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UK Ley-Line Map

Well, i don't know about Iron Age or Lithic Age Europeans, but i have spent a little time with Australian Aborigines, and their reality (the non-city fellas) is very very different to city people.

They know their 'country' by it's character, and have lines of energy which the Old Ones sing to, to preserve the land. They walk this land and greet big old trees as mates (friends) - conversely, they steer away from country that is 'cheeky' (powerful) because only those that are 'knowing' are comfortable (or allowed) there. The Old Ones see water as being mysterious and powerful, and will throw a rock into a pond or waterhole from a distance so as not to startle the water and it's guardian/spirit - They believe that stars sing, and that on a winter's night they sing the loudest. They'll use the knowledge of all of these things to take them where they want to go

Knowing this reality, they still live in the present. our reality, but not completely. My neighbour next door, Lynn, is sitting out in the morning sun. Lynn has solar cells on her roof so she's not being careful with the pennies - even though it's 16c/60f she will sit in the sun - in fact as you go through this little village, you'll see chairs sitting out in the yard for that express purpose - If you ask lynn, why do you sit in the sun when you could be inside with the heater on, or a fire going, she'll say something like 'well, why wouldn't you...', as if it was a silly question. If you ask those that are open, they'll say, because it's good for you, that fella up there is feeding me - but while Lynn is still living her ancesteral reality, she's also skyping with her extended family throughout Australia. Best of both worlds...Eh.

So I reckon that it does us no favours to stand at our place of science and say that because we can't see or hear something, that it won't exist, because to many others it does...or it once did.
That's a brilliant post, and it's important because this kind of thinking, led by experience of unusual energies and ways of interacting with it, does give a clue to why our ancestors went to such lengths to build complex stone structures at places where the energy was especially strong. It was their technological infrastructure. It may also explain the water filled henges, because it seems that water can act as an absorber and re-emitter of torsion energy. And given the apparent connection with time slips, for example, it seems that they may have been capable of all kinds of uses that we no longer comprehend.
 
So not actual evidence in the scientific sense of the word.



None of those things are demonstrably real.



In what context?

For example, any stone with quartz in it might vibrate when subjected to a changing voltage field and vice versa, or even at a stretch, when warmed up, but that's not mysterious, it could be measured. Ultrasonic transducers are cheap enough, the sun comes up most days, 'ley' lines not required.


Just out of interest, the famous 'Michael' line, is that a straight line on a map (as it were) or does it allow for the earth's curvature?
How do places on this 'ley' relate to the line? Must they be within 10 meters? 20? 50?
How does one decide which part of a place is the 'centre'?
So does a 'ley' have to pass through the altar of a church? The transept? Within 10 meters of either? Anywhere inside the consecrated area?
How wide is this 'ley'?
Regarding your final point: the early ley enthusiasts just used regular Ordnance Survey maps and drew straight lines. I found when checking this point that due to the very clever modified Transverse Mercator projection the OS uses, that straight lines do approximate closely to great circles -- even over a hundred miles the error is less than a metre. Regarding the accuracy of placing buildings, etc., you would really need to use very large scale maps to be sure that the alleged ley does actually pass right through a given target, and I doubt that many ley fans would want to spend the considerable sums required by OS for such charts.
 
Well, you wouldn't, because dowsing has long been regarded as something dubious by officialdom, despite its obvious utility, and because until some very bright spark in the MoD read Reddish's first book and connected it with the little known Russian research into torsion, nobody had seen the link. Many dowsers had recognised the role of geological faulting in modulating the earth energy but since nobody had any idea what earth energy was, their ideas were neglected in the wider community -- and still are. If, as seems to be the case in some areas, the energy can promote or create time slips and other odd phenomena, we have an explanation too for the well known connection between geology and strange happenings (cf Jenny Randles' book on the Pennines).

Yeah.... no. This whole "earth energy" thing is a bit warped, out of context. We can measure at quantum levels but this stuff can't be detected? Something is off.

I don't understand your comment about dowsers and faulting. I suspect this is exaggerated and oversimplified being that the history of geology and dowsing are not that different in age. Time slips... I'm not even going to go there. No good evidence, just tall tales.

I'm well versed in the idea of geology and paranormality (spookygeology.com). It's worldwide. But most people who say factors are geologically-related are guessing. They haven't even looked at maps. It sounds sciencey and therefore, convincing to laypeople, but they can't distinguish anything particular about the place that makes it geologically special. And, they mess up the facts considerably.

