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Introduction

The introductory information on the physical, psychological and spiritual aspects of dowsing will be of help to readers who do not themselves practise radiesthesia. The second section serves as a pause, for the subject at hand does not become accessible without a degree of critical distance from the prevailing materialistic way of thinking; rather, it will become more attainable through an understanding and respect for the spiritual ways of perception. The third part of the introduction sheds light on how the title of the book came about.

Body, Soul and Spirit in Radiesthesia

With the beginning of the dowsing process, the dowser assumes a posture observable in any small child who has learned to stand and walk safely. The rod in his hand, he also stands or walks slightly bent at the knees, with a straight lower back and somewhat leaning forward. The tendons and muscles on the outside of the legs are carrying the body’s weight. The inside of the legs and especially the abdomen remain entirely relaxed. In this way, breath passes unhindered from the nose to the deep abdominal region.

We normally unlearn this natural posture in the course of our socialisation after a few years. Then, the body energies no longer flow freely. Instead, we become accustomed to blocking the main conduits of power by pushing through the back and knees and sticking out the chest. The energetic effect of this is comparable to a reduction valve, a withdrawal of one’s own strength – just as unsuitable for dowsing as it is for Tai Chi, the martial arts or Qi Gong.

Before dowsing, I find it pleasantly strengthening and opening to first place the hand on my belly and let it warm up. When the dowsing begins in the posture described above, a certain willingness to sacrifice is required, because one instinctively feels that body and soul are wide open and self-protection is suspended. There is an intensive exchange with the subtle energies of the place at hand, which is all the more stressful the stronger the fields to be investigated are. It is a typical experience in beginners’ workshops that the participants are soon completely exhausted after practising the dowsing procedure over a discharging water vein for a longer period of time.

It is more difficult than the physical side of the matter to direct our mental concentration without any distraction to what is being investigated, and at the same time to remain mentally uninfluenced by apprehensions, expectations, anxieties or hopes. The desire to help, compassion for a suffering client, the expectation of a certain result, the worry or fear concerning an undesirable outcome – any inner mental stirring can trigger an initial effective irritation which, as a result of the inherent tension of the dowsing rod, immediately leads to a deflection and thus, possibly, to an erroneous result. Too much relaxation causes the proper point to „pass“ while too much tension provokes an futile reaction. The right degree of internal noninterference, of unconditional neutrality, and, at the same time, the requisite self-confidence, is difficult to learn. It is a long, delicate process that requires a lot of experience.

The Spiritual World View

The results of my radiesthetic research, which I will present on the following pages, tend to unfold best to inner understanding within a worldview in which spirit is conceived as the origin that brings forth concrete manifestation.

The opposing materialist worldview is obtuse when it comes to the subject of life, the soul or spirit and their reverberations or effects within creation. The modern zeitgeist, fixated as it is on objects and profits, lacks the organs of perception for these dimensions. And so those who propagate such materialism lack, figuratively speaking, a fig leaf to cover up this dearth of spiritual and sensual perception. This is not the only reason why influential circles charge „scientific cleaners“ with the task of erasing from the soon-to-be-only remaining encyclopaedia of knowledge – Wikipedia – or defaming as „untrustworthy“ anything that refuses to fit in with the materialist view and threatening to lend substance to a more open intellectual position. In the spirit of these endeavours, it is apparently undesirable to encourage people to develop independent sovereignty and to reject the extremism of radical materialism. The pertinent protagonists successfully present themselves as „critical scientists“ and are given to pass themselves off in public as „sceptics“, although they are diametrically opposed to the philosophical tradition of scepticism. Internationally, they are united under the name „Guerilla Scepticism on Wikipedia“ (GSoW) and, nationally e.g. within the German speaking world, in the „Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawisssenschaften“ (GWUP) („Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasciences“ ). In fact, they are – nomen est omen – more of an ideological guerrilla group with the aim of eliminating anything that stands in the way of the digital synchronisation of man and machine and their uniform calculability and controllability (compare, for example, www.freewiki.eu/de).

In view of these tendencies, there is little prospect for the cause of geobiology to achieve social recognition. This makes it all the more important not to be deterred and to consciously contribute to a world that is open to spiritual values and methodology.

