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#Dowsing: The Skeptics “Fix Wikipedia”

Posted on 23 June 2014, 13:37

“You can personally correct any Wikipedia article. As long as you can cite references, you can add the best available skeptical information to any article that needs it. When you add footnote references, you can even link directly to skeptical websites. You don’t need anyone’s permission. For simple text edits, you don’t even need web coding skills. Best of all, it’s rewarding and fun to use your skeptical knowledge to enhance an essential public resource.” See link [From an article entitled, “Fix Wikipedia”]

The message is directed to “Skeptic Activists”. 

I must begin by noting that for the organisers of Wikipedia studies of the paranormal in general, and dowsing in particular, are regarded as “pseudoscientific”. While I strongly disagree with this, I must acknowledge that to some degree the Skeptics are in line with Wikipedia guidelines. Nevertheless, when I see some of their attempts to “enhance”, it looks to me very much like an attack on open-minded science.  It behoves us to be aware of the bias of Wikipedia, and also to consult other reputable and sound sources about matters relating to consciousness studies and the paranormal.

In my previous blog, “Stolen Harp Recovered Using Dowsing”, a reader commented that we shouldn’t accept that dowser Harold McCoy in Arkansas, using a pendulum and a map, had located a stolen harp in town where it was stolen. The reader noted that there had been a letter drop,(inviting its return, “no questions asked,”) and that its recovery could simply have been due to that. But he failed to note that the dowser had mentioned a specific house on the corner of two specific streets, in Oakland CA, a town of 400,000. The letter drop had just been in the neighbourhood of that house. 

As for the Skeptics, if we Google “The harp that came back” together with “Skeptical” we will find them also giving the same misinformation.

“Fixing Wikipedia”

Let us now look up “Dowsing” in Wikipedia. There are signs of a Skeptic “fix” in the first paragraph: We read, “There is no scientific evidence that dowsing is effective.”(Justifying this claim is a footnote referring to Skeptic critiques. Do not non-Skeptic scientists exist as well?) Later we come to a heading “Scientific Appraisal” where we can suspect there may be another “fix”. We have no way of telling whether there have been any accounts of research into the phenomenon of dousing by non-Skeptic scientists. If a Skeptic “fixer” has removed such accounts, then we have a case of special pleading, where counterevidence is ignored, making the entry on dowsing valueless for the general reader. Skeptics have the right to be put forward their views, but not to remove counterevidence. In any case we do learn that the German branch of the Skeptics conducted tests for dowsing abilities without positive result. We also see that dowsing-denier, leading Skeptic, James Randi, a magician, not a scientist, is pictured giving a lecture on the subject at Rockefeller University.

James Randi demonstrates the reality of Dowsing

But do please look, however, at this 1980 video which shows a Discovery programme comp red by Arthur C. Clarke. We see the same James Randi testing for abilities to dowse for metals, and then for water. It turned out that the dowsers were not successful with the metals, but according to Clarke, with regard to water, they were quite successful, with odds against chance being 100:1.  This of course didn’t suit Randi, who averaged the results, declared the experiment to be a failure, added insult to injury by lecturing those taking part on their superstition, and thus saved himself paying out the considerable prize money on offer.  The video concludes with Clarke disagreeing with what Randi had done, and declaring that dowsing had just been successfully demonstrated.

How then are we to regard statements such as, “There is no scientific evidence that dowsing is effective”? Well, one successful test such as Randi’s, as just shown in our video, will disprove it. But the telling point for me, at least is, how do we imagine the practice of dowsing persisted throughout the centuries if dowsing never worked? An even more telling point for me, is that I know successful dowsers.

In a similar vein a reader of my blog wrote, “The communicable inter-connection of all matter is a belief not a fact of science.” Skeptics make such pronouncements, and they may convince the unwary. But can this statement be justified? What about the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen effect, confirmed by Alain Aspect? What about quantum entanglement? What about the observer effect in quantum mechanics? What about Bell’s theorem denying local causation? The science is too complex to describe here, but if we look these topics up in Wikipedia, we may get some idea. (Provided that Skeptical activists have not been finding things “rewarding and fun” and “fixed” the entries.)

Skeptics with their Materialist dogma are anti-science because science consists of a series of investigative tools, used by people of all races, religions and beliefs. The moment religious or philosophical conclusions are made about reality, we no longer have science. Instead we have dogma. The science that each of us uses, needs to have humility in the face of hard data. It tries to gain some approximation to what is the case, with further investigations always possible.

