The “Mind-Machine” Experiments: Pendulums

Introduction:             The New Age movement has heralded the rebirth of many curious little devices     that had faded into obscurity during the Age of Enlightenment. Perhaps the most celebrated and widely known of these is the pendulum. It consists of a weight–usually a flawlessly balanced piece of brass, copper or some other metal–suspended by thin threads that are either held vertically by a coalition of thumb and index finger or alternatively by fixed edifices such as the wooden trunk of a lamp, the edge of a lampshade, and the tripod stand of a telescope.

What renders this particular mechanism extraordinary by scientific standards is that it appears to respond to both non-verbal and verbal cognitive commands cogitated by its human operator. Indeed, for some obscure reason eighty percent of the population can consciously manipulate a hand-held pendulum so that it swings clockwise, anticlockwise, forwards and backwards, and sideways without any discernible trace of physical contact. And if this weren’t enough, it can also be preprogrammed to offer answers to “yes-no” questions where a swing onwards and backwards might denote affirmation and a swing from side-to-side negation.

Unlike many other “mind-machines” that lend themselves exclusively to the demonstration of a single force and aspect of the information universe, the pendulum is an implement that enjoys multifarious purposes; you can utilize it for the sake of finding misplaced or lost items; to discern a travel destination in the imminent future; to discover colours and shades that resonate with your psychological traits and composition; to discover where one’s passions, faiths, and dishonesties lie; and even to descry answers to personal history, collective historiography, and ontological taboos associated with cosmology.

Generally speaking, the pendulum seems to have access to personal and sometimes collective information that hasn’t yet infiltrated the personal conscious, a fact that leads me to believe that there’s some kind of etheric ‘superconscious’ field that exists and can be subtly detected by the peripheral nerves inside our fingers. This field is not unlike a roll of unexposed film that captures pictures in that it carbon-copies abstract and concrete phenomena and ideas occurring in real time and stores them as a vast collection of ‘racial memories’. Here, any learned esotericist will be reminded of ‘ksha’, a strikingly similar if not identical concept pioneered by the theosophical twins Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907).  Using the neural correlates of the human brain and the peripheral nerves as an intercessor between a dimensional storehouse of absolute knowledge where everything that has been is still alive and the three-dimensional world of solid matter, the pendulum transmits measurements and factual information sought by the projecting field consciousness (the user of the pendulum) faster and more efficiently than any information-processing system or supercomputer known to man. Because each projection of consciousness, each individual mind, is subjectively involved with nature and the greater cosmos from which it is trying to derive absolute knowledge, there is always a chance that facts and measurements will be skewed or distorted to reflect individual perception.

At this stage, this is the only explanation that accounts for the dialectical arguments put forth by the creative archaeologist Thomas Lethbridge (1901-1971) after conducting manifold experiments into the judicious powers of the pendulum and finding that it could extract knowledge about the material compositions and life processes of organisms long extinct as well as unveil specific details about the imminent future. Whatever the underlying mechanism of causation, its swift ability to answer questions posed with an anomalous success rate exceeding the contingencies of chance shows it to be a candidate deeply worthy of scrupulous scientific investigations!  

 

Aim:                To investigate functioning principles of the hand-held pendulum which have been under rug swept by a conventional science tending to view the former and its dabblers as the province of mystics, occultists, pseudoscientists, madmen, and charlatans. Why does a pendulum accord with both silent and verbalized mental signals and give conceivable answers through altered swinging patterns that are in most cases unprecedented and fundamentally true? More importantly perhaps is the problem of ‘how’: By what manner does it achieve this feat?

 

Hypothesis:                There are innumerable theories available that attempt to explain causal aspects of the swinging pendulum. Whatever our ontological position may be, an important truth to remember is that scientific inquiry is unable to enforce quantitative analysis upon a great many of them because the proposed fields of energy or “waves” thought to underpin them remain hitherto undiscovered. Hence the theorization becomes unavailable to the crudest and most mechanistic level of investigation.

