Observations placeholder
The Reverend Stanley dowses
Identifier
004194
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Dr Shafica Karagulla, born in the Lebanon but whose research took her to the USA and the UK, was a neuro-psychiatrist who spent eight years researching ordinary people who appeared to have extraordinary abilities. She started off being a skeptic as most scientists are [including me] but over time the evidence seemed overwhelming and she set up a research project to find out more. What brought her into the area was a book about Edgar Cayce, what kept her going was an open mind and an insatiable curiosity. Where she is remarkable is that she had no experiences of her own to confirm her eventual conclusions, but like all the very best scientists forgot her own life and concentrated on the observations and evidence.
Her research subjects were carefully chosen. She rejected all those who claimed they had these abilities but instead by a laborious process of enquiry and referral managed to find those who carried on normal professions and who never talked about their abilities but just used them.
A description of the experience
Breakthrough to Creativity – Dr Shafica Karagulla
Reverend Stanley, was a retired missionary, a grand old man in his eighties, very sincere and straightforward. He had always been able to dowse for water, and on authentic information he had successfully found wells for many people. The three of us discussed dowsing and then I asked him what he experienced when he tuned in on the presence of water in the earth.
He felt that he could best explain it by showing me what happened. He would demonstrate then and there in my apartment, how the divining rod worked. He took out a Y shaped branch which he had cut from a tree on his way to my apartment. Taking one fork of the Y in each hand he began to move around my apartment. I was on the third floor of a new twelve-story apartment building in Manhattan.
At two points in the apartment, the divining rod quivered and although the stem of the Y was being held straight upward toward the ceiling, it began to bend downward toward the floor. It twisted Reverend Stanley's wrists as it did so with a force that made it impossible for him to hold it upright. One place in my bedroom and another place in a far corner of the living room produced marked- reactions. He told me that there was a spring or well of water about one hundred and fifty feet down which was flowing freely, I could not prove it at that moment, but I was sure he was sincere in his demonstration.....
I asked Reverend Stanley if there was anything that could inhibit his dowsing abilities. He assured me that no matter what anybody did, the dowsing rod would bend downward in his hand when he walked over water.
I had been experimenting with some materials which seemed to inhibit certain types of HSP. I wrapped his hands with the materials, but in each case the rod worked just as effectively. At this point he said something very interesting to me. "Doctor, it isn't my hands, it is my feet that I feel the energy coming through".
It had not occurred to him to tell me this at first. I had him stand on the materials, and to his utter amazement, his dowsing rod did not work. There was no effect at all.
I had taken it for granted that there was no way of finding out whether water was flowing a hundred and fifty feet beneath my apartment. However, a few months Iater, I asked the porter about the sound of a machine I sometimes heard at night. He told me it was pumping water from under the foundation of the building. I asked the manager for more details. He told me that when the building was being erected, the contractors had struck running water and were unable to cap it completely. A pump had been installed to keep the water out. It was directly under my apartment.
Reverend Stanley had been right after all!