pendulum
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Do we have access to a 'superconscious' part of our minds - that can become, under certain conditions, and with much observation, more or less conscious, or at the very least, made use of? Are there technologies which can, like a psi-powered geiger counter, help us to find things in our environments - and perhaps even assist us to navigate life - from other levels of awareness? Not content to retire as honorary Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, T.C. Lethbridge devoted the latter part of his life towards answering these questions, and searching for the answers to questions that materialists aren't even aware of.

On this week's MindMatters, we discuss Lethbridge's last and most famous book, The Power of the Pendulum, and take a look at Lethbridge's experience using the pendulum, his thoughts about human perception, as well as his well-informed opinion of orthodox science and the ideas that seek to limit the very types of explorations into mind that he devoted many years to uncovering.


Running Time: 01:01:46

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Here's the transcript of the show:

Elan: Hello everyone and welcome back to another Mind Matters. Today we're going to be talking about a book by T.C. Lethbridge called The Power of the Pendulum. This is the book. It's a rather slim volume, 150 or so pages, maybe a little less. T.C. Lethbridge was a Cambridge archeologist, explorer. He served in Cambridge's university museum of archeology and ethnology for a number of decades. So he was an academic. One of his responsibilities was to keep charge of certain objects. But he was also something of a naturalist. He had a very intimate relationship to his environment and a pretty strong curiosity about nature.

So later on in his life he kind of veered off into subjects related to parapsychology and questions of the mind and psychic ability and wrote a number of books in addition to his more academic studies that explored those ideas. I had heard of using the pendulum as a way of acquiring a kind of subconscious knowledge of where things were, kind of like a psychic Geiger counter of sorts. I never really gave it much thought or gave too much credence to the idea I guess because I hadn't read too much on it.

But this book, The Power of the Pendulum really makes the case for the possibility of there being something to it. What really grabbed me right off was the nature of his writing and the introduction to the book The Power of the Pendulum by Colin Wilson. Colin Wilson was a prolific British author. He had written The Outsider, The Occult and a number of other nonfiction and fiction novels that were well regarded.

Harrison: Yeah, like The Mind Parasites is one of his novels, I believe.

Elan: I was just getting to that Harrison. I would not have left out The Mind Parasites. Harrison just brought up this other novel that is a favourite of mine called The Mind Parasites. It's really a story. He doesn't present it as a non-fiction study. But the idea is that the world has become attacked by this parasitic non-physical mind virus that affects the thinking of the world and creates all of this global destruction and catastrophe by design.

So anyway, Wilson was filled with all kinds of interesting ideas that he seemed to pull out of the information field and he writes a glowing introduction to The Power of the Pendulum because Wilson was also very much interested in the nuts and bolts workings of parapsychology and mysticism and the people who were proponents of ideas that might otherwise be considered fringe but that were so powerful that they made it into some mainstream awareness.

Like I said, he writes this glowing introduction to The Power of the Pendulum that hooked me in right away. One of the ideas that drew me in as well, as I started to read this book, was that Lethbridge first of all has a great sense of humour. He writes everything in a light manner. But the book was written around 1970, published in 1971. It was the last of all of his books. It was edited by his wife and their cousins. It was I think his encapsulation of a lot of the ideas he felt were the most pertinent to his career as a student of psychic ability and parapsychology.

One of the things that fascinating to me is that - and we'll get into the whole idea of what the pendulum is and how we connect to certain natural laws and things that exist in our environment via this psychic use of the pendulum. But what was really fascinating was the number of times, and really early on too, that he goes on the attack on Neo-Darwinism and the classic ideas of evolution that we were all brought up with. I was thinking, by that time yes, you had some studies in science that pointed to the idea that Darwinism is BS, but he was able to, almost 50 years ago and earlier, come out and say that Neo-Darwinism is bunk and the reasons why!

So I feel like it's all of the piece. It's like you have to understand in a way that materialism has through Neo-Darwinism and through a lot of other ideas, limited our scope of thinking about what reality is and what our relationship to the environment is and that there is a life of the mind or super conscious, separate from the subconscious - he makes this distinction in the book - that we can tap into via tools like the pendulum, the dowsing rod and just sheer observation of those things.