Pendulums and dowsing rods are apparatuses that enable all open-minded individuals a fair chance at establishing theoretical orientations based on repeated observations, the founding principles upon which all true science is based. This wheel is set in motion by curiosity and fuelled by empiricism. Firstly, the curiosity within must override any proclivities to cling to dogmatic perceptions and distance the observer from sandcastles built so high as to prevent circulation. Stagnation and musk were never significant players in the advancement of consensual knowledge. Walls aren’t that good for the health either, and they’re definitely not good for the gods and goddesses we wish to become and the sacred holistic sciences we wish to engender and live by. Experimental methods encumbered by the embellished walls of religious and scientific dogmas are an anathema to the powers of unprejudiced reasoning and will mostly create synthetic doors to illusions about the nature of reality. Our only chance at salvation rests on moderate shoulders that can embrace an open mind; when the slate of consciousness is cleared and regains its former untainted, virgin and entirely receptive state, the labyrinth of deception will capitulate…

This isn’t just a theory; it’s a deep-seated truth that has found an explicit voice in mystical philosophies and spiritualities and crisscrossed its way across many epochs and cultures. You must have the courage to lose sight of the shore if you are to discover new oceans; you must be prepared to suffer purgatory in order to arise anew and regenerated in a sturdier form less impervious to the environment; and you must remain unattached to matter and your belief system as to reduce suffering if and when their surrender is warranted. It is imperative that our inquiry into the causation of phenomena be heeded by childlike curiosity and an honest desire to know. These are the tools with which we should construct our sturdy walls of faith, but we would do well not to use stone. Stone is too rigid a material and cannot be transmuted into something else or dismantled altogether should our most contemporary set of deductions call for it. Let us always remember–we build our walls to adhere to laws determined by empirical deductions and walk through them when the growing tier of observed facts no longer buttresses the timeless zone of growing faith we had just begun to take comfort from.

With this philosophy in mind, I shall be so bold as to profess that the hand-held pendulum responds to intangible thought-rays, or rays emanating from the human mind; the uncanny ability of individuals to preprogramme the swing patterns to their personal taste before the experimental trials commence definitely supports such an assumption. Once a command or prompt is given, it radiates outwards from the cortices via the peripheral nerves along one’s fingers and interacts with what can only be described as a minute energy field. The latter is a powerhouse of emotional and intellectual information unique to that consciousness footprint and can be accessed rather spontaneously. If there is truth to the claims that the pendulum gives correct answers with a statistical probability that cannot be attributed to random chance, then it is quite possible for a human being to interact or converse with a minute energy field to which they remain largely unaware on a conscious level.

To put it a simpler way human consciousness might easily parallel a supercomputer with an optimum system level able to run diagnostic tests on itself. And it appears that these diagnostic tests can at times and under the appropriate circumstances extend beyond the personal into transpersonal realms of being. I say this because select men and women seem to have voluntary access to personal content held by other consciousness fields and to past, present, and future facts about the cosmos that were never a feature of their cerebral hardware. What might be inferred from such an anomalous phenomenon? Perhaps volitional ‘radars’ emanating from the realm of the personal conscious can breach confounding obstructions posed by other energy fields and project themselves into the timeless province of a ‘superconscious’ mind. In such cases the pendulum acts as an intercessor between two living entities; the individual mind with its personal energy fields and a much grander ‘superconscious’ being that includes nature and the Earth itself.      

      

Materials:                   To conduct this experiment you will need a piece of metal, plasticine, clay, or a paper clip to act as a pendulum bob, as well as a coil of string that can be silk, nylon, or sewing thread on which to suspend the weight.           

 

Method:                      The best way to fabricate a practicable hand-held pendulum is to measure out your chosen coil of string to about eighteen inches before severing it from its source. This should be long enough to garner powerful responses and short enough to manoeuvre from a seated position using only your elbow as support without the tip scraping across the table top every so often. Once you’re happy with the length, secure either end to the top of your chosen device–this is to be done on a paper clip stand-in by tying and on a plasticine or clay one by moulding and pressing the latter around the thin thread. Now you’re ready to roll!