Why would we need to develop advanced remote sensing (not to be confused with "remote viewing") equipment if dowsers were so great at it? Why not just dowse? Because it doesn't actually work when important and accurate distinctions need to be made. After many centuries, one still gets only stories in return for evidence. Lots and lots and LOTS of stories that are all the same.

That said, I do not doubt that many people have a savviness for nature and deeply know the land they know very well. They don't need fancy equipment to get by and, sadly, this is knowledge is fading fast. But it is not some paranormal lost sense. The concept of earth energy was blown out of proportion in the 1970s in an appeal to new magical beliefs about nature and pop mystical ideas about the world that never panned out. The Russian ideas, or any ideas about earth energy for that matter, have to stand up to scrutiny. Since dowsing can clearly make people money, it should have clarified its value by now. But it hasn't. I don't discount interesting ideas but there is a limit to what I can swallow as a proposed "explanation".

Also of note, I am open to the idea of earthquake lights as a form of "earth energy" because there are plausible mechanisms. So, I am not some closed-minded geologist. What I do know is that hydrogeology is too darn complicated to make sense of with just a stick.
 
How are property prices in the “Pubic Section”, or Adelaide as some call it?

maximus otter


I reckon that the pubic section is more to do with the ahem...great Australian bight.

It seems appropriate to me MO.
 
Can you say more about this @Mungoman?

No worries Frides.

There are a few Ancestry tales of when the land was much dryer - a lot of them were for the little'uns. This is one of 'em.

One of the the causes was a giant frog called Tiddalik who woke up angry and out of sorts one morning, and he thought that if he drank some water it would fix things, so he started drinking, and drinking, and drinking and drank all the fresh water on the Earth.

Pretty soon, things started dying.

All the animals gathered, and spoke together about the lack of water and this old wombat says to 'em...he was grumpy - that's why he drank everything, so you've got to make him laugh to get your water back.

They all tried to make him laugh but he was a miseryguts and he just sat there until a little freshwater eel came up and started to dance in front of him.

This little eel danced so hard that he kept tying himself in knots, which amused Tiddalik - pretty soon he was laughing like a drain, and all their water came pouring out of Tiddaliks mouth.

Footnote. They are all animals, not human beings, because the big flood hasn't happened yet, where Biaime's wife saves all the animals and turns them into human beings.

There is also the oral tradition of the two brothers who watched the flooding of the Spencer Gulf.

Obviously not one generation of brothers but I can surmise that the water rising must have been pretty obvious to those Old Ones because the Spencer gulf is about 75 K's across, maybe three hundred K's long and has a mean depth of only about 13 metres.

During the last Glacial maximum Australia had been inhabited conservatively for 40,000 years and the change in climate was so drastic that inland Aborigines either traveled to the coast, or perished. This was also the time of the outright end of our Megafauna.

Inland water dried up, predictable rain patterns ceased, inland forests died out, Predominant winds and climate changed direction from the west, which came across the continent, to a Southerly, straight of the Antarctic, the the majority of rain forest below the tropic of Capricorn died out along with the inland rainforest surrounding the inland Lake systems. Civilization, as the Aborigine knew it, ceased to exist.

Mean temperature dropped by 10 degrees C and the warmest area on the continent was close to large bodies of water. This wasn't the first time that the sea level had dropped.

The new land dreaming became, or was remembered from last time and was included in more recent folklore, and I reckon that this 'map' is possibly a very distant memory.

There are local myths of near marine topography all up the Eastern coast about islands that were once connected to the mainland and are predominant in the Tjukurpa (Dreaming), with some of them a bit of a hodgepodge due to the reserving of local Aborigines elsewhere.
 
Yeah.... no. This whole "earth energy" thing is a bit warped, out of context. We can measure at quantum levels but this stuff can't be detected? Something is off.

I don't understand your comment about dowsers and faulting. I suspect this is exaggerated and oversimplified being that the history of geology and dowsing are not that different in age. Time slips... I'm not even going to go there. No good evidence, just tall tales.

I'm well versed in the idea of geology and paranormality (spookygeology.com). It's worldwide. But most people who say factors are geologically-related are guessing. They haven't even looked at maps. It sounds sciencey and therefore, convincing to laypeople, but they can't distinguish anything particular about the place that makes it geologically special. And, they mess up the facts considerably.

Why would we need to develop advanced remote sensing (not to be confused with "remote viewing") equipment if dowsers were so great at it? Why not just dowse? Because it doesn't actually work when important and accurate distinctions need to be made. After many centuries, one still gets only stories in return for evidence. Lots and lots and LOTS of stories that are all the same.