He encouraged a lot of observation. He encouraged a lot of experimentation and says basically, "If you're a materialist, a hard core and you don't have any questions that come naturally to you about what we are as humans and what we're capable of outside of our five senses, then this stuff isn't for you".

Corey: Right. You get an idea of who he was in the introduction that Colin Wilson writes and then also throughout the book and some other of his writings where he talks a little bit about his upbringing and he sounds like an extremely adventurous, free-thinking, well-rounded person. In his younger years he said that he got skill for observation from being raised around a lot of hunters. So when out he was always having to pay attention to everything in his surroundings, everything that would signal a wounded animal and which direction the animal had gone and how to track that animal.

Then also he had politicians in his family so they trained him to spot people's reactions to things that were being said without them noticing that he was gathering information on how they were reacting to various hot topic issues or just different things that came up in conversation. Then Colin Wilson says that he was kind of a loner. He got married but before he was married his mentality was that of a very independent person. The two loves of his life up until his research into parapsychology and ghosts and ghouls were archeology and the sea. So he wrote a book on coasts and coast men and different things about the natural life of people down to earth. Like you said, he worked at Cambridge but he had a love/hate ambiguous relationship with them because clearly he was a man of quite a bit of intellect, if not just through being independent, just thinking and following things wherever they lead and not being biased in terms of what he would or would not consider.

But then he said that Cambridge was kind of suffocating. He loved it. He loved Cambridge and he loved everything that had to do with it but at the same time he also had that free spirit that finally, when he was able to leave, he was able to devote himself to the study of ghosts and ghouls and ancient religions and basically able to say all sorts of things that he never would have been able to say in a "respectable" academic setting.

In this book you really get an idea of what his world philosophy is. He really pares it down into 116 pages or something. You get an idea of how he views our point in time in history, the major dilemma between materialistic randomness, the point of view that everything comes about randomly versus the idea that everything is created and how that was such a dilemma for mankind.

Elan: Right.

Corey: And his attempt to grapple with that dilemma led to experiments in this higher dimensional parapsychological area so that he could ascertain for himself, using those methods that are taught and tried by materialistic science, but then applying that to so-called religious studies. Some of it is a little bit out there. I don't know. Some of his conclusions that he draws from the pendulum swinging, I'm like, you have to have a very gifted imagination to draw conclusions about different higher dimensions because of the length of a pendulum string and how many times it rotates and how many times it spins. I'm not a trained scientist but it seems to me that when you start saying that the higher dimensions are involved, it's very inspired in some sense and it lends credence to just how open a mind he had to things that are not supernatural but paranatural I guess.

Harrison: I guess you could call it a vast inferential leap, one of many vast inferential leaps that he makes.

Corey: Yeah.

Harrison: But oddly enough, they kind of make sense in a system that he kind of creates for himself or discovers through his own use of the pendulum. But maybe before we get into some of his more out there ideas, just a little bit on the pendulum itself. It's kind of like dowsing. With a pendulum you've got a plumb bob on the end of a string and it rocks back and forth, like you said. It can make spirals. It can go back and forth just like in a grandfather clock. And it can be used to find things like dowsing rods. You have dowsers that look for sources of water to dig wells, for instance, and dowsers are still used for that purpose.

It reminds me of an anecdote I heard not relating to pendulums or dowsing, but you'll see how it kind of fits in. There's a famous quantum physicist I believe somewhere in Europe and I believe it was a journalist - sorry, I don't remember the details of the story absolutely because it just came to my mind - but had gotten invited to go out to his farm basically. So they go out to the farm and the journalist notices a horseshoe above the door and says, "Oh, that's pretty superstitious. Do you really believe that?" And then the physicist said, "That's one of those things that works whether you believe in it or not" and that seems to be the approach that a lot of people take to dowsing. Farmers or people who live out in the country and need a well dug will call the dowser to do it because even if they don't believe in it, it seems to work. That's why dowsers are still sought after because it seems to work. They seem to be able to find water.

So it seems similar to the pendulum. I'd never really known anything about pendulums until several years ago and I've had two experiences with a pendulum. One came out just as a result of whimsy. We were doing some house renovations in the basement and installing some walls. We had to nail down these 2x4s to the concrete foundation essentially, the basement floor and we were using this drill to drill in the screws to hold down these boards but the concrete was spotty. Some parts of it were a lot harder to drill through than others and wherever we'd look for a spot to drill through, we'd hit these hard bit and couldn't drill through them. We'd be standing there for minutes and get a quarter of an inch down.

