Twinn
Fifty Shades of Dowsing
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Dowsing is an infinite spectrum of hues and highlights, tones and textures. It embraces the wild and romantic, the quiet and erudite - and also the wildly studious and the demurely romantic! The mundane merges into the mysterious, the academic with the alchemic. If today’s GB is a marvellous post-Olympic mongrel meting-pot, then the BSD is its exciting etheric alter ego.
Over the years, I have had the remarkable good fortune to have rubbed shoulders with some of the most experienced dowsers of our time. They are a magical melange of men and women, drawn from all creeds and corners, all niches and nuances. If trying to organise dowsers is indeed like herding cats, then trying to pigeonhole these dowsers would be one of life’s most impossible tasks.
Amongst my closest collaborators, Hamish Miller was an engineer, turned earth energy dowser and healer, whose spiritual enlightenment led him to become a philosophical researcher. Billy Gawn used to be a farmer and water diviner, before he became an archaeological investigator, who then branched out into the why of wonder via the earth energy route. The interests of my personal mentor, Alan Neal, continue to span right across the panoply of sensory activity. All of these, and probably almost everyone reading this, started in one sphere but moved through other realms, before realising that we are all on the self same journey. Whatever label anyone tries to stick on us as individuals, we morph away and leave it behind. We are all just dowsers.
Helping to co-ordinate a local group over the last decade has taught me that even in the tight confines of time and space, dowsers refuse to be constrained. An outing to a site of ancient religion is, as likely as not, to end up as a study of the local geology or of the subterranean flows of water. A visit to an historic stately home might see us tracing esoteric energy patterns on the lawn or investigating psychic phenomena in the broom-cupboard. We may start in one time and place (though not always even that!), yet we are soon scattered across the physical and psychological landscape of the South West - each in their own private cosmos, but tentatively tethered to one another by unseen bonds and common purpose.
A few dowsers - and it’s a very few - seem to have become a little uncomfortable with this evolving, nebulous diversity. It can be a slightly scary place, especially for those who consider that the depth of knowledge is more significant than the breadth. Neither approach is intrinsically more beneficial than the other. However, in a rapidly changing world, coming to terms with some of issues that are rocketing towards us out of the ether is a necessity - and it’s the investigation of these concepts that is, unavoidably, becoming the future direction of dowsing. For whatever reason, Pandora’s box is open for business and we have to come to terms with it or . . . Dowsing is an eternal and fascinating natural human adventure, but I wouldn’t recommend it for the philosophically faint-hearted.
Most of the more experienced dowsers I have met have transcended the artificial veneer that surrounded them either through a life-changing experience or encounter, or by a painstaking, persistent process of absorbing information and widening horizons. Clearly Hamish was one of the former and Billy is one of the latter. Whether it’s a bolt from the virtual heavens or the tireless construction of a stairway to enlightenment, the result is much the same. The dowser becomes able to look beyond the farthest horizon - even beyond one that they had not even been aware of at the start of their personal saga.
For me, to be too deeply entrenched in one furrow or another can, to some extent, eschew the opportunity for personal growth. The Earth Energies Group, which I feel privileged to assist, still acknowledges its roots in the epic debates about ley lines and energy grids. However, it has branched out to meet the ever-growing demand from new members to include the burgeoning fields of spiritual and psychic dowsing. I feel this is an encouraging sign of a vibrant tendency in rude good health, and long may this trend continue.
To misquote a man with whom I used to share a birthday - some may say I’m a dreamer, but (from the numerous personal conversations I have had with other BSD members over the years) I know I’m not the only one. Imagine the community of dowsers, working together as one across the world - living life in peace. I wonder if you can.
Nigel Twinn
Tamar Dowsers