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Practitioner's Technique and some Related Considerations
Diagnosis by dowsing requires the use and interplay of both the intellectual and the intuitive faculties, or perhaps, use and interplay of both left and right brain qualities. The intellect and the concrete knowledge which supports it are used to frame questions relevant to the correct understanding of the problem. Obtaining answers via the pendulum however requires a suspension of the intellectual process and an activation of the (higher) intuition. Intellectual knowledge may presuppose the practitioner to expect a certain result, and in my experience there is nothing so dangerous as a loaded pendulum, in that it will tend tell you the answer that you expect to find. The answer obtained via objective dowsing, if such an expression can be permitted, may be completely different from what is expected and is usually, in my experience, more relevant to the patient's requirements. It is therefore necessary to have and cultivate the openness - or even emptiness - of mind required to be able to work in this way. 23
From Alice Bailey's standpoint, physical reality is the result of the precipitation of energy into form via force, force being the vector or idea, as it were, which organises energy into coherent structures. Thus the immaterial is first and the material comes afterwards. The intent behind such creative action may be characterised by the first three ray qualities of Will, Love/Wisdom and Active Intelligence, which are concepts which we can use to help us try and understand, or reason with, the immense existential questions which lie behind the problem of life and the fact of the objective Universe.
The well-known esoteric maxim, Energy Follows Thought, also characterises this creativity and in a sense encapsulates the activity of the practitioner as a healer. The practitioner intends (Will) to heal (Love) and focusing his attention on the problem provides the basic energy required to perform the task. The selected remedy adds the required quality (Active Intelligence) to the intention and thus it can be suggested that on a microcosmic level the practitioner follows a model which may be replicated at many levels throughout what Bailey calls the Cosmic Physical Plane.
From this point of view radionics is a form of spiritual healing so-called, but using supports such as the pendulum and the radionic instruments and providing differentiated forms of healing energy. It may be that at a certain stage of the practitioner's development he or she would be able to dispense with the instrumentation and work with the required energies on the level of Higher Mind alone; through formulating the appropriate creative commands he will attract the needed energy and direct it to the patient. 24 The importance of the instruments to most practitioners is that they act as a focus for both the attention and the intention and may be set up to perform certain tasks. Otherwise the typical practitioner may run the risk of quickly exhausting his available energy and thus rendering himself unable to work.
Another view of how the practitioner may operate can be derived from studying the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake, who in his book The Presence of The Past, proposed the idea of Morphogenetic (structure-creating) fields in his Hypothesis of Formative Causation. In outline this theory proposes that
- there is an information field unique to every structure or concept, whether it is a form in one of the kingdoms of nature or the knowledge of how to speak a language;
- the field organises the basic physical material (e.g. DNA) or provides the unseen impetus or tradition which enables any new skill to be learned more easily by fresh generations of learners;
- the strength of the field is reinforced or even increased by usage;
- the field is adapted or evolves as new means of usage or different events occur;
- the field strength decreases from lack of usage;
- multiple and often nested fields exist for complex structures, such as human or animal bodies.
Although Sheldrake's theory was rejected and even ridiculed by some conventional scientists, I would suggest that the morphogenetic field is an integral part of the Etheric and other subtle energies which are addressed by the radionic practitioner. Thus the practitioner accesses the relevant field or fields as information when examining certain aspects of the patient; when treating, aspects of the field which may be considered dysfunctional are adjusted by the radionic rates; this in turn normalises or stabilises the relevant energy flow in the patient and adjusts the field to reflect the new conditions, which the practitioner can then read (dowse), often in advance of physical level results. It must also be considered that the morphogenetic field exists as an archetype, in the sense suggested by Ruth Drown in the quote at the beginning of this essay. The practitioner compares the present state of the patient with the ideal state of the archetypal form and attempts to conform the patient as far as possible to `perfection'. Ultimately, of course, all of this must be considered within the context of the Causal Body energy and the purpose, character and circumstances of the patient, which in many respects provides the driving force behind the individual incarnation and its present difficulties.
In conclusion, I would like to state that I personally consider the need to demonstrate, and perhaps even use - for the appropriate and right purposes - the existence of higher orders of reality as important.25 Human thought at the present time is dominated by the mechanistic and materialistic model of science, which has created numerous benefits but also many problems for humanity and the planet. Many incredible advances have been made by modern medical science, but the incidence of chronic disease and especially cancers is increasing. Radionic techniques and practices give us a window of insight into the higher reality, and we, although only a small group, should grasp this opportunity to increase and enhance human understanding. Radionics in my view is only at its beginnings, and if fortune favours the work many valuable advances will come in future years.
