The Pendulum
- An article by Robert St. John -

To be able to use the pendulum accurately it is necessary to fully and carefully understand that to which you wish to apply it. In this case, we want to understand the physical body, its functions, and its significances - on all levels of consciousness.

The physical body is simple to understand, it is excellently explained in any good anatomy book. Its function as far as it is understood - is explained in physiology books, not entirely well explained in some aspects because there is still exploration and development going on, particularly in the area of the endocrine glands. The part that is not explained at all in orthodox circles and only imperfectly in the esoteric is the mental and spiritual functions in relationship with the bodily functions.

This aspect is one that is very well explained through this work. The patterns of the blockages and their influences on functions describe - by inference, true - the nature of the nonphysical structure by which we live.

My observations of this structure were first in the analyzing of the prenatal patterns. These patterns inferred a structure that was as complete as the physical. However, the observation of them was quite theoretical. It was here that the use of the pendulum became practical and, in fact, imperative.

The pendulum does not tell you anything; it is an extension of one's own consciousness and has no virtue of its own.

The schools of thought that claim that the pendulum is responding to radiations and emanations are only partly right,

it is the user of the pendulum who is responding and not the pendulum, it is the dowser who is sensitive to water beneath the ground and not the rod.

Likewise, the radiesthesists of the past have emphasized the use of “witnesses”. These are usually something belonging to the subject, an article of clothing, a signature, a spot of blood, urine, or saliva; even a photograph. This was considered necessary as a means of contacting the subject. There are those, however, and I am one of them, who find that all that is necessary is to think of the subject.

The experienced radiesthesist becomes able to use these functions in himself without the use of the pendulum, simply by thought. I can do this but I find that for measurements in small degrees the pendulum has its advantages. The mind has to be entirely open and responsive, a perfect medium, to be able to do without the pendulum.

When we first of all realize that the pendulum is only an instrument, which makes our own faculties more easily usable, we can begin to use the pendulum practically.

The next step is to devise a system, which is compre­hensive enough to interpret all that we need of it. As the various aspects of this work became mature, I gradually developed my system. I was fortunate - or perhaps inwardly informed - in starting with a system, which was expandable into every use that I required of the pendulum. In fact, I found that the manifestations of the pendulum in its practical application to this work were teaching me something new about the principle I was investigating.

The movements of the pendulum are along positive and negative principles which can mean “yes” or “no”, high or low, actual measurements according to a scale used from 0 to maximum, or any of the measurements decided upon and any unit of relationship.

The movement of the pendulum tells you the degree of the subject along the course of the scale you are using.

The art of using it is in devising scales suitable to your needs and being able to use them.

It is possible that you will find that the pendulum is making some movement, which it has not done before. When this happens you need to consider two things,

(1) what is the scale you are using and

(2) what does the new movement mean in relation to this scale.

It is in this way that the pendulum teaches you. You are considering the subject, you have a scale or a means of measuring something about the subject, and now the pendulum is indicating an unknown factor. By reasoning out the indications of this unknown factor in relation to the known factors you can learn new things, not only about the subject but also about the principles of life.

It is best to presume that you have never used a pendulum before.

Take any more or less spherical object, preferably with a hole through it. If it does not have a hole and is of a suitable material such as wood, ivory or soft stone you can drill a hole through it. Drill through its long axis if it is not a true sphere, so that it is balanced.

If you want to be neat drill the hole only part way through, about ½ an inch, and use a 1/8th drill. Put a loop of nylon or wire in the hole and plug it with a small plug of the same material as the sphere. A little glue will make this permanent.

To suspend the sphere six to ten inches of fine chain is best. Cotton or string twists or frays. Nylon is strong and suitable, but a fine chain will untwist and straighten out immediately and is always ready for use.

If you use a chain, open the last link and insert the loop you have made in the sphere and close the link again. If you use thread or nylon just tie it to the loop.

Now you have your pendulum.

To learn to use the pendulum rest the elbow on the table and hold the chain near the top and let it swing idly.