That said, I do not doubt that many people have a savviness for nature and deeply know the land they know very well. They don't need fancy equipment to get by and, sadly, this is knowledge is fading fast. But it is not some paranormal lost sense. The concept of earth energy was blown out of proportion in the 1970s in an appeal to new magical beliefs about nature and pop mystical ideas about the world that never panned out. The Russian ideas, or any ideas about earth energy for that matter, have to stand up to scrutiny. Since dowsing can clearly make people money, it should have clarified its value by now. But it hasn't. I don't discount interesting ideas but there is a limit to what I can swallow as a proposed "explanation".

Also of note, I am open to the idea of earthquake lights as a form of "earth energy" because there are plausible mechanisms. So, I am not some closed-minded geologist. What I do know is that hydrogeology is too darn complicated to make sense of with just a stick.

Well, I think the Reddish research is key in understanding what is going on and you are clearly unfamiliar with that. You dismiss time slips without the slightest consideration, you say that people are "just guessing" about the relationship between geology and paranormal events, so you are clearly also not up to date on Paul Devereux's work on earthlights, which goes back to 1982, nor Randles' study of the Pennines events which clearly show geological correlations. Why would we develop remote sensing equipment if dowsers can do it already? Well, one obvious reason is that many people in the sciences automatically dismiss dowsing -- it is a knee jerk reaction. For some jobs, people in many professions have regularly used dowsing because it was for many years superior to any other way of detecting underground structures. Perhaps you are unaware that in Africa, where locating water supplies is a major concern, one very interesting study found that the most efficient way of doing this employs a combination of dowsing and electromagnetic sensing, which is more effective than either method on its own. Perhaps you are also unaware of studies that show that good dowsers are apparently ultra sensitive to very small magnetic fields, and that magnetic fields always produce a torsion component, which shows a connection between the two.

The connection between dowsing and earth energy goes back much farther than the 1970s, and I think it regrettable that New Age magical thinking has associated it with "pop mystical ideas." But that is how it is, and it is like that, ironically, because scientists have made very few efforts to understand the dowsing process., leaving the field open to the pseudo mystics. Exactly the same thing happened in ufology, of course. Until Reddish's work in the 1990s no scientists had done any systematic work on the matter, and it is fortunate that a specialist in stellar interference studies was able to realise that many of the patterns detected by earth energy dowsers in fact represented the effects of interference between waves from linear geological features. In fact, the well known Fortean researcher Ivan Sanderson conducted a very clever experiment in the 60s which showed that pairs of L shaped rods mounted slightly off vertical (as they are held by dowsers) will actually cross when over buried targets, at the same locations where dowsers had previously detected them. Reddish also had photos taken of his hands while dowsing, and found no evidence at all that the movements of the rods were caused by unconscious movements (the most popular "explanation" of dowsing, even amongst dowsers). There are also stories in the dowsing literature of instances where dowsers have encountered such powerful energy that the rods have been literally torn from their hands. (In fact, it was being informed about just such an event that gave me the first clues of a connection between earth energy and time slips.) In short, dowsing begins to look less like a form of ESP and more like a way of detecting a physical effect.

Now, I am all for people in the sciences taking a serious interest in Fortean matters (I trained as a psychologist myself) but it really requires an acceptance of the possibility that modern science doesn't already know everything and that many types of event do point to previously unrecognised kinds of phenomena. It is easy enough in the scientific world to point to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of a new approach and do a destructive demolition job on it. But if science has neglected to study a phenomenon because of prejudice or because it seems to be inconsistent with current theory, and this is very much the case regarding all kinds of phenomena, then this is what will inevitably happen.

Finally, you ask, if dowsing can make people money, it should have clarified its value? In what respect? If you are one of the better dowsers who do make a good living (and a lot of money for big corporations), why would you do anything to help conventional scientists understand how it's done? You would be risking cutting off your source of income.
 
While I can't have access to and read everything, I have found the much notable information on dowsing from multiple sides but especially in terms of American "water witching". And, as I mentioned, I worked as a hydrogeologist and have seen no professionals use dowsers. I am very familiar with the history of Watkins' ley lines and Spooky Archaeology as well as spooky geology. So I don't think much about paranormal commenters who go on and on about what "science" rejects due to prejudice or whatever assumption, and what I "obviously" haven't read. That's a cheap basis to support a claim and sounds like a cop-out to me. But I do admit I should by now know better than to try to discuss things with people whose proud point is "science doesn't know everything". Extraordinary claims tend to fall apart rather easily when even lightly scrutinized. I'll stick to my informed opinion until some well-established evidence comes along to change that.
 
No worries Frides.