The Skeptics prescribe the conclusions, and therefore attempt to preclude the research. Many of their members are not scientists, and only once as a group did they engage in serious research. Here is one of many sites that spell this out. They exist to influence the media, and unfortunately they have the ear of the media. If a paranormal event is reported, the Skeptics are invited to present an opposing view, in the name of “balance”.  The public of course would be much better served if a real scientist competent in the field were to be consulted.

Recently a group of twenty Nobel Prize winning QM scientists, and seventy other leading academics, signed a joint letter pleading that a more open approach to the study of consciousness be permitted in some academic circles. In other words they were pleading that research should not be stymied by Materialist dogma. They need to plead because there are indeed leading scientists who back the Skeptics, but doing so, step from science into dogma. They claim to have a final and unalterable understanding of reality.  It is very human of them, but it is still not science.

Here is an address delivered by Nobel Prize winner QM physicist Prof. Brian Josephson, of Cambridge, to a meeting of other Prize winners, on the damage to the cause of science caused by closed-minded Skeptics.

For non-dogmatic and genuinely sceptical scientists, the Skeptics’ access to the media is a big problem, because important discoveries are publicly laughed at, making getting research funds harder, discouraging further research. We can grant that it takes self-discipline and scientific rigour for individual scientists to overcome the tendency to come to unalterable conclusions. It is very human of   scientists to want to believe that they have come to some final truth. But the truth is that supposed facts are often contradicted by later work, or seen differently in a wider context.

In the real world scientists’ personal religious and scientific beliefs differ widely:  they can be Catholics, atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Materialists, or just spiritually minded. In the Materialist West some surveys suggest that as many as 40% of scientists would not be Materialists.

In a world of warring religions and warring beliefs, open-minded careful investigation using scientific methods and those of the law court, is our only hope. There are all sorts of rubbish out there, in the field of psychic research, scientific research in general, and no end of superstition and bad religion. The world cries out for open-minded i.e. sceptical research. Religions, philosophies, communities, traditions, and indeed some scientists, all need to take reality checks. It is such a tragedy that the Skeptics are not sceptical in the proper sense and take such reality checks as well. 

For further reading on this theme go to the April 2008 issue of The Ground of Faith.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.
His forthcoming book, Into the Wider Dream will be published summer 2014 by White Crow Books.

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Afterlife Teaching from Stephen the Martyr - Michael Cocks


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Stolen Harp Recovered Using #Dowsing

Posted on 06 June 2014, 15:53

In 1991, when her daughter’s rare, hand-carved harp was stolen, Lisby Mayer’s familiar world of science and rational thinking turned upside down. After the police failed to turn up any leads, a friend suggested she call a dowser—a man who specialized in finding lost objects. With nothing to lose—and almost as a joke—Dr. Mayer, a teacher at Berkley, California, agreed.  The man she called, Harold McCoy, president of the national dowsing organisation, lived in Arkansas, 2500 kilometres away. He asked for a map of the city in which the harp was stolen, and quickly said that the harp was still in the city, and was at a particular house in a particular street. Unwilling to go directly to that house, Dr Mayer distributed leaflets in the neighbourhood, inviting the return of the harp, no questions asked. Within three days it was back in her hands. The experience turned her picture of reality upside-down. “This changes everything,” she said to herself. ... Hear her tell the story herself.

harp


What does it imply that Harold McCoy could find the harp by suspending a dowsing pendulum over a map? It confirms the words of Lawrence LeShan in my previous blog, that “All objects and events are part of the fabric of being, and cannot meaningfully be separated from it.  The most important aspect of any object or event is that it is a part of the total ONE and it has to be primarily considered under this aspect.  Considering it under any other aspect is an error.”

“Valid information is not gained through the senses, but through a knowing of the oneness of observer and observed, the spectator and spectacle.  Once this complete oneness is fully accepted, there is nothing that can prevent the flow of information between a thing and itself.”

This fact, I believe, is what made the strange synchronistic events possible that I record in my forthcoming book, Into the Wider Dream.

There have been other famous dowsers, one of whom was the Abée Mermet.  In a book by D.J. Conway, we can read, “After World War I Abée Mermet used his map dowsing to locate German incendiary shells Although a few hundred years previously Abée Mermet would have been burned at the stake by the church, the Vatican recognised him for his work in 1935. He invented a special kind of pendulum consisting of several kinds of metals, the top of which could be unscrewed and tiny samples of sought metal placed inside.” He helped to discover deposits of metals in several countries.

