Twinn
Sound Dowsing 3
Rupert Sheldrake – Memories in Nature
……….. Morphic resonance is a memory principle in nature. Anything similar in a self-organizing system will be influenced by anything that has happened in the past, and anything in the future that happens in a similar system will be influenced by what happens now. So it is a memory in nature based on similarity, and it applies to atoms, molecules, crystals, living organisms, animals, plants, brains, societies, and indeed, planets and galaxies . . . it is a principle of memory and habit in nature.
……….. If somebody learns a new skill, say windsurfing, then the more people that learn it, the easier it becomes for everyone else because of morphic resonance. However, if you train rats to learn a new trick in one place, like Los Angeles, then rats all over the world should be able to learn the trick more quickly because the first group of rats learned it. That’s what I’m saying morphic resonance does. It’s the kind of interconnection between all similar organisms across space and time. It works from the past and connects like a kind of collective memory, and it interconnects all the members of a species.
……….. ‘The Laws Of Nature are more like habits but they are not fixed and can evolve. All species including humans draw on a collective memory.’
………… ‘What you do, what you say and what you think can influence other people by morphic resonance. So, we’re more responsible for our actions, words and thoughts on this principle than we would otherwise be. There is no immoral filter in morphic resonance, which means that we have to be more careful about what we are thinking if we are concerned about the effect we have on others.
Rupert Sheldrake
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According to Research Biologist/Biochemist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, the phenomenon of ‘Morphic Resonance’ arises from a non-physical aspect of memory that he calls a ‘morphic field.’ The shapes of all living organisms – and some inanimate objects such as crystals – are somehow determined by a form of ‘energetic’ resonance between the actual chemistry involved in building these structures and the postulated non-material field.
The information carried within morphic fields is determined by simple force of habit according to Sheldrake. Things become the way they are largely because of how they were in the past, unless the current activities of the organisms/inanimate structures change the information that the fields contain. Importantly, Sheldrake also maintains that ‘Ordinary memory works by morphic resonance; memories are not stored in the brain. Instead, the brain works like a receiver across time.’ When we recall a past event, we tune into the corresponding segments of the morphic field, giving us access to information across time.
Some Implications For Dowsing
Setting aside, for the moment, the recurrent nods towards pan-psychism in Sheldrake’s writing, the most important properties for dowsers ascribed to Morphic Resonance are probably three-fold:
a) that Morphic Resonance is, essentially, just another source of information that can be accessed by appropriate dowsing techniques.
b) that its potency increases with repetition across members of a species or across classes of object.
c) that its capacity or function as a collective memory implies that real – and potentially identifiable – interpersonal influences are possible, even between members of different species. (See Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home; And Other Unexplained Powers Of Animals. and also The Sense Of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects Of The Extended Mind.)
Naturally enough, Sheldrake’s ideas have been roundly dismissed by most of the orthodox scientific community, but he remains unabashed – and, in response to Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusionhas produced his own rebuttal of materialistic scientific methods, ‘The Science Delusion’.
This work, together with his publications specifically about Morphic Resonance (The Presence Of The Past: Morphic Resonance and The Habits Of Nature and A New Science Of Life)constitute sufficient reason to explore Sheldrake’s output – but there is even more. Rupert Sheldrake is a profoundly spiritual man, who spent some of his time while researching plant biology in India at the small Christian Ashram run by the Benedictine monk Father Bede Griffiths. There, Father Griffiths helped him to forge connections in his own worldview between Eastern religious traditions and Christianity.
Sheldrake has also worked with the American theologian Matthew Fox (author of Original Blessing : A Primer Of Creation Spirituality ) on a remarkable, if unlikely, book called The Physics Of Angels: Exploring The Realm Where Spirit And Science Meet. This should be of some interest – if not compulsory reading – for admirers of dowser Christopher Strong, whose work in a similar field may be more familiar to the dowsing community in the UK.
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The Bill Kenny Experience
The grumpy old chap in the picture is a retired university lecturer, who was also a part-time classical music critic for some years. In his time, he sang in a fair number of decent small choral ensembles, and still has an acute appreciation of the quality and definition of musical sound. He writes:
‘If Nigel Twinn (NT) is something of an expert dowser, then I suppose that I’m something of an expert listener. More than fifty years ago, I started ‘dowsing for sound.’ I called it ‘tweaking my hi-fi system’ then, but I’m certain now that what I was actually doing was mostly deviceless dowsing.
