An ordinary compass is all it takes to prove that the magnetic theories of dowsing are just the products of people's imagination. And, an ordinary L-rod is designed specifically to rotate under the force of gravity when held by the human hand, useless for detecting magnetic fields. Without a human hand holding it, it's dead in the water as far as detecting anything but the center of the earth.
Nobody's ever said that the hand of a corpse would suffice; therefore it's obvious that the action is really between the ears. A dowsing rod is merely an outlet for what's between the ears, just like an ouija board or tarot cards or forked stick. None of these are instruments for detecting anything physical relating to the finding of otherwise unknown buried objects, not even the LRL's which have their own forum here. The action is between the ears.
It all seems mysterious, because the action to which I refer is of the subconscious sort. After all, if you know consciously where something is, you can just point to it with your finger and there is no mystery about it. Social culture conditions us not to understand what's going on between our ears at the subconscious level (politicians, preachers, and advertisers don't want you to know how they manipulate you), so (for instance in the case of dowsing) people make up fanciful pseudoscientific theories to explain what's going on, rather than to simply admit to the obvious.
Now, if by dowsing you succeed in finding an otherwise unknown buried object that logically you shouldn't have been able to find by any combination of reason and dumb luck, then you've got a mystery on your hands: "How did I do that?" It ain't about the L-rods, it's about what was between your ears that led to an apparently successful dowse. In most cases it's probably clues picked up subconsciously. In the case of blinded dowsing (the kind I find most interesting) there's not supposed to be any clues, which leads to the question of where the information came from. Some people who actually realize this is a possibility attribute the information to (for example) "God" or "spirits" or "cosmic consciousness". These sources of information lie in the realm of speculation, inasmuch as nobody's demonstrated a way to test such hypotheses. But inasmuch as they do not necessarily involve any rejection of obvious scientific principles they aren't necessarily in the category of pseudoscience. And such hypotheses are compatible with what "skeptics" have long asserted: that under controlled blinded trial conditions with awards at stake, dowsers can't do it. If you look at the reasons dowsers give for not being interested in the A.R. or Carl "tests", it quickly becomes apparent that the dowsers know they can't produce and the alibi machine is in overdrive. If you can find a dowser who freely admits that they can't produce under such conditions and needs no alibi system to puff their chests out, you've probably found a dowser who actually has some ability and understands how it works.
Then there's the other end of the deal: if a dowse turns out to be bad, invoke the following words: "I guess I wasn't any good at it today." A few years ago I posted this principle under the title "Dowsing Without Alabis", and it was met with dead silence. That silence tells you a whole bunch about the dowsing community who collect on forums. If you feel the need to come up with pseudoscientific alabis for all the times you come up empty-handed, you will in the end be happy with the harvest of alabis, there will be no learning process directed toward successful dowsing, and you'll likely be posting here about all your pseudoscientific theories while meantime having no dowsing skill whatsoever and not even knowing you can't dowse worth a darn. Just like gamblers who know all the ins and outs of gambling, but for some reason they're behind two months on their rent begging you for a "loan". Same mental process, same result. If you spend some time reading this forum, you'll spot the pattern. It's worse over on the LRL forum where there's more denial to be invoked because LRL's involve being suckered by fraudulent electronics and in most cases paying huge amounts of money for privilege of being victimized.
--Dave J.