Much better known is “Operation Stargate”:  Remote Viewing, which can involve forms of dowsing, has been used by Americans, Russians and Chinese for espionage over a period of several years. I understand that their experiments proved that dowsing maps by geographical coordinates alone can yield impressive results. There were no doubt many failures, so possible correct information inferred through dowsing would have needed to be confirmed by other means. Here is a good website.

Can we be 100% sure of the reality of dowsing phenomena? “Operation Stargate”, for instance, would suggest so, but those wishing to protect a materialist understanding of reality are vigorous in their efforts to debunk the phenomenon. For instance Skeptics recently have been sabotaging the Wikipedia articles that don’t countenance materialism.  The Wikipedia article on Dowsing, for instance, has a number of sections implying the reality of dowsing, but early on the words are inserted, “There is no scientific evidence that dowsing is effective.”  Many articles on the paranormal have been tampered with in this way.

With regard to Operation Stargate, prominent Skeptic activist, psychologist Richard Wiseman has stated that by ordinary scientific standards of verification, the reality of remote viewing could be regarded as established. But that, in view of the unlikelihood that remote viewing is a reality, much higher standards of verification must be employed.  “If I said that I had seen a car accident, my testimony could be accepted; but if I said that I saw a UFO in my back garden, you would require much more stringent proof.” (Words to that effect.) Thus Wiseman equates the results of fifteen years of military research with seeing a UFO in his back garden. In effect Wiseman is saying that if evidence would discredit his materialism, then so much the worse for the evidence.

Similarly on a Discovery programme compeered by Arthur C. Clarke, Skeptic James Randi tested dowsers by inviting them to find a series of buried metals, and then buried pots of water. The dowsers did quite well with the water, but not with the metals. As a positive result would not be acceptable to Randi, he averaged the two sets of results, and declared that no evidence for dowsing had been produced.

Debunking Skeptics, as a group, do not do science, but seek to discredit non-materialist scientists who threaten their materialism. Without conscience they misinform and deceive.

Where did dowser Harold McCoy get his information about the harp from? I have quoted Lawrence LeShan: “Valid information is not gained through the senses, but through a knowing of the oneness of observer and observed, the spectator and spectacle.  Once this complete oneness is fully accepted, there is nothing that can prevent the flow of information between a thing and itself.” St Stephen said as much himself: What is, must be simple because we are it. We cannot be separate [p.22 Afterlife Teachings] “together, we are what is”[p.82]  “God is everything that you see, and more. It is all that you cannot imagine, all that you cannot conceive.”(Knowledge resides in this All-that-is God)

And…” The knowledge is there, and I am directed, as you are directed, to this knowledge, because this knowledge is there. The physical plane, or the physical manifestation of this knowledge which you feel is hidden, is even less hidden to you than your thoughts and the thoughts of others. It is there in a physical form and there are written words. To feel and know these words and the availability of these words, surely this is as simple a matter as knowing the hairs and their number on each one’s head. The knowledge is there and it is used.

All knowledge comes from one place, and what has been said has been given, and has been received.

Therefore do not read difficulties into a task that would be, if you were not in a physical state, a matter of simplicity.

How can I therefore give you an example of this simplicity for yourself?

The keys to your door. Do you know where they are?

The brush for your hair, the blades for your face?

Think then now of at least four hundred things that you know where their place of rest is.

Do you find the concept so difficult to think that you yourself in the confines of your own physical mind should be able to know these things?

Is it difficult to imagine that if you did not have the confinement of this physical body, that you should know the place of many more?

It is very difficult I know for you to understand this concept of the openness and availability of these things.

These are the only comparisons that I can give you, namely the things that are available, and the knowledge that is available in your own minds of other things. [pp.162-3]

In short, what the story of The Harp that Came Back tells us, is that LeShan’s Clairvoyant mode of viewing reality, is no mere mystical talk, but is an accurate description of All-that-is, just as accurate as a description of the “commonsense” cause and effect world.

For Libby Mayer the harp experience changed everything. And we others, once we truly experience an event which breaks the rules of the see and touch world, we too have “something like scales fall from [our] eyes”, like St Paul, and have a new vision of the reality of things.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.
His forthcoming book, Into the Wider Dream will be published summer 2014 by White Crow Books.

Paperback               Kindle

Afterlife Teaching from Stephen the Martyr - Michael Cocks


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