There are a few Ancestry tales of when the land was much dryer - a lot of them were for the little'uns. This is one of 'em.

One of the the causes was a giant frog called Tiddalik who woke up angry and out of sorts one morning, and he thought that if he drank some water it would fix things, so he started drinking, and drinking, and drinking and drank all the fresh water on the Earth.

Pretty soon, things started dying.

All the animals gathered, and spoke together about the lack of water and this old wombat says to 'em...he was grumpy - that's why he drank everything, so you've got to make him laugh to get your water back.

They all tried to make him laugh but he was a miseryguts and he just sat there until a little freshwater eel came up and started to dance in front of him.

This little eel danced so hard that he kept tying himself in knots, which amused Tiddalik - pretty soon he was laughing like a drain, and all their water came pouring out of Tiddaliks mouth.

Footnote. They are all animals, not human beings, because the big flood hasn't happened yet, where Biaime's wife saves all the animals and turns them into human beings.

There is also the oral tradition of the two brothers who watched the flooding of the Spencer Gulf.

Obviously not one generation of brothers but I can surmise that the water rising must have been pretty obvious to those Old Ones because the Spencer gulf is about 75 K's across, maybe three hundred K's long and has a mean depth of only about 13 metres.

During the last Glacial maximum Australia had been inhabited conservatively for 40,000 years and the change in climate was so drastic that inland Aborigines either traveled to the coast, or perished. This was also the time of the outright end of our Megafauna.

Inland water dried up, predictable rain patterns ceased, inland forests died out, Predominant winds and climate changed direction from the west, which came across the continent, to a Southerly, straight of the Antarctic, the the majority of rain forest below the tropic of Capricorn died out along with the inland rainforest surrounding the inland Lake systems. Civilization, as the Aborigine knew it, ceased to exist.

Mean temperature dropped by 10 degrees C and the warmest area on the continent was close to large bodies of water. This wasn't the first time that the sea level had dropped.

The new land dreaming became, or was remembered from last time and was included in more recent folklore, and I reckon that this 'map' is possibly a very distant memory.

There are local myths of near marine topography all up the Eastern coast about islands that were once connected to the mainland and are predominant in the Tjukurpa (Dreaming), with some of them a bit of a hodgepodge due to the reserving of local Aborigines elsewhere.
Wonderful, thanks @Mungoman :hoff:
 
Well, I think the Reddish research is key in understanding what is going on and you are clearly unfamiliar with that. You dismiss time slips without the slightest consideration, you say that people are "just guessing" about the relationship between geology and paranormal events, so you are clearly also not up to date on Paul Devereux's work on earthlights, which goes back to 1982, nor Randles' study of the Pennines events which clearly show geological correlations. Why would we develop remote sensing equipment if dowsers can do it already? Well, one obvious reason is that many people in the sciences automatically dismiss dowsing -- it is a knee jerk reaction. For some jobs, people in many professions have regularly used dowsing because it was for many years superior to any other way of detecting underground structures. Perhaps you are unaware that in Africa, where locating water supplies is a major concern, one very interesting study found that the most efficient way of doing this employs a combination of dowsing and electromagnetic sensing, which is more effective than either method on its own. Perhaps you are also unaware of studies that show that good dowsers are apparently ultra sensitive to very small magnetic fields, and that magnetic fields always produce a torsion component, which shows a connection between the two.
The connection between dowsing and earth energy goes back much farther than the 1970s, and I think it regrettable that New Age magical thinking has associated it with "pop mystical ideas." But that is how it is, and it is like that, ironically, because scientists have made very few efforts to understand the dowsing process., leaving the field open to the pseudo mystics. Exactly the same thing happened in ufology, of course. Until Reddish's work in the 1990s no scientists had done any systematic work on the matter, and it is fortunate that a specialist in stellar interference studies was able to realise that many of the patterns detected by earth energy dowsers in fact represented the effects of interference between waves from linear geological features. In fact, the well known Fortean researcher Ivan Sanderson conducted a very clever experiment in the 60s which showed that pairs of L shaped rods mounted slightly off vertical (as they are held by dowsers) will actually cross when over buried targets, at the same locations where dowsers had previously detected them. Reddish also had photos taken of his hands while dowsing, and found no evidence at all that the movements of the rods were caused by unconscious movements (the most popular "explanation" of dowsing, even amongst dowsers). There are also stories in the dowsing literature of instances where dowsers have encountered such powerful energy that the rods have been literally torn from their hands. (In fact, it was being informed about just such an event that gave me the first clues of a connection between earth energy and time slips.) In short, dowsing begins to look less like a form of ESP and more like a way of detecting a physical effect.
Now, I am all for people in the sciences taking a serious interest in Fortean matters (I trained as a psychologist myself) but it really requires an acceptance of the possibility that modern science doesn't already know everything and that many types of event do point to previously unrecognised kinds of phenomena. It is easy enough in the scientific world to point to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of a new approach and do a destructive demolition job on it. But if science has neglected to study a phenomenon because of prejudice or because it seems to be inconsistent with current theory, and this is very much the case regarding all kinds of phenomena, then this is what will inevitably happen.

