Have I actually tried to dowse? Once, following Art's instructions. I spent about a half hour at it. Part of that time was spent trying a pendulum instead; while it certainly moved, I could not get consistant movements of any sort. I may try it again sometime. I'm coming across as a jerk (as I normally do on the internet) but it's actually an interesting subject to me. I don't personally believe in it, but I've changed my beliefs in the past based on irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
To go back to your prior post (which I admittedly made a rather snarky response to that was unwarranted, and I apologize for that), I noticed that you confirmed your hits with a metal detector. Is this a common practice for dowsing? I bring this up because as a metal detectorist, one of the first things that I do when arriving at the site is to look around and perhaps walk it a bit. What I TELL myself I'm doing is that I'm looking for useage patterns, evidence of past digging, evaluating areas for how well they should produce, and trying to get the site in its contemporary state to synch up with its historical states, as revealed by research. What I'm REALLY doing is "getting the lay of the land," or getting a "feel" for the land actually. Certain areas will just look better than other areas. Most of this makes rational sense on some level, but my subconscious mind will catch it more quickly that my conscious mind and my conscious mind, in turn, will make me notice the spot without quite knowing why. Sometimes, when I'm fruitlessly walking back and forth to cover the grid, I'll stop and look around a bit for something interesting, something that may have more potential, and go there instead. It was exactly this tendency of mine that got me another ring today, along with a cool old toy car and some odds and ends - not exactly treasure, I know, but the kinds of stuff that I wanted to find. I'd avoided it in the past because it was a spot that had no picnic tables or playground equipment or anything, so there was no reason for anyone to go there. But there was obviously a reason to go there, wasn't there? Someone went there and lost a ring; another, a toy car. Someone lost a few coins as well. Unfortunately a few bottlecaps (and one entire bottle) were lost in the process, but you have to take the good with the bad.
I wonder if we're not doing the same thing in a sense, but using vastly different methods. I do rely upon my subconscious to some degree to catch the things that I may not spot through direct observation and logic (and this is indeed what occurred today); perhaps dowsers, through the ideomotor response, are simply using their subconscious in the same way. ("That looks interesting, although I'm not entirely sure why." Looking at period photographs and a few hours' of contemplation would probably show me why, but my subconscious caught it much more quickly, as it's working without filters.) We look around and get that gut feeling that that's the place to go to, perhaps without even understanding why - and then we do, and we find something good, and our behavior is reinforced. In this case, there is nothing mystical or even currently unexplainable by science involved. We take in so much raw data every second that we can't possibly process it all, so we focus on what's immediately important and our subconscious catches the other important stuff that we miss.
Interesting. I'll have to think about this a bit more.
Still though, only 15% more accurate than random chance? Unless you repeated this experiment thousands of times, that's not even a statistically significant difference.
Have you considered skipping the rods entirely and just going with your hunches? It's worked for me, and again, I now suspect that we're doing the same thing.
Helloooo Dave, if i should tell you that I dowsed for the lost airliner and found it, and gave the location, how in the world
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