Do you know, I was thinking of splitting this into a new topic myself, as it seems like it could be an interesting discussion. Perhaps our 'sources' are in tune with each other, Ian?
It seems to me that Michael Brooks' point is being over-looked.
A tacit assumption is being made by most dowsers, especially those introduced to it within the context of dowsing societies, that the movement of the rods imparts
meaning. This assumption is NOT always made by outsiders experimenting with rods by themselves. Very often a crossing of the rods is assumed by them to be a
reaction (c.f. radiesthesia) to the presence of (or "energy" from) underground water, pipes or whatever rather than a message from some kind of ghost or spirit or one's unconscious. Writers like Applegate and Underwood tend to write in terms of 'positive' and 'negative' reactions, but there is no semantic meaning implied by these terms, they are not 'yes' and 'no'. Also some experimenters like John Greenwood, Vincent Reddish etc. prefer to explain the dowsing reaction in purely physics terms (electrostatics, spin-torsion or whatever).
I don't use words like 'source' or 'guide' in relation to my dowsing because to my way of thinking they are unnecessary concepts that don't explain anything and just raise more questions than answers.
If the movements of the rod are to be understood in terms of natural language then this begs the question, "where does this information come from?" if you say "from a guide" this begs more questions such as 1) How does the guide know anything at all? 2) Why do different guides give different answers to the same question? 3) How come a single guide can give inconsistent answers, simply by rephrasing the same question in different ways? Whose guide is better than whose? etc. etc.
I assume that the rods are capable of behaving in a way that imparts meaningful information but it's not ouija because those answers come from me - I either know or perceive more than I am consciously aware of -
somehow - and ask questions to convert that information into something comprehensible. I am able to do this because through practice and repetition I have programmed my dowsing responses to mean what I want them to mean.
This still leaves the vexed question relating to that
somehow. I personally think that the "information field" concept espoused by people like our J.L. is the closest we have to a viable concept, although it may not always work that way all of the time.
Now, before I close,
can we please keep this as a debate, rather than a dowsing contest?. Please put your pendulums aside for a while and TELL us what you think. Just for a change.
Ian