Finally, you ask, if dowsing can make people money, it should have clarified its value? In what respect? If you are one of the better dowsers who do make a good living (and a lot of money for big corporations), why would you do anything to help conventional scientists understand how it's done? You would be risking cutting off your source of income.
What utter bobbins.
 
What utter bobbins.

Good reply since I clearly was not going to waste my time trying to respond to all that stuff. I wish I was European. [Funny tangent: At trivia night (what British would call a "pub quiz"), I had a puzzle to match the British slang sayings with their U.S. "translation". I got all of them correct while my teammates would have gotten about 3 out of 11. I credit Fortean Times and a lifetime of watching British comedy shows.]
 
While I can't have access to and read everything, I have found the much notable information on dowsing from multiple sides but especially in terms of American "water witching". And, as I mentioned, I worked as a hydrogeologist and have seen no professionals use dowsers. I am very familiar with the history of Watkins' ley lines and Spooky Archaeology as well as spooky geology. So I don't think much about paranormal commenters who go on and on about what "science" rejects due to prejudice or whatever assumption, and what I "obviously" haven't read. That's a cheap basis to support a claim and sounds like a cop-out to me. But I do admit I should by now know better than to try to discuss things with people whose proud point is "science doesn't know everything". Extraordinary claims tend to fall apart rather easily when even lightly scrutinized. I'll stick to my informed opinion until some well-established evidence comes along to change that.
Well, you haven't actually addressed any of the points I raised, which are all fairly specific, and which I would have thought were fairly easy to check up on and if possible dismiss. If you don't want to do that there is indeed no point in your continuing to discuss it. I don't think anybody would actually claim that science already knows everything -- if that was the case, there would be no point in trying to investigate anything.
 
I have a great respect for science and none for claims with no standard rigorous proof. But I do have to say that after a local dowser with a reputation for success (the well guy referred me to him) accurately found water for me on a plot of land I am assuming there's something in it if someone wants to bother to run appropriate tests. I wold not hesitate to hire one again.
 
We use Dowsers out here - we know it's there, water, that is, with the great artesian bore, and what with the buckling of the geological strata it does rise at points, but that is still to deep.

We can sort of read the lay of the land by what grows where, but we want water that is close to the surface, and we want a predictable amount, so for that we'd head off up the pub and have a chat with the local fella...or fellarina.

The problem with our deep water is that it's hot, and full of chemical.

We want to tap into a local recharge, into it's midstream and usually the local dowsers are spot on.

I'll accept both the geological science, and the bloke who's got a couple of bent 3.5mm welding rods personally.
 
I'll accept both the geological science, and the bloke who's got a couple of bent 3.5mm welding rods personally.

I've heard enough first hand stories (that is, been told by people who witnessed it themselves) to accept the possibility that dowsing for water may work.

Whether it is the dowser picking up some emanation from the water, or simply an ideomotor response to their intuition about where water is likely to be is a separate question. My dad believed he could dowse to find the run of concealed drains, but he was a builder for 50 years, so he probably had a fairly good idea where the drains were likely to be.

However, it is a huge step from accepting that (some) people can successfully dowse for underground water — a substance which is known to be essential to life, and which is often associated with visible surface features — to accepting that this in turn validates a belief that some people can dowse for an unspecified form of Earth energy which cannot be detected by other means.
 
I've heard enough first hand stories (that is, been told by people who witnessed it themselves) to accept the possibility that dowsing for water may work.

Whether it is the dowser picking up some emanation from the water, or simply an ideomotor response to their intuition about where water is likely to be is a separate question. My dad believed he could dowse to find the run of concealed drains, but he was a builder for 50 years, so he probably had a fairly good idea where the drains were likely to be.

