises", and most logicians (except Godel with his paradoxical theorem) now believe that logic is a linguistic construction
of the human mind, not a part of the external world.
The traditional claim was that you cannot deduce "ought from is"; so the moral order is
separate from the causal order, as post-modernists claim (Wilson 1998, pp 40-44, pp 214-215). But Searle (1969, ch 8) did deduce "ought from is". Waal (1996) describes how human morality evolved
from primate behavior. Thus logic and morality are created by mind/consciousness, which is a product of evolution, within
causality.
There is a growing realization among psychologists and others that, as Tibetan Buddhism
told us long ago, each of us human beings seems to be trapped in a model of the world, a model that each of us builds and
projects onto the world (Freeman 2000). We act according to the model, and revise
it when it fails.
In the case of perception (in the case cited above), my mind sees something in the distance,
interprets it as a person waving at me, and when that proves wrong and I decide it is really a tree blowing in the wind, my
mind revises my model to project a tree, rather than a person, into my model of the world. But I did not actually "see the
world". Rather, my mind/brain built a model of the world, a model I can keep
or change, depending upon my personal experience; mind/consciousness evolved within the causal order.
Each of us is trapped in our own private "conceptual relativism". However, all is not lost. If our model includes the concept
of a real world and a concept of our causal connection to that world, we can validate our picture of the world: accepting
realism (Wilson 1998, Searle 2007), rejecting post-modernism.
My proposal is that, just as we learn "to see" the world, so we also learn to dowse the
reality outside ourselves; and just as we can make perceptual mistakes, so we can make dowsing mistakes, and just as we can
correct our perceptual mistakes, so we can (with experience) correct our dowsing mistakes. But we are unable to verify all
of our beliefs at the same time, so we build "theories" that, if true, would account for our experience of the world. So theories come and go, as we learn more about our world.
Thus dowsing is not self-authenticating (self-proving), but an extension of (fallible) human
perception. Dowsing does not make the knowledge claims of an intuitive mysticism that transcend the natural world.
"Scientific naturalism" is the idea that everything that exists is part of nature (including
gods and spirits), and all of it is subject to scientific inquiry (Searle 2007 pp 1-36). A related concept is "scientific
realism", which provides a framework for integrating the physical and the psychological.
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Wilfrid Sellars (1963, p. 173) defines scientific realism as: "science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and what is not that it is not". Thus what really exists are electrons, quarks, or whatever entities science ultimately decides upon. But Sellars (1963 ch 1) also maintains there is truth with respect to the phenomenal
world of our experience of sensory qualities, emotions, and thoughts (veridical truth);
even though the sensory world may turn out to be "real" only in our minds, and not in the
external world.
So, in psychology, we are working in the realm of our inter-subjective conceptual systems
in which there is truth and error relative to the conceptual framework, even though the whole framework may be "false" in
the ultimate reality of physics outside our minds; and the "moral order" evolved out of the causal order.
Thus, the search for truth is a multi-layered process.
We begin with our perceptions, verifying what we can and guessing about the rest.
Sometimes we become so sure that our speculations account for the world, that we dogmatically assert that our theories
are true - only to to eat our words, as reality gives us feed-back that we do
not yet have the whole truth.
Moral Puzzles in the Search for Truth_
So much for "pure reason", or what I ought to believe.
What about "practical reason", or what I ought to do? If our knowledge
of the external world is subject to change, what am I to do when my actions to improve my knowledge violate the received conventional
wisdom?
In the extreme, follow Socrates: If the laws of Athens condemn one to death, and one believes in one's society, then one goes to death,
rather than accept banishment from one's society. Less extreme, what are the
ethics of research into dowsing, if that research may seem to conflict with the conventional wisdom embedded in the laws of
society?
At this point, my concern is not with water/mineral dowsers, for they are a knowledgeable
lot who obviously can take care of themselves. Nor am I concerned with UFO dowsers,
for they are in a realm beyond my capabilities. I am concerned with dowsing and
self-healing.
Ordinarily, we think of medical research on new methods of healing as an area not only restricted
to the medical profession (who presumably know what they are researching) but also restricted within the medical profession
to established research centers (where researchers presumably know more of the risks than ordinary medical practitioners).
If so, should not research into such far-out areas such as dowsing-for-wellness be restricted
to medical research centers?
No, not necessarily. If we think about it,
we realize that medical research must be confined within the limits of scientific knowledge.
If so, where is the "research" to be carried on that is "outside" science (as X-rays and electrocardiograms were beyond
the science of Newton's day)? Dowsing
research in self-healing must, of necessity, be "outside" science, until science can account for dowsing phenomena.
Even the briefest of surveys of healing practices reveals that much of what goes on has
to do with human
consciousness, mind, and emotions. Some not-so-kind
critics snipe that it is all "in the heads" of clients.
But science is still searching for a theory of mind and consciousness. Searle (2007) explores
the issues.
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Thus dowsers are involved in issues of wellness that are outside current medical practice
and research, but not medical tradition. Although today's medicine is restricted
to what is scientifically accepted today, Narby (1998) shows that shamanism may be within the empirical tradition of healing
to which dowsing and self-healing may also belong.
What I propose is a "Health Ethic", analogous to Leopold's ecological Land Ethic:
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of
the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." (Leopold 1949).
Just as land is too valuable a resource to be left to short-term economic gain, so health
is too valuable a resource to be left to short-term medical technology. So, to
paraphrase:
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve and enhance the health and harmony of an
individual's life and community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
This statement, I propose, as a credo for dowsing and self-healing.
_REFERENCES
David Albert, "Bohm's Alternative to Quantum Mechanics", _Scientific American_, May 1994
Richard Feather Anderson, "The Patterns of Life" (1995), email: geomant@earthlink.net
Halton Arp, _ Seeing red: Redshifts, cosmology and academic science_, Apeiron, Montreal CN 1998
Cleve Backster, _Primary Perception_, White Rose Millennium Press 2003
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture_, Mentor paperback 1946 (first edition 1934)
William Berkson, _ Fields of Force_,
Routledge and Kegan Paul 1974
Hans-Dieter Betz, "Water Dowsing in Arid Regions: Report on a Ten-Year Project", Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol 9 No 1 & 2 1995, Allen Press, 810 East 10th Street, Lawrence KS
66044
Christopher Bird, _The Divining Hand_,
Dutton 1979, Schiffer (with Epilog) 1993
(also) The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, H J Kramer 1990
John Bowlby, _Attachment and Loss_, Basic Books (Attachment_ 1969, _Separation_ 1973, Loss_ 1980)
C D Broad, _The Philosophy of C D Broad_, Paul Schilpp, editor, 1959; (also) Religion, Philosophy, and Psychical Research, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1953; Lectures on Psychical Research 1962
Howard Brody, _The Placebo Response_, Cliff Street Books (HarperCollins) 2000
John Casti, "Confronting Science's Logical Limits", _Scientific American_, Oct 1999
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Alex Champion, _Essays on Labyrinths_, Earth Maze Publishing 2001, PO Box 145, Philo CA 95466
Alain Connes, "Geometer of Particle Physics", _Scientific American_, August 2006 (pages 36-38)
Terrence Deacon, _The Symbolic Species_, W W Norton Co, New York 1997
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Cindy Engel, Wild Health: How
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W Y Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead_, Oxford University Press 1960 (first edition 1927)
R Feynman, R Leighton, M Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics_, Addison Wesley 1963-5
Nicolas Finck, quoted in The American Dowser_, Vol 38 No 4, Fall 1998, p. 26
Walter J Freeman, _How Brains Make Up Their Minds_, Columbia University Press 2000
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