When you’ve mustered all your reserves of psychic energy and are ready to begin experimentation, relocate to a quiet space equipped with a chair and table. Ensure that you’re nowhere near an open window or any crevices and orifices from whence a draft could emanate at any point and disturb operations. Either create a small loop and slide your thumb and index finger in or otherwise grasp the thread between your thumb and index fingers. Consequently slide the elbow of the respective hand onto the table and manually adjust the length so that the full arc made by the swing steers clear of any solid and immobile impediments. The next thing to do is to programme your mechanism so that a particular motion signals ‘yes’ and the opposing one ‘no’; for most, the conventional way is to use the motion forward and backward or a clockwise gyration as a gesture for ‘yes’ and a sideways or anticlockwise gyration for ‘no’. You can cup the pendulum in your hand to make the imprint or just do it with volitional thought. Either will work just fine. To end with frame your questions in a way that allows for ‘yes-no’ responses and proceed to ask them in a casual, relaxed manner. The more relaxed you are, the less likelihood they’ll be of unconscious intent changing the resting dynamics of the thought-rays and influencing the swinging motion.

 

Results:           The results section below is categorized into three tables for analytical reasons. The first records the results of experimental trials with questions relating to what the subject understands to be absolutely true within the context of his or her archetypal model of reality. The second tabulates the pendulum’s responses to factual-based questions modelled from the consensual model of reality that the subject probably doesn’t know the answers to. The third and last utilizes the pendulum to address subjective human concerns (questions of faith) about cosmology and metaphysics that might continue to elude the human race for some time yet.

The subjects tested in this study were all oblivious to what kind of questions they would be asked (except myself of course) and were requested to remain as relaxed as possible throughout the duration of the trials as to limit consciously contrived responses. Participants also remained unacquainted with the pendulum responses incited by others.

The subjects who participated in the pendulum study were:

Subject	Age (yrs)	Weight (kgs)	Racial Group	Physical Condition	Education Level	Religious Affiliations
Paul Kiritsis	33	73	Caucasian	Athletic; fit	Postgraduate	Spiritual; pneumatic
Dimitrios Kiritsis	28	81	Caucasian	Fair	Secondary	Agnostic
Mihaela R.	45	50	Caucasian	Healthy	Undergraduate	Spiritual; holistic sciences
Cathy I.	46	79	Caucasian	Fit	Secondary	Spiritual; pneumatic
Helen	50	48	Caucasian	Fitness instructor	Secondary	Christian Orthodox but not dogmatic. Sceptical of pendulums.
Christine	50	59	Caucasian	Fair	Primary	Greek Orthodox

           

Table One

Participants: Paul Kiritsis, Dimitrios Kiritsis

Questions posed	Answers for Paul	Answers for Dimitrios
Do I live in the universe?	YES	YES
Is the universe lit by light?	YES	YES
Is the light reaching Earth from Andromeda?	NO	NO
Is the light reaching earth from the Sun?	YES	YES
Is light the source of all growth?	YES	YES
Is Venus the home of human beings?	NO	NO
Is Earth the home of human beings?	YES	YES
Is water a source of life?	YES	YES
Is atmospheric oxygen the source of life?	NO	NO
Is atmospheric oxygen a source of life?	YES	YES
Did dinosaurs roam the earth?	YES	YES
Are dinosaurs still around?	NO	NO
Are humans the most intelligent animal on the planet?	YES	YES
Are humans made out of jelly?	NO	NO
Do humans have ten legs?	NO	NO
Does blood course through human veins?	YES	YES
Can humans breathe underwater?	NO	NO
Can we fly?	NO	NO
Can we fly with the assistance of machines?	YES	YES
Am I a human being?	YES	YES
Do I live in America?	NO	NO
Do I live beneath the ocean?	NO	NO
Do I live in Australia?	YES	YES
Am I located in a city?	YES	YES
Is my home made out of sticks?	NO	NO
Is my home made out of bricks?	YES	YES
Do I live in a big house?	YES	YES
Am I black?	NO	NO
Am I Egyptian?	NO	NO
Am I Australian?	YES	YES
Am I Greek?	YES	YES
Am I Greek-Australian?	YES	YES
Am I fifteen years old? Twenty-four?	NO, NO	NO, NO
Am I thirty-three years old? (for Paul only)	YES
Am I twenty-eight years old? (for Dimitrios only)		YES
Are my eyes yellow? Brown? Green? Blue? (for Paul only)	NO, NO, YES, YES
Are my eyes yellow? Green? Blue? Brown? (for Dimitrios only)		NO, NO, NO, YES
Am I male?	YES	YES
Is my hair blonde?	NO	NO
Is my hair brown?	YES	YES
Is my name Axel?	NO	NO
Is my name John? George? Kennedy?	NO, NO, NO	NO, NO, NO
Is my name Paul? (for Paul only)	YES
Is my name Dimitrios? (for Dimitrios only)		YES
Is my name Paul Fordham? (for Paul only)	NO
Is my name Dimitrios Fordham? (for Dimitrios only)		NO
Is my name Paul Kiritsis? (for Paul only)	YES
Is my name Dimitrios Kiritsis? (for Dimitrios only)		YES