‘I had caught the classical music bug at an early age from a BBC Childrens’ Hour radio play, which used the first section of William Walton’s score for the 1944 film of Shakespeare’s Henry V as its theme music. That was it: I was hooked for life, so I learned to read music, joined some choirs after my voice broke, and spent every spare penny on concert tickets, records and audio gear for far too many years afterwards
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‘When people asked me why I kept on upgrading my hi-fi system, I usually said that I liked ‘hearing all the notes’, which was actually true up to a point. However, I soon realised that what I really wanted was to find some way of hearing ‘all the notes’ played expertly on high quality instruments (including human voices) within the best possible acoustic. I was in fact searching for a way of creating the illusion of a decent concert-hall or opera house in my own home – a tough and expensive proposition.’
‘In the early 1970s, the UK hi-fi press was buzzing with news of a perfectly respectable – and actually much respected – audio engineer called Peter Belt. With his wife, May, Peter had started up a conventional manufacturing company in Leeds in the 1950s, but later switched away from making hi-fi equipment as such, and instead started producing ‘sound improvement devices’ that apparently enhanced the performance of orthodox equipment both markedly and cheaply. They also published some free ‘tweaks’ that anyone could try out for themselves. If I say that two of them were tying reef knots in connecting cables and power cords, and turning up one corner of a domestic curtain with a safety pin, you will catch the flavour of what they were doing!
‘One early idea was that stray and unhelpful electro-magnetic fields – a sort of electronic smog – were inadvertently caused by some of the traditional design elements of most hi-fi equipment. For example, the actual spinning of a record on the turntable – and subsequently the rotation of CDs – was cited as a problem and, since that was a necessary evil, Peter Belt gradually produced new devices, to counter such problems. The list of PWB products increased over the years, but the Belts found themselves increasingly marginalised by both orthodox manufacturers and by the audio press. They were kept going, however, by a loyal band of supporters – and I was one of them.
‘It was Mrs Belt who introduced me to the work of the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, and so inadvertently reawakened my interest in dowsing. I am glad to be able to report that the Belts are still in business after all these years, with the help of their son Graham.’
Over the decades, Bill has tried out and refined some elements of the Belts’ early innovations with labels that improve the apparent sound from hi-fi equipment, and with sufficient success to justify carrying on doing it. In a manner similar to the late Dr Masaru Emoto’s work, using messages stuck to sample bottles containing ice crystals from different water sources, fixing labels containing ‘invisible’ messages on audio equipment and system cables has long been one of Bill’s (admittedly rather peculiar) special interests. He has upward of several hundred different trials of various types of label under his own ‘belt’ all in the cause of trying to tease out how they might ‘work.’ That’s enough research, he reckons, to qualify him for an ‘Advanced Geek’ Badge (First Class) from the Misadventure Scouts of North Devon.
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The Nigel Twinn Experience
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When I first encountered Bill Kenny at my talk about Billy Gawn’s work, at Chumleigh in mid-Devon, I didn’t immediately appreciate that his line of research was a dowsing application at all. It seemed an interesting idea, and I had some vague memory of having heard about it in passing, years earlier, but that was about all.
However, Billy Gawn’s breakthrough that dowsing could be the retrieval of information about a target subject, rather than from it, is so profound that it requires us to revisit even those aspects of dowsing that we thought we almost understood.
My first foray into the world of information-bearing labels was not very inspiring. I tried to print off a page of labels that Bill had emailed to me, but my printer didn’t really want to know about them, and the output appeared so blurred they looked as if they wouldn’t be of any use at all. So, I waited until I visited Bill at his cottage near Bideford in north Devon, to acquire some samples of the ‘real thing’.
Whilst there, Bill demonstrated how the labels worked on each of his two hi-fi systems. I certainly became aware that there seemed to be a difference of some kind, with and without the labels, but being neither a hi-fi specialist nor an opera buff, I was left wondering if I had actually heard anything new, or whether it was just that I was listening harder to a musical style with which I was unfamiliar.
However, the proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the listening. I brought some labels home that Bill had kindly printed off for us. He explained the structure of the information on the labels to me. As a dowser, I have learned by experience never to accept or discount anything I am told, but to examine it for myself in the quiet of my own home.