However, it is a huge step from accepting that (some) people can successfully dowse for underground water — a substance which is known to be essential to life, and which is often associated with visible surface features — to accepting that this in turn validates a belief that some people can dowse for an unspecified form of Earth energy which cannot be detected by other means.
Just to make it plain, Reddish was not saying that dowsing for water was not using the same energy as dowsing for linear objects. It would make the situation all too complex if two different forces were involved. However, because water is said to absorb and re-radiate torsion it would obviously (perhaps!) make water the easiest thing to detect. Obviously we need to follow up Reddish's research and expand it to get more detail. But dowsing has traditionally been used for detecting underground structures of all kinds, not just geological strata --- for example, construction engineers used to use it to detect possible obstructions that might complicate or prevent building operations. The London Electricity Board used to issue its inspectors with dowsing rods as standard equipment, which came in very handy during the blitz when bombing had destroyed all landmarks and detecting and repairing electricity mains was a vital job.
By the way, it was when Reddish's drain got blocked and he was trying to find its location in his yard that a neighbour helpfully located it with a pair of rods in short order. When he asked how it worked, the neighbour replied, "But you're a scientist -- don't you know?" And that spurred him to do the research!
 
Good reply since I clearly was not going to waste my time trying to respond to all that stuff. I wish I was European. [Funny tangent: At trivia night (what British would call a "pub quiz"), I had a puzzle to match the British slang sayings with their U.S. "translation". I got all of them correct while my teammates would have gotten about 3 out of 11. I credit Fortean Times and a lifetime of watching British comedy shows.]
I think you're on the right track with a social explanation for this kind of dogged avoidance of reality. It's as if there is a social representation of ley-lines (a stock of values, ideas, metaphors, beliefs, and practices that are shared among the members of groups and communities ), which is mistaken by some as meaning ley-lines are a real empirical thing.

Once one incorporates a social representation and it's corresponding social identity into one's self identity, it's dogged hard to change. The mental manoeuvres the 'believers' use to avoid empirical evidence (or lack of it) are very characteristic of people avoiding something which challenges their view of themselves. So if science contradicts self-identity, science must be 'a conspiracy' or 'conventional science' (viz. 'not science') or a 'white patriarchy'. This kind of thinking is the very root of a closed mind is it not?
 
Everyone has heard "stories". Everyone seemingly has seen with their own eyes. But WHY can't it successfully be tested? Why are dowsers not reliable when tested? The same applies to psychics in my opinion. When they are called to perform, they often fail. I know, I know... the skeptics or the pressure ruin it but that is really a cop-out. There is better documentation for other unusual human senses such as supertasting, synesthesia, and those with extraordinary memory skills. Why has this "talent" not been objectively established?
 
Everyone has heard "stories". Everyone seemingly has seen with their own eyes. But WHY can't it successfully be tested? Why are dowsers not reliable when tested? The same applies to psychics in my opinion. When they are called to perform, they often fail. I know, I know... the skeptics or the pressure ruin it but that is really a cop-out. There is better documentation for other unusual human senses such as supertasting, synesthesia, and those with extraordinary memory skills. Why has this "talent" not been objectively established?


G'day Sharon, Good question, and like many things, I reckon we've just got to accept things the way they are, until we can detect whatever it is.

We're talking about some one walking around the bush with a withy wand or something similar, who reckons that they, or their wand, is being affected by something that could be 70 feet underground.

Personally, if this phenomena is happening consistently, then it is established that with some people, it can be done - if people demand further proof, then surely it is up to the inquisitor to come up with the telemetry - otherwise it's like that social media trope of, 'Pictures, or it didn't happen' - which is so 2000.
 
Well, i don't know about Iron Age or Lithic Age Europeans, but i have spent a little time with Australian Aborigines, and their reality (the non-city fellas) is very very different to city people.

They know their 'country' by it's character, and have lines of energy which the Old Ones sing to, to preserve the land. They walk this land and greet big old trees as mates (friends) - conversely, they steer away from country that is 'cheeky' (powerful) because only those that are 'knowing' are comfortable (or allowed) there. The Old Ones see water as being mysterious and powerful, and will throw a rock into a pond or waterhole from a distance so as not to startle the water and it's guardian/spirit - They believe that stars sing, and that on a winter's night they sing the loudest. They'll use the knowledge of all of these things to take them where they want to go

Knowing this reality, they still live in the present. our reality, but not completely. My neighbour next door, Lynn, is sitting out in the morning sun. Lynn has solar cells on her roof so she's not being careful with the pennies - even though it's 16c/60f she will sit in the sun - in fact as you go through this little village, you'll see chairs sitting out in the yard for that express purpose - If you ask lynn, why do you sit in the sun when you could be inside with the heater on, or a fire going, she'll say something like 'well, why wouldn't you...', as if it was a silly question. If you ask those that are open, they'll say, because it's good for you, that fella up there is feeding me - but while Lynn is still living her ancesteral reality, she's also skyping with her extended family throughout Australia. Best of both worlds...Eh.