Table Two

Participants: Christine, Dimitrios Kiritsis

Questions Posed	Answers for Christine	Answers for Dimitrios	Actual Answer
Did a creature called Brontoscorpio ever exist?	YES	YES	YES
Is the coelacanth still alive?	NO	NO	YES
Did Megatherium have small bony lumps under its skin that acted like natural chain mail?	NO	YES	YES
Was Ornitholestes a bird of the Precambrian Era?	NO	YES	NO
Did life begin four thousand years ago as the Bible suggests?	YES	NO	NO
Is the mammoth genetically extinct?	YES	YES	NO
Is human consciousness localized to one area of the brain?	YES	YES	NO
Is electromagnetism one of the four fundamental forces of nature?	NO	YES	YES
Did Mehmet II rally to take Constantinople in 1453?	NO	YES	YES
Did Samuel Taylor Coleridge write ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’?	YES	YES	YES
Is Jupiter a planet with many electrical storms?	NO	YES	YES
Does lightning produce nitrogen?	YES	NO	YES
Did Cleopatra VII have only one child?	NO	YES	NO
Was Emmanuel Swedenborg born in 1688 in Bavaria?	NO	YES	NO
Do sequoia trees only grow on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada?	NO	YES	YES
Score (%)	40	53.3	100

 

Table Three

Participants: Paul Kiritsis, Dimitrios Kiritsis, Mihaela R., Kathy I., Helen, and Christine

Question posed	Paul’s Response	Dimitrios’s Response	Mihaela’s Response	Kathy’s Response	Helen’s Response	Christine’s Response
Will we ever evolve to communicate telepathically?	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO
Can an atom be in two places at the same time?	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO
Is there an energy that heals the body of which we are unaware?	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO
Does ether exist?	YES	YES	YES	YES	No response.	NO
As a discipline, is psychology still in its infancy?	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO
Is time as we perceive it an illusion?	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	YES
Is time travel possible?	YES	YES	YES	YES	No response.	NO
Are there other dimensions of existence?	YES	YES	YES	YES	No response.	YES
Does evil encompass any objective existence?	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Are mind and brain the same thing?	NO	NO	YES	YES	No response.	YES
Can we move things with our minds?	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Did mind precede matter?	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO
Are our lives predestined indefinitely?	NO	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO
Is there free will?	YES	YES	NO	YES	YES	NO
Are our lives predestined to a degree?	YES	YES	NO	YES	YES	YES
Are there connections between the planets and the metals?	YES	YES	YES	YES	No response.	NO
Do human beings have a soul?	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Do we, or a part of us, survive death?	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Are human beings born with a unique footprint or personality?	YES	YES	NO	YES	NO	YES
Did human beings evolve from apes?	YES and NO (circular motion)	YES and NO (Circular motion)	YES	YES	YES	YES
Was Jesus Christ crucified?	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO
Was Jesus ever a historical figure?	NO	NO	YES	NO	YES	YES
Does the devil exist?	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Does God exist?	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES and NO (circular motion)
Are you telling me the truth, oh mighty pendulum?	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES

 

Discussion:                 The first set of questions was designed to examine the extent to which the pendulum conforms to the orientation of our mental ego within consensus reality. It’s no big secret that human consciousness yearns for stability, law and orderliness; it cannot and will not do without it. As a consequence our formative years are spent adopting roles, partaking of communal attitudes, biases, socially-approved pastimes and anything else intended to create independent positions. Save for the impetus of financial gain and security, the allure of attaining such a position is rendered even more desirable by community accolades that might come in the form of honorary awards, titles, and grants. It seems that society tailors for the conservation and augmentation of self-image, a phenomenon quintessential for the abatement of insecurities and anxieties constantly nibbling at the frontiers of the mental ego. In both experimental cases (Paul Kiritsis, Dimitrios Kiritsis) the minute energy fields are reflecting–quite accurately I might add–this contracted and rigid ego consciousness far removed from greater reality. To put it another way the pendulum is like the mercury in a thermometer, making measurements in fundamental harmony with the cosmos as we know and believe it to be.