We were wondering, "Well what are we going to do? This is crazy. This is the only drill we have." I thought, "It can't hurt" so I got out the plumb bob that we were using to get some lines straight when we were putting the boards up. So I just told myself, "Okay, I'm going to start it swaying back and forth and when I get to a spot where it will drill, I want it to stop". So I'm just going along and 2x4 and it's going voop, voop, voop and then I get to a spot and it stops. So we drill. It goes in. And we do that 10 times and it worked each time. Whereas before we were having zero luck, we couldn't drill any of these holes.

So I thought, well that was interesting, a fun coincidence. Was it actually working? Well it worked, whether you believe in it or not. Whether there was actually something paranormal going on, that's another question. But one of the interesting things I found about that was that it was like a need-based thing. There was no other way we were going to find out where these were unless we were going to drill hundreds of holes to try to find which one would work and that wasn't going to happen.

So there was no way to test for it, so we used this weird divinatory method to try to find it out and it ended up working. But then again another time I was looking for a missing object and just go nowhere, didn't find it. Someone else found it, totally not in the place where the pendulum was telling me it might be. And like Colin Wilson says in his introduction, Colin Wilson himself didn't have any luck with the pendulum. It didn't seem to work for him. But Tom Lethbridge seemed to have a knack for it.

It seems like that's the thing. Some things work better for some people than others in a lot of these parapsychological phenomena, whether it's remote viewing - some people are better than others - any different microfield that you find in wider parapsychology you find people who are better at it than others.

I'll leave his system and some of his conclusions to the side for a second. Maybe you guys can pick up on that after I finish this one point. He comes to all of these conclusions about everything, from these experiments he's doing with the pendulum. It makes me wonder whether they're repeatable by other people. I'm not sure if anyone has tried to verify whether they can get the same results that he has. The reason that's a question for me is that I wonder if the results that he got, even assuming or just accepting for the time being that they're true in some sense, that the results that he got might not be necessarily objectively true in the sense that anyone with a talent for the pendulum, if you can call it that, would find the same results or if they were a system that was specific to him in his mind.

I was reminded, I think it was in the First Sight book by Carpenter, I can't remember for sure though, where he was describing how some of the psychics whose work he was quoting seemed to have very specific routines and conditions under which things would work. So they each had their own style or personality of the overall system in which their phenomena would come about. So I'm wondering if the system of results that Lethbridge got were more of part of a structure of his own mind, that on some superconscious level, like he might say, That it really did all this categorization and systematization so that he was discovering these things that were put in his own particular language.

Elan: I would say there are a few different answers to that. He had conducted these experiments mostly on his own, but he also did them with his wife, he writes, and there's one experiment that he engaged in with I think a friend as well as his wife where they were dowsing for - and maybe perhaps using the pendulum - to determine certain elements of a very large stone. They were doing this in coordination and they were using dowsing rods and there was something in the response to his friend's using the dowsing rod that was a reaction to Lethbridge's own detection of this element, I think it is. This story might have been in one of the other readings. There's some good compilations of Lethbridge's work in other places so that might not be in this particular book.

So that's part of the answer. There was, at least among Lethbridge and his wife and people and intimates that he shared this research with, a consistency. And there was certainly, he claims, a consistency within his own research, that he claims again and again was repeatable. The idea basically, just to add a little bit to your description of how this works, is that you basically have this line at the end of a stick that is measured in a certain number of inches called a rate. So the rate of silver as an element, if you were looking for it buried underground, would be I think 22 inches, maybe something else. But the whirl or the pendulum swinging in a certain way would occur a certain number of times. So you'd have the length and the whirl that would happen consistently with certain elements.

So it wasn't just metals or elements. He would have assigned a certain rate or length of string to find a certain type of wood, a certain herb. He could also try and determine by an emanation that came off of an object that someone might have used, their particular emotional point of view. So he ascribed to the idea of manna or emanations that leave a vibratory imprint. He talks a lot about vibrations. It's through vibrations or a certain vibrational rate that the pendulum is, he believes, able to determine what something is to a certain degree. He thinks that this was a kind of ancient technology that was known to people thousands of years ago but that somehow got lost over millennia or however long.