Now tell the pendulum to swing back and forth. Do not move your hand let it be relaxed. “Will” the pendulum to make the movement you want. When it is making that movement tell it to make another one, from side to side. Do not stop the first movement; simply tell the pendulum to change from a back and forth movement to a side-to-side one. Most people find that they can do this after a bit of practice.

There are only four primary movements, back and forth, side-to-side, clockwise gyration and anti-clockwise gyration. The hardest is to make the pendulum change from a clockwise to an anti-clockwise gyration.

All other movements are modifications of these four.

When the pendulum is really obeying your will in its movements you can adopt some form of a system, but don't be in too much of a hurry to do this.

The next step is to get a circular protractor. This is a circular piece of transparent plastic with the 360 degrees of the circle marked around the edge. There is a very expensive protractor produced by the professional drawing and designing shops and a much cheaper one from almost any stationery shop.

Now take your pendulum and hold it over the centre of the protractor with the 0 on the protractor furthest from you.

Go through exactly the same drill of telling the pendulum to swing in various directions. Get used to making it follow the meridians of the protractor.

You can now introduce a few more movements such as along the 40 - 140 meridian and ellipses. Do these both clock­wise and anti-clockwise. It is not so easy to do the anti-clockwise movement, so practice it well.

When the pendulum is doing what you tell it to do you are ready to use it - and not before. Many people who try to use the pendulum and who get chaotic results have not disciplined themselves in this way to the use of it. Nor have they trained themselves to the next step of adopting a system.

You can use any system you like. The one I use is based on the protractor.

Realize that the protractor is only a measuring device, the degrees of the measurement, and you are deciding to use that particular measurement. You can measure the length of a piece of wood inches, centimeters, or any other unit or you could adopt a comparative method and make it in terms of percentage. This is the way you are using the protractor to measure the various aspects of the body and mind.
The whole thing is arbitrary; the measurement you are making is of your own devising. It is comparative because you have set up an optimum maximum and minimum and you are comparing your values with this. During the course of the measurement, you can change your unit of measurement and adopt another. The two are not comparable with each other in figures measured, but they are comparable when applying the principle of one code of measurement with another.

I go into this rather abstract detail because the whole use of the pendulum is arbitrary. Nothing that is measured has a value other than that which you give it at the moment or by virtue of the code used.

When measuring values concerning the physical body the measurements are concrete in the given moment, but because the physical body is subject to the mind - both conscious and unconscious, particularly the latter - these values only have reality with respect to the mind, we must consider the whole being. Therefore, all the values measured are in relation to each other at that time and not necessarily to values measured previously.

If we were able to know the whole pattern of body, mind and spirit we could expect to have real values, but we do not know this. Therefore, use this method of measurement as an almost intuitive glance at the situation and not as a hard and fast rule. If you do this, you will find that your use of the pendulum is teaching you something all the time, you will find that as you approach an aspect of the subject and obtain certain measurements they are opening up your mind to a fuller realization of the subject's whole self, your intuitive, perceptive consciousness is opening up.
In fact, you will realize that the pendulum is a medium for your own whole consciousness and the more you use it freely, arbitrarily, in this way the more valuable it will become to you as a measuring instrument.

By this time, you should have a fair control over your pendulum with your conscious mind. When this becomes automatic, it transfers to the unconscious mind as a technique and you are ready to use the pendulum as a system.

The operative line on the protractor is the 0 - 180 line, the back and forth line. In terms of measurement, this line becomes the absolute. We could make it any other line or even 0 - 360, but as you will realize later, the 0 - 180 line is the most practical.

The simplest method is to use the pendulum and the protractor as an answering device. The simplest answer is “yes” or “no”. Therefore let 0 be “no” and 180 “yes”.

Here we have the gist of the “yes” and “no” method. Its application is infinite. I have used it entirely successfully in searching for faults in my car: “It is in the petrol system?”, “Is it the electrical system?” simplifies the search for the trouble when the car will not start. A further analysis of either of those two questions soon leads you to the fault. Naturally, you must understand the working of the car to be able to ask intelligent questions, just as you must understand the workings of the body and mind to ask questions about them.