The first attempt at applying the labels to our own audio equipment wasn’t very promising either. I tried attaching them with blu-tack to the speakers of our kitchen ghetto-blaster, and played a range of our rather eclectic musical archive. Did anything change? Well, if it did, it seemed only that I was expecting it to happen. I ventured into the sitting room, labels in hand and stuck them next to the small integral speakers in the television. Having now assumed a stance that I would not be likely to hear anything different, I was a bit surprised to find that there did appear to be a slight change.
Having played a track of pizzica (southern Italian folk music) first without the labels, then with, then without (until I could stand the track no more!), I was obliged to adjust my judgment to the point that it seemed that something might be happening.
Pizzica is the local traditional music of the Salento region of the ‘heel’ of Italy. The recording that we have is quite recent and consequently of good studio quality. It is a lively and largely uncluttered musical form and, on the recording, the instruments and vocals are well separated (although it does sound more ‘authentic’ live on stage, with much less definition!). One distinctive trademark of pizzica is the strident, almost harsh, female vocal delivery. Without the labels it was very much ‘in your face’ – with them, it was that little bit more mellow.
However, it wasn’t whether the music is more or less pleasant that mattered here (and I’ve loved the pizzica style ever since we encountered the very first bars of the genre at WOMAD in 2013), it’s the fact that there seemed to be a slight, subtle difference to the sound with and without the labels. Something might actually have been happening.
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Our TV has rather modest audio reproduction, and the speakers on our ‘hi-fi’ haven’t worked properly for years. Indeed, the system has become more of a monument to our record-listening past, rather than an actively useful piece of equipment. So, I ventured up to our den, where we have a Mac desktop, which has speakers that are invisible and tiny but, being quite new, are the best in the house that still work!
I was just in the process of playing through various types of music when my wife, Ros, returned from a clog-dancing display – and was plonked in front of the Mac, with a minimum of introduction. I decided to try her straight away with a track that we both know to death, and have boogied to all of our lives – well, from the mid-sixties onwards –Get Ready by The Temptations. For those readers too young to remember them, I should explain that The Temptations were one of the star acts of the Tamla Motown label. Motown, short for Motortown i.e. Detroit.
Having been brought up in the Newbury area, we lived in close proximity to the then vast Greenham Common Airbase (later the base camp for the renowned Greenham Women). Darkest Berkshire in the 1960s was an almost homogenous white locality, with the Asian population that became so prominent in the Thames Valley in later decades yet to make much of an appearance that far west. South Newbury, however, was quite different in that Greenham Airbase had a large contingent of black American servicemen, who brought with them their radical and exciting homegrown musical genre – soul. We teenagers lapped it up wholesale. Briefly, The Soul Club in Newbury, became the third best known in the country, with just the Marquee in London, and the Torch Club in Stoke-on-Trent, having a higher status. Soul was the heartbeat of the local youth, and its anthems have stuck with us throughout our lives. Get Ready is therefore very well known to both Ros and I, and consequently it was the place to start a serious scientific study.
Tamla is famous not just for breaking the likes of The Supremes, The Four Tops and Marvin Gaye, but for its unique ‘sound’ – acoustically compressed, very high register, a ‘wall of noise’ rather than a clearly differentiated collection of performers. Even as youngsters we remarked that it sounded like a couple of dozen singers and musicians using a cheap mic in a phone box. Tinny, raucous, infectiously danceable and hugely addictive. Would this re-mastered analoguerecording, getting on for fifty years old, be susceptible to Kenny Label treatment?
We listened to the track once again (all 2 minutes 36 seconds of it) without labels, tapping our feet and waving our arms involuntarily. Then I put the labels on. As the track started, that familiar drum sound was prominent – as flat as a child hammering a cardboard box, so no change there. But as soon as Eddie Kendrick’s 1966 high-pitched vocal cut in, we looked at one another. His voice was a smidgeon clearer, ever so slightly smoother than on the original. The difference was so evident on a track that we knew so well. Something was definitely happening – at least in this instance.
At this point, we had an enforced break, which corresponded neatly with the arrival of a new set of labels from Bill. This spurred us into putting some effort into sorting out the ‘big’ speakers on the old hi-fi system. Today, these are regarded as being very much old technology, but in their time (about 25 years ago), these aging monsters in their 10” x 20” black wooden cabinets, were considered to be respectable mid-market equipment. As a trial, and seeing that these older speakers have exposed feeder leads, we opted to put the new labels on the incoming speaker cables themselves, rather than on the wooden cabinets and . . . wow!
