A Window into the Mind’s Hidden Powers
When Leslie Lemke was born prematurely, he had brain damage, cerebral palsy, and had to have his eyes surgically removed due to glaucoma. When he was put up for adoption aged six months, there were few prospective parents interested. Until May, a 52-year-old nurse with five children of her own, loved him immediately and welcomed him into her family.
When Leslie was sixteen, May was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of a piano playing in her downstairs sitting room. Thinking she had left the television on, she went down to turn it off. What she found instead stopped her in her tracks: Leslie was sitting at her beloved baby grand piano, playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 flawlessly. He had heard it on television earlier that day.
From that day on, despite having had no musical training whatsoever, Leslie began to play all styles of music – from ragtime to classical. All it took was to hear a piece once. For many years, before his health declined, he gave regular concerts in the United States, Japan and Scandinavia, and appeared on numerous American television programmes.
Then there is Ellen who, when she was eight, became fascinated by the speaking clock, listening to every announcement right down to the last second. From that moment on, she could tell the exact time – precisely to each hour, minute and second of the day, any time she was asked.
Both Leslie and Ellen are savants. This is the condition brought to wide public attention by the fictional Raymond Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 film Rain Man. Savant syndrome is rare but extraordinary: people with serious mental disabilities, including autism, sometimes possess an individual genius that stands in startling contrast to their difficulties.
The real Rain Man, who the film was based on, was Kim Peek. What Kim could do was astonishing: he had read some 12,000 books and remembered everything about every one of them. He used to read two pages simultaneously – his left eye scanning the left page while his right eye read the right – taking about three seconds to get through both. He could recall facts and trivia across fifteen subject areas, from history to geography to sport. Give him any date and he would tell you what the day of the week it was. And he remembered all the music he had ever heard.
Some savants are also known as Lightning Calculators. Daniel Tammet first became famous when he recited Pi from memory to 22,514 decimal places – a feat that took over five hours. Numbers, according to Daniel, are far more than symbols. He sees figures and calculations, a rare condition called synaesthesia. In his mind each number from 1 to 10,000 has its own unique shape, colour, texture and feel. He has described 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as especially beautiful, and Pi as breathtaking.
What all these remarkable people have in common, and what has fascinated me for years, is the ability to tap into a field of information that lies beyond the reach of ordinary conscious thought. Could any of us – ordinary, unremarkable people – access something of that same field?
The answer, I believe, is yes. And one of the most ancient and reliable routes in is dowsing.
The Spiritual Search Engine
When inventor Thomas Edison was asked what electricity was, he reportedly replied: ‘I don’t know – but it’s there, so let’s use it.’ Dowsing is rather like that. Something is there. When dowsers use the skill, it works. Whether we can fully explain why is almost beside the point.
Dowsing is a human faculty that allows access to information not normally available to our five senses. Historically associated with finding water, gold and minerals, it has also been used in matters of life and death. During the Second World War, Colonel Kenneth Merrylees used his dowsing rods to locate unexploded bombs with delayed fuses buried deep in the ground. During the Vietnam War, US Marines used the same instruments to find hidden tunnels and mines.
In the 1960s, in response to a challenge, American dowser Verne Cameron used a pendulum, dangled over a map, to locate the position of every submarine in the US Navy’s fleet. He then went on to do the same for every Russian sub in the world. The CIA subsequently judged Cameron a risk to national security and confiscated his passport, banning him from leaving the country.
In computer terms, dowsing is a kind of spiritual search engine – scanning all that is known for answers to anything and everything. From ‘Would applying for this job be a good career move?’ to ‘Is there life elsewhere in the universe?’ Dowsing for answers is limited only by the imagination of the person asking.
A recent study measured the depth of meditation reached by adepts – yogis, Sufis, Buddhist monks – by monitoring their brainwave patterns. The scientists found that experienced dowsers reached the same Theta levels as Zen Buddhists who had spent years perfecting their techniques. In other words, dowsing opens the same inner door – and it does so remarkably quickly.
What savants like Leslie, Ellen, Kim and Daniel demonstrate is that the brain, under certain conditions, can access something vast. Dowsing, I would argue, is a way of reaching for the same territory – not through disability or accident, but through a quiet, learnable skill that anyone can develop.
The hidden powers of the mind are not reserved for the exceptional few. They are waiting, in all of us, to be found.
Anthony Talmage is the author of seven books on consciousness, dowsing, and the hidden potential of the human mind, including the acclaimed Dowse Your Way to Psychic Power available from Amazon and all good online bookshops.