The second set of questions attempted to determine whether the hand-held pendulum could initiate a dialectical transition away from the intellectual and emotional strata of the mental ego and project into collective memories comprising our scientific and cultural inheritance. Five had to do with palaeontology, three with history, one with theology, one with the nature of human consciousness, one with geophysics, one with physics, one with English literature, and one with geobotany. On the whole, their immense obscurity was such that only a specialist in the respective field of inquiry would know the answer. The responses given by the two subjects that chose to undertake this daunting endeavour (Christine, Dimitrios Kiritsis) are definitely in support of such a contention. Their success rates were forty and fifty-three percent, reflecting the hypothetical position of their mental egos. The pendulum simply couldn’t shed any light on anything that wasn’t intrinsic to the spectrum of personal consciousness. Apparently there are limitations to the magical pendulum!    

The third and final series of questions addressed ontological speculations that have troubled human beings since our coming to consciousness. Some of the greatest minds to walk the earth have grappled with some of these questions, utilizing every form of systematic thinking available–deductive, inductive, and reductive–along with visionary, intuitive, and peak experiences to map and quantify that which resists quantification. They are protean in nature, resembling the mighty Nereids; just when you think you’ve untangled the eternal knot that shall shed some kind of light on the mystery, the knot spontaneously changes form and becomes a golden apple. A golden apple cannot be ‘untied’ so another method into the heart centre of the problem must be found.

At any rate the human mind is an anatomical dichotomy of intellect and emotions; concerns that elude the personal intellect and our collective knowledge are passed down to emotional understanding, the province of the ‘heart’. The intellect plays the role of ‘rider’ in the metaphorical horse-rider analogy, although it switches position with emotion and feelings when the rational frontiers of its evolutionary progression have been exceeded.  Both ‘rider’ and ‘horse’ are available to the subtle energy fields that the pendulum works with; when the ‘rider’ is incapacitated by blinding light the ‘horse’ leads the way heeded by the powers of transcendentalism and intuition. What I am expressing here is supported by the empirical data. All six participants (Paul Kiritsis, Dimitrios Kiritsis, Mihaela R., Kathy I., Helen, and Christine) seem to have been projecting authentic sentiments indigenous to their own being outwards, the rays of which incited the corresponding swinging pattern on the pendulum. No doubt the conscious will of each individual influences the pendulum, but content that remains latent in the unconscious exerts an even more formidable effect. The predominating nature of thoughforms arising from the imaginal and feeling realms like heartfelt wishes and desires can be seen clearly in the ‘yes-no’ responses to eschatological inquiry, the question of evil, and the mind-brain relationship. Each time the pendulum was prompted to address issues surrounding its own authenticity, it responded with a ‘yes’. The indication was uniform for all participants, a bizarre singularity when one takes into consideration that sets of answers were highly contradictory when juxtaposed with others. How could there be more than one truth if the ontological position of one is an outright negation of another?    

Simple really. The pendulum does tell the truth of what is being experienced; it tells your truth and illuminates your spiritual sun in the manner that a mirror reflects your physiognomy and form and fingerprints and footprints your inimitability.    

 

Conclusion:                Here is a mechanism that taps into the intellectual and emotional contents of one’s mind and externalizes them through specific swinging patterns predetermined through sheer willpower. Indeed, it patches together an archetypal framework of reality that accurately reflects the orientation of your mental ego. Its mode of operation appears to be buttressed by a very plausible hypothesis theorizing the existence of thought-rays that reach the pendulum via the peripheral nerves and subtle energy field subsisting around our bodies. Even though the empirical data gathered does not support contact communion with a ‘superconscious’ mind encompassing racial memories and information of transpersonal nature, I would not be so impetuous as to completely reject its existence. There are plenty of anecdotes describing the extraction of factual information that was not previously known to the individual. Comprehensive studies would have to be organized and countless trials conducted involving a wide continuum of men, women, and children from variant racial and ethnic backgrounds before a definitive judgement can be made.

Experimenting with the hand-supported pendulum is fun and definitely a great way to remember your own personal truth as your other unconscious self sees it!