Finally, I would like to partially reproduce a quote from a lecture by the late Aubrey Westlake, given to the British Society of Dowsers at Malvern in 1972. These words seem to epitomise the situation of the man or woman with a pendulum when viewed against the colossus of modern science and technology:
`God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty....God hath chosen...things which are not, to bring to naught things that are...In the eyes of the world Radiesthesia is a thing of no account compared with, say, nuclear or astro-physics or atomic research and yet....it can, when properly understood, open to us the mysteries both in this world and the world invisible. It can reveal to us the Truth in so far as our finite minds can comprehend it.' 26
Notes:
1. Dowsing itself, sometimes known as radiesthesia, is a vast field of study predicated on the idea that everything has a unique energy signature which can be detected by a human sensitive using a means such as the divining rod or pendulum. As I see it, the technique used mainly serves to amplify the dowser's subconscious reaction which is transmitted to his or her arm muscles via the nervous system. Although it seems that the pendulum is considered to have no intrinsic power, I have noticed that some pendulums seem to work better than others. I put this down to the fact that the material from which it is made may be more or less compatible with me in some way. There have been lengthy arguments as to whether the Radiesthetic reaction is a response to magnetic or some other form of energy, which can be called `subtle' energy, for the sake of argument. This can be summarised as the physical vs. the psychic approaches, psychic, let us say, meaning some form of ESP (extra-sensory perception). It may be possible that both explanations are correct, with physical energies shading off into subtle energies as the dowser searches on `higher' energetic levels.
2. The best history of radionics is Report on Radionics by Edward Russell, published by C. W. Daniel & Co. Essential reading, including fascinating material on agricultural radionics and the general techniques of weed and pest control without chemicals (suppressed in the USA in the 1950s by the chemical companies, according to Russell).
3. Abrams also developed electronically-based treatment procedures, but this promising line of work seems for the present to have fallen into neglect and is outside the scope of this article. It also possible that his concepts were used as a partial basis for the work of Royal Raymond Rife, the American inventor of another allegedly-suppressed healing technology. See The Cancer Cure That Worked by Barry Lynes. Abrams' work may also bear some relation to the current research of Dr Jacques Benveniste - see his website,
www.digibio.com4. Present-day practitioners tend to use a hair sample, and I think that the pendulum is now more widely used than the stick pad. It certainly gives a far greater range of responses.
5. See Drown Radio-Vision and Homo-Vibra Ray Instruments and their uses, Radionic Rate Book. This, and seminal works by Abrams and others, have been republished by Borderland Sciences Research Foundation in California, see
www.borderlands.com6. For the sake of brevity I am obliged to omit comment on important researchers such as George de la Warr (UK), T. Galen Hieronymous (USA) and Dr W. Guyon Richards (UK) - to name but three. The trend of their work, however, does not materially affect what I am describing.
7. Bailey's work covers 24 volumes and is not a religion, system or dogma. It may be considered to be a kind of gigantic cosmology within the context of which man is seen as an evolving conscious being currently manifesting through a physical plane body. The introduction to each volume basically says `take it or leave it' or even `take what you want and leave the rest'. A starting point within the context of radionic work might be Esoteric Healing (published by Lucis Press). Note that I have deliberately left out any mention of her system of Ray psychology because of space limitations.
8. There seems to be some debate about the exact nature of the relationship between the Nadis and the nervous system but Gurudas, in Flower Essences and Vibrational Healing, states that the Nadis are `an extensive ethereal nervous system just outside the physical body, and directly connected to the nervous system.'
9. The Logoic Plane is the plane of God (however we try to understand this concept); we do not have a Logoic body, although the Monad (or Spirit) is a `chip off the old block', so to speak.
In respect of the transpersonal self, I will state that on two occasions the pendulum has indicated that I should treat the Buddhic body and I have done so, with flower remedies. In both cases there was a deep level of personal insecurity with its source in some form of lack of self-confidence.
10. Perhaps this friction is what, from a philosophical point of view, we could consider to be the root of the miasm Psora as a general human phenomenon, i.e. the basic delusion of existence, which has been written about in many of the great spiritual writings. Possibly an individual who had overcome his lower nature would be free of Psora, or enlightened, as it is also called.
11. But not all. There are for instance classes of disease produced by conditions inherent in the physical and etheric structure of the planet itself, such as geopathic stress, or some of the miasms. For example see Chapter 9 of The Secret of Life by Georges Lakhovsky (English edition, 1939, republished by Borderlands), in which the author examines the statistical distribution of cancer in France against the underlying geology.
12. Which is to say, you don't have a separate chakra for each plane but the planes are present in the chakras like - to use a simple analogy - layers in a sandwich.
13. Chronic diseases are defined in homoeopathy as non-self-limiting conditions which generally have a slow onset and increasing degree of action (often spotted with acute episodes) ending in death. If it is correct that the miasms reside in the Etheric body, should they be activated by a problem at an energy level higher on the scale (e.g. Astral body impinged by shock) then it may be that you have to identify this and treat it, otherwise the maintaining cause - as it were - is still there.
14. Organon of the Medical Art by Samuel Hahnemann, Wenda Brewster O'Reilly edition.
15. Rajan Sankaran, the Indian homoeopath, proposes, in The Spirit of Homoeopathy, that disease is basically delusion. By this he means that reaction is out of all proportion to stimulus. A simple analogy is that if a man runs down the street being chased by a lion and screams that he is afraid of being killed by it, this is a reasonable reaction. On the other hand if a man runs down the street being pursued by a Yorkshire Terrier and screams that he is afraid of being killed by it, this is a delusion. The fear produced by the delusion may of course may kill him, if it strong enough.