Just a bit about history. He got the idea to use the pendulum by a French brigadier, a soldier who was pouring over maps and trying to determine where mines were over the sea. So he got inspired by this idea because this French brigadier wrote about detecting dangerous mines for shipping vessels that might blow up their vessels and had some success in determining where these mines might be. It made an impact on him so if this guy was using such a low-end technology for such an important aim, he might as well try it himself. So I thought that was an interesting thing.

Harrison: Well just on that, another little anecdote related to that, I think it was in this book I was reading recently, American Cosmic by an American religious studies professor and she was talking about how in the military, even today - I don't know because I haven't spoken to guys in the military but this is what she was saying - that in the units that she'd talked with members of, that each of these units had a guy in the mine detecting part of the team who had a sixth sense about finding mines and avoiding mines. So each military grouping would implicitly trust this guy because he had a record of just knowing where mines were.

This was perhaps in reference to the remote viewing tests that the military was doing back in the '70s and '80s. But aside from the actual official interest in parapsychology in the military, it was purely a practical measure that when you're in an environment where it's life or death, again you don't care whether you believe in the stuff or not. You just use what works. It seems like there are individuals who are just better at guessing where mines are. So you naturally say, "Okay, well you're in charge now." They guy's probably thinking "Oh Jeez!" But there are individuals like that.

Same thing in the example that you gave about the brigadier. That's a situation where you have a deficit in knowledge. You don't know where these mines are but it's a life and death situation. So you're going to try whatever you can to get the answer and it just so happens that some of these methods actually work, whether you believe in them or not. That also relates back to the idea, with me and my pendulum, which relates back to First Sight and Carpenter, about there being a need for the information. I don't know if there have been any studies like this in all the parapsychological research, but I'd guess, based on reading Carpenter's work, that you'll probably find better results when the information isn't immediately knowable by other means, when it can only be verified after the fact.

When you're doing a test, you put three items under cups and you move them around and then you're kind of using your pendulum to find which one is which, subconsciously your sub or superconscious is going to be saying, "Well, we could tell you the answer but all you have to do is pick up the cup to find out. You don't need any kind of special skill in order to find it out". If there are three sites located in different countries and you have only a limited amount of money and you need to find certain things, in that case, it's not easy to check each one, to conduct a random search of the entire Australian continent to find out where one particular object is. You're going to need something to help you find it. In that case, the only thing you could do is trust or experiment with some kind of alternative techniques like dowsing on a map or something.

So I think there might be a link between the lack of ready availability of the information and affirming a subconscious recognition of that, that "Okay, we have no easy way of finding this information or immediately verifying it therefore there's an extra need to use the non-sensory means of finding that information and giving a signal as to where it is".

Corey: And you could say that Lethbridge's need for discerning all of this information using the pendulum was based on that fundamental dilemma he saw, that crisis of faith in traditional religious structures, the traditional academic community and just modern society and especially Darwinism. Throughout the book he has peppered all of those little anecdotes of his issues with all of these things and you get the impression that that's the driving force, that's the fundamental need that could stand as a barrier between the average Joe replicating the kind of information that he has. That could be a possible barrier.

But just to answer your question about whether or not you can replicate this data, but it's a matter of just giving it a shot, reading down his methods and just trying to replicate them the best that you can and then understanding that a lot of us probably don't have intrinsic dowsing psychic abilities but that as we've seen from our reading and the shows that we've done on First Sight and parapsychology, that it seems like it's a fairly universal phenomenon, that even if we're not consciously able to access it, that under certain conditions it's more readily accessible than others.

One of the big ones that you've pointed out is needing the information that you're seeking and not being able to get it through other means. So that's where I think the drive and the quest that Lethbridge had was really the driving force that really opened up this entire world to him. Like I said before, it seems very inspired because, like you said, there are many inferential leaps from the spinning of a pendulum to the knowledge of how many levels there are to reality, although we haven't gotten to that point yet.

