What do you see?
A lot depends on what you expect to see – or what you think you should be seeing. Read any Agatha Christie novel just for starters …
Waiting to collect a friend last week, I picked up a copy of the Country Life magazine and came across an article by Catriona Gray[i] about water divining, also known as dowsing. Gray writes that dowsing, once denounced by the Christian Church as sorcery, is still considered by many as witchcraft. And yet it continues to be used because it is so effective.
This is a lot like homeopathy, I thought. And not merely because they both involve that magical substance we call water.
Dowsing has been practised for millennia. Gray notes that there is evidence from Confucius, the ancient Egyptians and ancient cave drawings, and that some notable thinkers and scientists including Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were dowsers.
Apparently even water companies use dowsing to find water pipes and wells, and Linda Fentum, a professional water diviner based in Worcestershire, is often called in after hydrogeological surveys have failed. She has found wells where more scientific methods have failed, and believes her success rate is more than 90%. Gray’s article also pictures Jack Timms, who in 1934 had already found more than 1000 water sources.
What I find so interesting is that, although 10 out of twelve water companies were found to be using dowsing amongst other methods in 2017, none would comment on it for Gray’s article. This appears to be the consequence of a series of disapproving articles about dowsing being a ‘discredited medieval practice’ – with “plenty of scientists weighing in on how ridiculous it was”.[ii]
So here we have a method of locating water, our most important resource after air, which has been proven time and again to be highly effective and efficient in the hands of a skilled practitioner, and which can achieve the desired result, even when “modern science” cannot.
But because we cannot explain it, many of us prefer to poo-poo it – especially if we have no experience of it as implemented by someone who uses it successfully.
I suspect that those who decry dowsing as witchcraft will not include those for whom it has saved the day by locating the water pipe they needed to find or correctly pinpointing where to drill that borehole.
If you have seen and benefited from it, does it matter if you don’t know how it works? What matters is that it works.
There are so many parallels here with homeopathy. Hippocrates started working with dilute solutions. Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of modern homeopathy published his first article on it in 1796, and went on to produce three major books which form the basis of homeopathy. He has been followed by illustrious homeopaths across the two subsequent centuries and from across the world, including a number of conventionally trained doctors who were subsequently won over to become homeopaths.
Homeopathy is the second most widely used form of medicine according to the World Health Organisation, and worldwide over 200 million people use homeopathy on a regular basis[iii].
People use homeopathy because they have experienced for themselves the huge change for the better that it can bring to their health.
Yet it is regularly rubbished by both scientists and the media – and very highly praised by those who use it.
Have a look here and see what other people have said about homeopathy. It works.
I was going to finish with a quote from Einstein about dowsing[i]. But then checking it up on the internet, I came across the following quote, also by Einstein, which distils the essence of what I want to say: judge by what you can see has worked, don’t be put off by the fact that modern science does not yet completely understand.
“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of enquiry.” Albert Einstein[ii]
Photo credits:
- Eye – amanda-dalbjorn-fvInY-Gh7sc-unsplash.
- Hands with water running through – mrjn-photography-YpZ2cj4s0oo-unsplash
Footnotes:
[i] “I know very well that many scientists consider dowsing as they do astrology, as a type of ancient superstition. The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the uncanny reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time.” Albert Einstein, quoted in Catriona Grey’s article (i), and at http://www.clearenergyhomes.com/did-you-know-albert-einstein-was-a-geomancer/
[ii] www.thegrowthfactor.com/albert-einstein-quotes/
[i] “It’s a kind of magic.” Grey, Catriona. Country Life Magazine, 23 June 2021.
[ii] Quotes from Grey’s article (i)
[iii] https://www.hri-research.org/resources/essentialevidence/use-of-homeopathy-across-the-world/