So I reckon that it does us no favours to stand at our place of science and say that because we can't see or hear something, that it won't exist, because to many others it does...or it once did.

I've always instinctively, greeted big trees and animals when encountering them and I'm not particularly a hippy, it's just something I've always done. I have my own names for certain stretches of roads, or lanes, trees and beasts.

Mind you my great great grandmother used to lay people out in her little village so I'm guessing she must have learnt something from her ancestors - so possibly passed something genetically along.
 
Everyone has heard "stories". Everyone seemingly has seen with their own eyes. But WHY can't it successfully be tested? Why are dowsers not reliable when tested? The same applies to psychics in my opinion. When they are called to perform, they often fail. I know, I know... the skeptics or the pressure ruin it but that is really a cop-out. There is better documentation for other unusual human senses such as supertasting, synesthesia, and those with extraordinary memory skills. Why has this "talent" not been objectively established?
The problem is that most of the tests developed in the West to assess dowsing abilities have not used real life situations. As far as I know nobody has used a design where experienced dowsers are told to locate the possible presence of a sustainable water source in an area which has not been previously investigated. In the rare cases where experimenters have used real life situations, usually a water source is known from previous surveys and a double bind design has not been used -- i.e. the experimenters knew but the subjects didn't. Many of the early studies failed to use adequate controls. The great majority of studies have been testing the ability of dowsers to detect various forms of energy, and it seems well established that dowsers are sensitive to very small magnetic fields. Another design fault is to use a large number of subjects, some of whom are not dowsers, or to introduce the requirement for the dowsers to operate in a way that they would not do in the field. It is a complex subject. Some dowsers are better than others, but it is not known why -- maybe they are more sensitive, or perhaps they have a superior ability to interpret the signals that they pick up. There are, however, some indications of physiological correlates. Nobody before Reddish had even considered simply progressing step by step, developing working hypotheses as you go, and treating dowsing as a physical issue rather than a "paranormal" one.

Russian work on dowsing has been more focussed, and biolocation, as it is termed, is pretty well accepted there. One of their ideas that seems relevant to this discussion is that dowsers don't detect static bodies of water, but actually the signals generated by water running through narrow channels and strata -- which is what a dowser is actually usually seeking, a constant flow that can be used as a source.

So I don't think the comparison with "psychics" is quite appropriate. Many people who publicly adopt this label are basically clever frauds, and testing them is bound to be a waste of time. The one person who has consistently performed well even under experimental conditions i,s I think, Matthew Manning. However, insofar as testing is always in some sense an artificial process, and most types of ESP related phenomena occur either randomly or when a genuine need for them is present (e.g. when psychics are helping to solve a crime), positive results require the use of very clever designs, and parapsychologists have only in the last few decades realised this.
 
Living in Witham, Essex I was very impressed with this Essex Mystery http://vulpeculox.net/misc/mystery.htm

Now, after reading this thread, it seems it is all an illusion
Well, now I've seen the information on that site, I wouldn't be too sure. The Templars definitely sited their churches and other buildings in a deliberate way, as we know from their properties in France, and it is know that they had contact with various Middle Eastern organisations such as the Masons or Builders. The Compass is a key symbol in Freemasonry, which ties in. The calculations seem very convincing as they stand, so I don't think it would even be necessary to convert the co-ordinates into Great Circle format.
 
Well, now I've seen the information on that site, I wouldn't be too sure. The Templars definitely sited their churches and other buildings in a deliberate way, as we know from their properties in France, and it is know that they had contact with various Middle Eastern organisations such as the Masons or Builders. The Compass is a key symbol in Freemasonry, which ties in. The calculations seem very convincing as they stand, so I don't think it would even be necessary to convert the co-ordinates into Great Circle format.

I'm very interested in your sources for this.

The Masons? do you mean one of the guilds?
 
I'm very interested in your sources for this.

The Masons? do you mean one of the guilds?
I got interested in this via the Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln research on the Priory of Sion. Unfortunately the authors got a lot of disinformation fed to them and ended up promoting their own bloodline of Christ theory. However, they came across a lot of historical info regarding the Templars and the Priory that was very interesting, without themselves seeing the connections. The Templars (whether or not they were the visible arm of the Priory) did contact Middle Eastern esoteric groups, from one of which, the Builders or Masons, they seem to have taken a lot of symbolism and concepts. Henry Lincoln (among others) noticed that many Templar castles, churches and associated buildings in the Rennes-le-Chateau region were sited to produce a pentagonal pattern.
Main sources:
Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, 1982 and also The Messianic Legacy
Henry Lincoln, The Holy Place, 1991, and Key to the Sacred Pattern, 1997.
 
