Being an ‘alternative’ field, dowsing does suffer from more than its fair share of kooks and flakey ‘New Age’ types, but at present there’s a much stronger emphasis on practicality, professionalism and discipline – hence my book on Disciplines of Dowsing that I co-authored last year with archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, and a set of related articles (see summary [PDF]) that we wrote for the society’s journal, which was the reason why I was at the conference. An interesting bunch.

So for me it was no surprise to find some innovative ideas there – some of which were definitely relevant to other fields, including business-architecture and enterprise-architecture.

One which bridged the gap between dowsing and technical world was a lovely Google Earth ‘mashup’ by Hugo Jenks, linking traditional dowsing techniques to current GIS (geographical information systems) with a purpose-built embedded-controller and an ingenious software hack. One of the standard dowsing techniques uses a single horizontal rod with a vertical handle as a mechanical amplifier to highlight small hand-movements. Hugo had made up a version of this with twin sensors to record the deviation either side of straight-ahead (the dowsing ‘signal’); he then fed this in real-time into a laptop which also had a GPS card to record position. A button on the dowsing-rod handle could also be used to trigger a GPS ‘waypoint’ marker to record specific key points of interest. With this array, he was then able to map the signal – again in real-time, if required – onto Google Earth, as a direct trace of response. A simple grey-scale indicated response-intensity, using a mid-grey as neutral, with white and black as the two extremes. The demonstrator video showed a clear mapping of below-surface structures on an archaeological site. Given the increasing use of dowsing in archaeology as a rapid non-destructive survey technique, this looks to be a really useful addendum to that toolkit – especially as this approach enables us to do away with the cumbersome stick-and-string survey-grid typical of many site-surveys, and also allows arbitrary granularity of search. Interesting.

Somewhat earlier I’d had a lengthy conversation with an engineer (whose name I forgot to record, much to my chagrin) about Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model – one of the cornerstones of systems-theory in organisations, that I reworked into a whole-of-enterprise ‘viable services model’ for my book The Service-Oriented Enterprise. This guy had done his Masters degree with Raul Espejo – Stafford Beer’s right-hand man on the Cybersyn whole-of-nation information-system in Chile in the 1970s – so was able to tell me a lot more about that ground-breaking work on organisational complexity.

Finally, an excellent conversation with an architect (Elizabeth Phillips or Catharine Fortlage, I think?) about physical architecture supporting organisational architecture, and the need to link the organisational silos or ‘tribes’:

Design the floor-plan to be like a wandering path through the jungle; each tribe has its own patch, its own personal space, yet there are shared ‘watering-holes’ – neutral spaces owned by everyone and no-one – where anyone from any tribe may meet any other.

This reminded me of some work we did a few years ago with state-police in Australia, where our brief from the executive was to create a metaphoric ‘totem pole’ to “unify the tribes” within the police-force itself. That conversation pointed me to the burolandschaft (literally ‘office-landscape’) movement of the 1950s; then to a really useful 1993 article – “A Vision of the New Workplace” – on the impact of management-theories such as Business Process Reengineering on office-design; and thence to ‘Origins of the Office’, another useful resource on working environments, office paradigms and interplay between management-theory and workspace, embedded in a website by architects Caruso St John for the Arts Council of Britain.

The moral of this story? Innovation and ideas can arise from anywhere, and the most useful ones often arise from unexpected places. As Louis Pasteur once put it, “in the field of research, chance favours the prepared mind”; if we only allow ideas to come from the expected places, we’re limiting our chances!

A couple of years ago it was Mike Mepham, who worked with me for some years in the Wordsmiths days, back in the mid-1980s, and went on to fame amongst puzzle-fans as the person who brought the Sudoku craze to Britain. This time it’s a perhaps more famous friend, John Michell (see the obituary in the London newspaper The Independent).

The rather gushing obituary concentrates on his writings, and indeed it was his The View Over Atlantis – the ‘rather peculiar book’ that my parents brought home from a Bristol bookshop in 1969 – that really started me on my own earth-mysteries researches, building on previous schooldays-experiments with Tom Lethbridge’s work on dowsing. I’ll admit, though, that I found almost all his later work impenetrable to the point of incredulity – with the exception of a brilliantly acerbic little poem written in the aftermath of the unprovoked assault by police (the Battle of the Beanfield) at Stonehenge in 1985:

…but here’s the subtle dodge:
Stonehenge has now been proved to be / an old Masonic Lodge
…[so] they’re not just simple coppers / spoiling other people’s fun
they’re members of the Brotherhood / out worshipping the sun

But to me it wasn’t the writings that that meant so much: it was the man. One who saw the world through rose-tinted glasses – literally so. A cultured Etonian voice; a sculptured, elf-like face; a bird-like manner, quick, sharp, like a heron; an intense scholar’s intelligence balanced by bright wit and a warm, genuine inclusiveness – I was stunned when, at a book-launch of mine a few years back, he told me that he regarded me as one of his peers, because to me he had no real equal either then or now. An eccentric in the best sense of that term: one who stands aside from the usual centre, and applies that leverage to change the world.

I last met him a year ago, at the Megalithomania gathering in Glastonbury. (Reading the Megalithomania site, I’ve just realised I’m a bit late in this – John died almost a month ago, 24th April. His obit was in The Independent only yesterday, though, and that was the first I’d heard of it.) He’d always looked older than his age – back in the 60s and 70s he looked to be in his sixties at least, though I now realise he must then only have been in his mid-forties – but he was definitely looking old by then, yet still active, engaging, aware, alert to all the subtle nuances of ideas.