The inner path of realisation of our existence, and the world, points in an entirely different direction. It is real, profound and fully accessible to human experience. This even concerns the enigmatic core, the matrix of our world, which denies itself to special technical equipment. Instead, it opens itself to exploration by the human spirit, which is not surprising assuming that creation emerges from the spirit. Spiritual knowledge leads to certainty. However, this requires wholehearted self-involvement, devotion, courage and the letting-go of all concepts.

The latter point is illustrated in the tradition of the Masonic lodges by the image of the „overturned altars“. It illustrates the requirement of the final degree of the inner path of development, the casting away of all teachings („altars“) that fixate the subject in his or her world of ideas and prevent immediate realisation. In Zen, the letting-go of all concepts is expressed by the irritating saying: „If you meet Buddha on the way, kill him!“. Throughout intellectual and cultural history, there are references to these contexts of meaning.

If habitual ignorance is truly dissolved on the path of self-enquiry by letting go of all preconceived assumptions, it may actually occur that the decisive gate will be passed through. At that moment, the constitution of the subject who has embarked on this path is transformed. The ego as the „observing I“ becomes the observed, exposed to an all-encompassing perception. It is dissolved just like every point of reference from which an outside or an object is perceived. Nothing comparable corresponds to the spatial dimension. At the same instance, for example, it becomes apparent that there has never been a journey from A to B, because everything arises in the workings of a mental projection. The normal mode of locomotion works fine in the everyday world – yet, in this experience, it exposes itself as an illusion which applies equally to the ego, the direction of perception from the inside to the outside, the familiar three-dimensional space.

This insight belongs to the most precious treasure of knowledge of many – perhaps all – cultures. Ultimately, it can hardly be translated into language. This is why we encounter enigmatic allusions in various places that „the sky is falling“ or „everything is being turned upside down“.

A lost 16th-century woodcut of unknown authorship, presumably copied by Flammarion (1842-1925), seems to depict this experience in its own manner – the world wanderer „arriving at that place where heaven and earth touch“. The peculiar double wheel at the top left of the picture recalls the riddle in Lao Tzu’s Tao te King: „Thirty spokes surround a hub: In their nothingness consists the work of the chariot…“ …

Illustration 1: Source of photographic reproduction: Camille Flammarion, L’Atmosphère: Meteorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888), pp. 163

Two extraordinary people, interestingly from completely different cultural backgrounds, told me about this experience. Curiously, both accompanied their explanation with the same typical hand gestures that demonstrated the movement of space that had taken hold of them in the process. The first was the Peruvian shaman and seer Don Eduardo Calderón Palomino (-1996) and the second was the German potter, painter and visionary Ernst Pensberg from the Bröltal in the Rhine-Sieg district (1902-1993).

Years later, I encountered this experience myself – but without the chance to dwell on it for a longer period of time. It started with the surprise that it was not I or anything else that moved in a room, but the room itself. When I realised my amazement at this process some time later, this astonishment instantly thrust me back into the everyday world. Afterwards, I realised that staying in this state would have required a mind that had realised „nothingness“, so to speak, and consequently could not be irritated by anything.

Some time later, when I met Chhimed Rigdzin Rinpoche (1922-2002), an aged Tibetan abbot of a Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism who had the reputation of being a „realised“ lama, I asked him if I could tell him about a personal experience. His spontaneous reaction was unfriendly and defensive. I therefore assumed I hardly had the time to give him an account and merely performed the typical hand gestures describing the experience referred to. Suddenly, his disinterest changed and he snapped in rapid sequence, as if firing a gun: When was that? Where was that? What did you do? Talking about the experience was superfluous, as it requires no confirmation, but of course he was interested in whether it had occurred within the context of his seminar, which it did not.

As the narrative makes clear, this kind of experience is independent of any individual perspective, sentiment, imagination or cultural conditioning. The dynamics of space, a paradoxical simultaneity of opposing movements, becomes the navel or gateway from which everything unfolds. This „nucleus“ of space is mysterious in its dynamics, but its structure is well known to radiesthesists. At its core it is the eight-pointed star of Cube system and Curry network intersections, which will be encountered again and again on the following pages.