I've always instinctively, greeted big trees and animals when encountering them and I'm not particularly a hippy, it's just something I've always done. I have my own names for certain stretches of roads, or lanes, trees and beasts.

Mind you my great great grandmother used to lay people out in her little village so I'm guessing she must have learnt something from her ancestors - so possibly passed something genetically along.


They're living things NF, aren't they - well, that's the way I see it.. And ancestral gifting...or genetic inheritance - I'm all for that (we see it too often in children where they exhibit a mannerism that you've seen their great grandmother do).

It's a strange life, and Mr Shakespeares rejoinder to Horatio, i reckon, is so spot on.
 
...the signals generated by water running through narrow channels and strata -- which is what a dowser is actually usually seeking, a constant flow that can be used as a source.

This makes little sense. Groundwater moving through porous or fractured rock moves VERY VERY SLOWLY, as in hours or days to go a few feet if there is no induced gradient. The idea that there are "underground rivers" that people can detect is generally false unless you are talking a major fracture zone or karst conduits. And, if that is the case, then there are obvious signs of where to get water as the subsurface manifests in some fashion at the surface. Sorry, not sold. The Russians generally think in a more mystical way than Westerners when it comes to paranormal stuff, doesn't mean they actually have discovered something genuine.

I give you that dowsing is hard to test in real life situations but one could have dowsers find a dry hole and a wet hole in the same area. That would be more impressive (though not many people want to spend to drill a dry hole). I still contend that local people who know the area (where there are ample aquifers) will more often than not hit water wherever they point. So, they appear to be talented.

You say many psychics are clever frauds. Yep. So are many dowsers. Like psychics, they may even believe themselves.
 
This makes little sense. Groundwater moving through porous or fractured rock moves VERY VERY SLOWLY, as in hours or days to go a few feet if there is no induced gradient. The idea that there are "underground rivers" that people can detect is generally false unless you are talking a major fracture zone or karst conduits. And, if that is the case, then there are obvious signs of where to get water as the subsurface manifests in some fashion at the surface. Sorry, not sold. The Russians generally think in a more mystical way than Westerners when it comes to paranormal stuff, doesn't mean they actually have discovered something genuine.

I give you that dowsing is hard to test in real life situations but one could have dowsers find a dry hole and a wet hole in the same area. That would be more impressive (though not many people want to spend to drill a dry hole). I still contend that local people who know the area (where there are ample aquifers) will more often than not hit water wherever they point. So, they appear to be talented.

You say many psychics are clever frauds. Yep. So are many dowsers. Like psychics, they may even believe themselves.
Well, I'm not saying how quickly the water would be moving in the Russian example, and I know "underground rivers" are not on the agenda. Reddish didn't actually do any dowsing for water, he was just testing the response to straight edges. I don't think he observed any change in response to pipes containing air or water. I think that more experienced dowsers might have been more sensitive to any small difference.
Oddly, I don't hear about fraudulent dowsers very often; dowsers get their reputation from their results, so if they fail to deliver there is no way they can disguise it, unlike many so-called psychics. Many of the New Age types do regard themselves as something special because of their skills, though, which is why the Sanderson experiment came as a shock to some of them. Unfortunately, as in the case of many other phenomena, the failure of scientists to respond sensibly to so called paranormal events has led to the takeover by the weird and wonderful brigade, at least as far as energy dowsing is concerned.
The most accessible source on Soviet dowsing work is Ostrander and Schroeder's book Psychic Discoveries. The water geologist, Professor Bogomolov, taught himself to dowse and found that he could determine the depths of underground water sources, locate pipes and cables, and estimate the diameters of water pipes. He published his first report with coauthors water engineering specialists Tareev and Simonov in 1944.
Some of his interesting findings: he tested the dowsing skills of around 100 men detecting electric cables, water pipes, and seeping groundwater. He also measured the force exerted on the dowsing sticks (the older Y shaped model) and estimated it up to 1000gm/cm.
Screening the dowsers with rubber or steel had no effect but water could not be detected inside a rubber hose.
Another geologist, Nicolai Sochevanov, looked at water dowsing. He found that a large body of water had little effect, but friction of water on the shore or movement through an underground saturated mass of soil did. He used a wire dowsing device of his own design and found that he could get strong effects from underground deposits (e.g. of lead). He found he could detect 3" thick ore deposits at 150 yards depth. And there is more -- well worth getting the book. It is a great pity that English translations of many Russian articles and books are just not available.
 
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