Simon Says... - British Dowsing

by John Harvey

Do you remember the game we played at school when we were young? The teacher would stand in front of us and say:
“Simon says raise your arms”.
“Simon says lower your arms”.
“Simon says raise your arms”.
“Lower your arms”.
Each time the teacher said “Simon says….” You were supposed to do what she/he said. If there was no “Simon says……” you were not to do it.
If you did lower your arms when there was no “Simon says……” then you were OUT. If you were like me you began to drop your arms and then tried to recover before the teacher saw you.

Early in my dowsing career I began to realise that I was acting as if Simon [or Simone] was telling me what to do. I was dowsing what others told me to dowse and believing what they told me to believe.
My life in the chemical industry had taught me to be wary of all results until they had been proven ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ [it is impossible to prove anything to the 100% level] and I was not doing that. In fact I was beginning to suspect the old adage “Don’t confuse me with the facts, I have already made up my mind” was alive and well in some dowsers minds and I didn’t want it alive in mine.

I needed to do something so that I could be reasonably certain that the results of my dowsing were reflecting reality and not opinion, imagination or previous knowledge. But what? Should I dowse the same subject umpteen times and then take an average? This doesn’t work, of course, partly because of a subconscious memory of the first result and partly because boring repetition dulls the dowsing senses and reduces reliability. As my main interest was archaeology and much of archaeological data consists of dates, perhaps I could teach myself to date sites and artefacts. I could check my results by referring to the literature. It was worth a try.

We had a dog which I used to take walkies twice a day. Much to his visible disgust I began to dowse and date local archaeological sites instead of visiting the usual woods and beach. I wrote down the results in a notebook, visiting different sites each day and then making the same rounds a few weeks later. This routine made visits to the same site far enough apart and numerous enough for individual results to be forgotten. After a couple of months I found my figures becoming consistent so the next step was to check dowsed figures against official dates.

My wife was persuaded to visit national archaeological sites with me. I would dowse dates and she would look up the official figures on the information boards or in the literature. Then we would compare answers. To my delight my results were accurate within a few years and over a period I found that my figures were consistently within 2% of the official ones.
Widening my dowsing experience, I began to find that dating could be applied to almost anything. I could date antiques as easily as modern items and food as easily as ancient pottery. Then came some disturbing discoveries.

In good faith I had believed that energy lines (energy leys) were all ‘Earth Energies’ – until I applied my newly acquired dating expertise. Genuine Earth Energies should be millions of years old but these weren’t. Straight energy lines were found to be mostly prehistoric, only hundreds or a few thousand years old, their ages falling into well defined groups. Sinuous lines (later named ‘lines of passage’) could be of any age from a few minutes to many thousands of years old and later investigations found that they had been left in place by living creatures going about their daily lives.
The next discovery was even more disturbing: a small proportion of straight energy lines and most grids could be dated to the modern period after about 1946.
The conclusions were fairly obvious. If my results were correct then not only did ancient man intentionally lay down straight energy lines but modern humans seemed to be laying down lines, grids and who knows what else, hopefully by accident.
This exercise changed my way of working. From that time on I dated everything I dowsed and I am still being surprised at the number and type of invisible energies that are of modern origin.
It worries me that so few people date the things they find. I have asked audiences at lectures “How many people date their findings?” and the proportion has been about 5%. On further questioning I found that even those people only did it occasionally, none as a regular action. Yet, this is the only reliable way I can think of which allows us dowsers to differentiate between natural and thought form energies. It took me about three months to teach myself but I find that beginners can be taught in less than an hour, which seems to mean that we all have this hidden skill waiting to be used.
Before any sort of dowsing session I try and make sure that I have a clear idea of what I am looking for. I also try and keep my subconscious under control so that answers to questions are not coloured by modern knowledge or imagination. Nevertheless, using dowsing as a substitute for psychometry to ‘read’ life stones can be fraught with pitfalls. It only needs one wrongly worded question or biased answer to be led up a blind alley. Pondering over this problem after one session, with my pendulum still in my hand I lightheartedly thought “I wonder if I have forgotten anything?” Without any delay the pendulum gave a positive “Yes”! Then, of course, came the difficult task of finding out what that forgotten something was.
These days I always end a difficult session with the same question. With some misgivings I sometimes use the additional question “Have I made any mistakes?” It is humbling to find how many times the answer to both can be “Yes”!
I would like to think that I have given you food for thought. Food for thought strengthens the mind and increases thinking power. Let my discoveries run around your mind when next you dowse invisible energies and write to the editor with the results of your deliberations.