If there had been any doubt in my mind up to that point, it was blasted away by the first super-crisp notes. We went back to playing the pizzica track from Southern Italy, and this time the edge had been taken right off the strident vocals of the powerful Maria Mazzotta. She had become, once again, the strong distinctive singer that had captured my attention in a marquee in a field in Wiltshire a year earlier. The acoustic guitar accompaniment suddenly had a distinct ‘ching’ instead of a duller strum, and each of the vocalists and musicians had their own place in the sound image – including a castanet player, who was so deep in the mix that I had never heard them before. We were – how you say in UK? – gobsmacked.
The last link in this particular chain took us back to the Mac, with its equally embedded speakers (i.e. it has no exposed acoustic cables on which to stick labels). For consistency, and to reduce the temptation of getting carried away, we went back to our pre-digital Motown masterpiece – with the new label on the incoming mains lead.
Again, we listened to the track in the buff, as it were, before affixing the label and playing it again. Bearing in mind that we’d already experienced quite a sound shift by putting labels on the outside of the speaker locations, if we had had any preconceptions, they would have been that putting the label on the mains lead might possibly work about as well. However, never have pre-conceptions when dowsing –never! In this latest incarnation, Eddie Kendrick’s voice had mellowed and expanded to a point that it sounded more like a cover version than a tarted-up reproduction of the original.
The classically jumbled Tamla backcloth now had separate instruments; the strings sounded like actual violins, not some synthesized mush added to pump up the volume. As a personal clincher, I had always found it amusing that the brief saxophone solo towards the end of the track seemed to consist of the staccato repetition of just two notes, a kind of cameo audio in-joke. With the assistance of the label, it was quite apparent that there are, in fact, at least four or five notes played repeatedly in rapid succession and it’s not something that a faint-hearted or inexperienced brass-blower would ever attempt in public. Stunning, conclusive, game over.
Our experience has raised many new questions – some of which Bill has sought to answer himself, but others that spring to mind are corollaries to other work that I have undertaken. We will go on to discuss some of these, and their implications, shortly.
However, we were able to throw one small glimmer of light on to the dark and formless void of incomprehension that confronted us. When the labels arrived, I put them on the kitchen table for Ros to see. The way they were printed left them looking a little indistinct, and Ros leaned over them to look at them more closely. Being a far more sensitive soul than myself, she immediately felt a force (perhaps an aura) emanating from, or surrounding, the page of labels, which she dowsed as reaching at least six inches above the surface of the page. Even a single label had a tiny, but distinct aura, about an inch above the surface of the print, which was itself considerably more than the aura of the paper itself, which measured just a few millimetres.
This might not explain how the informational aura arrived in the label in the first place, let alone how it could have been copied and transmitted digitally, but it does suggest the first element of a meta-mechanism, that might just be the seed of an explanation.
However, it certainly doesn’t explain why the labels seemed to work better for us on the more distant mains cable than on the closer speaker cabinet. Could it be that the electrical flow in the mains cable is carrying information to the sharp end of the player – perhaps in a similar way to underground water transferring detrimental energy from a disused quarry to some nearby resident’s home?
All we can tell is that, seemingly ‘homeopathically’, about 50 years ago, a group of iconic soul singers sang live in a studio in Detroit, which created an analogue recording (which itself would probably have been repeatedly reprocessed, before being released), and that the master tape has been transferred to a digital format at some stage, which I have then changed to a modern-style file format on my Mac – only for elements of the original event seemingly to resurface in 2014, courtesy of a photocopy, on plain paper, of a hand typed digital label, composed in north Devon by a retired opera critic.
As my mother used to say at moments like this ‘I think it’s time for a cup of tea’.
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The Wisdom of Goethe
In putting this site together, we have been constantly aware that its content and subject matter will seem highly implausible to many – perhaps even to most – of our readers. Some might even think it adds up to little more than self-indulgence, kitted out to look more ‘respectable’ with a hotchpotch of philosophical and psychological ideas.
Well, in one sense that’s completely understandable, but our excuse for our meanderings is that our discussion tackles something so familiar to everybody, that it seems not to need much special attention. We want to discuss the experience of listening and it turns out to be more complicated than we originally imagined.
Readers are asked to note here that we are not talking about the mechanics of hearing or about physical acoustics, but rather about how people set about listening – their differing listening styles if you like – and also about what they may or may not hear, as a consequence. While people do seem to differ enormously in how they listen, very few of us are taught or even encouraged, to listen particularly attentively – unless perhaps we are musicians.