In view of these connections, the Buddhist concept of an essentially insubstantial, empty nature of phenomena is extremely significant. It offers an explanation for the existence of a paradoxical space that is dynamically entwined in and through itself. For this would be neither conceivable nor possible if things or beings actually had their own substance or materiality.

The solidity of things as perceived by us poses no contradictory to this fact, assuming that the Buddhist teaching also applies, which sees its cause in the development of the five senses and their effects, integrated into the „chain of conditional emergence“. However, this teaching will be difficult to „objectify“ for outsiders, because its verification requires an uncompromisingly rational and, concurrently, meditative self-analysis, including the requisite mental abilities which have to be developed.

For those unfamiliar with these perspectives, some exemplary methods as taught by meditation masters will be enlightening:

• In the mindfulness method, if we use an upright posture with free breathing as the focus of concentration, additional subtlety emerges if, at the same time, the practitioner examines the nature of the mind that maintains and observes this concentration.

• It is also possible to start with the final result of development by essaying to visualise directly the omnipresent light-inherent nature of all living beings. Your own mental focus is supported by imagining the structure of a crystal. Immersing ourselves in its aspect of clarity and emptiness, we approach the „fundamental nature“ of ourselves and of all phenomena. Visualising the play of light in the sun – concurrently white, clear and in the colours of the rainbow – can enhance essential cognition.

• Where exactly is the mind when it simultaneously observes posture, breath and the emergence of thoughts, which it does not follow but allows to dissolve on their own like clouds?

• Mental exercises of this kind are conducive to the development of the faculties. Yet it is of even more outstanding importance to repeatedly shift resolutely to a determined attitude of non-practice – wide awake, completely without concepts, unconditionally open to nothing but, exclusively, actuality.

Tantra or the Fabric of the World

When talking about „space“ or „structures of space“, I spontaneously associate „grids“, certainly in agreement with those colleagues who conduct geobiological consultations. It is the „great grid intersection“, as I term it, the eight-pointed star of Cube system and Curry network intersections seen from above, which represents the basic matrix of space, its germ cell, so to speak. From their repetition emerges the spatial texture or rhythmicity in which practising geobiologists travel.

The four main cardinal directions of the compass rose represent, in all cultures, the central structure around which the cosmos of traditional knowledge is arranged, with its assignments of the four elements and the other forces. Altitude is the fifth (space) element, also expressed in the fixed or polar star from which the celestial tent is suspended. The central axis of the tent is the shaman’s „axis mundi“ through which he travels to the different worlds to mediate between humans and spirits.

Not alone in the world of the Central Asian yurt, but equally in Western European culture, there was the idea of the world as a fabric that connects everything with everything else. In Norse mythology, it is the three Norns Urd, Verdandi and Skuld, the goddesses of fate of the past, present and future, who weave the fabric of time and the world at the foot of the world ash tree Yggdrasil at the Urd spring of life. In Sanskrit, this context is found in the term tantra which appears in a wide variety of meanings but in its literal translation simply means „loom“ or „fabric“.

The idea of our reality as a fabric created by the Creator Spirit, whose weaving threads work the connections on all levels, and the reality that can be experienced by the senses, concurs with the perception of radiesthesia. The grids represent the fundamental structure into which all other energies or vibrations are woven, including the planetary lines. Here lies the invisible but biologically highly effective matrix in which geobiologists gain their experience, and which makes it possible to counsel people.

As with many who have preceded me, I was driven by the curiosity to explore the peculiarities of this web, its dependence on the conditions of any given place, or vice versa, and to apply the knowledge gained therefrom for the benefit of people.

In Europe, a radiesthesist often has to endure indulgent, sometimes even mocking looks from the apparently „scientifically enlightened“. In contrast to these experiences, I found it unusual and liberating in Nepal and India to encounter an effortless apprehension of my work as a dowser everywhere when I explained it with the term „Tantra“. I only needed to explain the term by expounding that I was tracing the energetic lines that form the fabric of the place to exclude the areas that are too intense for humans. The invariably friendly and undisguised openness I encountered in people’s faces inspired the title of this work – and I sincerely wish this form of social feedback to all colleagues who are involved in Geobiological Counselling for their fellow human beings.