Still with reference to the “yes” and “no” method some remarks should be made about time. To be quite accurate in your findings with the pendulum your enquiries should refer to the present - “now”.

Strictly speaking, you can only use the pendulum with reference to the now.

To use it with reference to the past or the future requires a “placing of the mind” in the past or the future.

This rule applies to all abilities of subjectively seeing any time other than the present. Our mind is made to observe and comprehend the present, even though this may entail aspects from the past and sometimes, by a subjective and “psychic” sensitivity, a reflection of the future into the present.

Any ability to “see” the future by whatever method must be done by an identification of something that exists now and will exist in the future time referred to in the same or similar form. A calendar is useful. We have accepted the method of dating events and of calibrating time in terms of years, days, and hours and in this acceptance, we have a form of measurement as practical as the protractor method. This method is not as arbitrary as the protractor because days are formed by the rotation of the Earth round the sun, and months by the phases of the moon as well as by astrological classification.

The past has existed in fact and to think of a time in the past when “enquiring” with the pendulum is to identify one­self with that time both by thought and by the fact that the events of the past are as established in our make-up as the genes in the cells of our body.

If one-steps outside the present life span of the subject enquired into, the cellular or “genetic” aspect of the contact is missing, but I have had relative success - not easily proved, I grant you - in my enquiries into historical characters and their physical or mental well-being. To refer back a day, a month, or a year into the life of a current subject I find is as practical as enquiring into the present moment.

To look into the future is practical but requires a real and thorough ability with the pendulum.

The weakest factor in the use of the pendulum is that it is based on all aspects of your consciousness and that a greater part of this is unknown to you consciously. Therefore, your enquiries have an element of the unknown - in this respect.

Another factor that confuses the use of the pendulum and often causes people to give it up in despair is that you can quite easily get two contrary answers to the same question if you ask it twice.

There are two reasons for this, the main one is that you have, by repeating your enquiry, put a doubt on your own faculties in the art. The whole strength of any positive element in the self is in the deep and unvarying confidence one has in oneself; to doubt it once is to throw it into confusion. When learning to use the pendulum do not repeat the same enquiry. If you are wrong you are wrong, but the more confidence and positively you have in your ability the less you will be wrong. This is a subjective art.

The second factor for this error is that the second enquiry is made at a different time; true the differences in time may only be a few seconds but the factors of life are always changing and if you are enquiring about a person he is always changing and so are you. Again, the influence of the unconscious mind is responsible for more of this “change” factor than the conscious.

Whether one is using the “yes” and “no” method or any other procedure, the technique as well as the answers, are based on the same pattern.

The more involved aspects, which the nature of my enquiries has led me into, are all based on this same principle.

Probably this is the right moment to introduce the subject of polarity because it is actually, what we are measuring when we ask the pendulum any question concerning the health of a subject.

Polarity is the “in-tuneness” of the subject to the forces of life. When we are fully in tune, we are fully healthy and when we are out of tune, we are unhealthy to the degree of our out-of-tuneness. From the point of view of my work, out-of-tuneness means blockage or patterns of stress in the unconscious.

If our polarity were perfect, we would have a supreme consciousness, a mind capable of using the whole consciousness and therefore the ability to have knowledge of all the past - if we need it - and the future. Needless to say, this point only concerns us as an ideal, a possible ideal to attain, but one that is the “motive” or driving principle of the direction of our aim.

All the religions of history have been based on a supreme deity and sometimes a “Master” to introduce or explain the deity. The methods of worship and nature of the deity have varied - from the Totem Pole to the Christian God, the sun, the phallus, numerous gods and goddesses of creation and destruction, the form is unimportant because the function of a god is to attract the attention of the worshipper out from himself towards a sense of infinity.