But I think that at the very foundation I can see where he's coming from because if you were able to replicate the findings that whenever you are looking for silver or you're thinking about anger or love or women or gold or any of these other things and you consistently get the same mechanical response from the dowsing rods, then you have to think that there's something objective out there somewhere, some sort of a coordinate system that responds to that and that you are picking up on it through some sort of psychic, electromagnetic type of energy and that it's coming down and it's interacting with physical reality. Then once you start thinking about things that way then you've opened up a whole new world of potential ways of investigating the cosmic mind essentially.

Harrison: So we're going to have to set up a series of tests and do another show to show our results because I think we'd have to take into account at least a couple of things. First we might have a sample of people and set up some kind of simple test to see who might be the most talented with the pendulum, see if there's anyone with a kind of natural ability, that sort of thing. Then hopefully that person has no prior knowledge of Lethbridge's specific system or results, but only with the information and intent to confirm whether there are these consistencies, right? So whether you can get consistently a certain length of string and number of circles for silver compared to gold or something.

Then see if you can get consistent results that are repeatable over time and then only after that, see if those numbers are the same as Lethbridge's numbers. Because at least hypothetically I think, it's possible to get consistent results but that are different results. That's why I think that the tests should be done to see whether Lethbridge's specific results are universal or whether that was a product of his mind. Again, hypothetically, if you have a really good dowser you might be able to find someone who gets just as consistent results but that has completely different signatures for each metal, for instance.

So what if someone else consistently gets 20 inches for silver as opposed to 22 or whatever it was? And they have their own unique system? The question would be whether those numbers are inherent in the things themselves or if those numbers are a kind of code that are only signifying or hinting at an objective quality of the thing in itself. Just like any other language, is 22 inches the actual essence of the thing in itself or is it just a letter or a symbol for that essence, for that thing in itself?

Elan: He actually makes reference to us as decoders. This table that we have the cameras and our paperwork and our books and water and cigarettes on is not exactly as we would interpret it to be, but that exists on another level of reality and that we're decoding it based on a limited base sensatorium of criteria, if that makes any sense.

Corey: He says that the brain is the sensor for earth level reality. That's how he describes it, as the brain consciousness. The brain is a sensor.

Elan: It's a sensor and he's also careful to, in one place, make the distinction between the brain and the mind which is what I really appreciate about his work too.

Harrison: Let me just interrupt there. I'll give his definitions. Right at the beginning he gives his terminology to distinguish these things. So he says he uses these words so he defines them, when he refers to body he just means body but by soul he's referring to individual consciousness and then by spirit he's referring to mind, possibly much more extensive. Then when he's talking about brain he says it's the sensor for earth-level thinking. So those are the distinctions he makes there.

Elan: Yeah. And getting back to that point you were making a little earlier Harrison about this consistency, this across-the-board data points that we can look at as an objective reality of how the pendulum reacts and responds to certain things, by way of analogy he says that he's gotten a lot of letters from readers he mentions. One of the things that he's read a lot about and has been written to on the subject of, is people having out-of-body experiences, people who, because they've been in a car accident or were sickly and might have been close to death or even just in bed asleep and, for whatever reason their consciousness left their physicality, across the board there always seems to be this vantage or viewpoint of people of a certain number of feet in the air and just off to the side which he considers to be consistent with the number of whirls and a certain rate or distance that you would compute using a pendulum if such a thing were measurable, to indicate that we're kind of constructed in a similar way.

I don't know how clear that is, but the way he describes it it's quite clear. Corey's got a look on his face folks. {laughter} Go ahead Corey. Tell me...

Corey: Alright. So what I was thinking when you were discussing the whirls and the activity of the pendulum I was thinking about the show we did on the book Consciousness-Anatomy of the Soul where they talk about attractors. In the mathematics the attractors are different ways that these systems can behave. So you have chaotic attractors. They all behave differently. The very simplest system is when I don't think the pendulum would even move.

Harrison: It would move back and forth.

Corey: It would just move back and forth, correct. So the spinning around is the next level attractor. In that book they discuss the fact that they found that as consciousness rises, there is different attractor levels. I can't think of the proper way to describe it. Do you remember how they discussed that? There's linear attractors. There's chaotic attractors. So the solar system behaves in one attractor type way.

Harrison: And they've each got - I can't remember the phrase - but like a dimensional number.

