Stupid Ideas That Work
by Dan Wilson

I am not a friend of the idea of energy lines - but before we go any further, let me say clearly that "energy lines" is a powerful and good way to go about geopathic stress work. It just might not be the whole story.

I have a story I tell in my dowsing courses. Let us suppose you've got a real problem with guns. Maybe it's a (so-called) "past life" thing. If a gun is pointing at you - no matter where it is, across the street or in Russia - you're not at all well in yourself. Places where guns are pointing are pretty numerous, but there are a couple of spaces in your home where things are clear and you feel relaxed. So you call in a dowser and she (I make it a 'she' because that really wakes up the class who are mostly women) says: "oh, there are all these alignments where you feel bad. You've got an energy line problem."

The point I make is, by starting with a different way of describing the problem, which makes some clear sense, I've shown one way the idea of "energy lines" can come about. If "energy lines" are all like this - a simplified way of talking about linearly-significant aspects of a highly complex reality - dowsers haven't found a proper way of talking about it yet.

My introduction to "energy lines" was in one of the late Major Bruce MacManaway's summer schools, when we were all loaded into cars and taken to a warehouse in Ayr where there was constant bickering and fatigue. The proprietor was anxious that his interest in Bruce's work should not be made too apparent to his staff, so we were given a secondary task, which was to pronounce on why there was rising damp. (We said: sloppy construction in the 1930s. Too much mortar has been dropped down the cavities and covered over the damp-proof course. This later proved to be correct.) Bruce busied himself banging in a short iron stake on waste ground nearby and the following day was phoned by the client to be told it was a "new firm" and thanks.

Invisible things whether dowsable or not have always got under my skin and this event stuck in my mind as I progressed in dowsing. What other ways of describing the problem would give me a high percentage of "correct" when dowsed ? (I was using "the clock system" of numbers on my watch face.)

If you get into dowsing ideas, the whole thing gets very slippery. You soon realise why dowsers rarely agree: causation is an immense stack of events and dowsers naturally pick up first the ones they're best at detecting, which may not be the conventionally-expected ones at all. Indeed, if you do this percentage-of-right thing it flickers about all over the place, giving you quite strong "yesses" for wildly divergent views. Dowsing suddenly feels like a short route to the funny farm.

Luckily for me, I got launched into guided writing in which you effectively "talk" to your subconscious (or whatever-it-is - another description is "the subconscious's attempt to give you what you think you're talking to, including your subconscious") and get into a real dialogue. Mine told me I could have any stupid idea I liked provided it worked, from which I have tended to draw the conclusion that maybe this is how existence itself happens - but that's to digress.

On the Ayr "energy lines", which we'd all confirmed to within a few inches, the "voice" suggested that it would be constructive to think about burning. Bruce had often remarked that "energy lines" had an affinity with old sacrificial sites and microwave towers. So I said, "what about burning?" Answer: Fear of it. Question: The people in the building had fear of it? Answer: The important people. And the building. Question: The building had the fear? Answer: The mortar did.

I must shorten this. The sand in the mortar, if the "voice" was right, had been quarried from a hill nearby which had been a sacrifice site (this is no great distinction as the ancient people were at it continually) and the "energy line" was nothing more than what an earlier generation of dowsers used to call a "ray of union" - which is to say, a dowsable line joining any two similar things - between the sand and the hill where it came from.

I was not satisfied. If the sand had the fear, and the people had the fear, what was the significance of the "line" ? Wasn't the whole problem local to the building? Answer:

The line is to key you into geopathic-stress thinking. Using iron rods or clearance patterns will produce a better result than just trying to heal the building. The iron lattice is especially conducive to healing fear of burning.

If this was right, the whole "energy line" manifestation was an artefact of our own potentials and only incidentally to do with "nature" at all. Before Bruce tragically died I began to utter this suspicion in his classes and it was a thing that upset him dreadfully. "How can a healer be said to bring these dreadful things on people?" he'd roar at me. I didn't have the answer handy then - the dreadful thing is there anyway: we only give it shape, to optimise its healing.

I have of course had dozens of similar cases since, with quite different fears attached and different kinds of alignment - curves, snakes, blobs. On new jobs I still ask "can I treat this crudely as 'energy lines'?" The answer is still, very often, yes. But sometimes it isn't - and that gets us into other "stupid ideas that work" - few of which fit this (to me) strange custom of viewing the infinity of perceived reality as "energy lines".

DAN WILSON is a chartered electrical engineer who got into dowsing to identify distant telephone trunk equipment faults and was diverted by pressure of demand into doing people. 26 years later, he is a professional dowser and "therapeutic healer" who runs his own health clinic at East Grinstead 30 miles south of London. He specializes in animal health, disturbed places and hauntings.

Reprinted with permission.

© Copyright . Dan Wilson