Water divining

Water diviners and astrologers are welcome in Erleichda, together with mediums, sorcerers, magicians, tarot readers… but not sceptics. Sceptics are not welcome. 

We encourage scepticism, but if you're a sceptic, don't come knocking on our door. Sceptics have a kind of meaness of spirit that we choose to do without.

Graeme set me up for this one when we had a water shortage and he showed me how to divine water.

"Take this piece of wire," he said, handing me a length of rusty fencing wire which he had twisted into an "L" shape, with a rather long vertical. "Now grasp the short bit in your hand, and let the other end point wherever it wants to. Just hold it firmly."

So there I was, holding a piece of rusty fencing wire shaped like an "L", with the long bit pointing out straight in front of me.

"Now walk across there," said Graeme, so I did. I walked a hundred metres or so, the wire still pointing in front of me, when all of a sudden, it started to twist. Not gently - I was holding it quite firmly, and it twisted the flesh of my hand. To stop it twisting took real effort. "Just hold it firmly and let it point where it wants to point," said Graeme, "and follow where it wants to go."

So I followed the wire, and Graeme told me that if I sank a well or a bore anywhere along the track the wire and I traced, we would find water, so I did and we did. The trouble with sceptics is that they would probably still be telling me why drilling for water on the testimony of a rusty piece of wire is irrational. Or that I was deluded, or tricked. So let's have a nice cool glass of water while we discuss their limitations.

A few years ago, some sceptics got together and offered a hefty reward to anyone who could divine water in an experiment they designed. They buried plastic pipes under the ground, and some of them had water, and others didn't, and none of the silly diviners who took up their challenge collected the money. Only the sceptics were happy.

"Now what they proved," Graeme informed me, "is that a certain group of people couldn't divine water flowing through plastic pipes in an area where nature never intended water to flow."

"It's all very well for you to say that," I countered, "but what about all the times divining fails, and where's the scientific evidence?"

"How do you explain what happened to you?"

He was right, I had no explanation for the way that wire twisted in my hand. All that proved, of course, is that a wire twisted in my hand, and by the way, continued to do so every time I walked over that part of Erleichda. What is also true is that when I drilled for water in that location, I found water.

What it does not prove is that water divining is possible.

I started to realise that scepticism is valuable, but being a sceptic is not. That's when I developed another part of the Erleichda philosophy, which makes all sorts of wonderful magic possible in Erleichda, because we all choose to have this belief: It is not necessary for me to have a belief about that.

This is how they train fleas for a flea circus: they put them in a box. When the flea jumps too high, it hits its head, and gets a flea headache, and soon learns how high it can jump. When it tries to jump too far sideways, its bruises itself against the sides of its box, so it soon learns not to jump too far sideways. The flea very quickly learns the size of its world, and not to venture outside it, and soon you can take the box away, and the flea will not stray. The flea is a sceptic, and is now ready to perform in your circus. And it will not venture outside the centre ring of that circus until you prove that the outside exists.

Human sceptics are far smarter than fleas, and able to defend the limitations of life far more eloquently.

In Erleichda we prefer to say "It is not necessary for me to have a belief about that", and we step out of the circus and experience what is there to be experienced.

Many of our critics say that is childlike. They are right.

The first thing that we say about interesting phenomena is "What would happen if that were true?" and our universe and its possibilities keep expanding, and our world is full of magic. Childlike.