The most balanced and simplest of all “religions” is the ancient Chinese doctrine of Yin and Yang. Yin is substance and Yang is non-substance. From a practical point of view, Yin is the Earth and Yang is space. In their doctrine, it is said that all living form, mineral, vegetable and animal, is created out of a balance of Yin and Yang, and that illness is caused by an imbalance. From a comparative point of view, we would say that Yin is Matter or the consciousness of matter - and in this consciousness in its fallen form, it is easy to create the idea of the Devil and Yang is God.

Polarity is the balance of the supreme no-consciousness, or God principle, with the supreme consciousness, or matter principle.

I should note here that I am using the words consciousness and no-consciousness in an opposite sense to that of the Indian philosophers. I am using it in the sense of our own experience, that which we are conscious of is matter and form, action. That, which is beyond matter and form, is no-consciousness.

That this balance becomes confused and interfered with by blockages is beside the point in our present consideration of polarity. To look at it as a pure concept is necessary before we regard its distortions.

Substance needs no-substance to give it life, just as the reverse is true. Matter - in mineral, vegetable or animal form needs “God” to give it life, just as God - presumably needs matter to manifest in.

In our perfect form we, as material creatures, turn to the source of the no-consciousness just as the plant turns towards the sun and grows upwards in that direction. Man in his perfect form has a natural ability to “find” the source of his life. In his blocked and imperfect form, he finds it necessary to cultivate a technique of attunement to this source. Hence the religions.

Polarity is the accomplishment of this attunement in the practice of our life.

We can attain polarity by one means or another - this is the subject for another treatise - but when all is said and done, we are only struggling through the blockages of our consciousness, an imperfect function at the best of times, and not really being truly “in touch”.

The nature of my work is to remove these blockages and the result is a spontaneous restoration of the true polarity. It may sound presumptuous but it is true that the result of this work produces a person who does not need to say his prayers, to meditate, to worship. He is “in touch”. He knows the presence of God. He is balanced in Yin and Yang. In addition, this is spontaneous, a natural function of a free and normal being.

So polarity is the principle of “in touchiness” and lack of polarity is the degree by which a subject is blocked or prevented from being in touch.

In the use of the pendulum to measure states of health in the body and mind, we are measuring the degree of affinity that the substance has for the no-substance that consciousness has for no-consciousness that matter has for “God”.

With the use of the protractor as a unit of measurement, the 0 is Yang or “God” and 180 is Yin or matter.

Here we are being arbitrary again. There are no fast rules as to the value of God or of matter. We must make our own. When using the pendulum for this purpose there is probably no criteria to which we can refer or to which we adhere from one instance to another. If we think that we have assumed a value that measures maximum polarity or in-touchiness we find that one small factor, a depressing thought, the arrival of a bill, some criticism or anything that depresses or lowers - for the moment ­the polarity can change our attitude towards this criteria of measurement and the maximum that we know before is no longer of the same value.

Perhaps a method of attunement will help to establish a stability that could do much to avoid this factor, but this is up to the individual.

Therefore, we are measuring the polarity, the polarity of each part of the body, the person as a whole, the person's attitude towards life, their psychological values, and the various aspects of the prenatal pattern and so on.

Never forget the transient nature of this measurement. Never fall into the trap of institutionalism, of tying down to hard and fast rules. You must become a creator and not merely a user of the tools of life.

An illness is a negative polarity. Health is a positive polarity. When you think about an organ of the body - the bladder, for instance - and seek to measure its quality of health, its polarity, you are measuring the degree in which it is in tune with the principles of life natural to its function. This bladder is an individual - of limited consciousness and function, true but an individual whose purpose in life and activity is in accordance with the function and purpose of the body in which it lives. Look at a bladder in a slaughterman's yard, at a slab of liver in a butcher's shop and you may find it difficult to realize an element of individuality, of personality and purpose in such an amorphous mass, but place these organs in their proper place and give them life - then you know their true nature. Approach the examination of the body from this point of view and you will know the full splendor of the body’s function.

Recommended Reading:

Pendulum Healing Handbook by Walter Lubeck