Curiously, however, one of the important things to notice when talking generally about musical experiences is just how often the language used is couched in purely visual terms. We discuss this more thoroughly in the section called ‘Hearing And Listening.’
When we began thinking about this problem, initially we found very little literature that was directly helpful, and so we were forced to review the subject in a more unusual way. This took us back to the development of scientific enquiry in general, and to the work of the great German philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) in particular. Bearing in mind the widespread use of visual metaphors when talking about listening, his Theory of Colour turned out to be surprisingly relevant.
The notes concerning the physicist Henri Bortoft’s book about Goethe’s science, The Wholeness of Nature, state that Goethe’s scientific work ‘represents a style of learning and understanding which is largely ignored today.’
“According to Bortoft, modern science tends to break objects down in a purely analytical way; by contrast, Goethe was interested in the ‘whole’ of a phenomenon, and in particular about the relationship between the object of the enquiry and the observer. Bortoft examines the phenomenological and cultural roots of Goethe’s approach to science and argues that Goethe’s insights, far from belonging to the past, represent the foundation for a future science respectful of nature.”
This sounded much more in keeping with a discussion about dowsing than anything else we could turn to and, in essence, this is the general approach that we have tried to follow. To illustrate Goethe’s methods, we might usefully turn briefly to his experiments into the perception of colour.
While the British genius, Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1747), had shown that colours arose when white light was split by a prism into the seven-hued rainbow spectrum with which we are all familiar, Goethe took his investigation in a completely different direction. He was particularly interested in his viewers’ visual experiences, and asked his subjects to record what they saw when they kept their eyes open in a totally dark place for a while. After that, they were asked to look at a white, brightly lit surface, before turning to view objects that were only moderately lit. Goethe’s reasoning for carrying out these ‘tests’ was to establish just what the subjects saw – without them adding externally imposed explanations.
David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc in their book Goethe’s Way of Science (1998), report that from the experiments just described, Goethe concluded that the eye is ‘in the utmost relaxation and susceptibility’ in the first instance – and feels a ‘sense of privation, as it strives to perceive outwardly into the darkness’. In the second case, the opposite effects occur, since ‘the eye is in an overstrained state, and scarcely susceptible at all. It is dazzled and, for a time, cannot see the moderately lighted objects.’ Goethe concluded from these experiments that ‘darkness in the world instantaneously produces in the eye an inclination towards light’ and that ‘light produces an inclination to darkness’.
Goethe also argued that the reciprocity between darkness and light, points to what he called the ‘ur-phenomenon’ (the essential process or pattern) of colour. For him, colour became the resolution of a tension between darkness and light, so that darkness-weakened-by-light led to the darker colours of blue, indigo and violet, while light-dimmed-by-darkness creates the lighter colours of yellow, orange and red. Goethe eventually came to believe that colours are completely new formations created by the interplay of darkness and light rather than simply entities arising from light (via a prism, for example) as proposed by Newton.
However, this is not to argue whether Newton’s idea is more or less accurate than Goethe’s (and Goethe’s book The Theory of Colour contains more experiments and exercises for further exploration of the subject), but to make the point that different ways of examining problems can produce radically different ways of understanding them. Recognising this may actually enhance both points of view, if neither is automatically rejected as being wholly false.
Goethe would, presumably, not have said that Newton had been incorrect: only that forming some idea of how an individual experiences colour is probably at least as important as explaining the nature of light physically.
Overall then, when we come back to the concept of ‘dowsing for sound’ (where we only have access to seriously subjective accounts of how it might or might not work) we have deliberately chosen to use theoretical ideas that seem directly relevant to us and make sense within our particular context. All of them are likely to be written off by orthodox scientists however, at least for the time being.
We are, in fact, most interested in ideas that help us understand the processes under discussion, rather than simply becoming able to explain them – as so much of modern science seems to do. ‘Explaining’ something often seems to suggest wrapping it up neatly so that it can ‘tidied up’ or even ‘explained away’, never to be questioned again.
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But if dowsing teaches us anything, it is that very few aspects of the world of human experience are so orderly – and if readers complain that our ideas are incomplete, or are inconsistent with each other, then maybe that is just how things are for the time being. We don’t mind this at all, because from our standpoint, external – and even critical – comment is the best hope that anyone can have for developing understanding further.
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