How Does Dowsing Work?

Pioneering scientific research by Ed Stillman of the American Society of Dowsers has shown that when dowsing, dowsers are using all four main brain states in high power and high coherence, a most unusual phenomenon. So we know that something is going on when we dowse, even deviceless – without a dowsing tool - as shown by these experiments where a pendulum was only visualised to prevent artifacts from physical movement.

In site dowsing, such as water location, it is thought that the dowser may be working as an active biosensor for emanations given off by rock faults and/or the movement of water droplets along a water vein. The latter have been found to generate infrasound at frequencies that correlate to alpha, delta and theta brain wave function. Water veins are often found under sacred sites and places of religious significance and it may be via infrasound that they contribute to the experience of those visiting them by biasing towards certain more meditative brainwave states.

When remote dowsing, such as map dowsing, or informational dowsing such as using dowsing to gain information about a clearly defined question, no such
site-based emanations are present yet a dowser can obtain information as if he or she were physically there. Similarly answers can be accessed to questions where there is no physical link between the questioner and the question. In this case, it has been postulated by the Dowsing Research Group of the British Society of Dowsers that dowsing is tapping into the infinite informational field that surrounds us, something the existence of which is described in a manner of ways by Lyn McTaggart’s book “The Field” and appears also to explain remote healing, water’s ability to store information such as is found in homeopathy and the power of focused thought.

If the DRG and others are correct, dowsing is merely a way of linking ourselves more consciously to what some science-philosophers call the Universal Consciousness and, ultimately, there is no question to which we can not find the answer, presuming we have both the ethical purpose and ability to do so.

We may never figure out why dowsing works precisely, but like any art, through increasing experience, those of us who consider ourselves dowsers, know that is does.