From Barbara Ann Brennan’s Hands Of Light (p. 81-2):
The best way I have found to start sensing the states of the chakras is to use a pendulum….
To measure the state of the chakra, hold the pendulum on a string about six inches long over the chakra [as the patient lies on his back or stomach] and empty your mind of all bias as to the state of the chakra. (This is the hardest part and requires practice.) Be sure that the pendulum is as close to the body as possible without touching it. Your energy flows into the field of the pendulum to energize it. This combined field of the pendulum and your energy then interacts with the field of the subject, causing the pendulum to move…. It will probably move in a circular pattern, circumscribing an imaginary circle above the body of your subject. It may move back and forth in an elliptical movement or a straight line. It may move erratically. The size and direction of the pendulum movement indicates the amount and direction of energy flowing through the chakra.
Likewise, from Rosalyn Bruyere’s Wheels Of Light (p. 73-5):
When used as a pendulum, a prism or crystal is a tool that can corroborate chakra movement. This is because a crystal is an effective energy transmitter. (It is able to rectify the moving electromagnetic field of the chakra into a direct current.) When a crystal is suspended over the chakra of a reclining person, the energy of the spinning chakra will cause the crystal to swing in a corresponding motion.
As James Randi explains, however:
One method of divination uses a pendulum. A weight of any kind, the bob, is suspended at the end of a string or chain: crystals, real or fake, are currently popular. The device is held over a map or other object, and various movements of the bob are interpreted in different ways by different operators….
In this phenomenon, it can always be seen that the subject moves his or her hand to set the pendulum swinging, though this will be vehemently denied. The event is a perfect example of ideomotor reaction.
Ah yes, our old friend from the world of dowsing, the ideomotor effect:
The movement of pointers on Ouija boards, of a facilitator’s hands in facilitated communication, of hands and arms in applied kinesiology, and of some behaviors attributed to hypnotic suggestion, are due to ideomotor action. Ray Hyman … has demonstrated the seductive influence of ideomotor action on medical quackery, where it has produced such appliances as the “Toftness Radiation Detector” (used by chiropractors) and “black boxes” used in medical radiesthesia and radionics (popular with naturopaths to harness “energy” used in diagnosis and healing.)
Yes, Brennan endorses the ineffectual nonsense of radionics, too. “Surprise.”
[...] look are completely explicable in terms of basic wave-diffraction phenomena of physics; and her ideas about how pendulums interact with the human energy field are fully explicable in terms of the ideomotor effect. If you think that, when these “leading [...]