Corey: A dimensional number, yeah.

Harrison: So you can calculate the number of dimensions needed in order to mathematically represent that system. I think the point attractors is one dimension and then you've got, I don't know, the simple attractor is two dimensions. Then when they get up to three plus dimensions, then at some point the more dimensions you have, that's when it becomes chaotic. And they're quantum like that. They jump from one to the other. I'll stop there because I'd just be talking nonsense because I don't know math.

Corey: Well I don't know math either but I remember in the book they discussed the fact that they thought consciousness came out of a mathematical type dimension. Whatever causes the pendulum to act in the way it does, it acts in a way that's similar to these different attractors, when the whirl is one and then just back and forth is another.

So it just sparked my curiosity to wonder if there is any way that you can look at the two phenomena and see if there is at the root, something similar going on between the Consciousness-Anatomy of the Soul and the different consciousness attractors and the different kinds of behaviour of the dowsing rod or pendulum.

Elan: The one part that's described in the book that seems to approach that idea, again he talks about the subconscious or the lower motivations of the human being versus the super conscious or higher dimensional part of the self that is said to exist. This is part of the conclusion that he's come to after so many years of thinking about and experimenting with the pendulum, that there is a higher dimensional self that exists on worlds, if you're thinking about it in terms of the swinging of the pendulum, that think on another level. Actually I don't think that answers your question at all Corey.

Corey: No it doesn't. It's not even close. {laughter} But I like where you're going with it.

Elan: So something else that he seems to incorporate in his study is the idea that there's memory and consciousness and awareness that exists, not only when we sleep or when we've left our bodies, but after death. He also attributes certain places in the distance of a physical body to where the consciousness would reside, for instance if they had left their bodies completely and had gone into an afterlife. He incorporates this so seamlessly into how he describes this. If you've ever read anything on the subject of an afterlife existence and there is a large amount of literature to suggest that that's a possibility, he is able to put that idea right in there.

Another thing I wanted to mention which seems to suggest that he was so ahead of his time is that he talks about animal telepathy. He talks about being able to command his cat to come over here or to leave a certain space or something and that his cat would, at a distance even, respond to his wishes. It just reminded me of Rupert Sheldrake's research with animals predicting when their owner would come home and it predates Sheldrake's research by decades.

So it's just another area that he pulls in that just impresses me.

Harrison: Well I'll throw one more thing onto the table to add to our speculation and our possible future experimentation. In the introduction Colin Wilson summarizes a bit about the overall worldview that Lethbridge developed over the years throughout his book. As Colin Wilson says, he didn't just come up with a whole bunch of ideas in his first book and then just rehash them and expand on them in the other books. His thoughts have changed and morphed and grew and developed over time. So new ideas would come in, new interpretations would come in until he got to this final book, but that one of the main, overarching points was that past events would impress something onto the objects themselves.

So a stone or a bullet used in a war hundreds of years ago would still resonate with the anger and the violence of that time in the present day. There's a word for psychics who do that kind of thing now. I can't remember what it is (psychometry) where they use objects to sense things about the owner or like a psychic canine unit tracking the scent essentially. It's like, "Okay, the owner of this object is missing and they were murdered and their body should be here", something like that for the kind of psychics that police might use. Again, another example of not necessarily believing but doing it because it works whether you believe it or not.

So objects can acquire the impression of past events that gets carried on and Lethbridge hypothesized or theorized that this had something to do with a field, like the electromagnetic field. Something about the field of moving water, there's something about the fields produced by certain phenomena and he'd say not only moving water but potentially also by desert landscapes or mountains, that receive the impression of emotions. Like I said with the example of the ancient bullet or stone, any kind of projectile, that would retain the emotional significance of that event in which it was involved.

So that made me think along the lines of some of the stuff that Whitehead was writing about because for Whitehead, like Lethbridge, in a different kind of field, for Whitehead everything comes down to vibration. The basics of physicality, what we think of as physicality come down to a vibration, like electromagnetism, like a photon of light. There's wave-like properties to everything and that is vibratory in nature and he essentially equated vibration with feeling, with experience.