16. Psionic medicine, which is practised by doctors and uses dowsing primarily in conjunction with homoeopathy, takes treatment of miasms very strongly into account.
17. Bailey writes about the Miasms in Esoteric Healing, although I do not believe she refers to them under that name. More recently Gurudas, in Flower Essences and Vibrational Healing, has proposed that we add new environmental Miasms such as produced by petrochemical pollution, etc. Hahnemann recognised excessive medical drugging as a cause of chronic disease states.
18. Lakhovsky, op. cit., also writes about what are in effect interference patterns created by cosmic radiation striking certain mineral strata and being reflected back to create cancer-forming energy conditions on the Earth's surface.
19. In §6 of The Organon, footnote, Hahnemann states that `The medical-art practitioner can never see the....life force that creates disease, and he never needs to see it'; in fact the Dynamis is something which is only detectable in terms of the symptoms it produces. Other lines of thought, such as that employed by radionics, suggest this is not so. There are grounds to believe that we will in time be able to see the Dynamis and the subtle bodies; Drown and de la Warr developed radionic cameras which purported to be able to photograph the etheric fields of whatever the camera was tuned into, and this includes homoeopathic remedies - for instance, see de la Warr's radionic photograph of Aconitum Napellus in New Worlds Beyond The Atom (by George de la Warr and Langston Day, 1956, out of print). There are also various so-called aura cameras around which appear to depict the aura quite accurately, although whether they show the other subtle bodies is not clear to me yet. I can imagine that interesting experiments could be done where people are photographed before and after taking a radionic treatment, and so forth.
Perhaps Hahnemann's Dynamis may be considered as the life force, perhaps prana, or chi, and needs to be clearly differentiated from subtle anatomy, perhaps not. Whether one could have a perfectly functional subtle body but which is not energised is a point to consider, i.e. can the circuit be separated from the energy in any practical sense?
20. Apart from reading their books, I have attended seminars with both Vithoulkas and Scholten. Vithoulkas is a fairly strict follower of Kent and seems to disapprove of Sankaran in particular and Scholten in general - not to mention pendulum users!
21. Quoted from Report on Radionics, p. 28. Readers familiar with the story of Hahnemann's early work will recognise that he started out by testing Cinchona Officinalis (China) - from which quinine is derived - on himself and noted that the symptoms proved were similar to those of malaria.
22. In electronic terms this appears to me to be akin to the phenomenon known as phase cancellation. If two identical waveforms in inverse relationship are added together, they will cancel each other out. I do not yet know if this idea throws any light on what actually happens in radionic treatment, but it is worth considering.
23. Bailey emphasises meditation practice to purify the subtle bodies and Tansley emphasises that the best protection for the practitioner is keep his or her focus on the higher spiritual centres.
24. Bhattacharya in Teletherapy, which was in effect the first book I read on radionics, writes of creating Cure commands and treating the patient with them. He suggests you write on a piece of circular card in red ink , `Mr X, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, CURE' and broadcast it to the patient via his witness, using one the various methods set out by Bhattacharya. What Bhattacharya calls the `intelligent cosmic rays' will then be set into motion and perform the healing work, over a suitable time period. He claims to have obtained many excellent results by this simple method. Can it be so easy?
It may also be possible to contact and work with the Devic kingdoms as the builders of form, mentioned by Bailey in A Treatise on Cosmic Fire; maybe the Devas are similar to the `intelligent cosmic rays'. Bailey writes that in time to come (which may be now, as it is virtually 70 years later) the human and Devic kingdoms will begin a rapprochement. This may being happening anyway in radionic and other healing work, but unconsciously to the practitioner. I readily admit I have yet to grasp the question of the nature of the Devic kingdoms in any substantial detail, fascinating as the matter is. Otherwise radionic work may also fall under the category of magical work, as discussed at length by Bailey in A Treatise on White Magic. What is considered as magic, of course, may simply be manipulation of subtle energy on its appropriate plane to bring about results on the physical plane. Whether the magic so-called is White or Black depends upon the magician's intent and desire-nature. Analogously we manipulate physical plane energies on this plane but subscribe to the idea, supported by science, that we understand what is happening.
25. There may of course not be any `higher orders of reality'. Implicit in the radionic approach are the ideas of reincarnation, life after death and many related concepts which are hotly disputed down here on the Earth plane. If the physical world is the end product of higher energies, forces and intelligences then it possible to suppose that these existed before the manifestation of physical, or objective, reality. For example if the incarnating soul exists prior to the human form then it can exist without such a form; from that we may think that it can continue to exist after discarding that form which has served its purpose temporarily.
26. Quoted in Dimensions of Radionics by Tansley, Rae and Westlake, published by Brotherhood of Life.