Yes, and a real ‘character’ too. The obit coyly states that he “joined the civil service as a Russian interpreter”, but it was more likely the intelligence-service, either MI5 or MI6: in other words, he was, bluntly, a spy – part of the same Cambridge clique that produced the double-agent Kim Philby. Yet though he may have come from the Establishment, he was certainly not of it: there is a happily apocryphal tale of him in one of his post-Cold War visits to Moscow, chatting to the security-guards at Vnukovno airport whilst rolling up a joint literally under their noses, lighting up and waving to them as he wandered out of the door surrounded by a cloud of that so-characteristic aroma. It undoubtedly never occurred to him to be concerned about its extreme illegality, and they probably never had a chance to notice: like the best of anarchists, he harmed no-one, yet he made up his own rules everywhere he went.

Oddly, I know almost nothing about his earlier life beyond his writings and research. The Independent obituary mentions his time at university and in the Royal Navy, but no mention of parents or childhood. In a very literal sense, he seems to have come from nowhere: it certainly felt like that when, as an awed, angst-ridden eighteen-year-old, I first met him in Glastonbury almost forty years ago.

Yet there’s a quote from him in the Independent obit that seems to sum up almost perfectly his life and his work:

The important discoveries about the past have been made not so much through the present refined techniques of treasure-hunting and grave-robbery, but through the intuition of those whose faith in poetry led them to scientific truth.

Life as poetry: that was John Michell. Like so many others, my own life has been enriched by his gifts and his presence: so my thanks, and fare you well.

Aim is to give a variant of the presentation I did for the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury last year, but this time with much more of an emphasis on the underlying disciplines that make it possible to get useful results in working with ‘alternate realities’ and suchlike – in other words, to bring it into line with the book Disciplines of Dowsing: the quest for quality that I co-wrote last year with Liz Poraj-Wilzynska, and which we’re currently adapting for archaeography and archaeology.

Looking forward to being at the conference, especially as some old friends such as Paul Devereux will be there. See you there too, perhaps?

It’s a two-page (i.e. single-sheet) summary of the four ‘disciplines’ – Artist, Mystic, Scientist, Magician – as a useful ‘cheat-sheet’ for reference whilst working. The different perspectives and keyphrases that apply to each mode or discipline are listed under the following headings:

• mode’s role is…
• mode manages…
• mode responds to the context through…
• has decision-sequence of…
• use this mode when…
• you’re in this mode when…
• rules include…
• warning-signs of dubious discipline include…
• bridge to other modes with…

As with the book itself, the aim is to help boost the effective quality of work in dowsing and other subjective skills.

Share and enjoy, folks?

Disciplines of Dowsing went off to press this afternoon – hooray!

The usual info-piece and book-blurb are already up on the Tetradian Books website; likewise the PDF e-book, which is now available for free download (though note that it’s a lot larger file than the others, weighing in at more than 2Mb). Physical books should become available on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and so on in a couple of weeks.

As for its purpose and so on, see my previous ‘Flat-out writing‘ post. The aim was to get it ready in time for the British Society of Dowsers’ conference at Cirencester on the weekend after next, and it looks like we’ll just make it.

More later, when I’ve had a chance to rest up a bit – this has been a solid slog for a fair few weeks. A lot to catch up on, too. Ah well… still feels like it’s been worth the effort, though.

Links on the Tetradian Books website also point to the (free) e-book versions:

• Elements of Pendulum Dowsing description
• The Dowser’s Workbook description

Will probably take me another week at least to get the e-commerce section of the site up and working. But judging by the speed with which Real Enterprise Architecture turned up on Amazon, they should also be orderable direct from Amazon, Borders, Barnes&Noble and the others with the next few days, too.

Please pass around to your various acquaintances, if you would? – many thanks!

• E-book for Elements of Pendulum Dowsing
• E-book for The Dowser’s Workbook

Share and enjoy?

(Physical books should be available by the second week of May, in time for the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury on May 17-18. They’ll be priced at £9.95 each, plus P&P – the e-books are free, but you can’t print or copy from them.)

This is the current draft for the cover of the new edition of my 1989 book The Dowser’s Workbook (also known as Discover Dowsing). The aim is that it’ll come out, together with Pendulum Dowsing, as the first in my new ‘Tetradian Alternate Realities’ series.

Again, as with Pendulum, it’s ready to go once the proof-copy comes back, so ready to launch together with Pendulum and the Grey House ’30th Anniversary Edition’ of Needles at my presentation at Megalithomania.
Turns out to be almost the same size as Pendulum – 132 pages rather than 128 – so will aim also retail at £9.95 inc. P&P. But again, should it go out at £8.95 instead? Comments / suggestions, anyone?

This is the current draft for the cover of the new edition of my 1989 book Elements of Pendulum Dowsing, to go out as the first in my new ‘Tetradian Alternate Realities’ series.

Editing and layout and the like are all complete; I’m just waiting on a proof-copy before sending it to press.

Still on track to launch at the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury in mid-May.

Aim is to retail at £9.95 inc. P&P – perhaps a little high, for 128 pages, but hey, it is a classic, and (though I say it myself) still one of the best books out there… But should it go out at £8.95 instead? (It’s a POD book, so I can’t afford to do it for less – apologies! – though there will also be an e-book version soon.) Comments / suggestions, anyone?

The new edition has two new chapters:

• Looking back – a chapter-by-chapter review of changes (good, bad and sometimes outright ugly) in the earth-mysteries scene over the past three decades
• Looking forward – a review of some issues such as ‘newage’ and ‘golden-age’ myths that are crippling current research in the earth-mysteries field, and suggestions about which aspects of the domain seem most likely to yield worthwhile results in the next few decades

It’ll retail at £12.95. Order direct from Grey House via their website at www.greyhouseinthewoods.org/nest.htm – or pick up a copy at the launch at the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury in May.

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