So at the most basic level of reality, the things that we see as vibrations are the objective appearance of the feeling of experience. So you could write a mathematical equation (energy = feeling) because for Whitehead, every objective thing, everything you could observe and see as an object had its own subjectivity to it. There's an inside and an outside to everything. When we're looking around the world we're seeing the outsides of everything but then from the perspective of that thing there will be some iota at least, of experience, from the most basic vibratory phenomenon up to human consciousness and above.

So those ideas are reminding me of each other, that there's something about the nature of vibration equating to experience, to the most basic form of consciousness and with the pendulum vibrations and using that to divine something about higher realities, higher consciousness. If you think about the brain where you have all this electrical activity going on, but there's nothing intrinsic about a lot of different kinds of brain cells that distinguishes one from the other. It's not like you have a specific type of brain cell that perceives one type of signal and another specific type of brain cell that perceives another signal. You've got a whole bunch of the same kind of neurons that will get signals from various different parts of your body but that seem to somehow facilitate or produce different sensations or thoughts.

If there had to be a unique correlation between each type of thought and the physicality of it, you'd need an infinite number of different types of brain cells in order to have the range of thoughts that we have. We use the same cells to have different thoughts. So there can't be this one-to-one correlation so you've got the same vibration that can be used for different forms or types of experience.

So when you have an ancient projectile it's just got its own make up. It's got its own physical make up that would be analyzable by any scientist who knows how to do that kind of thing, the elements that make it up, the minerals and whatever it acquired over time, it's got its own physical stuff that makes it up. But, if Lethbridge is right and it can receive the impression of either anger or potentially love if it was part of a bracelet or a necklace or something that was given and received and worn with affection, it's not like the actual physical make up that thing was changed in some way. It's not like it's a different physical thing with anger than it is with love. There's something the same about it. It's the same object. It's just that that vibration has acquired a different symbol to it, a different form of information that's being held in the same medium essentially. The medium seems to be able to hold a multitude of different types of information, even if it's just one medium that shares the same physical properties.

Corey: Well I just wanted to interrupt Elan really quickly. I just wanted to add that when you were talking about objects retaining some sort of an energetic signature over time, in the book Lethbridge talks about it - I'm not sure if it's in this book, I can't remember - of going to Stonehenge and of using the dowsing rods at Stonehenge and saying that it was spinning out of control and that he had repeated this in other energetically hot spots and that there was something about it that led him to speculate that this knowledge was something that we had, that has been lost to mankind.

When you think about it, when you're talking about these things and this ability to read it, if it's true, it does make you feel like you're in Plato's cave when you're reading it. You feel like you're in the dark in terms of seeing all of this detail, like you said, this emotional signature in stones. It could be in houses. As Lethbridge says it can result in ghosts. There's a signature that can result in what he calls ghouls where he would feel this evil presence in an area and then find out that it was due to something horrible that had happened in the past and that there's something in the area, he speculated, had retained that. Water had retained that signature.

You really get the impression that for most of us, if this was knowledge that humanity had millennia ago, at this point we're just blind, stumbling around, groping in the dark for things that are just so many magnitudes higher and more fundamental and important to people, all of these different things.

Elan: Just to quickly get back to your point Harrison about that stone retaining either the anger, love or whatever emotion or signature or imprint or manna that it might have received from the person using it, I was just thinking maybe there is a physical change of vibration that is so subtle that it can only be measured by instrumentation or technology that I am currently unaware of. So I'm just offering that up as a possibility.

Another point that I thought we'd get back to is how he intuits intelligent design without actually stating that the world must have a creator. Actually he does come out and say that. This is from a chapter called "Heredity". What he says is,

"The orders of nature known as the invertebrates seem even more convincing than any birds or mammals. Just look at a crab for instance when you are getting it ready for eating. Can anybody really believe that all those complicated armoured joints reached their present shapes by each successive ancestral crab type adding something more efficient to the general family of crabs? Where did all those bristles on its legs come from? And how did it learn to extract calcium carbonate from the water to provide it with protection?

As it grows bigger, it has to cast off that relatively impenetrable covering and hide naked under a rock until it can draw more calcium carbonate to it to form a new shell. Presumably this elaborate process feels like death and a new birth to a crab. But how did it learn to do it? Actually there are very early fossil crabs in the geological record and they are obviously crabs already. It would appear that there must have been blueprints for each type of crab or how else could the cells of which they are composed possibly have developed? If you give each cell the wisdom of Solomon, it could not have thought out what to do. Some other entity must have thought up the plans and drawn the blueprints."

That's intelligent design! Circa 1970, 1971. So there's something else that seems to be at work here in terms of Lethbridge as a living example of tapping into this type of knowledge that we're not brought up thinking about or accepting or considering and that is that it's all related in a way. I mean, yes, you wouldn't exactly say that he was a man of science but he was a man of knowledge. He was thinking about things as deeply as possible and had an intimate respect for nature and the environment. But look at all the things that that connects to.

So we just mentioned intelligent design. He also discusses at length the messages he's received in dreams that were borne out a few days later in letters that he has received or things that people have said to him. So he has observed himself as a kind of receiver of telepathic information, for lack of a better description. You said before Corey that it kind of reminds you of how much in the dark we all are in terms of our relationship to reality. It also opens up the door in a way because if we were to engage some of this very low tech, very easy to use technology and just test it out as you propose we might do in the future Harrison, what might we open our ideas and minds to in areas that we might not even anticipate?

Harrison: Right.

Corey: Space travel. High speed space travel. That's my first goal.

Elan: But you know what I mean? It's kind of like a foray into using the mind in ways that we're not traditionally used to using it and exercising a faculty for perception and for understanding, at least in theory. I have yet to try all of this.

Corey: Well yeah. What he's saying is that there is a super consciousness that is so far above human consciousness that there are very, very few people who can tap into it and that there's natural barriers, for whatever reason, between the earth world and super consciousness. You can catch glimpses of it sometimes in very meaningful dreams. There's a reason why sometimes dreams can take place and you can get an idea of the future, future events in just an ordinary dream. I'm sure many of our listeners and we in particular, have had dreams that were prophetic in some way, even if it was mundane, but they were prophetic and you're just struck by "How the heck do I know the future in a dream?"

So he's talking about this level of the super consciousness that exists outside of this very restricted cave-like world that we live in and that we can use instrumentation that can deliver messages to us. Just like Carpenter was writing about in First Sight, the book on Psi, there is a consciousness that's far beyond our own that exists outside of space and time. Certain people are more sensitive to it than others but we can tap into that information. But it seems like, from what we've read, that you kind of have some sort of orientation towards it. You have to have the proper attitude towards it, towards life. You have to be seeking. You have to be open to the information.

You have to have exhausted the limited capabilities that are there for you because like you pointed out Harrison, if you're just playing a game of "find the ball under the cup" your super consciousness isn't going to say, "Oh here, let me give you the answer!" According to this way of seeing it that's not how it works. It's much more like "If you are in desperate need of the answer then maybe I'll help" but the point of life is to struggle and to seek answers on your own. If we know that as humans, then what more could a super consciousness that's obviously vastly more aware, is going to be willing to allow you to fumble around in the dark until you actually do approach it with the correct attitude, with the correct willingness to open yourself up to answers that are sometimes mind-blowing.

Elan: And the benefit of stumbling around in the dark, as all of us are used to doing to some degree or another, I think, is that once you have found something, once something makes a certain amount of sense on a deeper, intrinsic level, then what comes with that is a kind of conviction. It becomes locked in and it becomes part of your system, your being.

In any case, folks we certainly haven't exhausted this subject by any means. {laughter} It's a rather large topic. I think the idea of actually engaging this is a great idea through experimentation. If anyone does try this at home, keep in mind that even if it doesn't appear that you have a natural knack for it, Lethbridge does say that these abilities can be developed to some degree or another. But certainly if you're listening to this show and if you've enjoyed some of our shows in the past, chances are you're pretty smart, you have good intuition, some psychic abilities {laughter} and have some link to the super conscious. I'm half kidding of course.

Unless anyone else would like to add anything, ...

Corey: And if you do experiment, just send us the details. That'd be cool. We'd like to know that.

Harrison: Or take a video and put it on YouTube so we can watch.

Corey: Yeah!

Elan: And on that note, thanks for listening and y'all have a great week and we'll see you again soon. And don't forget to hit like and smash {laughter} and subscribe.

Harrison: Subscribe to smash.

Elan: Subscribe to smash. Thank you everybody.